Customer Reviews

James, the Brother of Jesus

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Robert Eisenman was the leading figure in the movement to free the Dead Sea Scrolls and make them all public, which was essential to start understanding what happened twenty centuries ago around Jesus. The present book is the result of his lifelong research in Middle East religious history. First the method. He brings together all documents available from the end of the 1st century BC to the beginning of the 3rd century CE. He considers all that is common but that does not give him the truth. For him the truth may come, and any interpretation can only come, from the differences in overlapping documents. He considers all documents are ideological interpretations of facts and stylistic rewriting of these same facts. The New Testament is a complete rewriting in Greek (he uses the concept of overwrites) of previous documents (he does not specify what they were : probably oral tradition in local semitic languages). He tries to decipher the rewriting and discover the buried version, using the method invented and devised by Kenneth Burke in his logology and his approach of Augustine. And it is the different elements he can find in other documents that lead him along the way to a reasonable and effective interpretation. Second the style. His extremely detailed work leads him to many repetitions of documents and facts in the whole book. It is circular, but each document or fact that is used several times, is used every single time in different conditions and thus helps build a different interpretation and thus gets a different meaning. We have to be patient and very humble in our search for truth, because one fact can have a great number of values and interpretations. That is the style at book level. If we go down at chapter and subchapter levels we have the same circularity but this time because the author threads up facts one after the other in a continuous flow of data from which he eventually gets his interpretation. The discourse is syncretic and thus may give you a vertigo. But it is the only way to proceeed : lines of data from which you draw a conclusion or rather a hypothesis from which you are going to work on. Now the general ideas. Jesus had three brothers, James the Just (minorized in James the Less, and there was only one James), Simon the Zealot, Judas the Zealot (but also Thomas and many other names among which Jude), and one sister, Mary Salome or Salome. The author concentrates on the brothers. First he denounces the multiplication of some names like James, Mary, Judas, Simon, etc. This is done to erase Jesus' family and to lessen and minorize the brothers who were invested by Jesus himself with the responsibility to further his work, James first, in no way with the intention to create a new religion but to create a new balance of power in the East to impose some freedom for the « Jews » to the Romans, and in no way with the intention of being God, or anything like that though he presented himself as the Son of Man, i.e. the Son of Adam, hence the Second Adam, hence the one announcing the end of this unjust world and the coming of divine judgment. The best case is Judas Iscariot who probably did not exist and was a complete invention drawn from various elements in the Old Testament and historical events of the period. This leads to a very clear interpretation of this family as a Zealot or Nazirite family fighting for a strict observance of the Law of Moses (righteousness, love of God, circumcision, separation : no fornication, no consumption of wine and eventually meat, no riches). The book then follows the historical Saulus and his transformation into Paul and his vision/invention of the Christian religion : no circumcision, no food code, spiritual communion with God and Jesus Christ, and communion in the body and blood of Christ (bread and wine) in a ritual sacrifice for everyone. He attacks James in the early 40s but fails to kill him. He lets the Priests and Herodians attack him in 62 which leads to his being stoned. Paul seems to be the inventor of the Christian religion though Mary's perpetual virginity is contained in Nag Hammadi apocryphal documents attributed to James himself. Obviously a new religion was being born. The nazirite of James' party would have led to strong tensions with the Roman empire. His death led to an all-out confrontation and the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple. But James was spreading his influence fast and far beyond the Jews. Paul highjacked this movement and produced a religion that was universal and acceptable by the Roman Empire, which was to happen with Constantine : the Christian religion became the unifying element of the Empire. With this book we are at the center of such questions, though I do not accept the conclusion that Jesus was on the same line as James. I think Jesus was trying to bring together the two lines : confrontation and collaboration with the Roman Empire into some independent project that would have guaranteed independence for the Eastern part of the Empire, or maybe even more : a federal conception of the Empire.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

Detailed extensive history of the circumstances existing at the time of Jesus. Origins of Islam? Origins of Christianity? Origins of modern Rabbinic Judaism? Rings closer to the truth than anything else I've read. You'll refer back to it time and time again. Or.... you'll put your blinders on and go back to sleep. It was a real wakeup call for me. Great book! Must have for anyone serious about finding out the real circumstances of the historical Jesus and Paul and James.

Professor Eisenmann has provided us with a thoroughly researched, heavily documented account of an individual the average "Christian" will never hear about and is kept carefully ignorant. As well, the culture of which all these individuals were part is brought into bright light of day. It provides proof positive that one cannot use the New Testament to prove the New Testament. I have simply laid aside my childish fantasies after having completed this book. It is a heavy read but one very much worth the effort.

In this massive and challenging scholarly tome, Eisenman seeks to reconstruct the earliest origins of what became Christianity. Drawing on sources such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, Apostolic Constitutions, Clementine Recognitions & Homilies, Eusebius, the Western Text of Acts, Josephus and the Slavonic Josephus plus the two James Apocalypses from the Nag Hammadi library, he investigates the personalities and events behind a formative proto-Christianity with reference to the struggle between the Jamesian and Pauline strains.

