Book Discussion on James the Brother of Jesus by Robert Eiseman (Better Quality)

Robert M. Price Drew University In his recent publications The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered (with Michael Wise) and The Dead Sea Scrolls and the First Christians Robert Eisenman has been threatening/promising to redraw the map of Christian origins and now, by God, he has done it. The breadth and detail of Eisenman's investigation are breathtaking, as are its implications. In James the Brother of Jesus he tells the long-lost tale of formative "prehistoric" Christianity as it emerged from the crucible of revolutionary Palestine and from the internecine hostilities between Pauline and Ebionite Christianities. I call it "prehistoric" because Eisenman reconstructs the events lying before and beneath our canonical histories of early Christianity. His enterprise is in this sense akin to that of Burton Mack, that other great delver into the subterrene depths of religious pre-history. Like Mack, Eisenman discovers a "Christianity" (or perhaps a proto-Christianity, or even a pre-Christianity) for which Jesus had not yet attained centrality. Only whereas Mack sees the initial germ of the new religion as a variant of Cynicism, Eisenman rejuvenates, even vindicates, Renan's old claim that Christianity began as "an Essenism."