Robert Eisenman
Encyclopedia
Robert Eisenman is an American Biblical scholar
, theoretical writer, historian, archaeologist
, and "road" poet. He is currently Professor of Middle East Religions, Archaeology, and Islamic Law and director of the Institute for the Study of
Judaeo-Christian Origins at California State University Long Beach.
Eisenman led the campaign to free up access to the Dead Sea Scrolls
in the 1980s and 90s, and, as a result of this campaign, is associated with the theory that combines Essenes
with Palestinian messianism (or what some might refer to as "Palestinian Christianity") - a theory opposed to establishment or consensus
scholarship. He is also well known for his work in the field of Christian origins
and, in a general way, introducing the public to the character known as "James the brother of Jesus
."
Before this, Eisenman spent five years "on the road" in the USA, Europe, and the Middle East as far as India, encapsulating all these things in his poetic travel Diario (1959–62), published in 2007 by North Atlantic Books
, Berkeley, California and called The New Jerusalem, in which he describes the San Francisco "Beat
" scene in 1958-59, Paris when still a "moveable feast
", working on kibbutzim in Israel, the Peace Corps
, and several voyages on the overland route to India.
- best known for his design of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, the Visitor’s Center at Santiago de Compostela
in Spain, and the Arizona Cardinal Football Stadium.
) majored for two and a half years in Engineering Physics
(a course theoretically which was to prepare students to enter nuclear physics
), graduated B.A.
from Cornell University
in Physics and Philosophy in 1958. He received an M.A.
Degree in Hebrew and Near Eastern Studies with Abraham Katsh from New York University
in 1966. He received a Ph.D. Degree from Columbia University
in Middle East Languages and Cultures in 1971 with a Minor in Jewish Studies and a Major in Islamic Law
where he studied with Joseph Schacht
. He was a National Endowment for the Humanities
Fellow at the American Schools of Oriental Research
, Jerusalem, Israel
, 1985–86 and, in 1986-87, he was a Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies
, Oxford
, England
.
and Islamic Origins at California State University Long Beach. He is also a Visiting Senior Member of Linacre College, Oxford University, and was a National Endowment for the Humanities
Fellow at the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research (American Schools of Oriental Research
) in Jerusalem.
in Maplewood
/South Orange, New Jersey
, but skipped his senior year to take up an acceptance in the Engineering Physics Department at Cornell University
. In his junior year Eisenman moved, first to Philosophy to study with Max Black
, then on to Comparative Literature (John Senior), and then back to Philosophy to graduate in 1958 with a major in Aesthetics
and a minor in Physics.
’s On the Road
published the previous year 1957), but now not nationally, internationally. People who knew him then say he was the first to introduce American tennis shoes - substitutes for his college "white bucs" - as white walking shoes to Europe (see the picture at right) and the first American “backpacker” they ever saw (Australians, New Zealanders, and assorted Europeans had been doing it earlier).
Stopping in Paris, he spent the Fall in Alt Aussee in Austria
; and from there down to Vienna
, Greece, Athens
, and ultimately Hydra Island, where he was entertained by the Norwegian writer and poet Axel Jensen
and his wife Marianne (later immortalized by Leonard Cohen
in his song “So Long, Marianne
”).
Having been accepted for graduate study in Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley, Eisenman returned to the U.S. via Paris
and Cape Cod
and ultimately went across the country by Greyhound Bus to San Francisco where he found a room on Russian Hill and tested the scene at North Beach. When he finally went across the Bay to register at UC Berkeley, what he saw reminded him so much of Cornell (Bermuda shorts
, bobby socks, fraternities/sororities, etc. – this was a decade before the Free Speech Movement
there) that he ripped up his computer punch cards right on the Registration line in the Armory and tossed them into a wastepaper basket.
