Know Your Herods III: Herod Agrippa, Superstar

In the middle of his novel, Claudius the God, the sequel to I, Claudius, writer Robert Graves interrupts his narrative about the Roman Emperor to tell the story of a friend of Claudius’, the son of a Jewish royal family whose career had more ups and downs than an epileptic yo-yo.  He is mentioned very briefly in the Book of Acts, but like the rest of his dysfunctional family, there is so much more to his life than that.  He was the rock star of the House of Herod:  Herod Agrippa I.

Agrippa was the son of Aristobulus IV, one of the children of Herod the Great, and one of the sons Herod had executed.  Little Agrippa was only three at the time, and therefore incapable of plotting against Grandpa Herod, so the family sent him to Rome.  Agrippa grew up at the Roman Imperial Court and became good friends with Claudius and with the Emperor Tiberius’ son, Drusus.

After his mother’s death, he came into some money, but quickly spent it all and dug himself deep into debt.  When his friend Drusus died, he had to flee Rome to escape his debts and he stayed for a while in Idumaea, where his grandfather’s family originally came from.

His uncle, Herod Antipas, gave him a minor administrative post in the city of Tiberius in Galilee, but that didn’t last very long.  He bounced around a bit after that, ending up in Alexandria in Egypt, where with the help of his wife, he was able to secure a loan to pay off his debts, enabling him to return to Rome.

Once again in Rome, he became close friends with Caligula, Tiberius’ designated heir.  For a while, these were good times for Agrippa; but on one occasion a servant heard him joking that he wished Tiberius would hurry up and die so that Caligula could ascend to the throne.

Word of Agrippa’s injudicious remark got back to Tiberius.  The Emperor did not find the joke terribly funny.  Not that many years before, Tiberius had discovered that his best friend, Sejanus, had practically taken over ruling the Empire and was using him as a figurehead.  Tiberius regained control of the situation, but the betrayal had left him justifiably paranoid about that sort of thing.  Herod Agrippa was sent to prison, and there was nothing Caligula could do to help.  If he had tried, Uncle Tiberius would have seen it as proof that Caligula really was plotting against him.  Which Caligula probably was.

So there Agrippa sat, until the old hedonist finally did croak, and Caligula took over.  Caligula did not forget his old pal.  He freed Agrippa and by way of restitution gave him a chain made of gold as heavy as the iron chain Agrippa had worn in prison.  Caligula also appointed him king of the province of Syria and the regions previously ruled by Agrippa’s late Uncle Philip, (the brother of Herod Antipas).  This rankled Antipas, who for years had coveted the title of king, but had to be content with being called a tetrarch.

On his way to Syria, Agrippa revisited Alexandria.  According to Philo, a First Century Jewish historian living in the city at that time, the honors the Emperor had bestowed upon Agrippa stirred up jealousy and resentment against the Jewish community amongst the populace.  Philo describes public insults to Agrippa made by rabble-rousers, and acts of violence against the Alexandrian Jews.  The provincial governor, a guy with the embarrassing name of Flaccus, was either too incompetent to curb the violence or, as Philo insists, complicit in it.  None of this seems to have been Agrippa’s fault, though, and Philo seems to have had a high opinion of him.

Philo wasn’t the only one who liked Agrippa.  Unlike the rest of the rulers in the House of Herod, Agrippa actually got along with his Jewish subjects.  Maybe enough generations had passed that Grandpa Herod’s Idumenan blood wasn’t that important anymore; maybe Agrippa was more observant than his hedonistic Uncle Antipas; maybe years of Roman rule had made people nostalgic for the glory days of Herod the Great.  Personally, I suspect that Herod Agrippa had a talent for schmoozing which his other family members lacked; but we don’t read much about that aspect of Agrippa’s personality from Josephus.

His Uncle Antipas didn’t like him, though.  You may remember that Herod Antipas was only a tetrarch, the ruler of one quarter of a province; but the Emperor appointed Herod Agrippa to be a basileus, (king).  Antipas tried lobbying the Emperor for an upgrade in his job title; and while he was at it, hint that Agrippa was doing a crappy job; (the same sort of rumors Antipas used to pass on about his rival Pontius Pilate).

Agrippa anticipated him, and sent Caligula accusations of his own against Uncle Antipas.  Guess  which one Caligula believed.  Antipas found himself exiled to Gaul and his former tetrarchy got added to Agrippa’s territories.  Agrippa now ruled over all of the Jewish territories in Palestine, except for the core provinces of Judea and Samaria, which remained for the time under Roman administrators.

Agrippa remained close buds with Caligula, which in itself was no small accomplishment.  He accompanied the Emperor on a military campaign to the Rhine Valley, not because he had any great military skill, but I think because Caligula wanted a drinking buddy on the trip to pal around with.

This relationship helped Agrippa in what was probably the biggest crisis of his career.  As Caligula slid further and further into the teacup, he issued a decree that statues of himself be placed in every temple in the empire.  This would not have gone down well in Jerusalem.

