gurugeorge

Just reading through Robert Price's highly entertaining review of Robert Eiseman's "James the Brother of Jesus".

The main thing that struck me is the difference between my usual opinion about this stuff - that evidence is thin on the ground, conclusions hard to come by - and how Eiseman seems to find a veritable cornucopia of evidence for something very precise in all those scribbles.

IOW, with all the conventional story, we labour to try and find bits and pieces that support one measly variation or another, and it all seems very hard and difficult. Yet here is Eiseman actually going right into the texts and finding quite a lot of evidence in them for a very different (and it has to be said, gripping and realistic-seeming) story.

Most notably, he finds a lot of Josephus in the makeup of the gospels, showing in detail how some of the stories in Josephus are used as tropes in the story of Jesus, such that Jesus is a sort of a composite collection of some of the dramatic events narrated by Josephus that did happen, but happened to different people.

What do we think? Is Eiseman on to something, or suffering from scholarly hallucinations?

Needless to say my favourite bit is how Eiseman agrees with some main themes of one of my hobby-horses - the Simon Magus connection. He doesn't quite equate "Paul" with "Simon Magus", but it seems to me the way he shows that "Paul" was deemed by some Jewish Christians as a foreigner, a pagan messing with Judaism, might support the idea.

mountainman

Dear gurugeorge,

What does the author have to say about the TF?

Best wishes,


Pete

Toto

Eisenman (not Eiseman) is a loner. His book got some notice when it was published, but no one has been able to take his insights (if they are that) and gain any new understanding. Part of the problem is that he stakes his theories on dating the Dead Sea Scrolls to the first century, which is incompatible with the carbon dating.

As I recall, his technique in his book is to assume that any characters with the same name are the same person, split up for literary reasons. This is possible, but how can you prove it? When do you know to stop? E.g, there is a character named "Saul" in Jospephus, and Eisenman assumes that this must be the same as Paul, and then goes on to build an elaborate theory on that isolated factoid. But was there only one person in the first century Roman Empire named after the famous King Saul?

Eisenman is not the only Biblical Studies tenured professor who has gone off on what other scholars consider an eccentric tangent. I suspect that there is some value in his work, but I don't know how to extract it.

Toto

Eisenman is quoted as accepting the basic authenticity of the shorter mention of Jesus:

quotes

DCHindley

Eisenman actually suggests just about every interpretation possible for every set of common or even close name forms in the NT, early Christian tradition, and Josephus. The problem is that he never really organizes these possible interpretations into a form that can be profitably analyzed. He told me a couple years ago that he has a sequel to JTBOJ ready to publish, but his publisher has been sitting upon it until popular attention is turned back to James the Just for other reasons. I think there was hope his archaeological work with the graves near Qumran would produce James tomb or something. He did not say if he would systematically organize the interpretations he wrung from the raw data in JTBOJ, though.

DCH

DCHindley

In several things, Eisenman seems to have been influenced by Robert Eisler (Messiah Jesus and John the Baptist, 1931) although he does not cite him.

Eisler believed, on the basis of his hypothesis the Slavonic versiojn of Josephus' War of the Jews was influenced by a now lost Aramaic original Josephus' description of the Capture of Jerusalem, that Josephus had there said something about Jesus, although he waver as to whether it was flattering or not.

The TF, in Eisler's interpretation, is a heavily sanitized version that replaced what was oiginally written in the Aramaic Capture of Jerusalem. Eisler attempts to reconstruct the original description from other sources.

This is eveidenently what Eisemnan is referring to.

DCH

robto

I tried to read this book, and failed completely. It seemed to me that Eisenman was assuming his conclusions right at the outset - making the rest of the book superfluous. Price seems to have found something of value in it, but personally, I like a scholar to state his assumptions up front and give a clear line of reasoning to his conclusions. I couldn't figure out Eisenman's starting point, so I was lost right at the outset.

youngalexander

It is some years since I read this 'weighty' tome which upon inspection I see comes to 1074 pages. My lasting impression is of endless summation of previous summations.:constern01:

Requires a bit of a precis I reckon:devil1:

As for a sequel, god forbid:constern02:

matthewthomas

I was under the impression that a sequel had been out for some time:
New-Testament-Code-Damascus-Covenant (or via: amazon.co.uk)
It was in my local Borders and Waterstones over a year ago.

Best wishes,
Mt

DCHindley

Yup,

That would be it! While he's a nice guy, he is even more verbose than I am and relatively hard to penetrate due to the sheer volume of details he throws at you and relative lack of organization. It is also HUGE!

DCH