02x19 - What Happened to the JC Bunch?: Tracking the Tribe

[bunniefuu]

What does it all mean?

This is where the archeology has been found.

Oh, hi how are you?

Look at that.

I need a planter.

A shrine to a bellybutton.

Is this a rock of salt?

Look at that!

No one gets into this place?

Whoa, don't take me too far!

Now that's naked archeology.

[theme music]

[SIMCHA] Last time on the Naked Archaeologist.

I started my quest to find out what happened

to the original Jesus movement.

Some people may be surprised

that the earliest followers of Jesus were Jewish.

That's why some scholars call them Judeo-Christian.

The Torah, tradition tells us, is the set of laws

passed from God down to Moses

and the Judeo-Christians lived by the Torah,

which means they circumcised, ate kosher,

and respected Saturday as the Sabbath.

The Judeo-Christians differed from traditional Jews

on only one belief: that Jesus was the messiah.

His job as messiah was to liberate Jerusalem

from the Romans and bring world peace.

I travelled from Jerusalem

to where the dead sea scrolls were found, in Qumran,

a dry plateau about a mile inland

from the shore of the Dead Sea.

I met with Prof. Robert Eisenman

who told me that Qumran supported various communities

starting years ago.

But scholars are loathed to identify Judeo-Christians

with the dead sea scrolls found in the Caves

here around Qumran.

And what do the scholars do?

They come along and tell us:

"Oh, people like Eisenman don't know

what they're talking about."

"Oh, nothing there, nothing interesting,

nothing to do with Christianity.

This is a much earlier group.

You can go to sleep folks and forget about it."

Then we came along and said, no, folks, wake up.

This is not just an earlier group.

This is a contemporary group.

In fact, this is an aboriginal Christian group here.

[SIMCHA] Eisenman says that James,

the brother of Jesus, ran things for the Judeo-Christians

here at Qumran.

His theory is one that many scholars can't swallow.

nonetheless, he says he can uncover an early Christianity

that has been hiding in plain sight.

How can he do it?

It's complex but it goes something like this:

By building a detailed comparison of ancient texts

with the Christian Bible, Eisenman says

he can draw a treasure map and identify a landmark

that physically places James at Qumran years ago.

And that may change the way we look at Christianity.

His method starts with a new examination

of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

We're looking across into the most important cave found,

Cave . That is the Library Cave.

There were literally tens of thousands of fragments

found in that cave, just piled up in a huge, unruly manner.

The famous Dead Sea Scrolls.

Absolutely. We live in miraculous times.

Out of nowhere comes this beautiful material

that tells us all about this movement.

[SIMCHA] In the Dead Sea scrolls,

Eisenman says he's found references to James,

the brother of Jesus, also known as James the Just.

We know that every time in the Qumran materials,

if you see the words "Just One" or "Righteous One",

the interpretation is the righteous teacher.

So there's a leader in the Dead Sea Scrolls

called the "Just One" or the "Righteous One",

Do you believe the Teacher of Righteousness is James?

Yes.

Why do you think that?

Because everything in his doctrine,

everything that we identify with him,

everything that we know about him,

makes it clear that his thinking is parallel

or part of the kind of group we have here.

We have one basic messianic movement out here,

and this is the centre of it.

[SIMCHA] If Eisenman can place James

at the centre of it all, he can unveil a form of Christianity

that has been lost for years.

It would mean that the Dead Sea Scrolls contain

some of the earliest writings of the Jesus movement.

And we can see them as they were.

Yes. It's all in their literature. They're righteous.

They're very imaginative. They're messianic.

They don't believe in turning the other cheek.

They don't love their enemy.

They wish a final apocalyptic judgment on all the people

who are destroying Palestine, the Israelites,

and all the people around them.

[SIMCHA] But most scholars call the group

that lived at Qumran, the Essenes,

and the group that followed James, the Ebionites.

These scholars believe that the Essenes

wrote Dead Sea scrolls... not James' Ebionites.

But Eisenman tells me to look a little closer at the evidence.

He believes that many of the Essenes and the Ebionites

were one and the same

and that means that they were Judeo-Christian.

I don't even know if there's someone else who would say,

"Hey, g*ng, you read about the Teacher of Righteousness.

That's James, the brother of Jesus.

That's the Ebionites.

You're reading they're the original Jesus movement

before it's been tampered with.

Before it's been, yes, overwritten.

That's what you believe.

Oh, absolutely.

