The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls by Professor Robert Eisenman
PROFESSOR ROBERT EISENMAN. HERO OF THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS CONTROVERSY REVEALS A STARTLING NEW PICTURE OF THE ORIGINS OF CHRISTIANITY AND THE SEMINAL ROLE OF JAMES. THE BROTHER OF JESUS In a profound and provocative work of scholarly detection, Eisenman establishes
James--a figure almost entirely marginalized in the New Testament-- as the leader of all opposition groups in the Jerusalem of his day and spiritual heir to his famous brother Jesus. James, not Peter, was the true successor to the movement we now call Christianity. Once we have found the
Historical James we have found the Historical Jesus.
Drawing on the Dead Sea Scrolls and on long overlooked early Church texts, Eisenman reveals in this groundbreaking major exploration the Christianity of Paul as a distortion of what James and Jesus preached. Whereas James and his followers, "zealous for the
Law" of Moses, were nationalistic and apocalyptic. Paul's Hellenized movement promoted itself as pacifist, cosmopolitan, and faith-based.
In an argument with enormous implications, Eisenman identifies Paul as deeply compromised by Roman contacts, and James as not simply the leader of Christianity of his day, but the popular Jewish leader of his time, whose death triggered the Uprising against
Rome. Creative rewriting of early Church documents has obscured this fact.
Eisenman shows that characters like "Judas Iscariot" and "the Apostle James" did not exist as such and details an actual physical assault by Paul on James in the Temple. By rescuing James from the oblivion into which he was deliberately cast,
James, the Brother of Jesus reveals one of the most successful historical rewrite enterprises ever accomplished.
ROBERT EISENMAN, co-author of The Facsimile Edition of fbe Dead Sea Scrolls and The Dead Sed Scrolls Uncovered, is professor of Middle East Religions and Archaeology and Director of the Institute for the Study of Judeo-Christian Origins at California State
University, Long Beach, and Visiting Senior Member of Linacre College, Oxford University. The consultant to the Huntington Library in its decision to free the Scrolls, he was the leading figure in the worldwide campaign to gain access to the Scrolls. A National Endowment for the Humanities
Fellow at the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem, he was a Senior Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies.