He then hitchhiked back across the country and returned to Paris. From 1959-60, Eisenman stayed at “the Beat Hotel
” where he encountered the likes of William Burroughs, Gregory Corso
, et al., but he was not really interested in these sorts of persons or their scene. All this he documents in The New Jerusalem: A Millennium Poetic/Prophetic Travel Diario, 1959-62, published in 2007 and taken directly from the Free verse
notebooks he kept during this period, which he in his "Introduction" and his publishers on the back cover both call "an Anti-Beat Manifesto".
He then went on to Israel
and Jerusalem, where he had the epiphany-like experience of encountering his family whom he had previously not known or ever heard of (his great grandfather had gone to Jerusalem at the time of the Turks and was one of the founders of the Bikur Holim Hospital
there, while his two oldest sons left him in Istanbul
and come directly to America), worked on Kibbutzim in the Galilee
(1960-61 - he had previously worked on John F. Kennedy
’s 1960 Campaign,) and finally went back to join the first Peace Corps
Group to go into the field. This, curiously enough, trained at the International House at UC Berkeley, so he was back to where he had started out; but while they went on to meet Kennedy on the White House
lawn and to Ghana
, he was flown back to New York
because, as he saw it, he was on his way to India and the East not Africa.
Resuming his “Passage to India,” he returned to Paris, and then on to kibbutzim in the Galilee again. The next Spring, after staying in monasteries throughout Israel, and a climactic fight with the future Israeli “Peace Pilot” at the California Café in Tel Aviv
; Eisenman made the last overland run from Cyprus
, across Turkey
, Iran
, Beluchistan, and Pakistan
by bus, train, and boat to India
, where he ended his journey as a guest of and sleeping in the Jewish Synagogue of New Delhi
, most of whose members were up in the Simla Hill States because it was high summer and monsoon. He returned to Paris over the Indian Ocean
, up the Red Sea
, and across the Mediterranean.
. The Scrolls had been discovered from 1948-56 in several waves, but after a suggestive article by literary critic Edmund Wilson
in The New Yorker
magazine, editing more or less ground to a halt from about 1959 onwards.
This is not to say the Scrolls were not out. The Israelis had been very forthcoming with the first Scrolls that came into their possession from Cave I. It was the Scrolls from later caves discovered like III-XI, which came in after 1948 and Partition and on-site excavations by persons like Dominican Father Roland de Vaux
, which were the problem. In 1985-86, Eisenman, who had written his first book presenting, as he called it, “A New Theory of Qumran Origins” in 1983 and a follow-up on James as Righteous Teacher in 1985, received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem (also known as “the American School") where Cave I Scrolls had first come in and been photographed in 1947-48.
Ostensibly he was to work on a project Comparing the Jerusalem Community of James the Just
to the Community at Qumran
, but while at the American Schools of Oriental Research
(then the Albright Institute) he found that there was nothing he could do – all paths being barred to him. Notwithstanding, he and a colleague, Philip Davies
of Sheffield University, England
, went in to see one of the curators of the Shrine of the Book and were told uncategorically, “You will not see the Scrolls in your lifetime.” Subsequently he came into possession of the complete computer print-out of all the Scrolls in possession of the Israel Antiquities Authority
, both those before 1967 and those afterwards at the Rockefeller Museum
and, not three years later, a complete photographic archive of all previously unpublished materials from Cave IV all the way up to Cave XI.
He sent a copy of this computer-generated print-out to the Editor of Biblical Archaeology Review
, Hershel Shanks
, which created a huge stir in the office and the campaign to free the Scrolls really began in earnest.
During his stay at Oxford University as a Senior Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies
and a Visiting Senior Member of Linacre College in 1986-87, a colleague had also passed him a xerox
copy of 4QMMT
, a document which had been talked about but which no one outside the inner circle had ever been allowed to see. This, too, he freely shared with anyone who wanted to see it as part of the campaign, and, thereafter, it made the rounds.
At this time, too, he brought James Robinson
– a colleague of his at Claremont University and the Editor of the Nag Hammadi
Codices (a dispute similar to the Qumran
one) – into the mix and together they took the decision to publish all the unpublished photographs. This amounted to 1785 plates. The original publication (in microfiche form) was supposed to occur in April, 1991 through EJ Brill in Leiden, Holland.