Some years earlier, Pontius Pilate had faced riots because he brought soldiers into the city whose regimental standard bore the Emperor’s likeness.  More importantly, the Maccabean wars of a century or two earlier when the Jews revolted against the Selucid Greeks and briefly established their independence, was triggered when the Selucid ruler, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, ordered sacrifices to Zeus in the Temple.

Agrippa was descended on his grandmother’s side from the Hasomean Dynasty of priestly kings who ruled Judea during this period of independence.  He could see how this would go:  the Jews would resist the edict, as they did in the days of Judah “the Hammer” Maccabeus; only this time, the Romans would be the ones doing the hammering.

With his considerable powers of flattery and diplomacy, Agrippa was able to intercede with Caligula – very likely at the risk of his own life – and persuade him to rescind the edict.  Jerusalem and the Temple were spared revolt and the crushing Roman retaliation for a generation.

Before Caligula could change his mind again, he was assassinated.  As luck would have it, Agrippa was once again in Rome when it happened.  Always one to know who his friends were, Agrippa glommed onto Claudius, his old school chum and Caligula’s uncle.

Claudius had always been considered too feeble-minded and bookish by his family to get involved in their Imperial power struggles; but with the death of Caligula, he was about the last male member of the House of Caesar available as a successor.  The Praetorian Guard, the Emperor’s elite bodyguards, declared their support for Claudius to be the new Emperor.  In Josephus’s book The Antiquities of the Jews, he describes Agrippa as being instrumental in persuading Claudius to seize the throne and challenge the Roman Senate.  His earlier book, The Jewish Wars, simply depict Agrippa as a messenger to Claudius.

When the dust cleared and all the blood mopped from the floor, Claudius was Emperor, and he granted his buddy the remaining Jewish provinces of Judea and Samaria.  Now Herod Agrippa truly was King of the Jews.

And, from the accounts of Philo, Josephus, and some of the rabbinical commentators on that period, he did pretty well as king.  His ringside seat in Rome witnessing the reigns of Tiberius and Caligula gave him an exemplary education in what not to do when you’re an absolute monarch and he seems to have taken those lessons to heart.

But you know he wouldn’t be a Herod if he didn’t execute someone somewhere along the line.  And that’s where he comes into the New Testament.

It was about this time that King Herod arrested some who belonged to the church, intending to persecute them.  He had James, the brother of John, put to death with the sword.  When he saw that this pleased the Jews, he proceeded to seize Peter also.  (Acts 12:1-3 NIV)

James the son of Zebedee, along with his brother, John and with Simon Peter, are described by the Gospels as the closest of Jesus’ disciples.  He took the three of them with him up on the mountain to witness his Transfiguration; and later on, he also took them along when he prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane. At one point, the mother of James and John lobbied Jesus to have him place her boys at his Right and Left Hand; an idea Jesus quashed, but which caused a bit of resentment among the other Disciples.  The Gospels say little of James actually doing much, and I’ve always gotten the impression that John was the one who was really close to Jesus and that James came along because the two brothers were inseparable.  I also have to wonder how much of the hostility in the Gospel of John towards “The Jews” stems from the execution of his brother.  I may be reading too much into this, though.

The James mentioned here, the brother of John, is a different guy from the James who appears later in Acts as an important leader in the Christian Community, and who is called “James the brother of Jesus.”  Unless the author of Acts did some major messing with the sequence of events, which is also a possibility.  But no, I think if the two Jameses had been the same man, the writer would have made this more clear.

Why did Agrippa have James arrested and executed?  He probably considered James’ wacko religious splinter group as disturbers of the peace.  Or perhaps, as the text darkly suggests, he did it solely to suck up to the Jewish religious authorities, who regarded them as blasphemers.  Or, most likely, I think, a little of both.

He had James executed by the sword, and not by crucifixion.  It seems to me that this is a telling point, but I’m not sure what it tells me.  Crucifixion was a Roman punishment for crimes against the Empire of Rome; Agrippa, I think, wanted to be seen acting on behalf of his own kingdom and not on behalf of the Emperor.  Or maybe he figured that since the Messiah these people followed had been crucified, that doing it to James too would just encourage them.

The poll numbers from his action were encouraging.  After all, no politician ever misses a chance to appear Tough on Crime, and being Tough on Heresy is even better.  So Agrippa also had Peter brought in during the Feast of Unleavened Bread, intending to put him to public trial once Passover ended.  The Book of Acts tells of how Peter miraculously escaped from prison in a jailbreak that was simultaneously awesome and a little bit creepy.  (And capped off with a bit of comedy, when Peter showed up at the house of some friends and they refused to believe it was him).  Presumably Peter laid low after that, because we get no mention of Agrippa trying to arrest him again.