The major finding is that Jamesian "Christianity" emerged from the Zadokite priestly sect that was not much different from, overlapped with or later became Essenes, Zealots, Nazoreans, Nazirites, Ebionites and Mandaeans. John the Baptist might have been the founder and is likely to have been succeeded by James the Just. Yeshua/Jesus did not occupy a soteriological role in this movement which eventually fragmented along the lines of loyalty to Jesus (Ebionite Christianity), John the Baptist (the Mandaeans), and James the Just (the Qumran sect).

In his earlier work now available as Dead Sea Scrolls And The First Christians, the author identifies James the Just as the Qumran Teacher of Righteousness. James's struggle against Paul is one of the major themes in the book under review. The person of Yeshua was not central to the movement whilst the canonical Twelve Apostles were an artificial replacement for the smaller circle of his brothers. The portrait of Jesus in the Greek gospels appears to be based on episodes relating to various messianic and prophetic figures in Josephus.

Eisenman unties the knots of theological disinformation by amongst other methods, a detailed investigation of names as they resonate across the aforementioned sources. The plethora of similar names in the gospel accounts where the apostle lists differ amongst themselves and between various manuscripts of each gospel is confusing to say the least. Eisenman's explanation is certainly plausible. He claims that the alterations arose from the aim of obscuring the identity of Jesus' heirs whose names had to be manipulated to comply with proto-Orthodox dogma so that siblings became cousins, and so forth. The expression "Jesus son of Joseph" does not reveal the name of Jesus' father but instead represents a messianic title "Messiah ben Joseph."

Chronologically, Eisenman places the gospel narratives closer to the First Jewish-Roman War. According to Josephus, the execution of John the Baptist might have taken place in 35-36 CE. Epiphanius claims that James' pontificate lasted for 24 years after the departure of Jesus whilst the date that Josephus gives for the death of James would place Jesus' death in about 38 CE. The church father Irenaeus imagined Jesus died at age 50, in the reign of Claudius.

In Josephus, Eisenman identifies the Herodian called Saulus who was active during the siege of Jerusalem, with Paul of Tarsus. As Sanders concludes in Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People, Paul's arguments are really just a mass of inconsistent rationalizations. However, it was Paul's religion that prevailed; Christianity emerged as a paganized, syncretic and diluted Judaism designed for the Roman Empire. Eisenman considers Pauline Christianity as a compromising, assimilating, Herodian apostasy.

The author agrees with Hyam Maccoby that Paul was neither Pharisee nor Jew. In his books Paul and Hellenism and The Mythmaker, Maccoby proves that the Pauline writings with their antisemitism, elements of mystery religions and non-Jewish perception of Torah as a burden were not written by a Jew. Eisenman provides evidence for Paul's Herodian connections: Roman citizenship, his kinship with a certain Herodion and the family of Aristobulus. This confirms the Ebionite charge that Paul was a member of the Idumean Herodian family. Eisenman points out that Paul claims to be an Israelite, a Hebrew and a Benjaminite but never refers to himself as a Jew.

So Paul might well have been the enemy of the Righteous Teacher, the Lying Spouter of the Scrolls who repudiated the Law and betrayed the covenant. The similarities between Qumran rhetoric and New Testament remnants of anti-Paulinism are indisputable. Eisenman makes a convincing case for Luke's use of Josephus as source. Luke's Hellenizing agenda substituted the succession of Jesus by James the Just for the replacement of Judas Iscariot by Matthew. The name Matthias quite likely derives from Mattathias the father of another Judas, the hero Judas Maccabeus.

The aforementioned is but one example of what seems to have been a deliberate mockery and masked incitement to antisemitism (in addition to its overt manifestation). Another case involves the suicide at Masada and the myth of the suicide of Judas Iscariot. In the Gospel of John, the tale of the wedding at Cana holds the key to many a mystery that Judith Taylor Gold examines in minute detail in Monsters & Madonnas, a rather chilling work.

A valuable book that investigates the origin of the New Testament as regards its authorship, claims, chronology, contents, canonization and language is Jonathan Sjordal's Two Witnesses: Hebrew Texts Changed By The Greek New Testament. It shows how NT writers "quote" non-existent Hebrew scripture, quote Hebrew prophecies that had already been fulfilled then claim that NT events are their fulfillment and quote 50 to 60 OT passages as proof of fulfilled messianic prophecies while none of those is a prophecy.

I highly recommend Eisenman's sequel to this book, titled The New Testament Code, as well as The Authentic Gospel of Jesus and The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English by Geza Vermes. Finally, it needs be said that James The Brother of Jesus is not an easy read; it requires patience, appreciation for meticulous research and determination to pursue the truth wherever it may lead.

Eisenman promises a second volume in which he will discuss "the confrontations between the Righteous Teacher and the Liar in the Scrolls, going through the parallels between James and the Righteous Teacher at Qumran in meticulous detail. It will show the Habakkuk Pesher in any event-and by implication, all documents related by sense and nomonclature to it-to be first century." This second volume-The New Testament Code: The Cup of the Lord, the Damascus Document, and the Blood of Christ-doesn't do what was promised. Until this promise is kept, Professor Eisenman's theories must remain suspect.