However, a few weeks before publication, Brill's representative had attended a Scrolls Conference in Madrid
, Spain
and mistook the uproar there over Kapera’s publication the year before in Poland
of the samizdat
copy of 4QMMT
he had received from Davies for a dispute over freedom of access to the Scrolls generally. Following this, newly-appointed Israeli representatives came to Leiden and talked the Brill publishers out of the Eisenman/Robinson microfiche project and into a newly-conceived one of their own. So Eisenman and Robinson had to fall back on the offices of Hershel Shanks
and the Biblical Archaeology Society
who were unwilling to go to press before October/November of that year.
While all these things were going on, Eisenman had been invited to become a consultant to the Huntington Library in San Marino
, California
, which had become aware that it had in its archive a collection of photographs of all the Dead Sea Scrolls
, donated to it by Elizabeth Bechtel. The late William Moffatt, its Director, asked whether he thought the Library should open its archive to all scholars. He was projecting this for September, two months before Eisenman's and Robinson’s own projected B.A.S. Edition. Eisenman encouraged him to do so, though he knew the Library would get most of the credit for breaking the monopoly and Robinson and he very little.
s in their enthusiasm to find artifacts had clearly been in almost all accessible caves, there might have been others, inaccessible to them or hidden in some manner or cave-ins. These were the best possibilities of finding new Scrolls.
In the first expedition, between 1988–89, he and his students were involved in the excavation of a cave a kilometer or two south of Qumran, in which they found some Bronze Age
artifacts, including an arrow that had evidently been shot into the cave, which still displayed its lacquer
rings and feather marks, an oil jug, and the wooden remains possibly of a plough
.
From 1989-92 Eisenman and his students conducted a walking survey of the entire Dead Sea
shore and its environs from seven kilometers north of Qumran to thirty-five kilometers south, past Wadi Murabba'at
, to the Northern limits of Ein Gedi
, mapping the whole area. In this survey they went into some 485 caves and depressions.
In 1990-91, with the help of author Michael Baigent
and radar
groundscan specialist Tony Wood, he conducted the first radar groundscan of the Qumran plateau, its ruins and, in particular, the top of the various marls, including Caves 4-6 where he felt there was the best chance of finding hidden pockets that previously might not have been visible to the eye. Ground-scanning on the marls and below Cave VI did point to several such pockets and seemingly empty areas in the marls adjourning Cave IV.
In 2001-03, his teams joined an expedition led by Hanan Eshel and Magen Broshi and sponsored by John Merrill and the B.A.S. In the course of this expedition, two of his students, Dennis Walker and Ron Dubay, excavated a small building on the eastern edge of the Qumran Cemetery. They found that it contained bones: two secondary burials (and the next year one primary burial was uncovered beneath this). This was an extremely important find, as was the rare zinc
sarcophagus
found elsewhere in the graveyard, others of his students were involved in uncovering, cleaning, and unearthing. The next year everyone went back to do more work on the enclosure and the bones it contained and to further survey the graveyard at Qumran, which evolved into the first comprehensive map of the Qumran settlement and adjacent cemetery.
In 2004, they had the opportunity to return and investigate the empty areas in the marls of Cave IV, but with little result.
Tour Magdala in the French village of Rennes-le-Château
.
who first worked on the Dead Sea Scrolls led them to erroneously date the non-biblical, sectarian community documents to the Maccabean period, and to read them as the writings of a serene, retiring community of Essene monks exiled to the wilderness in the course of a dispute with the reigning priesthood of the day led by the "Wicked Priest"/"Spouter of Lying."
Eisenman reads the attitude of these documents as militant, nationalistic and zealous and places them not in the Maccabean period but the later, Herodian
era (c. 35 BCE to 70 CE and beyond), which means the establishment priesthood that they opposed was the collaborating, compromising, corrupt Herodian priesthood. He sees parallels between the political, religious and ethical stance of these sectarian documents and that of James the brother of Jesus
, whom he identifies as the scrolls' Teacher of Righteousness
, and sees 'the Wicked Priest
' and 'the Man of Lying' as two different adversaries of the scroll community, the Wicked Priest being the High Priest
Ananus ben Ananus, James' executioner, and the Man of Lying, St. Paul.