[SIMCHA] Eisenman points out there is a letter

in the Dead Sea Scrolls that scholars call MMT.

It's a letter that just may be greased

by the fingerprints of James.

That makes Eisenman pretty excited.

It's a letter. I like to call a letterpp

It was found here?

It was found in Cave .

And what it is a letter to a foreign king of some kind

that needs tuition in the Law of Moses.

They're telling a king how to...

How to keep the Law of Moses there are converts

in northern Syria who do need tuition, MMT,

to my mind, is a Jamesian letter to one of these rulers,

laying out things that are required of them.

[SIMCHA] Eisenman has compared the MMT letter

found at Qumran with a letter attributed to James,

in Acts of the Christian Bible.

And what he's discovered is extraordinary.

The letters seem to match.

We know that James' followers in Acts

took a letter down to Antioch,

which banned fornication, blood, strangled things

meaning carrion and things sacrificed to idols.

It reflects Qumran doctrine almost all the way through it.

It's totally consistent

with everything you find here in Qumran.

So, if you're right, the letter found there

called "MMT" is actually maybe penned by James.

That's the key. That that letter, actually contained

all the things we know that James' letter

contained in the Book of Acts.

But this is huge. You're telling me

that some of the writings that we find here

are really the writings of what we would call today,

or the world generally, the early Church.

The early Church in Palestine. Not the Pauline one.

No. The actual followers of Jesus.

Yes.

[SIMCHA] Eisenman is quick to make the distinction

between the followers of Jesus

and another developing movement that scholars call

Pauline Christianity. That's because for the Ebionites,

the continuing Jesus movement led by James,

the real troubles begin with a man named Paul.

Paul was the enemy of his.

Paul persecuted early Christians.

He didn't even know who he was. What?

Paul's telling us he knows Christ better than James?

Better than Peter?

Better than people who spent their whole life with him,

who followed him, who succeeded him,

like the Kennedy brothers,

would know more about who their brother was

than people who were their enemies,

who admit to having persecuted Christians in their lifetime.

[SIMCHA] Eisenman also points out

that the writings uncovered here describe

"a spouter of lies", an enemy of the Dead Sea Scrolls Community.

According to Eisenman the mysterious "spouter of lies"

is none other than the apostle Paul.

After all, unlike the Twelve Apostles, Paul never met Jesus.

I didn't even know him...

[SIMCHA] According to Acts,

Paul admits to be a brutal persecutor

of the Ebionite Jesus movement...

until his mircaulous conversion to Christianity.

So Paul is the first guy to try to drive a nail into the Ebionites,

the James party, the Judeo-Christians.

He pacifies the messianic movement.

Whether he did it on purpose, whether he has a-

An a* to grind.

-a super-ego.

You don't like him.

How can you like someone like that?

[SIMCHA] Eisenman's dislike of Paul

stems in part from comparing the Christian bible

to an ancient documents called the Clementine Recognitions.

The Clementine recognitions which is a literature

who we know ultimately was the first

or second pope in Rome after Peter.

[SIMCHA] Eisenman says there is an event

described in both the Christian Bible and in Clement's writings

that involves James and Paul.

Only when you compare both texts do you get the full story,

and it paints an ugly picture of Paul.

[SIMCHA] Robert Eisenman believes

he has identified strong evidence that Qumran

was HQ for the early Jesus movement.

By comparing The Clementine Recognitions

with the Christian Bible he says he can identify

a landmark that physically places James,

the brother of Jesus, at Qumran

The Recognitions were supposedly penned by the rd pope,

aptly named Clement.

Clement describes a scene in which James flees

from Jerusalem seemingly to Qumran.

You have Clement going to Jerusalem,

witnessing this debate on the Temple steps,

interrupted by this ferocious man

who comes in and leads a riot of blood and b*ating,

in which he throws James down the Temple steps

and leaves him for dead. James is not dead.

That night his followers, and this is recorded,

pick him up, take him to a house in Jerusalem.

The next day, , of them flee down to Jericho with James.

The enemy, he's not named, as such

he's just called the Hostile the enemy man.

But any case, he goes and gets a letter from the high priest

to pursue these early Christians, as they're called,

all the way to Damascus.

[SIMCHA] Although the Clementine text

does not name the "hostile enemy",

his actions exactly match those of the apostle Paul

as described in the New Testament.

In Acts , Paul is chases the early-Christians down the road

to Damascus but before he can catch them

he has a vision of the resurrected Jesus.

