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

King of the Peoples beyond the Euphrates’ , is basically the sister city of Haran some thirty miles south. Haran is well known in the Bible as Abraham’s place of origin before he received the call to depart for the Land of Israel (Genesis 11:28–32), a fact its inhabitants are not slow to advertise to this day. Nor were they in ancient times as Abraham’s fame grew more and more legendary.
    Not only do shrines and legends connecting Abraham with sites in this area persist to this day, Paul and Muhammad – whose respective salvationary schemes, while not always distinguishable from one another, pivot on the spiritual status of Abraham – both emphasize their common connection to ‘ the Faith ’ or ‘ Religion of Abraham’ . 68 So does the ideologically o p posite and, in this sense, parallel salvationary scheme set forth in the Letter of James and, if one looks carefully, one can detect the same ideological focus on Abraham across the breadth of the Qumran corpus. 69
    Paul makes his allusion to Christianity being ‘Abraham’s Religion’ in Galatians 3:6–4:31 and Romans 4:1–22 and 9:7–9, even going so far as to claim that Christians were the true ‘ Heirs to ’ or ‘ Children of the Promise ’ and ‘ were justified ’ in the way ‘ Abraham was justified ’ – his famous ‘ Justification by Faith ’ polemic. 70
    In James however, Abraham ‘ is justified by works’ , his ‘ Faith ’ rather ‘ Perfected ’ or ‘ made Perfect ’ – according to some translations ‘ completed ’ – by ‘works’ . This then fulfills the biblical passage about Abraham’s ‘ Belief’ , that he ‘ believed God and it was counted ’ or ‘ reckoned to him as Righteousness’ . It is as a result of this that, according to James 2:22–23, ‘ he was called Friend of God’ , all terminologies well-known to the Dead Sea Scrolls. 71 This position, of course, is the opposite of that of the stated opponent of James – ‘ the Empty ’ or ‘ Foolish Man ’ (2:20) – that Abraham was saved ‘ by Faith only ’ and thought by most to reflect the position that can be identified with Paul in Galatians 2:16–3:7 above. 72
    For Muhammad, Islam is ‘ Abraham’s Religion ’ (for Paul, the term is ‘ Abraham’s Faith ’). But as in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Letter of James, Muhammad goes even further designating Abraham as ‘ the Friend of God ’ – the epithet for him ever after in Islam to this day to the extent that al-Khalil (‘ the Friend ’) is used in place of Abraham’s very name itself. 73 The diffe r ence between Muhammad’s arguments, as they develop in the Koran, and Paul’s, however, is that for Paul, Abraham’s ‘ Faith ’ (using the language of Genesis 15:6) ‘ was reckoned to him as Righteousness ’ before the revelation of the Torah to Moses and, therefore, Abraham – as he puts it so inimitably – could not have been ‘ justified by the Law’ . For Muhammad, following Paul’s ploy, it was rather ‘ Abraham ’ s Religion ’ that came before both Judaism and Christianity or, as he so inimitably puts it in the Koran, before either Judaism or Christianity could corrupt ‘ the Religion of Abraham ’ with their ‘ lies ’ (2:145–56).
    If these arguments were directed to the inhabitants of Northern Syria (as to some extent, in the writer’s view, they are in the Dead Sea Scrolls as well), then the evocation of Abraham’s salvationary status is perhaps neither accidental nor very su r prising, particularly where those seeing themselves as inhabiting ‘ Abraham’s homeland ’ were concerned.
    MMT actually uses the language of ‘ works reckoned as Righteousness ’ (only really to be found elsewhere in the Letter of James) in addressing the King it compares to David, who would appear to be its respondent; and ‘ his People’ , that is, as we shall see, seemingly a foreign People . 74 By implication, this compares the salvationary state of this King with