They Called My Brother a Heretic

Words to Know

Heretic — someone officially judged to hold wrong beliefs.

Pillar — Paul’s word for the top leaders in Jerusalem. James is listed first.

Hostile witness — someone describing a group in order to condemn it. Most of what we know about these people comes from such sources.

I had brothers.

Your Bible names four of them, and mentions sisters (Mark 6:3). The best known of my brothers was James.

During my life he was not a follower. My family thought I had lost my mind and came to take me home (Mark 3:21). John says it flatly: even my own brothers did not believe in me (John 7:5).

Then I am executed. And within a few years that same brother is running the whole thing in Jerusalem.

How? Paul hands you two reasons.

One: something happened to him. In Paul’s summary of the faith, the one I showed you in Lesson 14, there is a line people skim past: then he appeared to James (1 Corinthians 15:7). Whatever that was, the man who thought I was mad did not stay where he was standing.

Two: he was my brother. When a teacher died, his movement did not hold an election. It looked at his house. When James was killed, an old account says the surviving relatives chose one of my cousins, a man named Simeon, to take the chair in Jerusalem. ¹ It was not a vote. It was a family.

So he led the movement. Paul, who had every reason to play him down, calls him the Lord’s brother (Galatians 1:19) and lists him first among the three men he calls pillars (Galatians 2:9).

Go deeperWhy the embarrassing details are worth trusting

The men who wrote the accounts were clearly embarrassed by the story of my family coming to take me home, and left it in anyway, which is itself a reason to trust it.

Look closer at that appearance to James in Paul's list. It comes after the appearances to Peter and to the rest, listed separately, as his own.

And being my brother mattered far more in my world than it does in yours. Leadership stayed in the family because the family was the one thing a frightened group could agree on without tearing itself apart.

None of this is a small claim, and it does not come only from friendly sources.

He tried to hold one table together.

In Lesson 14 you saw the argument over whether a non-Jew had to be circumcised and keep the food laws in order to be one of us. Acts says that at the meeting in Jerusalem, James stood up and gave the decision, and it was a compromise, not a surrender.

He did not require circumcision. But he kept four rules, and every one of them is about being able to share a room and a meal. Stay away from meat offered to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals, and from sexual immorality (Acts 15:19–20). He was not asking Greeks to become Jews. He was asking Greeks to eat in a way that a law-keeping Jew could sit down and eat beside.

It did not hold. Paul, who was there, never once mentions those four rules in any letter he writes about food, and he tells the Corinthians they may eat whatever is sold in the market (1 Corinthians 10:25). The two accounts of that meeting do not sit comfortably together, and I am not going to pretend they do. ²

But the shape is not in doubt. The last man with the authority to make both halves of my movement eat at one table used it. And within a generation there were two movements.

He was killed in the year 62, and we know exactly how.

A Jewish historian named Josephus, with no stake at all in praising him, wrote it down. The Roman governor died in office, and for a few weeks there was nobody in the province above the high priest, a man named Ananus. Ananus convened a court, charged James and some others with breaking the law, and had them stoned. He did it in the gap because he could not have done it with a governor present.

And it backfired on him. The men in the city most careful about the law were disgusted and complained to the new governor, and Ananus was removed from the high priesthood after three months. ³

Hold on to that last part. When my brother was killed, the strictest law-keeping Jews in Jerusalem were on his side. He was one of their own.

A later Christian account adds more, that he was called the Just and was thrown from the Temple wall. That one was written to praise him, and it is harder to lean on. ⁴

Go deeperThe governors' names, and what Rome reserved for itself

Festus was the governor who died in office, and Albinus, his replacement, was still on the road, which is what opened the gap Ananus used.

Rome reserved executions for itself, which is exactly why that gap mattered.

Notice who exactly was disgusted: the very people James was supposedly offending against, the men most scrupulous about the law in the whole city, who rode out to meet the new governor and lodge their complaint in person.

That same friendlier account adds one more detail: his knees had grown callused like a camel's from so much kneeling in prayer, and death came only after he had already been pushed from the height above.

That is what the original movement looked like.

James kept the law. He observed the sabbath, ate what a Jew ate and worshipped at the Temple. He believed I was the anointed one, and he did not believe that following me meant you stopped being a Jew. It was not a new religion. It was a movement inside Judaism, led by my brother, in my capital, made up of people who had known me personally.

Then it was taken apart, and not by an argument.