He might not have had the chance; because after the Passover festival of AD 44, Agrippa returned to the city of Caesarea to preside over a series of games in honor of Claudius.  According to Acts, he had been quarreling with the people of the nearby provinces of Tyre and Sidon, and they had sent envoys to Agrippa to sue for peace.  Josephus, describing the occasion, makes no mention of the envoys and only says that Agrippa was presiding over a public festival.  The Book of Acts describes it this way:

On the appointed day Herod, wearing his royal robes, sat on his throne and delivered a public address to the people.  They shouted, “This is the voice of a god, not of a man.”   (Acts 12:21-22)

If this doesn’t sound like the kind of thing a crowd of Jewish subjects would say, you’re right.  But Caesarea was a predominantly Gentile city.  The author of Acts strongly hints that the envoys from Tyre and Sidon were the ones doing the flattery.  Josephus’ account says that the occasion was a a series of public games held in honor of the Emperor, which would likely draw a mostly Romanized crowd anyway.  And I suspect that after a couple of generations of Roman Emperors being declared gods after death, and of Caligula claiming godhood for himself while alive, the idea of granting divine attributes to a king had pretty much come to be considered one of the perks of the job.

Josephus gives a little more detail:

Now when Agrippa had reigned three years over all Judea, he came to the city Caesarea [...] There he exhibited shows in honor of the emperor [...] On the second day of the festival, Herod put on a garment made wholly of silver, and of a truly wonderful contexture, and came into the theater early in the morning; at which time the silver of his garment was illuminated by the fresh reflection of the sun's rays upon it. It shone out after a surprising manner, and was so resplendent as to spread a horror over those that looked intently upon him. At that moment, his flatterers cried out [...] that he was a god; and they added, 'Be thou merciful to us; for although we have hitherto reverenced thee only as a man, yet shall we henceforth own thee as superior to mortal nature.'

Upon this the king did neither rebuke them, nor reject their impious flattery. But as he presently afterward looked up, he saw an owl sitting on a certain rope over his head, and immediately understood that this bird was the messenger of ill tidings, as it had once been the messenger of good tidings to him; and he fell into the deepest sorrow.  [Flavius Josephus, Jewish Antiquities Book 19 ch.8]

The owl was a reference to the earlier occasion when Agrippa had been imprisoned by Tiberius.  He saw an owl perched above him while in prison and took it to be an omen of good fortune.  When he saw the owl again, he interpreted it as a sign that his luck was about to change.

A severe pain also arose in his belly, and began in a most violent manner. He therefore looked upon his friends, and said, 'I, whom you call a god, am commanded presently to depart this life; while Providence thus reproves the lying words you just now said to me; and I, who was by you called immortal, am immediately to be hurried away by death. But I am bound to accept of what Providence allots, as it pleases God; for we have by no means lived ill, but in a splendid and happy manner.'  After he said this, his pain was become violent. Accordingly he was carried into the palace, and the rumor went abroad that he would certainly die in a little time. But the multitude presently sat in sackcloth, with their wives and children, after the law of their country, and besought God for the king's recovery. All places were also full of mourning and lamentation. Now the king rested in a high chamber, and as he saw them below lying prostrate on the ground, he could not himself forbear weeping. And when he had been quite worn out by the pain in his belly for five days, he departed this life, being in the fifty-fourth year of his age, and in the seventh year of his reign.  (Josephus,  Jewish Antiquities Book 19.ch. 8)

The Author of Acts has little positive to say about the killer of James, and is much briefer: 

Immediately, because Herod did not give praise to God, an angel of the Lord struck him down, and he was eaten by worms and died.  (Acts 12:23)

What was this malady that took away the resplendent Agrippa in the vigor of his life?  Some have speculated that it might have been the same ailment that took his grandfather, Herod the Great; but since we don’t know what that ailment was, it doesn’t really help that much.  If it was the same cause of death, Agrippa was lucky he only suffered for five days instead of the years it took Grandpa Herod to die.

In his novel Claudius the God, Robert Graves has the Emperor, hearing about his friend’s death, muse that the Hebrew god must be pretty arbitrary and petty to strike Agrippa down like that for such a trifling offense.  And perhaps it was.  But in Josephus’ telling at least, Agrippa seems to have taken his fate philosophically.  He might well have said, with Job:  “The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away.”

He left behind a son, Agrippa II who was only 17 and considered too young to take over the throne; and so the restored Kingdom of the Herods once again fell to the rule of Roman administrators.  In the meantime, the fringe group following the crucified Messiah that Agrippa tried to crush grew.  And so did the tensions between the Jewish population of Judea and their Roman rulers.

Simon vs. Simon

He was a sorcerer and a charlatan; he was demonized as the source of every heresy to trouble the Early Church; he loved the most beautiful woman in the world, and it is said he was the arch-enemy of the first pope.  And he had his very own sin named after him.

But who was Simon Magus?