[SIMCHA] It's an experience so powerful

that Paul stops his chase

and enlists with Christ.

The story in Acts exactly matches the tale

in the Clementine Writings.

And so Eisenman says that the un-named enemy must be Paul.

Paul's chasing the James community.

Right. After the riot in the Temple.

Paul pursues James on his way to Damascus,

comes through Jericho, but he misses them.

Where did they go? Where did they go?

Wait, I'm going to tell you where they went.

[SIMCHA] By matching the Recognitions

to the Christan Bible,

Eisenman has uncovered the complete story.

While James and his followers were on the run from Paul,

they made a detour to visit a monumental tomb

very close to Jericho.

The tomb housed the remains of two brothers

and it had a special characteristic that made it visible

for miles around.

The pseudo-Clementine Recognitions say

the James community were out of Jericho,

visiting the tomb, or mausoleum,

of two of the brothers that was considered to have

miraculously whitened of itself every year.

But this is very white. Look at it.

Yeah. Well, I know. But the point was...

[SIMCHA] Robert Eisenman has uncovered

what must have been a magnificent

and obvious place of veneration: a massive cemetery

oriented towards a promontory of brilliant white earth.

This is spectacular.

Look at the-these graves are undisturbed for , years.

Grave after grave after grave after grave.

Look at this.

Now-

And it's all leading up, you're saying to that.

Right. This is an absolutely spectacular promontory here.

Most people just thought it was a lookout or something,

a natural formation of some kind.

Nobody realized that there was something there.

This is incredible.

Now we're getting to the most beautiful mother load of all.

Come here, Simcha, and look back at this

incredible presentation in front of you

of the whole graveyard, all centered on this point here.

Look at this.

Here we have the remnants of the burial enclosure

or mausoleum. There's your view going south.

And up to the north here you have the way to Jericho-

Jericho's right there, right?

No. It's up there, about ten kilometres.

A structure here would have been seen by what?

Everybody for miles around, right?

[SIMCHA] Eisenman's students excavated this mausoleum

and uncovered a male skeleton that he believes

may be the remains of one of the two brothers

that James and his followers were venerating

while on the run from Paul.

The archaeology substantiates the Clementine writings.

And that means a Qumran detour saved James

and his JC bunch from certain death

and bought them enough time for Paul to find Christ!

This is that burial monument sepulcher,

that we're standing on it, that is such a magnificent,

clearly monumental place,

that that's where they were and that's

where they went when Paul missed them right here.

This is mind-boggling.

This is a piece of detective work that I think is incredible.

That's the best I can do.

[SIMCHA] But this remarkable archaeology

points to Qumran as an early Judeo-Christian headquarters,

and some of the Dead Sea scrolls

as the earliest Church writings ever found.

But the community here was not to last.

James was stoned to death in :

an execution ordered by the high priest in Jerusalem,

worried about the growing power of his movement.

Eisenman argues that the death of James

may have triggered the First Jewish-Roman w*r

that led to the destruction of Qumran in .

The JC bunch were in trouble.

They'd lost their HQ at Qumran and Jerusalem was besieged

by the Romans. To make matters worse,

Paul took their guidebook and cut a few rules

that would change the religion forever.

It was the launch of Christianity.

How did Paul do it?

[SIMCHA] I'm on the shores of the Sea of Galilee,

in the ancient town of Migdal,

Mary Magdalene's home-town to talk with

Professor Charlesworth about the Apostle Paul

and his effects on the early Jesus movement.

I think most historians, as they read the New Testament,

realize there's a tremendous tension somehow

between Paul's version of what Jesus is all about

and James, his brother.

Paul wants to go to the gentiles,

he is going to go to the non-circumcised,

whereas James and Peter are going to the circumcised.

Paul is saying you don't have to be circumcised,

you don't have to have a perception of Torah,

Jesus has replaced Torah, whereas it looks like James

is stressing morality, the same stress on purity

that Jesus and his followers had.

[SIMCHA] The Torah, tradition tells us,

is the set of laws passed from God down to Moses.

Both Jesus and James obeyed the Torah

but Paul wanted to change a few rules.

There were many disillusioned Roman's,

in Paul's time wanting to embrace a monotheistic faith,

one God. But when considering the Jewish faith,

these gentiles had a hard time paying the ticket price.

Judaism was very attractive to many people,

many Romans and Greeks. Why?

The high morality, the wonderful family life,

and a day off. It was the Jews that say,

"We get a day off in seven." Wow. That's neat.

