num_pages: 1114
description: 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" didn't 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.
language: English
title: James the Brother of Jesus: The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls
titlecomplete: James the Brother of Jesus: The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls
genres: Christian, History, New Testament, Religion, Theology, Church History, Biblical, Nonfiction, Christianity, Unfinished
ratings_count: 271
publisher: Penguin Books (NYC et al.)