James, the brother of Jesus

James, the brother of Jesus by Eisenman, Robert. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780571175734.

James was a vegetarian, wore linen clothing, bathed daily at dawn in cold water and was a lifelong Nazirite. In this work of scholarly detection, biblical scholar Robert Eisenman introduces a theory about the identity of James, Jesus brother, who was almost entirely marginalized in the New Testament. Drawing on early Church texts and the Dead Sea Scrolls, he reveals in this groundbreaking exploration that James, not Peter, was the real successor to the movement now called "Christianity." In an argument with enormous implications, he identifies Paul as compromised by Roman contacts. James is presented as not simply the leader of the Christianity of his day, but a popular Jewish leader, whose death triggered the uprising against Rome—a fact that creative rewriting of early Church documents has obscured. Eisenman reveals that characters such as "Judas Iscariot" and "the Apostle James" didnt exist as such. In delineating the deliberate falsifications in New Testament documents, he shows how James was written while anti-Semitism was written in. By rescuing James from oblivion, the final conclusion of James the Brother of Jesus is, in the words of The Jerusalem Post , "apocalyptic". Who and whatever James was, so was Jesus.