He appears very briefly in Acts chapter 6; a man named Simon in the city of Samaria who boasted great powers.  He was one of many prophets and would-be messiahs who popped up in Palestine during the First Century.  The text tells us that he practiced sorcery and had attracted a wide amount of attention in the region.  He billed himself as “The Great Power” and people attributed his magic to divine power.  Then Philip showed up.

Philip was a follower of Christ who, like many others, had fled the city of Jerusalem fleeing the attempts by the Temple authorities, (and by later convert Saul in particular), to suppress the Church.  He was one of the seven deacons, chosen by the Twelve Apostles to perform administrative functions and organize the Church’s charitable mission while the Apostles themselves devoted their attention to teaching.  (One of Jesus’ original disciples was also named Philip, but this seems to have been a different guy).

The name “Philip” is Greek, so perhaps he was a Greek convert to Judaism who had become a follower of Jesus.  Or perhaps one of his parents was Greek and the other Jewish, as was the case with Paul’s student, Timothy.  Or possibly Philip was just the name he went by among his Gentile friends. 

Philip came to Samaria and began preaching the good news of the kingdom of God.  The text tells us that many were baptized, both men and women, including Simon.

Was Simon sincere?  The text tells us that he “believed and was baptized” and offers no judgment on this, although it does remark that Simon was impressed by the “signs and miracles” he saw Philip performing and that he followed Philip everywhere.

It seems very likely that Simon saw Philip’s message as The New Thing, and rather than denouncing it, as the Jewish religious leaders in Jerusalem did, he sought to latch onto it so he could incorporate it into his own schtick.  Or perhaps he really was moved by Philip’s preaching, and his initial acceptance of the message was sincere.

The Apostles back at the Home Office in Jerusalem heard about Philip’s success, and sent Peter and John to take a look.

When they arrived, they prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit, because the Holy Spirit had not yet come upon any of them; they had simply been baptized into the name of the Lord Jesus.  Then Peter and John placed their hands on them, and they received the Holy Spirit.  (Acts 8:15-17 NIV)

This deserves a little more attention.  Frequently the Book of Acts refers to believers “receiving the Holy Spirit” but does not go into great detail about what this means. It was an intense, ecstatic religious experience in which the person felt full of spiritual power and excitement.  In some cases, the text describes them speaking in different languages, “speaking in tongues.”   The church tradition in which I grew up doesn’t like to talk a whole lot about this aspect of the Primitive Church, because we Lutherans tend to be wary about things like enthusiasm; but other churches, coming out of the Charismatic Movement and other churches of the Pentecostal tradition, make the expression of the Holy Spirit central to their worship.

Whatever the specifics, what Peter and John did had a noticeable effect on the Samaritan believers, and Simon was impressed.  Afterwards, he came up to the apostles with a bag of cash and asked them how much it would cost to teach him the trick.  Bad move, Simon.

Peter answered:  “May your money perish with you, because you thought you could buy the gift of God with money!  You have no part or share in this ministry, because your heart is not right before God.  Repent of this wickedness and pray to the Lord.  Perhaps he will forgive you for having such a thought in your heart.  For I can see that you are full of bitterness and captive to sin.”  (Acts 8:20-23)

Did Simon repent?  According to the text, he backs down, and contritely says “Pray to the Lord for me so that nothing you have said may happen to me.”   (v.24)  So maybe his heart was in the right place, but he just didn’t fully grasp the Gospel message.  Lord knows that Peter certainly missed the point on more than one occasion during Jesus’ ministry. 

Some historians have suggested that Simon was actually Paul of Tarsus and that the story in Acts 8 is based on disagreements the two had early on, but that the name was changed after the Pauline and Petrine factions of the Church resolved their differences.  I don’t think I can buy that interpretation, though.  The picture we get in Acts 8 of the opportunistic charlatan trying to buy magic powers jibes with neither fanatical Pharisee we get in Saul’s earliest appearances, nor the driven Apostle for Christ we see in the rest of Acts and in his epistles.

The Book of Acts makes no more mention of Simon and we have to turn to other sources to learn what happened next.

In his book Antiquities of the Jews, the Jewish historian Josephus makes mention of a sorcerer working for procurator Felix, the Roman administrator in Caesarea at about this time.  Some Latin texts of his work call the sorcerer “Simon” and identify him with the Simon of Acts chapter 8; but the guy mentioned by Josephus was a Jew from Cyprus, not a Samaritan.  Simon was not that uncommon a name; Peter’s name was originally Simon for that matter.

About a century later, the Early Christian writer and apologist Justin Martyr and later on Bishop Irenaeus added to the story of Simon Magus.  Both men associated Simon with the Gnostics, a sect of Christianity which grew up during the Second Century and which the orthodox Church Fathers considered heretical.

