If it is true that fools rush in where angels fear to tread, then Robert Eisenman should certainly be considered a fool. His project is nothing less than a complete rewriting of the origins of Christianity. Traditional views of Christian beginnings, based largely on the Bible and the works of the 1st-century Jewish historian Josephus, emerge as compromised, if not, indeed, wilfully corupt.
Eisenman's revision does notstop here: the rabbinic forebears of present-day Judaism are exposed in much the same light as their Christian counterparts. Much of the content of this huge book reproduces arguments Eisenman has presented in several previous publications.
The basic theses are simple. The central figure in early Christianity was James, brother of Jesus. The writers of the New Testament texts played down his importance because they rejected (or betrayed) the kind of movement which he (and Jesus before him) represented. References to James, particularly in non-biblical texts, allow reconstruction of his role.
This reconstructed James shows such similarity to the "Teacher of Righteousness", the enigmatic leader-figure in the Dead Sea Scrolls, that they must be the same person. His analysis then yields a picture of earliest Christianity as a religiously-motivated Jewish nationalist movement, which ultimately lost out to powerful pro-Roman collaborationist upper class groups, of which the Jerusalem high priests, the Herodian royal family, the historian Josephus and St Paul were all representatives.
That there were aspects of the emergence of Christianity about which the New Testament tells us little is not a new or controversial insight. Likewise, it is nothing new to stress the importance of Roman imperial rule over Palestine in the evaluation of this period. The edifice which Eisenman builds on such basic insights is, however, deeply questionable. At the end of the
Introduction, he urges readers to go directly to the ancient sources themselves". All that is required, he continues, is a critical faculty, sensitivity to language, and simple common sense".
Most non-specialist readers will not have the opportunity to consult the ancient sources. One suspects this is a rhetorical flourish on Eisenman's part, as his use of original texts is often peculiarly selective, to say the least. Or perhaps, he understands "common sense" differently to most people. For example, for Eisenman there were basically two factions in 1st-century Judaism, pro-Roman collaborationists (high priests; Herodians and Pharisees) and the "Opposition" (Zealots, Essenes and Christians - all basically the same group), focused around the family of Jesus, especially James.
Eisenman gets a lot of mileage from Josephus's account of the founding of the revolutionary group he calls "Zealots", by figures named Judas the Galilean and Saddok. Although he mentions Saddok more than thirty times, Eisenman fails to mention that Josephus calls him "Saddok the Pharisee". Had Eisenman chosen to mention details like this, it would have caused serious problems for his simplistic presentation of the Pharisees as collaborationists. One could mention many other similar details which cannot lightly be explained away; Eisenman, however, simply ignores anything which conflicted with his theory.
Presumably, he doesn't expect his readers actually to check. This is one of very many instances when my critical faculties, not to mention-common sense, made me uncomfortable with Eisenman's approach. One fears he is trying to pull a fast one on the unsuspecting reader who trusts his use of source-texts and mistakes the confidence of his assertions for objective expertise. Interestingly, at the end of the book he points out that he has tried "to provide everything the reader will need in the text itself without going to secondary sources". Perhaps he considers "credulity" a synonym for "common sense".
Another strange working assumption is that texts from as later as the 3rd to 5th centuries which tell us about James contain better historical information than the New Testament texts, written within a few decades of the events they narrate. Certainly the New Testament is not objective. The same applies to the sources Eisenman prefers, yet he makes little mention of the biases of his most prized sources, while crudely disparaging the historical value of the New Testament.
Eisenman's identification of James with the "Teacher of Righteousness" in the Dead Sea Scrolls is deeply problematic. The Scrolls are too cryptic to allow any such confident identification. Some of what can be reconstructed about this figure is not incompatible with James. Other aspects are extremely difficult to reconcile, but Eisenman, not surprisingly, does not mention these.
When faced with insufficient evidence, most scholars find caution preferable to jumping to sweeping conclusions. The traditional view, shared by Jewish and Christian scholars alike, that this figure was an unknown early leader of the group called Essenes (not early Christians), retains more strength than Eisenman's speculative assumptions and circular arguments. The content of this book is profoundly one-sided and unreliable, but it does represent another manifestation of a recurring tendency in popular or semi-popular writing on Christianity (and Judaism): the need to find something more behind the orthodox, usually something secret and startling, and often sensationalist.
Eisenman's attempts to reinvent history are, in the end, completely unconvincing, but even if in a sophisticated form, the compulsion to seek some kind of "Holy Grail appears unwilling to go away. It is fascinating to wonder why this is so.