• 70: Rome takes Jerusalem, burns the Temple and levels the city. My brother’s people lose their center, whether or not they escaped across the Jordan to Pella, as an old account says. ⁵
• 135: A second revolt is crushed. The emperor Hadrian rebuilds Jerusalem as a Roman city and bars Jews from it. ⁶
• About 180: Bishop Irenaeus writes a catalogue of wrong groups, and my brother’s people are in it. ⁷
• 380: An emperor makes one version of the faith the law of the empire, and being on the list now means the government has a name for you.
• 383: Jerome, the man who translated the Bible into Latin, argues that my brothers were really cousins. ⁸
• Early 400s: Jerome writes of these law-keeping followers of mine that while they want to be both Jews and Christians, they are neither. ⁹

Go deeperThe names behind the war, the revolt and the catalogues

The war itself started in the year 66, when my people first rose against Rome. Everything the movement's Jewish half rested on, the Temple, the place they met, the authority that let a man like James settle an argument for everyone, was inside that city, and it was gone in a single summer, before the siege even closed. It never came back.

The second revolt, in the year 132, was led by a man called Bar Kokhba. It took Rome three years to put it down.

The catalogues that followed had authors of their own. Irenaeus wrote his in Gaul. A bishop named Epiphanius, writing on Cyprus in the fourth century, produced a far longer one, eighty groups in all, and called the whole book a medicine chest: poisons, and the remedies for them.

Jerome, the same scholar whose Latin translation of the Bible Europe would read for the next thousand years, sent that judgment in a letter to Augustine.

Now count up who was left standing. The Jewish half had no Temple, no Jerusalem and no leadership, and belonged to a people the empire had crushed twice and was taxing as a punishment for it. The Greek half was in dozens of cities, growing, with a collection of letters, an organization, and every reason on earth to make very clear to a Roman official that we are not those people.

That is not a fair fight. One side lost its country.

And then the winners wrote the rules.

Jewish followers of mine went on existing for centuries anyway. Bishops wrote catalogues of wrong groups, copied from church to church, so that a leader anywhere could check a travelling stranger against the list before letting him speak. Read what the bishops actually hold against my brother’s people. They keep the law. They are circumcised. They say I was an ordinary man. And they reject Paul. They called him a traitor to the law and would not use his letters at all.

Being in the catalogue had teeth. It meant no shared meal and no letters of introduction, which were the only thing that got a travelling Christian a bed and a hearing in the next city. You were cut off from the network, and the network was the whole point.

So Jewish followers of a Jewish teacher, keeping the law their teacher kept, in the country their teacher came from, were informed by a Latin-speaking European that they were not Christians. That word did not exist in their teacher’s lifetime.

Let me be careful, because it would be easy to overclaim here. I cannot tell you that the group called by that name in the fourth century believed exactly what my brother believed in the year 50, because three hundred years had passed for them too. And nearly everything we know about them comes from hostile witnesses who were describing them in order to condemn them.

But the shape is not in doubt. Two movements grew out of me. One was Jewish, led by my family and by people who had known me, in my own country. The other was Greek-speaking and urban, built on the letters of a man who never met me. The second one won. It had the cities, the numbers, the letters, the organization, and a homeland that had not been destroyed.

It also had a reason to define itself against them, and it was not only theology.

After those two wars, being Jewish anywhere in the empire was dangerous and expensive. A Greek-speaking congregation that could say we are not them, we are something new was safer than a congregation that could not. So the movement said it. And once it defined itself against the Jews rather than as part of the Jewish people, everything Jewish about me became a problem to manage.

My family faded out. The teaching that my mother remained a virgin her whole life meant she could not have had four more sons and some daughters afterward. So the sons had to go somewhere, and Jerome made them cousins.

Mark says brothers. It says it in a list, with their names in it (Mark 6:3).

The church edited my family out of my life. And then, having removed the Jews from around me, they spent nineteen hundred years blaming the Jews for my death, which was carried out by Roman soldiers, on the orders of a Roman governor, using a Roman punishment.

Go deeperWhat got reinterpreted along with my brother

Every year the argument that the church was not Jewish got easier to make and more useful to have made.

My own law-keeping became something to be tolerated temporarily rather than explained. My arguments with other teachers, ordinary disagreements of the kind common in that era's literature, were reread as an outsider condemning a whole people.

My brother himself was reinterpreted two different ways: as a cousin, or as a stepbrother from an earlier marriage of Joseph's.

So here is the question this lesson is really asking.

If the movement led by my own brother, staffed by people who had eaten with me, speaking my language, in my country, was formally declared heretical by the institution that carries my name, then who is that institution following?

I am not going to answer it for you. You have the dates and the names.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Galatians 1:19 and Galatians 2:9.

You will find: Paul calling James my brother, and listing him first among the leaders.

Then look up: Mark 6:3, where my brothers and sisters are named.

The Short Version

• My brother James led the movement for about twenty years after I died, because he was family and because something happened to him.
• He ruled that non-Jews did not need circumcision, but kept four food rules so that one table could hold.
• Rome destroyed Jerusalem in 70 and barred Jews from it after 135. That, more than any argument, finished the Jewish half.
• Their descendants were listed as heretics in bishops’ catalogues, which cut them out of the network.
• The version that won was built on a man who never met me.

Think About It

1. What would it take for a church today to declare the founder’s own family wrong?
2. Why is it significant that those groups rejected Paul specifically?