I can’t really do much justice to the teachings of Gnosticsim, partially because their precise doctrines varied from branch to branch, and partially because they wrote very little that has come down to us, and much of what we know about them comes from hostile sources like Justin and Irenaeus.  The Gnostics claimed to possess an oral tradition of Secret Knowledge derived from Christ himself in addition to the plain vanilla Gospel taught by the Mainstream Church.  Among other things, they taught a form of dualism where Matter is inherently corrupt and on the Spirit is wholly good and that the only way a fleshly human can attain the Realm of Perfection is through the pursuit of gnosis, or knowledge.

According to Justin and Irenaus, Simon Magus was the founder of Gnosticism. Simon taught the existence of what he called the Ennoia, or the First Thought of God, a divine emanation which took on an existence of its own.  This Ennoia became bound to a human form as a mortal woman of exceptional beauty, who was re-incarnated many times through history.  Helen of Troy was one of her incarnations.  Another was Simon’s girlfriend, who also happened to be named Helena.

It occurs to me that this might have been the origin of part of the mediaeval Faust legend, another dabbler in Dark Arts who desired the Helen whose face did launch a thousand ships and burned the topless towers of Ilium.

The Church Fathers took a dim view of Simon’s girlfriend.  The Third Century writer Hippolytus said that she was a prostitute from Tyre and that Simon made up the Ennoia story to justify shacking up with her.  Oh, and that the Gnostics were big on Free Love.  Damn Gnostic Hippies.

Simon also, it was said, taught that he himself embodied all three aspects of the Trinity, appearing to the Jews as the “Son of God,” mediating for sin; to the Samaritans as the “Father” and Creator; and to the Pagan world as the “Holy Spirit”.

He supposedly went to Rome, where he was opposed on several occasions by Peter.  Finally, according to Hippolytus, Simon told his disciples to bury him alive, promising that he would rise from the dead on the third day.  They did.  But he didn’t.

The apochryphal Acts of Peter, written in the Second Century gives a different version of Simon’s death.  It describes the running duels of Magic vs. Miracle between Simon the Sorcerer and Simon Peter in greater detail.  In order to prove himself a god, Simon levitates high over the Forum in Rome.  Peter prays that God stop him, and Simon plummets to his death.  That pisses off the Emperor Nero, who had bet five bucks on the Magus, so much that out of spite he crucifies Peter upside-down.

That’s the ending that legend and popular tradition gives to Simon.  But I prefer to leave him the way the Book of Acts does:  apologizing for his foolish request and asking for forgiveness.

Simon did leave one other legacy behind him.  Traditionally, the sin of selling church offices, and profiting off the selling of spiritual functions, has come to be called simony.

Foreskin Wars

You’ve probably heard the question – or perhaps you’ve asked it yourself – why Christians get hung up over certain passages in the Book of Leviticus, but ignore others.  The Levitical prohibitions against eating shellfish or wearing polyester/cotton blends are usually the ones mentioned.  The official answer involves drawing a distinction between Ceremonial Law and the Moral Law, and seems a bit hair-splitting.  And maybe it is.

But the question has been around for a while.  Some Jewish scholars have held that certain parts of the Law of Moses will be superseded in the Post-Messianic Era; although they disagree which parts those might be. There are instances where the Learned Rabbis, unable to come to a consensus on the interpretation of some point of the Law, have deferred a definitive ruling until the Messiah comes.

The early Christians, believing that the Messiah already had come, didn’t have that out; and so they needed to determine how much of the Law of Moses Christians need to follow.  This formed the core of the Church’s first major controversy.  For the sake of a snappy title, I’m going to call it the Foreskin Wars.

As the Early Church spread out from Jerusalem into Judea and Samaria and to the Ends of the Earth, as the fellow said, more and more Gentiles became attracted to the Message of Christ.  This posed a problem for the Church leaders.  How should they deal with these new Gentile converts?

For one faction in the Church, the answer was obvious:  to join the community, one would first have to become a Jew.  For that reason, the Church has come to call this group the “Judaizers”. I’m not sure if I like that name; it sounds like a Hebrew Arnold Schwartzenegger.  Elsewhere, Paul refers to them as “the circumcision party” because in order to become a Jew, one must first be circumcised.

Circumcision, the cutting off of the male foreskin, was established as part of God’s covenant with Abraham way back in Genesis chapter 19.  It was required not only of Abraham and his male children, but also of all the males in his household, even his slaves and servants.  It was a physical sign of belonging to the Tribe of Abraham.

The Gentile response to this, of course, was “You want me to cut off my WHAT???”

Some  members of the circumcision party came to Antioch, the city in Syria which Paul used as his home base.  Paul and his partner Barnabas disputed the claim that converts needed to be circumcised in order to receive salvation.  The local church decided to send a delegation including Paul and Barnabas to Jerusalem to get a ruling from the apostles and the elders of the Church as to who was right.

Here the text makes a remarkable statement, one that I don’t remember noticing in previous readings of the passage.  Then some of the believers who belonged to the party of the Pharisees stood up and said, “The Gentiles must be circumcised and required to obey the law of Moses.” (Acts 15:5)

If you’re like me, you’re probably used to thinking of the Pharisees as the Bad Guys in the Gospels; and yes, the Gospels describe several clashes between Jesus and Pharisees over interpretation of the Laws of Moses.  But he had more in common with the Pharisees than he did with the Sadducees, the faction among the Jewish leaders most prominent in the Temple organization.