He is critical of the ways radiocarbon dating
and paleography have been employed to date the Dead Sea Scrolls, and relies instead on the internal evidence, what the texts say themselves. He finds parallels between the James-Jesus
first century milieu and the scrolls' repeated allusion to "the Star Prophecy", the aggressiveness of the War Scroll and similar documents, the hiding of the Jerusalem Temple treasure as delineated in the Copper Scroll
, the description of foreign armies (the Kittim
) invading on a much more massive scale than any Hellenistic invasion during the Maccabean period, and the reference to themselves several times as "the Congregation," "Church of the Poor" and Ebionites
(“the Poor”), the name of James’ community as described in Early Church literature and Paul. Eisenman lays particular emphasis on the scroll community's description of the Kittim's military and religious practices in their interpretation of Habakkuk
2:2-2:4 (the Habakkuk Commentary
) as "sacrificing to their standards and worshiping their weapons of War", and their reference to Roman
“tax-farming” across the whole of the civilized world.
both in the Pauline corpus (Romans
, Galatians, et al.) and in the Epistle of James
. He sees as proof positive that these documents were written more or less contemporaneously and at a time when this prophecy
or proof-text was in play.
In addition, he sees the interpretation in the Habakkuk Commentary
at Qumran, seemingly written in the latter part of the Community’s history and witnessing its fall and the fall of the Jerusalem Temple
(c. 70 CE), as ‘Jamesian’ as opposed to ‘Pauline’. That is, first of all it is confined to “Jews” or, in the language of the Commentary, “the House of Judah,” and second of all, it applies only to “Torah-doing” Jews (“doing” here, the basis of the Hebrew word for “works” throughout the Qumran corpus and also being an extremely important usage in the Epistle of James), that is, it does not apply to “non-Torah-doing Jews” and certainly not "non-Torah-doing Gentiles."
For Eisenman this is a direct riposte and a rejection of the Pauline interpretation of this prophecy, and the basis of the Pauline theology one finds in Galatians and Romans and actually, in fact, seemingly argued against in the extant Epistle of James whether seen as authentic, not authentic, or just part of ‘the Jamesian School’; and, therefore, a definitive chronological indicator for the document as a whole.
Finally, he points to the fact that there are even collections of messianic proof-texts at Qumran which include, for instance, the Star Prophecy
of Numbers
24:17 which Josephus
, at the end of the Jewish War
, singles out as the reason for the outbreak of the revolt, and even one dedicated to “the Promises to the Seed” or “House of David.” For Eisenman the Dead Sea Scrolls are Messianic, it being not properly appreciated just how messianic the Scrolls actually are. They represent "the literature of the Messianic Movement in Palestine" which he prefers to the usage “Christianity in Palestine".
Though, one might call them “Essene”, one must take the definition for this from what the Scrolls themselves say, not necessarily what others think or say the Essenes were. Hippolytus, for instance, possibly preserving an alternate version of Josephus, thinks there are two or even three groups of “Essenes”, “Zealot” or “Sicarii
Essenes”, and for Eisenman, this is a better definition of what the Essenes were than the more normative ones people are familiar with. For him the Essenes are what Christians were in Palestine before ‘the Movement’ went overseas and was Paulinized, turning it into the mirror opposite of what it was in Palestine before the fall of the Temple.
