James, Brother of Jesus: The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls

Drawing on the Dead Sea Scrolls and on long overlooked early Church texts Eisenman reveals in this groundbreaking major exploration the Christianity of Paul as a distortion of what James and Jesus preached. Whereas James and his followers "zealous for the Law" of Moses were nationalistic and apocalyptic Pauls Hellenized movement promoted itself as pacifist cosmopolitan and faith-based. In an argument with enormous implications Eisenman identifies Paul as deeply compromised by Roman contacts and James as not simply the leader of Christianity of his day but the popular Jewish leader of his time whose death triggered the Uprising against Rome. Creative rewriting of early Church documents has obscured this fact. Eisenman shows that characters like "Judas Iscariot" and "the Apostle James" did not exist as such and details an actual physical assault by Paul on James in the Temple. By rescuing James from the oblivion into which he was deliberately cast James the Brother of Jesus reveals one of the most successful historical rewrite enterprises ever accomplished.