Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

is indeed
     what he means), then the statement is patently false; only the high priest could enter
     the Holy of Holies. There is also a variant tradition of James’s death in Hegesippus
     that contradicts what scholars accept as the more reliable account in Josephus’s
Antiquities
. As recorded in the
Ecclesiastical History
, it was James’s response to the request of the Jews to help dissuade the people from
     following Jesus as messiah that ultimately leads to his death: “And [James] answered
     with a loud voice: Why do you ask me concerning Jesus, the Son of Man? He himself
     sits in heaven at the right hand of the great power, and is about to come upon the
     clouds of heaven! So they went up and threw down the just man, and said to each other:
     Let us stone James the Just. And they began to stone him, for he was not killed by
     the fall; but he turned and knelt down and said: I entreat you, Lord God our father,
     forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
    What is fascinating about this story is that it seems to be a variant of the story
     of Stephen’s martyrdom in the book of Acts, which was itself swiped from Jesus’s response
     to the high priest Caiaphas in the gospel of Mark. Note also the parallel between
     James’s death speech and that of Jesus’s on the cross in Luke 23:24.
    Hegesippus ends the story of James’s martyrdom thus: “And one of them, one of the
     fullers, took the club with which he beat out clothes and struck the just man on the
     head. And thus he suffered martyrdom. And they buried him on the spot, by the temple,
     and his monument still remains by the temple. He became a true witness, both to Jews
     and Greeks, that Jesus is the Christ. And immediately Vespasian besieged them” (Eusebius,
Ecclesiastical History
2.23.1–18). Again, while scholars are almost unanimous in preferring Josephus’s account
     of James’s death to Hegesippus, it bears mentioning that the latter tradition is echoed
     in the work of Clement of Alexandria, who writes: “there were two Jameses, one the
     Just, who was thrown down from the parapet [of the Temple] and beaten to death with
     the fuller’s club, the other the James [son of Zebedee] who was beheaded” (Clement,
Hypotyposes
, Book 7).
    Josephus writes of the wealthy priestly aristocracy seizing the tithes of the lower
     priests in
Antiquities
20.180–81: “But as for the high priest, Ananias, he increased in glory every day,
     and this to a great degree, and had obtained the favor and esteem of the citizens
     in a signal manner; for he was a great hoarder up of money: he therefore cultivated
     the friendship of Albinus, and of the high priest [Jesus, son of Danneus], by making
     them presents; he also had servants who were very wicked, who joined themselves to
     the boldest sort of the people, and went to the thrashing-floors, and took away the
     tithes that belonged to the priests by violence, and did not refrain from beating
     such as would not give these tithes to them. So the other high priests acted in the
     like manner, as did those his servants, without any one being able to prohibit them;
     so that [some of the] priests, that of old were wont to be supported with those tithes,
     died for want of food.” This Ananias was probably Ananus the Elder, father to the
     Ananus who killed James.
    Josephus’s account of James’s martyrdom can be found in
Antiquities
20.9.1. Not everyone is convinced that James was executed for being a Christian.
     Maurice Goguel, for instance, argues that if the men executed along with James were
     also Christians then their names would have been preserved in Christian tradition;
     Goguel,
Birth of Christianity
(New York: Macmillan, 1954). Some scholars, myself included, believe that he was
     executed for condemning Ananus’s seizure of the tithes meant for the lower-class priests;
     see S.G.F. Brandon, “The Death of James the Just: A New Interpretation,”
Studies in Mysticism and Religion
(Jerusalem: Magnus Press, 1967): 57–69.
    Whether the Jews were outraged by the unlawful procedure of the trial or by the unjust
     verdict is difficult to decipher from Josephus’s account. The fact that they complain
     to Albinus about the illegality of Ananus’s calling the Sanhedrin without a procurator
     in Jerusalem seems to suggest that it was the procedure of the trial they objected
     to, not the verdict. However, I agree with John Painter who notes that “the suggestion
     that what the group