For him, Acts
confirms this, averring that “Christians were first called Christians” in Antioch
in Syria
in the mid-Fifties AD. As opposed to this, he considers the more historically-oriented sectarian or later documents of the Dead Sea Scrolls to be the messianically inspired literature of a pietist, Law-oriented, and nationalistic Party in opposition to Roman
/Herodian
rule in Palestine which uses the language as “Sons of Zadok
” (in some vocabularies, “Sadducees
”) or “Zaddikim (צדיקים),” a derivate usage, in referring to itself or even “Messianic Sadducees”, as opposed to “Herodian Sadducees” pictured in both the New Testament
and Josephus.
could at least do something like AMS carbon testing of the unpublished Scrolls. This proposal was contained in a series of letters to John Strugnell
, Eisenman wrote with Philip Davies
of Sheffield University in England
and copied to Amir Drori
, the Head of the Israel Antiquities Authority
.
This transpired in the following manner - at the same time that he was writing for access to the unpublished copies of the Damascus Document
in the Scroll corpus (the one everyone had been using up till then was from the Cairo Genizah of 1896-7), Eisenman hit upon the idea of asking for AMS carbon dating of the Scrolls. Though he knew there had been earlier carbon dating of the Scrolls, this was to prove their authenticity and nothing had been done since the new method known as “AMS” had been developed. Though he realized that even the new method would not be precise enough to determine actual dates - the margin of errors being too large - his wish was to use it to test the claims of paleography by "relative dating," that is, earlier vs. later in the same test run.
Not two months after he and Davies made this request to the Antiquities Authority, to which they attached a recent article about AMS radiocarbon techniques, it announced its intention to run just such tests while neglecting to mention from whom the initial suggestion had come. But he and Davies had also included in their letter to the IAA a caveat, that “Opposition Scholars” be included in process because it was they who felt the most need for the tests and they who could identify which documents should be tested. As it transpired, they were completely frozen out of the testing, the results of which were uneven and on the whole rather “skewed.” Nor was any attention paid to testing the paleographic arguments of “earlier vs. later”.
For Eisenman, the problem was that those tests, and the later ones, sought to achieve “absolute dating”. He and Davies felt that this was impossible to achieve, given the narrow chronological parameters of the Qumran documents, and that the best it can be done was "relative dating."
It was neglected too the FBI Crime Lab discoveries, that tests of this kind usually came out either to reflect or reinforce the preconceptions of those conducting them. This was why it would have been better to include “Opposition Scholars" in the process, in particular, those who had actually proposed conducting the tests in the first place; and, finally, to take into consideration that all such tests involved “interpretation” of the labs doing the testing – some of them, the very same ones that had conducted the widely-disputed testing of the Turin Shroud.
, the individual Paul
actually refers to as either "brother of Jesus" or “the brother of the Lord,” is the historical character who exhibits the most in common with “the Teacher of Righteousness
" pictured at Qumran and he considers that these events are the ones vividly portrayed in the Habakkuk Commentary. Historically speaking, it is this character who led the “Opposition Movement,” including Essenes, Zealots, Sicarii
, and/or Nazoreans - even Ebionites
- and who, as “Zaddik" (צדיק), i. e., “the Zaddik of the Opposition Movement,” about whom all these groups revolved until his death at the hands of the High Priest
Ananus ben Ananus in 62 CE as described both in Josephus and Early Church literature. For him, the popularity of James and the illegality of the manner of his death at the hands of the Herodians, establishment High Priesthood, and Pharisees
in 62 CE set the stage for and possibly even triggered the First Jewish Revolt against the Rome
in 66-73 CE - to say nothing of the fire in Rome
, not long afterwards which, aside from his probably having set it himself, Nero
was reported to have blamed on “Christians.”
For his part, the Jewish historian Josephus makes it clear that those he is calling “Essenes” (as opposed to these same Herodians
, Sadducees
, and Pharisees
) participated in the uprising, willing to undergo any torture or any form of death rather than "eat things sacrificed to idols" or "break the Law." For Eisenman, these “Nazoreans,” (נצרים) “Zealots,” (קנאים) “Zaddikim” (צדיקים) or “Ebionim” (אביונים) were marginalized by a Herodian named Saul (Paul of Tarsus
) and the gentile Christians who followed him. This version of Christianity
, as it later emerged from a gentile milieu as led by Paul, transformed the apocalyptic militancy of the Ebionite/Essene Zaddikim into a universalist peaceful doctrine. In this manner, Eisenman sees the doctrine of Christianity
as largely the product of Pauline dialectic
and apologetics
. In so doing, Eisenman attempts to recover the authentic teaching of Jesus and/or James from the obscurity into which it seems to have been intentionally cast by resultant orthodoxy. As he puts it at the end of James the Brother of Jesus, once you have found the Historical James, you have found the Historical Jesus
or alternatively, “who and whatever James was so too was Jesus”.
