robert eisenman
Robert Eisenman
You may wonder why I have included this author on my site – I am currently engrossed in his “James the Brother of Jesus” and feel his work deserves a look-see, especially as Jer 8:8 warns us, “How can you say, ‘We are wise, and the law of the LORD is with us’? But behold, the lying pen of the scribes has made it into a lie.” If we are to grow in grace and knowledge, we cannot be afraid to think outside the box and to test the spirits.
Eisenman is Emeritus Professor of Middle East Religions and Archaeology and Islamic Law and the 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. He holds a B.A. from Cornell University in Philosophy and Engineering Physics (1958), an M.A. from New York University in Near Eastern Studies (1966), and a Ph.D from Columbia University in Middle East Languages and Cultures and Islamic Law (1971). He was a Senior Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies and an American Endowment for the Humanities Fellow-in-Residence at the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were first examined.
James the Brother of Jesus
The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Penguin, 1998.
“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 the 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 Christian texts, Eisenman reveals in this groundbreaking major exploration the Christianity of Paul as a distortion of what James preached.”