The First Christians / pt. 12
We have recently looked at the Testament of Levi as a Naṣarene-inspired work. Another work, one found at Qumran (1Q21) and known as “The Words of Levi,” seems to have been an earlier version of Test. Levi and has a similar tone. The Naṣarenes and Qumran were antagonists (as were Yeshu and the Teacher of Righteousness), and the fact that some Naṣarene writings were found in the Qumran caves suggests to me that the DSS was a library and not the repository of a single sect.
Levi—the third son of Jacob and Leah—is accorded particular reverence in a number of works, including the Naṣarene Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs (T12P), where two patriarchs are accorded special status: Levi and Judah—the religious leader (High Priest) and the secular leader (king). Lest the reader be in any doubt as to which of the two is pre-eminent, the author addresses this question in a critical passage from Test. Judah:
[Judah speaks on his deathbed.] “And now, children, love Levi so that you may endure. Do not be arrogant toward him or you will be wholly destroyed. To me God has given the kingship and to him the priesthood; and He has subjected the kingship to the priesthood. To me He gave earthly matters and to Levi heavenly matters. As heaven is superior to the earth, so is God’s priesthood superior to the kingdom on earth…” (Test. Judah 21:1–3. Cf. Test. Reuben 6:7–8.)
The superiority of priest to king, and of “earthly matters” over “heavenly matters” is entirely consistent with Naṣarene theology which, as we have seen, describes God as the “Lord of spirits.” The crux of the matter is the statement: “As heaven is superior to the earth.” This vital assertion is a departure from normative Judaism and veils an incipient dualism, a disparagement of materiality that can be considered Platonic, “idealistic” (a modern philosophical term)—or even Buddhist, in which materiality is viewed as an illusive decoy.
Historically, the special veneration of Levi is not a coincidence, for numerous affinities exist between the “Levites” and the early Christians, the early Naṣarene followers of Yeshu haNotsri—as I show below.
Who were the Levites? In Deut. 18:5 (621 BCE) Levi is granted the right “to stand and minister in the name of the LORD, him [Levi] and his sons for all time.” In one scholar’s words, “Deuteronomy demands that a single cultus be established and that an exclusive priestly monoply be granted to the tribe of Levi.” This eternal promise, however, would soon be broken, for in the fourth century BCE the rewritten Pentateuch (the so-called “Priestly Source”) appeared and introduced a completely new class of priests, the Aaronides (sons of Aaron, the brother of Moses), who arrogated to themselves exclusive rights to minister to Yahweh at the new Second Temple, where only they could approach the altar. While the Aaronides made sure to claim membership in the tribe of Levi, through their pen they reduced all other Levites to the status of inferior religious functionaries. They also rendered all country altars illicit, ensuring that the Jerusalem Temple was henceforth the only sanctioned venue of sacrifice. Hence the ubiquitous phrase in Jewish scripture, “priests and Levites” (as if Levites were not/no longer priests—E. Rivkin, op. cit. chp. 2.)
It will become clear that the “Levites” were carriers of suppressed (including proto-gnostic) religious traditions in opposition to the dominant Second Temple priesthood (Zadokites, Aaronides, and [later] Sadducees). To illustrate, I here consider a passage from the Testament of Levi, in the T12P:
1/ [Levi speaks.] “Now I have come to know that for seventy weeks you will wander astray and profane the priesthood and defile the sacrificial altars.
2/ “You will set aside the Law and nullify the words of the prophets by your wicked perversity. You persecute just men and you hate the pious; the word of the faithful you regard with revulsion.
3/ “A man who by the power of the Most High renews the Law you name ‘Deceiver,’ and finally you will plot to kill him, not discerning his eminence; by your wickedness you take innocent blood on your heads.
4/ “I tell you, on account of him your holy places will be razed to the ground.” (Test. Levi 16:1–4)
Verse 3 mentions a man “you name ‘Deceiver’.” From v. 1 we see that “you” (pl.) are those who “wander astray and profane the priesthood and defile the sacrificial altars.” Note the plural—the author is writing about multiple altars that have been desecrated. This cannot refer to the Jerusalem temple but to the many competing local altars in the land that were destroyed after the return of the Aaronides from captivity in Babylon (beginning c. 539 BCE). Those local altars were the purview of the Levites, country priests who were dispossessed after the construction of the Second Temple c. 516 BCE.