But to ask me to as a Roman to be circumcised,

forget it, buddy. No way.

[SIMCHA] And so Paul threw that rule out,

along with eating Kosher and other commandments

that he believed didn't apply. Believe in Jesus,

he said, and that's enough,

you don't have to keep the Torah.

So if you want to say it,

Torah observers versus non-Torah observers.

But if Paul doesn't break down the barriers

that kept Judaism becoming powerful in the gentile world,

we probably would never be standing here

and talking about Paul and James and Jesus.

I mean, Christianity might never have taken over the world.

I don't think it would have.

Paul took Jesus's message out of it's original Jewish Home.

He then injected it into gentile popular culture.

And when it came time to assemble the first

standard Christian bible the gentiles

ignored the Judeo-Christian gospels.

Not many people today, and even not many scholars know

that the Jewish Christians, the Judeo-Christians,

had gospels. The Gospel of the Ebionites,

the Gospel of the Hebrews,

the Gospel of the Nazarenes, and other gospels.

These are what we call Jewish-Christian gospels.

These are lost. Why are they lost?

Perhaps the powerful community

that became the Church did not want them.

They didn't put them in the New Testament,

and probably they destroyed them.

As the "Pauline" followers of Christianity

were establishing the Church, they were

writing the Judeo-Christians out of their bible.

They emphasized the supernatural divinity of Jesus

and did not accept the Judeo-Christian belief

that Jesus was a mortal man, a messiah but not a god.

And there were pressures

coming from the Jewish side as well.

Even though the Judeo Christians honored the complete Torah,

including the rules Paul had chucked out,

it wasn't long after the deaths of Jesus and James

that the JC bunch was getting booted from the synagogue.

To find out why, I went to Jesus' home town, Capernaum.

[SIMCHA] I'm in Capernaum, Jesus' home town

to find out what happened to the Judeo Christians,

the early followers of Jesus and James.

Ok I'll tell you something when I'm in a place like this

I can't be this close to the house that Jesus lived in

Headquarters right we got to go. There's just no choice.

[SIMCHA] Capernaum was hometown for Jesus

and his apostles, James, Andrew, John, Matthew

as well as Simon Peter.

Right over here is the house of Simon Peter.

There's an unbroken tradition that this is where it was.

There's a church over me but this is the archaeology.

It means that room in the center

was where Jesus preached was the Headquarters

of his movement.

It's incredible just to be in a place like this.

Archaeology doesn't get better.

[SIMCHA] I met up with archeologist Motti Aviam

who told me that though this was the hood

for the original Jesus movement,

it wasn't long before they got pushed around on their own turf.

So Jesus, according to Christian tradition,

the gospels, lived here for a while.

He lived here. He preached in the synagogue of Capernaum.

And we are in the synagogue of Capernaum.

Yes, but this, of course, different periods.

We have here, and what you see all around you,

is a th century synagogue.

We don't have here remains of a synagogue

of the time of Jesus.

Odds are, that if it's not underneath here,

then it's somewhere over here.

Yes. If we were able to excavate all of Capernaum,

I believe we'll find it.

So wouldn't it make sense,

that this is where the headquarters

of the Jesus movement

after the crucifixion was. Because they were Jews.

They were praying at the same synagogues

as everyone else, they would eat the same kosher food.

The only difference between them and everybody else was,

the other guys were waiting for the Messiah,

they say, he came and is soon coming back.

Yup. There were not Christians in the nd century,

because there was no Christianity in the nd century, for sure.

It's a sect in Judaism. They were inside Jewish community

towards the end of this period, towards the nd, rd century,

Jews pushed them out there was a great split

between the Jewish Christian and the Jews.

And then when Christianity became what it is

when that took over, they also pushed the early Christians out

they didn't want them because they were Jews.

The Jews didn't want them because they were Christians,

and the Christians didn't want them

because they were Jews.

Exactly. And that's probably how they dissolved.

They just dissolved into the two religions,

back to Judaism or into the new Christianity.

[SIMCHA] And that's how most scholars

believe the JC bunch disappeared,

squeezed out. Not welcome in church or synagogue.

But the great thing about archaeologists

is that they keep digging things up.

This is a code.

There have been recent excavations

that have unearthed strange symbols.

It's very suggestive.

What are they doing here?

All of these may point to an ongoing underground

of the Judeo-Christian movement well beyond

what we originally thought possible.

But that's a story for another episode.