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April 20th, 2010 
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- ISBN13: 9780140257731
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
In a profound and provocative work of scholarly detection, Professor Robert Eisenman establishes James–a figure marginalized in the New Testament–as the leader of all opposition groups in the Jerusalem of his day and spiritual heir–rather than Peter–to his famous brother, Jesus of photos .Amazon.com Review
Robert Eisenman, one of the most eminent researchers of early Christianity working today, has produced an exhaustive study of the historical milie… More >>
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Theology and bibical study has a tradition of tough-mindedness and intellectual rigor that makes extreme demands on the modern reader who has grown up with Sesame Street and Chicken-Soup For The Lazy. Eisenman cuts the reader no slack.
This volume should be read with the understanding that any commentary on the Dead-Sea Scrolls published more than perhaps 5 years ago was warped into meaninglessness by the pious orthodoxy of the guardians of those scrolls. Any reader of the King James version of the New Testement must acknowledge that James was the brother of Jesus and the designated leader of the church after Jesus departed the scene. Orthodoxy has never explained how the theology of Paul came to dominate the Christian tradition and the little letter of James is taken with such a large grain of salt. Eisenman is a giant step in that direction and deserves a respectful counter-argument from the orthodox tradition
John P. Meier’s 2 vol work “A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus” is a good supplement to Eisenman. Meier has more extensive footnotes with good expanding remarks on Josephus where Eisenman only cites his sources. Eisenman makes good use of “the normal canons of historical argument and literary analysis” particulary as they have developed in redaction criticism of the bible. The reader need not have a degree in bible studies to slog through this difficult intellectual swamp. But the reader will drown if they depend on a traditional Christian fundamentalist life jacket to keep their faith afloat while making this journey.
Rating: 4 / 5
The reader is not a scholar, but enjoys reading scholarship concerning early Christianity. Eisenman’s book produces so much detail it is hard to keep it all in mind. Yet after 400 pages this reader, through meticulous repetition on the part of the author, was able to make sense of what the author was trying to say. And that is: that James is the blood brother of Jesus; James was the one who succeeded Jesus; and very importantly, if James Messianic version of what would become Christianity had succeeded, there probably would have been no Christianity because it would have died in the ruins of Jerusalem.
Eisenman’s work challenges current mythologies of Jesus in the Gospels as well as the Pretine succession. But a faithful Christian need not fear his conclusions, because one can see how important tradition is. Tradition interprets events and scripture.
The rewrites, overwrites and omissions in the New Testament are a teastment themselves of how what would become the prevailing understanding would see the impact of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. Eisenman at the beginning of the study warns the reader to beware of what comes from the predominant view of any particular time.
Eisenman being a scholar does not always write things directly because he is working with material that has shifting meaning. Several languages are involved and studies from the first several centuries did not understand Hebrew and Aramaic languages. Yet there were times when the reader would have wished for a statement about where he was going.
There is to be volume II, hopefully shorter. But this reader is looking forward to seeing it.
Rating: 5 / 5
Eisenman’s “James” is the BEST work of non-fiction I have EVER read. It should be required reading for anyone who makes ANY claim to (Western) Religious Knowledge — theological, historical, or spiritual. It is not for the faint of heart: It is both physically massive and conceptually dense. In my case, six months, cover-to-cover. My wife called it the “Omnipresent Tome.” To pick it up is a true investment — But boy does it pay.
Though deep scholarship, Eisenman’s tale is nonetheless gripping. He outlines his premises, then weaves and connects them with meticulous care. His book reads like a detective story. But “James” is much more — a monumental struggle to recover lost memory. A Deleted History, to which each of us has a real and important relation. It is a story of intrigue and transcendence, of subterfuge and conflict.
For some readers, the book must imply a dark, unspoken theme. Dark, because there is the most Insidious and Ironic Purpose behind our forgetfulness. Eisenman is not just reproducing the shattered. He is not merely recreating processes of undirected time. He is helping us to name the Culpable, the Robbers of Self-Memory, the Perpetrators of the Shattering. “James the Brother of Jesus” shines a very direct light on the shadowy foundations of Western religious assumption.
I was fascinated by the principal personalities of Eisenman’s story — James, Josephus, and Paul — as well as the dozens of fragmentary echoes of voices that were silenced long ago. One is left wondering at the Systematic Erasure of early witness. So much history (yet so little) exists only as attributed quotes, eviscerations which appear in others’ writings, as if they had crawled there to be hidden, like the Treasures of the Copper Scroll… Eisenman gathers a thousand such fragments and very carefully plots the implications. Separately, the pieces are puffs of air; together, they constitute a secret, essential, and yet sad, Forbidden Gospel.
The major points the author makes are:
James was the undisputed successor to Jesus;
Early Christianity was very Jewish and very messianic;
Early Christianity was stronly allied with the Qumran-Essene population;
Paul’s philosophy of inclusion is antithetical to the real tenets of early Christianity;
Luke was the quintessential propagandist;
The New Testament is corrupted by forgeries, which Authorities even now use to justify themseleves;
… and goodness, a thousand other things….
If you want to understand Christianity, “James” is a giant first step.
