I think that is supposed to be a "loin" cloth (he loins being the groin area). So, he has just a threadbare linen loincloth, and is sweaty from not using the bath, and this gets him into the temple precincts? This sounds a little like the male stripper porn that SA keeps bringing up.
Normally the Levites wore woolen garb, which if anyone has ever worn wool knows makes you, well, hot, sweaty and itchy. The priests were very proud of the fact that they could wear cool and comfortable linen, and had even objected when the temple singers petitioned, and got the right, to wear linen too - in the temple precincts. As far as I know, the poor Levites who did all the killing, cutting and dragging of the offered animals, still wore woolen vestments.
What about Hegesippus who thinks James could even get into the holy of holies, to the exclusion of even the high priest himself, presumably because he was the *rightful* high priest in the Christian POV? Now you can see why no "iron implement" (usually translated razor) ever touched his head. The alter and holy of holies was built from unhewn stones (unworked by stone smiths with iron chisels). Your sources seem to think that James' own head was the alter of sacrifice.
So, James is described as sweaty like a Levite but wearing linen like a priest. But rabbinic sources say that even the HP, if he enters the Holy of Holies in an unclean state, "the other priests split open his head with clubs".That he was not considered the legitimate HP by the real priests comes from the fact that the fuller finally dispatches him (per Hegesippus) with a club. Yet I thought Peter was the "rock" upon which the kingdom will be built? Many Judean ideas about a messianic age included a rebuilt temple, which I suppose would include a fresh new alter of unhewn stone.
The themes and memes here are incredibly mixed up, meaning whoever came up with them, and I blame Hegesippus, knew almost nothing about the temple cult of the Jews, but snatched bits of this and bits of that from the tales of the wayfaring friends he meets while traveling to Rome. Epiphanius is notorious for this confusion of themes, names and terms, and he added insult to injury by twisting Hegesippus' ideas even further.
Yet there are scoffers who scoff to scorn when I suggest that Hegesippus used a (fake?) trial transcript of the confession before the judge, Simon bar Giora, of the Idumean Jacob son of Sosa,* that references "real" events from Josephus (if we trust him) involving a speech from a wall, by a Jesus, who was later killed along with the HP Ananus, the very man whose death Josephus stated flat out was the cause of the destruction of the city, and their bodies thrown from the wall in contempt by the Idumeans at the time of the factional disputes for control of rebel Jerusalem in 68 CE.
"Completely incredible, and inedible" they say. I say, "eat this!"
DCH
*There is an ingenious (if I must say so myself, humbly of course) retelling of one such "confession" of a former revolutionary leader in Russia who was caught up in the purges of Stalin around 1938, in which I brilliantly made into the story of Jacob son of Sosa before Simon bar Giora by changing a handful of details.
http://www.earlywritings.com/forum/view ... 705#p60117
So, such things really and truly do exist.