as a Herodian
, based on the view that Paul's version of Judaism
was so peculiar that, more than anything else, it seemed to represent the interests of the Herodian Dynasty both in Palestine
and as it sought to extend its influence into Asia Minor
and further East into Northern Syria
and Mesopotamia
. He covered this in a series of papers and books beginning in 1984 and found the proof of this in Paul’s own salutation (if authentic), at the end of his Letter to the Romans, where he sent his greetings to his “kinsman Herodion” (i. e., “the Littlest Herod”) and “all those in the Household of Aristobulus” (the putative son of Herod of Chalcis
and the ultimate husband of the infamous Salome
– in fact, their son was “the Littlest Herod”).
He also found it in Josephus’ picture of a curious member of the Herodian family, an individual he also calls “Saulos” who actually seemed to have many characteristics in common with “Paul” in New Testament
portraiture. Not only was this “Saulos” involved in an appeal of sorts to “Caesar
,” he was also involved in violent behaviour in Jerusalem (although on the surface, at a somewhat later time); and it was he who made the final report to Nero
in Corinth
about the Roman reverses in Jerusalem which resulted in the dispatch of his best general Vespasian
from Britain
.
Finally he found this in Paul’s own outlook, his philosophy of “winning“ or being a “Jew to the Jews, a Law-keeper to the Law-keeper and a Law-breaker to the Law-breaker” also expressed in I Corinthians 9:19-27. In his own identification of himself as of “the Tribe of Benjamin
” (Romans
11:1 and Philippians 3:5), a claim he might have felt Herodians, as Edomites, were making for themselves, and his founding “a Community where Greeks
and Jews could live in harmony, etc.,” where there were “no foreign visitors,” as well as in the easy access he seems to have had to positions of power, and his own Roman citizenship.
To complete his arguments, Eisenman cites the matter of an unidentified “nephew” of Paul, seemingly the son of Paul’s sister, resident in Jerusalem (Cypros married to the Temple Treasurer Helcias? – see his genealogies at the end of The New Testament Code and James the Brother of Jesus,) who has unfettered entrée to the Commander of the Roman garrison
in the Tower of Antonia who, in turn, then saves him from “Nazirite
oath-taking” “Zealot”-like Jewish extremists who take an oath “not to eat or drink till they have killed Paul” (Acts 23:12-4) – Eisenman identifies this individual as Julius Archelaus, the son of this Saulos’ sister by the name of Cypros above. Nor is this to say anything further about his Roman citizenship or his own philosophy of paying the Roman tax to Caesar and seemingly placing Roman Law
above Jewish Law as an expression of “the Righteousness Commandment” of “loving your neighbor as yourself”
in Romans 13:1-10.
was fraudulent when it originally surfaced in October, 2002 and he did this on the first day it appeared in news articles from AP
and op-ed pieces as in the Los Angeles Times
on the basis of what the inscription actually said and not on the basis of ‘scientific’ or ‘pseudo-scientific aids like those of palaeography
or patina
analysis.
In the first place, when he actually saw the ossuary
at the AAR/SBL
Conference in Toronto
three weeks later, it was clear there were two separate hands on the inscription, the second patently more cursive. Secondly, even if the “Jacob the Son of Joseph” part were authentic (there being plenty of ossuaries of this kind available around Jerusalem), the second “Brother of Jesus” part would have to have been added a substantial amount of time later, either in antiquity by a pious pilgrim or in modern times, by a not-very-sophisticated forger because at the time (62 CE), Jesus – if he existed as such - would have been no more well known in Jerusalem than his putative brother James, and probably far less so; so there would have been no need to add such a rare cognomen
except to please believers.
