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Books - James the Brother of Jesus: The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls
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Rating:  -
I know the title of my brief review sounds crazy, but it can mean two things. Either pick up this book in a library or peruse it in a B&N while you are drinking a latte, before you invest good money in in purchasing it.
Eisenman has made a reputation of writing off-beat material that goes squarely against all academic trends, whether they be conservative or liberal! His ideas on the Dead Sea Scrolls, which feed into this book as well, have been either panned or simply ignored by sensible Scrolls scholars. The book is SO long and tedious and based on so many esoteric and exotic views that it is hard to know where to start. If you are one who buys into either the "conspiracy" view of history or you like the Ehrman/Pagels reinterpretation of early Christin history, you will be fascinated by many of Eisenman's ideas.
OK, but you say that your public or college library does not have this volume and you are too ethical to do the B&N thing I suggested. Well, try this. Read the Excursus on Eisenman's book in John Painter's sober and scholarly work titled "Just James: The Brother of Jesus in History and Tradition," pages 277-288. If you still think it is worth buying, go ahead. Eisenman is fascinating and creative, even if his ideas are screwy at times.
Oh, by the way, he identifies James with the "Righteous Teacher" in the DSS.
Rating: -
This was a challenging read, to say the least. It is almost as though the author believes that his sheer breadth of scholarship and mastery over fine details are enough to convince the reader. So he overlooks the absurdity of his central argument - that the Dead Sea Scrolls were compiled by Christian scribes. According to Dr. Eisenman, Jesus is not mentioned or alluded to anywhere in any of the scrolls, even by pseudonym. Yet he is certain they were written by followers of James, Jesus' brother. How the followers of a religion centered on Jesus did not actually mention him in their literature is baffling. Much more feasible is the notion that the Dead Sea Scrolls were the product of a sect that was more Baptist-oriented than anything else, decidely anti-Jesus.
Rating: -
Many of Eisenman's ideas are anticipated by Hyam Maccoby's Revolution In Judea and Paul The Mythmaker. In particular, the appendix of Revolution In Judea presents the idea that the several New Testament characters named James are actually one and the same historical person. And Maccoby is sooooo much more readable than Eisenman.
Rating:  -
Concede that Eisenman is dead wrong in his dating of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Concede that they predate New Testament times by at least one hundred years. Concede that Paul is not the "Lying Spouter" of the Scrolls, and that Jesus' brother James is not the Scrolls "Teacher of Righteousness." Concede that this book is tedious, overlong, repetitive and often incomprehensible. Has the sting in its tail been drawn? Not at all. What remains is a revolutionary understanding of the social, political and religious context which gave birth to the New Testament literature and from which Christianity came. Christianity is peculiarly dependent upon historical claims it makes in regard to events in Palestine in the first half of the first century C.E. "James, the Brother of Jesus" shakes those foundational claims to their very roots. The book convincingly demonstrates a radical disjunction between the Pauline Christianity we have inherited and the ministry and legacy of Jesus as embodied in the Jerusalem Church. Is that important? In his book "Why Study the Past" Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, says, "The New Testament sets out to show that Jesus' story is the key to all other stories of God's dealings with his people, despite the discontinuities, the newness of what has happened through him. It also has to display a unity within the life of Jesus and the life of the early Church." In Eisenman's book that unity between Jesus and the life of the early Church is demolished. I would like to add "once and for all" but that would be overly sanguine.
Rating:  -
I found Robert Eisenman's book "James the Brother of Jesus" to be a very lengthy and redundant work that makes big assumptions but proves very little. It is a study that raises many questions (over and over and over), but never does the author (in this reviewer's opinion) really satisfactorily prove any of his claims.
The narrative is a bear to get through. I try to completely read every book that I begin to read. Very rarely in my life have I put down a book and simply stopped reading to the end. I had to put this dull and lethargic work down several times out of sheer boredom and the author's tendency to repeat himself ad nauseum. When Eisenman feels he has a point to make, he insists on beating it into your brain again and again.
But that's about this author does in this thick book: he merely makes bold assumptions and then repeats the assumption numerous times. He never cross-examines himself, or states a question, but actually claims things which I have never heard anywhere else before in any other study of early Christianity before this.
I gave this book a chance because it was published by Penguin (whom I usually respect quite a lot for the books they publish). But this time Penguin miss the mark and back a hack writer who really doesn't prove anything and tries to discredit orthodox belief that's been established for well over two-thousand years.
Is the true story of James the actual cover-up that Eisenman claims that it is? I doubt it. We have no real way of knowing just who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls and when and for what purpose. Using the Dead Sea Scrolls as evidence is dangerous to any argument. We simply don't know enough about the Dead Sea Scrolls to use them for or against any proclamation.
I found the author's insistence that St Paul and the early diaspora Jews as being "pro Roman" and antisemitic as being a bit belligerent and intolerant. The author attempts to discredit the Christian faith and I found that distasteful and arrogant on his part. It's a free country and he is allowed the freedom of speech and the press, but we are also free to call him out in return. I found the author's entire thesis as being very much based on agenda, rather than merely a detached observation which began its life as a mere questioning.
There is no proof that the Righteous Teacher of the Dead Sea Scrolls is in fact the same James named in the writings of the New Testament and other early Christian texts. The author makes this claim many times, and I assume his strategy is that repetition will make the wary reader start to release all thoughts of skepticism and just start to assume that the allegation must be true. It's mere conjecture, not proof.
Other than the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are highly dubious writings that are very inconclusive, even today, there hasn't been any recent archeological discoveries that would back any of the arguments made in Eisenman's book. We simply don't know any more about the true identity of the so-named "James" than Eisenman does, or the authors of the early Church histories seem to.
I doubt this was an overwrite. More likely, the numbers of Jewish converts probably was never that numerous after Jesus' Crucifixion. The heavily Hellenized overtones of Jesus' thoughts and beliefs is most likely the explanation why there were so many diaspora Jews and gentile early Christian converts as opposed to purely Jewish ones in Palestine. Thus, it seems most probable that, like St Paul's and St Peter's travels according to Christian legend, Christian belief and conversion soon centered in the Mediterranean world of Alexander the Great and his successors rather than in the middle east. I doubt James was "written out" as much as the absence of mention of him and his role would indicate what it seems to indicate: and that is that whomever "James" truly was historically, he probably wasn't that important or significant a personage. The dominance of the Church in Rome was neither a political nor a racial plot, but most likely just a natural progression as tradition holds to this day.
Read Eisenman's book with an open mind, but always keep in mind that the author never fully backs his claims and most are unfounded. I cannot disprove his theories any more than he is able to prove them. They shall remain what they are: questions to ponder and little more.
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