The “seventy weeks,” 70 x 7, when counted in years = 490 years. If one takes the number literally, then the author of Test. Levi was writing about the year 26 BCE. He was signaling a long period of time reaching back to c. 500 BCE when the ancient (Levitical) priesthood was replaced by the Aaronides and “the sacrificial altars” throughout the land were rendered moot. In the words of E. Rivkin, the Aaronides “come to power with the finalized Pentateuch and, as such, are their own creation.” We read in the book of Numbers:
So bring with you [Aaronide priests] also your brothers of the tribe of Levi, your ancestral tribe, in order that they may be joined to you, and serve you… But they must not approach either the utensils of the sanctuary or the altar, otherwise both they and you will die. (Num 18:2-3.)
With these and similar verses (cf. Num 18:4–7; 8:19; 16:40) the country Levites became servants of the Jerusalem religious establishment (later the Sadduccees). Henceforth, only the descendants of Aaron carried out priestly duties. The altars in high places outside Jerusalem became unusable (and were doubtless destroyed), for according to the above verses the Levites could no longer approach an altar to perform sacrifice. The Levites became Aaronide servants and ancillary Temple staff (e.g. musicians—Ezra 7:7).
In v. 3 above we can infer that the Temple priests call somebody “the Deceiver,” a person who “by the power of the Most High renews the Law.” They “plot to kill him, not discerning his eminence” and thus they “take innocent blood on [their] hands.”
Contemporary Dead Sea Scroll accounts (esp. Peshers Nahum and Habakkuk) associate “the man of the lie” with Ephraim/Samaria (see below), and similarly describe his followers as “deceivers”:
This refers to the deceivers from Ephraim, who through their deceptive teaching, lying talk, and dishonest speech deceive many: kings, princes, priests, native and foreigner alike. (pNah 2:8)
I have already demonstrated that the Man of the Lie was none other than Yeshu haNotsri. It seems clear to me that the author of the Test. Levi, in the previous citation above, is rebuking contemporary Qumranites who are accusing the Naṣarene leader of being a “deceiver” and “Man of the Lie.”
If the foregoing analysis is correct, then we have arrived at an important milestone in research—where the data begin to confirm each other. In the above paragraphs we have multiple attestations from independent sources (indeed, antagonistic sources) converging on the same historical datum: the ministry of a prophet known (in the Talmud) as Yeshu haNotsri. The Talmud dates Yeshu to the early decades of I BCE. The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs date later in that century, during the first Christian generations. Thus the data from multiple sources (and more sources are to be presented in other posts) converge on the I BCE era of Yeshu haNotsri, who was tried and executed by the Sanhedrin c. 64 BCE, and on his first followers who were writing in the ensuing generations.
With the convergence of multiple attestations, it is (or should be) increasingly difficult to write off the Yeshu haNotsri thesis as “unfounded,” “crank,” or worse. The onus of proof moves to the person who doubts verifiable (albeit obscure) historical data. The facts are there. The texts exist. The history is patent. Scholars of early Christianity, long inured to Greek and Latin writings, will have to look at these non-Greek and non-Latin works (for example, the Qumran Words of Levi is in Aramaic), no matter how uncongenial, “suspicious,” or “marginal”—for they constitute real history that has been heretofore assiduously suppressed.
Verse 4: “on account of him your holy places will be razed to the ground.” The Naṣarene author looks back and views the Roman conquest of Palestine in 63 BCE as immediate retribution for the execution of Yeshu haNotsri by the Sanhedrin only one year earlier.
If Test. Levi is a Naṣarene work, as I believe, then it appears that some of the long-dispossessed Levite priests and their families rallied to Yeshu haNotsri (himself a Levite by blood) and were counted among his early followers. They are known to have been strongest in the northern province of Galilee—a region distant from the Jerusalem priesthood—and are known as “Galileans” in some writings, the term being somewhat pejorative and implying unorthodox views. The (much maligned) Levite stronghold was far to the north at gnostic Dan, a sanctuary originally founded by a Levite from (nota bene) Bethlehem (Judges 19). Dan lies at the headwaters of the Jordan River. Thus, the Levites are implicated in a nexus of gnostic tropes: Bethlehem, the Jordan River, baptism, and Jesus’ Transfiguration (which occurs in the region of Dan—“the district of Caesarea Philippi,” Mt 16:13; 17:1–8).