Moreover, as he said in his Los Angeles Times
op ed of 10/29/02, he would have been much more impressed if the first part of the inscription had said “son of Clopas’/‘Cleophas’/‘Cephas’ or some such thing, which is how individuals connected to this family were known in Palestine
in this period and not the more pat or theologically-consistent “Joseph”; or if the second part had simply added the cognomen “the Zaddik” (הׂצדיק) or “Just One,” which was also how James was known by everyone in Palestine at this time according to Eusebius.
Bible
The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...
, theoretical writer, historian, archaeologist
Archaeology
Archaeology, or archeology , is the study of human society, primarily through the recovery and analysis of the material culture and environmental data that they have left behind, which includes artifacts, architecture, biofacts and cultural landscapes...
, and "road" poet. He is currently Professor of Middle East Religions, Archaeology, and Islamic Law and director of the Institute for the Study of
Judaeo-Christian Origins at California State University Long Beach.
Eisenman led the campaign to free up access to the Dead Sea Scrolls
Dead Sea scrolls
The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of 972 texts from the Hebrew Bible and extra-biblical documents found between 1947 and 1956 on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, from which they derive their name...
in the 1980s and 90s, and, as a result of this campaign, is associated with the theory that combines Essenes
Essenes
The Essenes were a Jewish sect that flourished from the 2nd century BCE to the 1st century CE which some scholars claim seceded from the Zadokite priests...
with Palestinian messianism (or what some might refer to as "Palestinian Christianity") - a theory opposed to establishment or consensus
Scientific consensus
Scientific consensus is the collective judgment, position, and opinion of the community of scientists in a particular field of study. Consensus implies general agreement, though not necessarily unanimity. Scientific consensus is not by itself a scientific argument, and it is not part of the...
scholarship. He is also well known for his work in the field of Christian origins
Origins of Christianity
For centuries, the traditional understanding has been that Judaism came before Christianity and that Christianity separated from Judaism some time after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE....
and, in a general way, introducing the public to the character known as "James the brother of Jesus
James the Brother of Jesus
James the Brother of Jesus may refer to:*James the Just,* James the Brother of Jesus , 1997, by Robert Eisenman...
."
Before this, Eisenman spent five years "on the road" in the USA, Europe, and the Middle East as far as India, encapsulating all these things in his poetic travel Diario (1959–62), published in 2007 by North Atlantic Books
North Atlantic Books
North Atlantic Books is a non-profit, independent publisher based in Berkeley, CA. Founded by authors Richard Grossinger and Lindy Hough in Vermont, North Atlantic Books was named partly for the North Atlantic region where it began in 1974, as well as Alan Van Newkirk's Geographic Foundation of the...
, Berkeley, California and called The New Jerusalem, in which he describes the San Francisco "Beat
Beat generation
The Beat Generation refers to a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired...
" scene in 1958-59, Paris when still a "moveable feast
Moveable feast
In Christianity, a moveable feast or movable feast is a holy day – a feast day or a fast day – whose date is not fixed to a particular day of the calendar year but moves in response to the date of Easter, the date of which varies according to a complex formula...
", working on kibbutzim in Israel, the Peace Corps
Peace Corps
The Peace Corps is an American volunteer program run by the United States Government, as well as a government agency of the same name. The mission of the Peace Corps includes three goals: providing technical assistance, helping people outside the United States to understand US culture, and helping...
, and several voyages on the overland route to India.
Life and career
Eisenman is from New Jersey. His brother is deconstructionist architect Peter EisenmanPeter Eisenman
Peter Eisenman is an American architect. Eisenman's professional work is often referred to as formalist, deconstructive, late avant-garde, late or high modernist, etc...