A lot of Jesus’ moral and ethical teachings are similar to those reflected by the Rabbis of the Pharisaic school.  His rhetorical question “If any of you has a sheep and it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will you not take hold of it and lift it out?” (Matthew 12:11) is an example found in rabbinical discussions on the Sabbath; and perhaps Jesus’ most famous teaching, “do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets,” (Matthew 7:12) is a restating of the Rabbi Hillel’s famous summary of the Law a generation earlier:  "What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary; go and learn"

It is not completely surprising that there were some adherents of the Pharisaic traditions among Jesus’ followers.  But it is even less surprising that of his followers, these would be the most concerned with maintaining the Law of Moses.

Which brings us back to the Council.

The apostles and elders met to consider this question.  After much discussion, Peter got up and addressed them:  “Brothers, you know that some time ago God made a choice among you that the Gentiles might hear from my lips the message of the gospel and believe.”  (Acts 15:6-7)

Peter was alluding here to an incident recorded in Acts chapter 10, where he received a vision from the Lord with which prompted him to accept an invitation by Cornelius, a Roman official who was curious to hear Peter’s message.  This led Peter to an important understanding:  “I now realize how true it is that God does not show favoritism but accepts men from every nation who fear him and do what is right.” (Acts 10:34-35)

At the Council, Peter went on to say,

“God, who knows the heart, showed that he accepted them by giving the Holy Spirit to them, just as he did to us.  He made no distinction between us and them, for he purified their hearts by faith.  Now then, why do you try to test God by putting on the necks of the disciples a yoke that neither we nor our fathers have been able to bear?”  (Acts 15:8-10)

Peter’s mention of the Holy Spirit was a potent argument.  The church in which I grew up tends to downplay the Holy Spirit except when unavoidable like on Trinity Sunday or the Feast of Pentecost because we Lutherans tend to be suspicious of extreme outbursts of enthusiasm, but the Book of Acts mentions frequent occasions where believers and new converts had ecstatic experiences which they attributed to the presence of God.  That these Gentile converts also experienced this same thing seemed to Peter and the other Apostles irrefutable evidence that God approved of them.

James the Brother of Jesus, who later tradition named James the Just to differentiate him from other Jameses and who had become an important leader among the elders of the Church by this time, stepped in with a compromise.  I get the feeling that he sympathized with the circumcision party; his epistle certainly emphasizes that Christians have an obligation to do Good Works just as Moses had commanded.  But James could not deny the evidence of Peter and Paul either.

“It is my judgment, therefore, that we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God,” he said. (Acts 15:19)  He recommended that the new converts not be required to be circumcised, but to have them abstain from a few practices common among the Gentiles which are prohibited by Mosaic Law:

(1) food polluted by idols

(2) sexual immorality

(3) the meat of strangled animals

(4) eating blood

Of these prohibitions, the first is largely obsolete; idolatry takes on more subtle forms these days and doesn’t usually involve sacrificing food.  The last two are based on the Levitical view cited by Doctor Van Helsing that “The Life is In the Blood” and that it is therefore uncool to consume it.  Animals killed for food were to be drained of blood as much a practical before being cooked.  These prohibitions have been largely ignored in cultures that enjoy blood sausage.

The second one, so broad and vaguely-worded, is the one that the Church has obsessed over for the past two millennia.

I suspect that Paul found even these bare-bones prohibitions more restrictive than he liked.  In his First Letter to the Corinthians (1 Cor 8:1-13) we find him finessing the rule about food sacrificed to idols, and he devotes much of his Epistle to the Galatians to insisting that Salvation is not predicated on following certain rules.  One of the sad ironies of Paul is that although he argued forcibly against legalism in Galatians and many of his other letters, his writings have also been used to justify most of the legalistic practices that have burdened the Church ever since.

James’ compromise was a big turning point in the development of the Church.  It averted the Church’s first major schism, and made the message of Jesus more accessible to the wider Gentile audience, but at a price.

Up to this point, the followers of Jesus could consider themselves a Jewish sect.  Heck, they were Jewish.  But with the Council of Jerusalem, that changed.  You can argue that this was the true source of the enmity between Judaism and Christendom:  not the blame for the Crucifixion, nor the blasphemous claim of Christ’s Divinity, but rather this decision by James and the other Apostles that the Jewish Identity as defined by the Laws of Moses no longer mattered.

You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus … There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.  If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.  (Galatians 3:26, 28)

That was Paul’s ideal of Christian equality; but in practical terms, the Church could either be a Jewish one, or a Gentile one; and when it made circumcision and the Law of Moses optional, the Church ceased to be Jewish.