Rating: 5 / 5
Man alive, is this book poorly written. I was drawn to it by its scholarly pose and its revolutionary subject matter, but now rather than call him a rebel or a scholar I’d just say he’s a long-winded crank.
I was prepared to do some heavy slogging, understand. I wasn’t put off by dense prose. But the man can torture sentence structure like nobody’s business. I even bookmarked one page, which had a sentence I couldn’t find a verb in for the life of me. I would show it to friends, asking them, “It’s not just me, right? That sentence has no verb?” They all agreed. Usually, though, while he may lead a precarious trail through innumerable clauses and parenthetical phrases, he does construct actual sentences; that’s not the main problem. The main problem is that he feels the need to repeat himself incessantly. Let me give an example. Here’s a simple story: I needed grapes. I went to the store. I had to use a credit card because I didn’t have cash. I came home and ate my grapes. Now, here’s that story the Robert Eisenman way: I needed grapes. Needing grapes, I went to the store where they sold grapes, which I needed. The need for grapes prompted an understandable need for cash for the needed grapes, but cash for needed grapes was not to be had, and, needed or not, needed grapes were of paramount importance, and I needed them, the grapes, which I needed. Thus, inevitably, the need for grapes being on my mind, I found myself using a credit card for the purchase (the purchase the importance of which centered on grapes) of grapes, which I had sought to buy earlier with cash, out of a need that has been previously stated but cannot be stressed enough, which was a need for grapes. Since I could not eat grapes in the store no matter how much I needed them, I took the grapes to my home, and, having passed the episode of needing grapes and initiated the epoch of actual grape consumption, I could only reflect on the need I had had, the grape need, the need for grapes, the grapes which had become posessed by me through the process of a feeling attached to grapes, a feeling related to grapes but not a feeling I could call “grape,” inasmuch as that would be confusing a feeling with the object of that feeling, which may appeal to some Eastern perspectives but in a Judeo-Christian context is out of place, therefore the grape-centric emotionality had to be named a non-grape name, and I called it need.
…except he’s worse. Anyway, it’s a darn shame, because the subject matter is fascinating. The approach makes a lot of sense: since we can assume everything said about Jesus to be biased, we may be able to learn more about him by looking at the writings on his brother, James, as historical accounts of him would be less under pressure to conform to dogma. The book made me want to sit down and re-write it, because I enoyed the original thinking I encountered every fifth page. Seriously, without all the repetition, this book would be the size of Cat’s Cradle.
I would wait for someone else to synthesize his views and read that. I tried to push myself through this book, but after about halfway, I started using it as a mousepad.
The author gravely needs to have someone else organize his writing. His points, when I could see them through the tangled syntax, were compelling, but if he wishes to communicate, he must find a love of brevity.
Rating: 1 / 5
As Eisenman makes clear, Christianity today only fractionally relates to the historical Jesus. The Jesus of modern X-tianity is a dim reflection of James found in a hodge-podge of Arthurian-like rememberances of the political movement to kick Rome out of Palestine.
The implications of Eisenman’s book for X-tianity are legion: The moral content of Jesus’s philosophy, admirable as it is, is a Hellenistic smoothing over of Mithraic and Zoroastrian mystery cults from the border legions. Jesus was no more than a political marionet of the Parthian empire (read between the lines in both the redacted “New Testament” and Josephus), and he and his family represented a front against both the Herods and Rome. He was an anti-establishment icon that only in the 4th century took on the other-worldly dogma the religion holds today. His historical greatness rests in the Parthian attempt to set up a buffer state against Rome in place of the Idumean Herodian line that was joined at the hip with the empire. What X-tianity is today is no more than the by-product of a political cult surrounding the legend of Jesus that could tolerate no other interpretations of his life because they threatened the power of those who claimed divine knowlegde. The first suppression of the Gnostics in the 4th century is one example. Later heretics suffered the same cruelties. That is always the way it goes with Abrahamic religions: It boils down to politics and eradication. Like an old worn coin, we cannot see it 2000 years later for what it originally was when minted. Jesus was a political figure at a time when religion and politics were the same thing: “the king of the Jews” who was killed in a manner reserved for political rebels.
Eisenman has done the world a tremendous service with this work, as so many reviews note. My only observation beyond what others have said is that there is no reason to unhinge the book’s main logic on the point of Paul’s unlikely ability to have had a long range Roman political agenda, as some critics of the work have tried to do (in an apparent effort to discredit the mass of evidence Eisenman arrays). The argument, a red herring if I ever smelled one, is that Eisenman can’t be right because Paul could have had no view of the future of Christianity, and therefore no motive to invert and emasculate the “fourth philosophy” of the anti-Roman Jerusalem Christians under James. Suppose we grant that point–it changes only one thing: Paul’s likely motivation. All we need do is look to Paul’s own writings for his motives, to see that he constantly seeks money from his overseas communities, all in the name of being saved, while boasting of his special relationship with Jesus. Sound familiar? Paul was clever, and merciless, and he knew he could get tithe money easier by defrauding people spiritually than by demanding it as a Roman tax farmer. So maybe he wasn’t a Roman agent, although the evidence suggests he was, yet he still convicts himself out of his own mouth–a close reading of his letters will show that to any reader who cares to look beyond the hocus pocus and the scare tactics. Eisenman brings history into focus.
Rating: 5 / 5