Free James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls I by Robert Eisenman Page A

as Matthew 2:17 would have it, but these were rather his own children with Maccabean blood! This behaviour shocked even his Roman sponsors, particularly Augustus, who upheld family values and was by all reports very displeased with it. 7
    But Herod survived all, got away with everything, including obliterating the Maccabean family and grafting his own family on whatever remained of it. This mostly-Idumaean, Greco-Arab line continued for three more generations until Titus, the man responsible for burning Jerusalem, made off with Bernice, a descendant of this line, as Caesar and Anthony had made off with Cleopatra – one of the last descendants of Alexander’s ruling élite – before him. Nor does this give any more pleasure to the people of Rome – who do not appear to have wished to see an Herodian Princess as their Empress, than Caesar’s and Anthony’s actions had done previously. Bernice’s fate is uncertain, but Titus seems to have put her away at some point prior to succeeding his father in 79 CE.
    Herod also had the last Maccabean High Priest, Mariamme’s younger brother Jonathan, put to death in 36 BCE when he reached the age of majority. Herod’s marriage with the last Maccabean Princess, Mariamme, would appear to have been contracted by her mother, Hyrcanus II’s daughter, on the basis that Jonathan would become the High Priest on reaching majority.
    Josephus records the pathetic scene of how, when the boy at thirteen years of age donned the High Priestly vestments, the Jewish crowd wept when he appeared in the Temple ( War 1.437/ Ant . 14.50-56). For those who would still cling to the contention that the people considered the Maccabean family usurpers, this should provide vivid testimony to the contrary. Wild with jealousy, Herod then had the boy taken down to his winter palace in Jericho and drowned while he was frolicking in the swimming pool with some of his attendants. He was the last Maccabean High Priest .
    After this, Herod is careful to maintain personal control over the High Priestly garments and appoints men, as Josephus himself observes, ‘who were not of eminent families, some hardly priests at all’ ( Ant . 20.247). Once instituted, this was the policy followed by procurators such as Pontius Pilate after him (26–37 CE; Ant. 20.6–16) and kings such as Agrippa I, his brother Herod of Chalcis, and his son, Bernice’s brother Agrippa II, until the Uprising against Rome. At this time ‘the Zealots’ elected their own High Priest, a lowly stone-cutter of the humblest origins whom Josephus calls ‘Phannius’, that is, Phineas . Such were the bloody origins of the Herodian High Priest class, tendentiously portrayed in the New Testament as the legitimate ‘Chief Priests’ and Sadducee party of the Jews!
    At Herod’s death, after he had indulged in all the cruelty and brutalities enumerated above and the total destruction of the national independence of the Jews and their previous royal priest line, revolutionary unrest began in earnest and continued for the next seventy years. This was possibly understood by exegetes like those at Qumran as the seventy-year period of ‘Wrath’ mentioned in Daniel 9:2. It continued until the outbreak of the War against Rome.
    Actually, it continued for the next hundred and forty years until Hadrian crushed the Second Jewish Revolt in 132–6 CE and renamed Jerusalem Aelia Capitolina. He forbade Jews to enter Jerusalem or even to come within eyesight of it, except once a year to mourn its past glories. During this period, too, descendants of the family of Jesus and his brothers were involved in ongoing Messianic agitation and were martyred in their turn. This was the end of the earthbound Messianic hopes among the Jews, hopes that gradually turned more other-worldly, ethereal, or ‘Gnostic’. This is what the imposition of Roman control really meant – destruction.
     
    Chapter 4
    First Century Sources Mentioning James
     
    The New Testament and the We