Oh, the Leaders of the Church tried to have it both ways.  Even Paul urged his student Timothy, a young man with a Jewish mother but a Greek father, to become circumcised in order to demonstrate that he was not advocating Jews to reject the Law.  He did not make that request of his student Titus, a Greek.

When Paul visited Jerusalem for his last time, James and the elders of the Church warned him that rumors had spread that Paul was teaching Jews to turn away from Moses and to stop circumcising their children.  They suggested he accompany some men who going to perform a purification ritual at the Temple, to show everyone that he was fine with following the Mosaic traditions.

A good plan, but it didn’t work.  Some troublemakers stirred up the crowd at the Temple, claiming that Paul had brought a Gentile into the sacred Temple grounds.  The text calls them “some Jews from the province of Asia”.  These might have been the Jewish Christians of the circumcision party whose teachings prompted Paul to write his letter to the Galatians, or they might have been some of the members of the local Jewish community who opposed Paul when he traveled through Asia Minor.  The text doesn’t specify.

Either way, they started a riot which brought in the Roman authorities to quell the disturbance.  Paul was arrested, in part for his own protection, and remained a prisoner for two years while the Roman judicial system tried to figure out what to do with him.

In the end, Paul requested to have his case heard by Caesar; which was his right as a Roman citizen, but which further emphasized the rift.  Henceforth, the fate of Christendom would be linked to Rome, not to Jerusalem; and the Church would be a Gentile religion, not a Jewish one.

Family Connections

In 2002, a stone ossuary, a casket used to contain the bones of the dead, was discovered in Israel bearing the inscription:  “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus”.  Public reaction broke down into roughly three categories:  there were those who celebrated the find, because it’s always nice when archaeology corroborates something in the Bible; there were those who questioned it, suspecting that the inscription was a hoax; then there was the vast majority of Christendom whose reaction was:  “Jesus had a brother???”

James, like Mary, is another of those names which occur frequently in the New Testament, to the reader’s confusion.  The best-known one is James the son of Zebedee and the brother of John.  The bar-Zebedee brothers, along with Simon Peter, seem to have been Jesus’ closest friends among his twelve disciples.  Jesus had another disciple named James, who is called the son of Alpheus, or sometimes James the Lesser, either because he isn’t as prominent in the Gospels, or possibly because he was shorter.

But who was the brother of Jesus?

The first mention of Jesus’ siblings comes in the third chapter of Mark:

When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him, for they said “He is out of his mind.” … The Jesus’ mother and brothers arrived.  Standing outside, they sent someone in to call him.  A crowd was sitting around him, and they told him, “Your mother and brothers are outside looking for you.” “Who are my mother and my brothers?” he asked. Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, “Here are my mother and my brothers!  Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.”  (Mark 3:21, 31-35 NIV)

His first mention comes in the book of Matthew where Jesus returns to his hometown of Nazareth and preaches in the local synagogue.  The people who here him are amazed.  “Isn’t this the carpenter’s son?  Isn’t his mother’s name Mary, and aren’t his brothers James, Joseph, Simon and Judas?  Aren’t all his sisters with us?” (Matthew 13:55-56)

Catholics have long found this passage problematic.  The Catholic Church has traditionally maintained that Mary was sinless and that she remained a virgin her entire life.  Saying that Jesus had brothers and sisters strongly suggests that she and Joseph … well … Did It.

Some scholars have gotten around this by saying that the word “brother” used here in the text may also be translated as “relative”, meaning that James was a cousin of Jesus or maybe even a wacky uncle.  Although “wacky” is not an adjective that really suits James.

Another popular explanation, and this one actually seems plausible to me, is that Joseph was a widower when he wed Mary, and that James and the other siblings were children of his previous marriage.  This makes a certain degree of sense.  The Gospels don’t mention Joseph after Jesus’ childhood, and so it seems reasonable to guess that he was much older than Mary and had died before Jesus started his ministry.  And the brief mention in Mark chapter 3 of the family trying to bring Jesus home to me carries the strong vibe of the Responsible Older Brother trying to get the Rebellious Kid to settle down.  I might be reading into it, though.

Despite at first thinking his brother was crazy, James did come around.  Later on in his ministry, Jesus’ brothers came to him again, this time to give him advice on public relations:  “You ought to leave here and go to Judea, so that your disciples may see the miracles you do.” (John 7:3)

Jesus ignored their advice and didn’t go down to Jerusalem until he was good and ready.

After Jesus’ Resurrection, James seems to have become more closely associated with his Disciples, becoming a prominent leader of the Early Church, called by later tradition “James the Just”.  When Peter was imprisoned by Herod in Acts chapter 12 and then miraculously freed, Peter told his friends to “Tell James and the brothers about this.”  (Acts 12:17)

James came up with the compromise that settled the circumcision crisis at the Council of Jerusalem in Acts chapter 15, and he is mentioned in some of Paul’s letters as an important figure in the Jerusalem Christian community.  I always assumed that this was James the brother of John, but James bar-Zebedee was already dead by this point, executed by Herod Agrippa I (Acts 12:1-3).  Paul identifies the James he knew as James the brother of Jesus in Galatians 1:19.

