Don't Confuse Me With The Facts Please!

Cresswell develops the theme of name plays and inversions used by early Christian authors to transform a Jewish messianic resistance movement into a religious cult obedient to Rome. He shows how the character of zealots and sicarii assassins was altered and how one of the movement's messiahs, Jesus, was converted into a resurrected pagan god.

Drawing on the Dead Sea Scrolls and on long overlooked early Church texts, Eisenman reveals in this groundbreaking major exploration the Christianity of Paul as a distortion of what James and Jesus preached. Whereas James and his followers, "zealous for the Law" of Moses, were nationalistic and apocalyptic, Paul's Hellenized movement promoted itself as pacifist, cosmopolitan, and faith-based. In an argument with enormous implications, Eisenman identifies Paul as deeply compromised by Roman contacts, and James as not simply the leader of Christianity of his day, but the popular Jewish leader of his time, whose death triggered the Uprising against Rome. Creative rewriting of early Church documents has obscured this fact. Eisenman shows that characters like "Judas Iscariot" and "the Apostle James" did not exist as such and details an actual physical assault by Paul on James in the Temple. By rescuing James from the oblivion into which he was deliberately cast, James the Brother of Jesus reveals one of the most successful historical rewrite enterprises ever accomplished

Eisenman examines such topics as James' relationship to the Qumran community's Teacher of Righteousness and offers a reinterpretation of the Dead Sea Scrolls, especially the relatively recent translation of the MMT document, which he links to a Jamesian proto-Christianity. There is also much here about the Messianic movement in the first century and, more personally, about Peter and Paul's relationship to James and to one another.