There is not space here to investigate the links between the dispossessed Levites and the gnostic region of Dan/Mt. Hermon—the ancient place of meeting between God and man (cf. the Epic of Gilgamesh, 1 Enoch), or the links between the Levites and the similarly dispossessed Kenites/Rechabites (James the Just was one), and their ties to the “scribes” of Jabets (1 Chr 2:55). In sum, there existed an alternate “underground” tradition in the land—one that valued education and was ebionite (the Kenites, Rechabites, and Levites were all landless and distrusted both urbanization and money)—an alternate tradition that opposed the Jerusalem establishment and was basically written out of Jewish scripture. “Levi” became a pejorative. (Cf. “Leviathan,” the sea monster—and note its connection with water, an age-old gnostic symbol).
To recap: I suspect that among the first followers to rally around Yeshu haNotsri in I BCE were long embittered anti-Jerusalem Levites from the north. A significant number of them probably made up an important contingent of the Naṣarenes/early Christians, which may be the reason that the later evangelists located Jesus’ ministry in the Galilee. One of those anti-Jerusalem Naṣarenes/Levite scribes may have penned the verses of the Testament of Levi cited above.
Samaria. We recall that when Jonathan the Hasmonean (Yeshu) returned to Palestine from exile in Egypt, he went to Samaria. His followers there formed a new, gnostic, sect dubbed “Dositheans” (< Gk. “Gift of God”) after an alternate name for Jonathan (< Heb. “Gift of God”). Dositheus is thus the Samarian cipher for Yeshu haNotsri, and the Dositheans are another name for Yeshu’s followers in Samaria.
The Dositheans were genetically opposed to both the Jerusalem priesthood and the contemporary Samaritan priesthood, for the Samaritans, when they first split religiously from Judaism in mid-IV BCE, had simply imported a version of the (hated) Priestly Code, now centered on Mt. Gerizim (see Rivkin, IDBSuppl., 1982:3.i). Modern scholarship views Dositheanism as a branch of Samaritanism, but we can now appreciate that this view is incorrect. The Samaritans themselves have consistently and pointedly disavowed the sect as heretical. My investigations confirm the impassable split between Dositheanism and Samaritanism. Incidentally, Dositheus’ principal disciple was named Levi , and further study is required to establish the links between the Dositheans (Naṣarene followers of Yeshu in Samaria) and the old class of Levites in the land.
Dositheus in the Pseudo-Clementine literature was a disciple of John the Baptist—another cipher for Yeshu. So all these traditions come together when one cuts through the abundant “misinformation” created by the Church Fathers.
In my view, an obscure Dosithean work (currently dubbed “Samaritan”) obliquely refers to Yeshu haNotsri:
And of [the twelves sons of Jacob], Levi became the portion and lot of God, for he was the bearer of the ray of light for the sake of prophecy. In him He placed His glory. From his seed the house of the priesthood grew. For God selected him to minister and to bless his congregation, and his seed for all time. The Levite tribe with all the blessings that he had, carried the mystery of Moses, and in goodness the essence was carried when he transmitted his seed. For from the seed of this holy tribe arose the exalted of all men. (S. Miller, Molad Mosheh. New York, 1949, p. 240. Emphases added.)
This passage informs us that the Levite tribe carried the “mystery” and “seed” of Moses, and that from the seed of the Levite tribe “arose the exalted of all men.” Apparently, we have here an identification of Yeshu haNotsri, written in I BCE, by a Dosithean of Samaria.
______________
There is much new in this post and in its outward-pointing links. Perhaps your head is spinning from all the astonishing information. The Church has woven such a rich tapestry of falsehoods, for so many hundreds of years, that clarifying the early history of Christianity is tantamount to revealing a new world. But the work must be done. Those who are incurably addicted to old views are not able to proceed. On the other hand, those who can jettison the comforting myths of the gospel savior from Nazareth will discover a story that is empowering because it is real, human, and very true.