So how did James wind up a respected figure in the Church?  He wasn’t one of the Twelve; he wasn’t even one of the larger group of followers who gathered around Jesus.  He didn’t even approve of Jesus and his ministry at first.  Well, obviously he eventually came around to support his weird little brother the rabbi.  If, as has been suggested, James was an older brother, perhaps the Twelve deferred to him as an elder.  Or it might have simply been a matter of family connections; as Jesus’ oldest living male relative,  he took over the family business, so to speak.  At least taking on an administrative role.

James and Paul had an interesting relationship.  I get the feeling it was a combination of cautious respect and mutual antagonism.  After Paul’s conversion to Christianity, he went to Jerusalem to meet with Peter and James, who confirmed his bona fides and gave him further instruction in the teachings of Jesus.  In his epistle to the Galatians, Paul cites James’ approval as one of his credentials as an apostle.

Yet there was friction between the two as well.  A split was growing between the predominantly Jewish church in Jerusalem – the Home Office, so to speak – and the newer communities starting up outside Judea, like Paul’s home base in the Syrian town of Antioch, which were becoming more predominantly Gentile.  A disagreement arouse over how the Church should treat these Gentile converts, which led to the Council of Jerusalem described in Acts chapter 15.  In this case, James brokered a compromise between the two factions, but elsewhere we get a strong impression that he wasn’t exactly on Paul’s side.

In his epistle to the Galatians, Paul tells of an incident where Peter was visiting the church in Antioch.  Peter had no problem hanging out with the gentile members of the community until “certain men came from James.” (Galatians 2:12).  Then, for political reasons, Peter decided it was expedient to keep kosher.  Paul called him out on this hypocrisy.

Granted, this is Paul’s version of what happened.  Some scholars have noted a discrepancy between the story Paul tells in Galatians and the Acts account of the Council of Jerusalem where Peter was strongly on Paul’s side.  I’m not sure if this is an inconsistency in the Bible as much as an inconsistency in Peter.  I suppose a lot depends on when the two incidents took place in relation to each other.

A greater conflict lies between the epistles of Paul, Galatians especially, and the Epistle of James, traditionally attributed to James the Just.  Martin Luther strongly considered leaving that book out when he was compiling his German translation of the New Testament, and grumbled that it was “an epistle of straw”.  The Book of James seems to run counter to the doctrine of Salvation by Grace which Luther derived from Paul and which forms the core of Lutheran understanding of the Gospel.

Luther was far from the first reader to notice this tension between the two Apostles.  “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith” Paul says, “not by works, so that no one can boast.”  (Ephesians 2:8-9)  Yet James counters:  “What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? … In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.  But someone will say, ‘You have faith, I have deeds.’  Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by what I do.”  (James 2:14, 17-18)

I think what was happening here is that James was speaking from the long tradition in Judaism – which continues to this day – that good deeds, moral actions, are an essential component to the godly life.  It has been suggested that James’ letter was written in reaction to early reports of what that nut Paul in Antioch was teaching, or to people who were misunderstanding Paul.

Luther eventually figured out how to reconcile the two, at least to his own satisfaction.  Paul is not saying that Good Works are unimportant; only that they are not the means by which people draw near to God.  In fact, in the verse immediately following the famous Ephesians 2 passage, Paul adds:  “For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works…” (Ephesians 2:10)

In other words, we shouldn’t be doing Good Works to try to get into Heaven; we should do Good Works because they’re the right thing to do.  Which is what the Atheists have been telling us all along.  I’ll have to think about that a bit.

When Paul made his last trip to Jerusalem, he met again with James to report on his travels.  Apparently rumors had come back to Jerusalem that Paul was teaching Jews to turn away from the Laws of Moses, which wasn’t exactly true, but close enough that it was re-opening the schism that the previous council had averted.  James and the elders of the Church recommend that Paul perform a public act of ritual purification to show that he still respected the Law.  It didn’t work; and in the resulting riot, Paul wound up arrested.

Scriptures does not say what happened to James the Just after that.  According to the First Century Jewish historian Josephus, the High Priest took advantage of a vacancy in the Roman governorship of Judea in AD 62 to condemn James and have him stoned.  Some of the Early Church Fathers stated that James died during the Roman siege of Jerusalem in AD 69.

But where was James buried?  Maybe in that ossuary with the controversial inscription.  The collector who revealed the James Ossuary to the world was accused of being part of a forgery ring.  Although the box itself was genuine, dating back to the First Century, the Israeli Antiquities Authority, which investigated the discovery, decided that the words “brother of Jesus” had been added to the inscription at a later date.  Other experts who have examined the ossuary have disagreed.  And so the argument goes on.

James probably wouldn’t have thought it important.