Dead Sea Scrolls & The First Christians [Hardcover]

Robert Eisenman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 19, 2000

This exciting work by the author of the 300,000-copy bestseller The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered challenges established views on the origins of Christianity. Professor Eisenman reveals startling information about the first Christians, the Righteous Teacher, the apocalyptic documents of the time, and more.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 449 pages
• Publisher: Element Books Ltd.; 1St Edition edition (December 19, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1852307854
• ISBN-13: 978-1852307851
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,611,966 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good Research, October 5, 2004

By 

J. Joyner - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Dead Sea Scrolls and the First Christians: Essays and Translations (Hardcover)

Eisenman takes a great interest in his work and the importance of getting the scrolls out to the public. Not sensational like the "Dead Sea Scrolls Deception" for it was the work on which the sensational book was written. As much as the Christian church would like to downplay these discoveries, there clearly existed a dichotomy in the New Testament between Paul and James. And only a mass interpolation by scholars could have covered the great difference between the Jewish-Christian and Gentile-Christian doctrinal issues. Good job Robert!

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Classics of Dead Sea Studies, June 23, 2008

By 

David Adams (Minnesota) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Dead Sea Scrolls and the First Christians: Essays and Translations (Hardcover)

Included in this volume are Professor Eisenman's two ground-breaking works, "Maccabees, Zadokites, Christians and Qumran" and "James the Just in the Habakkuk Pesher," which were first published in the mid-1980's, but were not previously widely available. These classics are a foundation piece of his research on the Dead Sea Scrolls and fascinating for the beginner and scholar alike. Most importantly, these works triggered the debate over the relationship of the Dead Sea Scrolls to Christian Origins, which ultimately led to the freeing of the Scrolls in the early 1990's a struggle in which Eisenman played a pivotal role. Also included are previously unpublished papers and essays written by Eisenman and presented at international conferences over the last decade. In addition, this volume provides new translations of three key Qumran documents, "The Habbakkuk Pesher," "The Damascus Document," and "The Community Rule," available previously in the sometimes inaccurate and often inconsistent renderings by consensus scholars, missing the electric brilliance of the writers of the Scrolls.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Treasure from a cave, August 29, 2010

By 

Daniel G. Schaeffer "popperfan" (St. Louis, MO) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Dead Sea Scrolls and the First Christians: Essays and Translations (Hardcover)

An underground classic -- and, at least indirectly, the only "Historical Jesus" book you may ever really need. A series of essays that are definitely academic, and perhaps rather abstruse for the layman; and any reader, lay or not, will have to go through Eisenman's muscle-bound prose line by line, with pencil in hand. In "James the Just in the Habakkuk Pesher" he shows, using multiple sources, by the process of elimination, that James, "the brother of Jesus," was ALMOST certainly the "Teacher of Righteousness" in the DSS -- which of course means that they're the first "Christian" scriptures, and contain nothing about miracles, parables, etc. As might have been expected, the "consensus scholars" have tried to pick holes in his argument, and without much success, in this layman's opinion, among other reasons because they apparently can't recognize that they're implicitly taking the side of Paul in the James-Paul dispute -- and Eisenman demonstrates, in the essay "Paul as Herodian," was ABSOLUTELY certainly a Pharisee in the nastiest sense, probably a Roman spy, and the PERFECT candidate for "The Spouter of Lies."

After reading this essay, by the way, I was moved to re-read the Pauline material, and was stunned to note such details as the bizarre end to Romans, the near-paranoid tantrum in the second half of Galatians, and the apparently-intentional Monty Python-esque multilayered humor hidden in plain sight in the "Trial of Paul" scene in Acts -- one can envision John Cleese, as Herod, strutting around and pontificating, while Eric Idle, at his oily best ("Nudge, nudge! Say no more!") exlaims that he does not lie as he preaches the risen Christ, and Terry Jones and Michael Palin, as "The Jews," sharpen their sicarii while making grotesque faces.

They don't tell you about this in church.