My point once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are dumb enough to take them literally.
John Dominic Crossan, Who Is Jesus? 1
The force with which St Paul of Tarsus (while he was still known as Saul) threw James, the brother of Jesus, down the steps of the Temple of Jerusalem was considerable. As a Nazorean his appearance was ascetic, a man who fasted regularly and did not wash, whose hair was long and whose every word his many followers clung to: he was a holy man. His shattered body was duly collected by his followers and carted off into exile – across the Jordan.
This is a true account, told in detail in a document little known outside Biblical scholarship. The Clementine Recognitions (long believed to have been composed by Clement, one of the early Popes) is a 1stcentury text written by Hebrew-Christians (that is, members of the Jerusalem Church). They give a telling detail: that forever after, James limped when he walked. The text also tells us the number of the followers of James as he escaped the tense brutality of Jerusalem: 5,000. They were soon to be pursued by 5,000 followers of Saul (soon to become St Paul), a Temple agent who harried and persecuted the early Christians. The Book of Acts and Paul himself confirm this fact, but not the sheer number involved.
Somewhere, on the road to Damascus, 10,000 people met in combat in one of the most important, but little-known, episodes in Christian history. Important, because during this encounter, as we shall see, Paul was shown an object no bigger than the palm of his hand. It was so surprising: it shook him to the core of his soul. Paul’s response was to fall from his horse, blinded. The object he had seen transformed him into the saint of legend – and changed the course of history.
This dramatic story challenges the idea of the early Christians as a small peace-loving group of Jewish idealists, largely unknown and not yet politically influential. What it tells us is the exact opposite: that the Temple authorities, who ruled in the name of Rome, were worried enough by the power of the early Church to send their chief and most resourceful agent with clear orders: seek and destroy.
The subsequent conversion of Saul was a landmark in the survival of the nascent Christianity, which was soon to be divorced from its Jewish background. However, the form of Christianity espoused by James, which adhered to the Law of Moses and rejected the idea of faith without works, was not so lucky. In the downfall of Judea at the hands of the vengeful Roman armies in the war of AD 66–70 much was destroyed, but by virtue of having reached Rome before this time, Paul’s vision became the central motif of his new faith, the kind of Christianity that James and his followers had objected to – the Christianity that became the foundation-stone of the Church in the West.
There are other texts to which we can turn to when investigating the very early period of Christian origins, but there is not much that pre-dates the letters of Paul. The New Testament gives us surprisingly little detail about the period immediately after the Crucifixion. It is all very murky. With the discovery of the lead codices, however, some of our basic assumptions about these shadowy years in the formative era of Christianity are about to be challenged.
Amidst the shadows, all signs of James and the Jerusalem Church disappeared: what was not wilfully destroyed by the victors lay hidden for a very long time – in caves in northern Jordan. What is forgotten is that, in their rush to exile, the community of St James took their precious store of books with them, for James had been privy to the Secret Teachings of Jesus Christ.