Robert Eisenman; Viking Penguin; New York, NY; 1997
by James A. Bacon
James, the brother of Jesus, has never captured the imagination of scholars studying the origins of Christianity. It is commonly acknowledged that he succeeded Jesus as first “bishop” of the Jerusalem church, and that he contested with Paul the Apostle for leadership of the early Christian community. Martyred at the instigation of the High Priest Annas, he also is one of only three Christian icons – the others being John the Baptist and Jesus himself – deemed significant enough to warrant mention in the chronicles of Flavius Josephus. But his activities, notable though they were, have stimulated only a fraction of the scholarly interest of, say, Paul, John the Baptist or any of the Gospel authors.
If we are to believe Robert Eisenman, however, James may be the most under appreciated personage in the study of both the New Testament and Second Temple Judaism – and the key to understanding early Christianity. In Eisenman’s interpretation, James was far more than the leader of the nascent Christian church in Jerusalem: He was a leader of the Essene sect and probably the Teacher of Righteousness alluded to in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Functioning as an opposition High Priest, he served as the lynchpin of resistance to the rule of Rome. His call for the expulsion of foreign “pollution” from the Temple of Jerusalem inspired the lower ranking priests, shortly after his death, to halt sacrifices to Caesar and precipitate the Great Revolt in 66 AD.
Although his views are radically unorthodox, Eisenman commands our attention. As Professor of Middle East Religions and Archaeology at California State University in Long Beach, he ranks among the leading experts of the Dead Sea Scrolls. He led the worldwide campaign to make the scrolls, long guarded by their academic caretakers, more accessible to the public. In his volume A Facsimile Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls, he caused a sensation by reproducing photographs of scrolls that had theretofore gone unpublished. This treatise on James follows two previous works exploring the relationship between the Qumran texts, the Essenes and the early Christians.
In traditional Christian iconography, James has been a shadowy, peripheral figure. He barely warrants a mention in any of the Gospels or the Acts of the Apostles. A rich lore about him survives in the writings of the early church fathers, but so much of the literary evidence is contradictory, obviously mythical and of such a late date – 3rd and 4th centuries, mostly — that scholars have dismissed it as having little historical value.
Approaching the material afresh through the lens of the Dead Sea Scrolls, however, Eisenman makes a powerful case that James, known as “the Just” or “Righteous,” hewed to the doctrine of the Essenes. A lifelong ascetic and Nazirite, James ate no meat, drank no wine, kept celibate and bathed daily in cold water. His writings – the Epistle of James in the New Testament and two “apocalypses” found amid the Gnostic Nag Hammadi texts – resonate with the images and vocabulary of the Dead Sea scrolls. James preached the imminent overthrow of the Romans and their Jewish collaborators by an angry God “coming in power on the clouds of Heaven with the Heavenly Host.”
Zealous in his observance of the Law of Moses, James refused to admit gentiles into his movement unless they embraced every aspect of the law themselves. His hard-line position on circumcision and dietary rules put him in conflict with the Apostle Paul who, as a missionary to the gentiles, fought to relax the restrictions. Eisenman traces the conflict as Paul struggled to wrest the churches in gentile lands from the control of James in Jerusalem. Paul’s faction won in the end, but only after the high priests executed James and the majority of the Jewish Christians perished in the Great Revolt.
As the saying goes, the winners — or, in this case, the survivors — write the history. The authors of the canonical Gospels, all of whom were in Paul’s camp, dealt with James by ignoring him. From the beginning, they depicted Jesus as rejecting his family. Then, as the doctrine of the virgin birth emerged, they downplayed Jesus’ siblings by describing them as the children of Joseph, not of Mary – making them step brothers and step sisters. The evangelists obscured James’ close association with Jesus – as one of his apostles and successor of his movement — by referring to him as James the Lesser or James the son of Alphaeus. Most tendentiously of all, Eisenman contends, Luke virtually wrote James out of the history of the early church in the Acts of the Apostles. In just one example among many, Luke turned on its head the martyrdom of James by retelling it as the martyrdom of Stephen, a fictional character sympathetic to the gentiles.
Eisenman explores James’ perspective by roaming outside the New Testament canon. A pro-James spin appears in the Clementine Recognitions, a late-dated work of Jewish-Christian provenance that scholars have downplayed as a work of fiction. Eisenman argues plausibly that the Recognitions incorporate an authentic early tradition. He also finds James’ point of view expressed in the Qumran texts. James, he believes, appears as the “Teacher of Righteousness,” Paul as the “Spouter of Lies” and the High Priest Annas as the “Wicked Priest.”
Such arguments, though controversial to varying degrees, are at least defensible. Had Eisenman limited his book to the points outlined above, he would have left a work of enduring significance. Unfortunately, he undermines his genuine contributions to the study of early Christianity by pushing his material too far. Over and over, Eisenman seizes upon any coincidence or similarity in names to equate characters found in the New Testament with those appearing in the works of Josephus and, then, to reinterpret their historical significance. To cite but one of many examples, he suggests that Paul the Apostle (formerly Saul) may be identical with an obscure kinsman of King Agrippa II whom Josephus refers to as “Saulus.” This Saulus and his brother led a riot in Jerusalem around the time of James’ death. Later, during the Great Revolt, Saulus acted as an intermediary between the Jewish peace faction and the Romans. Taking this and other coincidences of equally dubious significance, Eisenman builds a case that Paul actively schemed and collaborated with the Romans and – most incredibly — that he may have participated in the stoning death of James!
Such consistent overreaching might be forgivable if it were the only flaw in his work. But Eisenman treats those who disagree with him much as the evangelists dealt with James: by totally ignoring them. Conventional scholarship dates the Dead Sea Scrolls to the era of the Hasmonaean priest-kings some two centuries before James’ era. He would have enhanced the credibility of his own interpretation had he elucidated, even briefly, the problems he found with the conventional view.
Finally, Eisenman imposes an artificial polarity on Jewish politics. In one camp, he places the Romans and their collaborators: the Herodian princes, the priestly aristocracy, the scribal Pharisees and the agitator (and self-proclaimed apostle) Paul. Arrayed in the other camp were the anti-Roman nationalists: Zealots, sicarii, Essenes and early Christians, not to mention the poor and downtrodden. There is no room in Eisenman’s vision of 1st century Palestine for a kaleidoscope of mutating factions and philosophies that fell in and out of favor with one another, nor the notion that some groups might have been ambivalent about Roman rule. Nor, finally, does Eisenman acknowledge the existence of Jewish mysticism – surprisingly, given its prominence in the Dead Sea Scrolls – which might lead some Jews to seek salvation through spiritual means rather than through earthly action.
Still, despite the mind-numbing redundancy, wild conjecture and simplistic analytical framework, there’s plenty to reward the reader who slogs through this 1,000-page tome. Many of Eisenman’s speculations may be utterly without foundation, but he makes so many connections that only a handful of them need be well grounded to change our thinking about key New Testament figures. He argues quite convincingly, for instance, that James was the unnamed companion of Cleopas on the road to Emmaus who shared the encounter with the resurrected Jesus. Eisenman also draws upon sources largely ignored in mainstream scholarship – the Clementine Recognitions, for instance; the Helen of Adiabene material in Josephus; the apocryphal Edessa documents. Perhaps his bold use of these materials will encourage others to approach them with fresh perspectives.
In the end, one cannot help but agree with Eisenman’s conclusion: If we ever hope to understand the historical Jesus, we must understand the historical James. As Eisenman puts it, “Who and whatever James was, so was Jesus.”
June 4, 2000