- best known for his design of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, the Visitor’s Center at Santiago de Compostela
Santiago de Compostela
Santiago de Compostela is the capital of the autonomous community of Galicia, Spain.The city's Cathedral is the destination today, as it has been throughout history, of the important 9th century medieval pilgrimage route, the Way of St. James...
in Spain, and the Arizona Cardinal Football Stadium.
Education
Eisenman (like Thomas PynchonThomas Pynchon
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. is an American novelist. For his most praised novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon received the National Book Award, and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature...
) majored for two and a half years in Engineering Physics
Engineering physics
Engineering physics is the study of the combined disciplines of physics, engineering and mathematics in order to develop an understanding of the interrelationships of these three disciplines. Fundamental physics is combined with problem solving and engineering skills, which then has broad...
(a course theoretically which was to prepare students to enter nuclear physics
Nuclear physics
Nuclear physics is the field of physics that studies the building blocks and interactions of atomic nuclei. The most commonly known applications of nuclear physics are nuclear power generation and nuclear weapons technology, but the research has provided application in many fields, including those...
), graduated B.A.
Bachelor of Arts
A Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...
from Cornell University
Cornell University
Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...
in Physics and Philosophy in 1958. He received an M.A.
Master of Arts (postgraduate)
A Master of Arts from the Latin Magister Artium, is a type of Master's degree awarded by universities in many countries. The M.A. is usually contrasted with the M.S. or M.Sc. degrees...
Degree in Hebrew and Near Eastern Studies with Abraham Katsh from New York University
New York University
New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...
in 1966. He received a Ph.D. Degree from Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
in Middle East Languages and Cultures in 1971 with a Minor in Jewish Studies and a Major in Islamic Law
Islamic law
Islamic law can refer to:*Sharia: The code of conduct enjoined upon Muslims in the Quran*Fiqh: Muslim jurisprudence...
where he studied with Joseph Schacht
Joseph Schacht
Joseph Schacht, born in Ratibor, 15 March 1902, died in Englewood, 1 August 1969, was a British-German professor of Arabic and Islam at Columbia University in New York. He was the leading Western scholar on Islamic law, whose Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence is still considered a centrally...
. He was a National Endowment for the Humanities
National Endowment for the Humanities
The National Endowment for the Humanities is an independent federal agency of the United States established by the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965 dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation, and public programs in the humanities. The NEH is located at...
Fellow at the American Schools of Oriental Research
American Schools of Oriental Research
The American Schools of Oriental Research, founded in 1900, supports and encourages the study of the peoples and cultures of the Near East, from the earliest times to the present. It is apolitical and has no religious affiliation...
, Jerusalem, Israel
Israel
The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...
, 1985–86 and, in 1986-87, he was a Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies
Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies
The Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies is an independent institution which is part of the University of Oxford. Its research fellows teach on a variety of Bachelors and Masters degrees in Oriental Studies, and it publishes the Journal of Jewish Studies.-History and Case Statement:The...
, Oxford
Oxford
The city of Oxford is the county town of Oxfordshire, England. The city, made prominent by its medieval university, has a population of just under 165,000, with 153,900 living within the district boundary. It lies about 50 miles north-west of London. The rivers Cherwell and Thames run through...
, England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
.
Current position
He is Professor of Middle East Religions, Archaeology, and Islamic Law and the Director of the Institute for the Study of Judeo-ChristianJudeo-Christian
Judeo-Christian is a term used in the United States since the 1940s to refer to standards of ethics said to be held in common by Judaism and Christianity, for example the Ten Commandments...
and Islamic Origins at California State University Long Beach. He is also a Visiting Senior Member of Linacre College, Oxford University, and was a National Endowment for the Humanities
National Endowment for the Humanities
The National Endowment for the Humanities is an independent federal agency of the United States established by the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965 dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation, and public programs in the humanities. The NEH is located at...
Fellow at the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research (American Schools of Oriental Research
American Schools of Oriental Research
The American Schools of Oriental Research, founded in 1900, supports and encourages the study of the peoples and cultures of the Near East, from the earliest times to the present. It is apolitical and has no religious affiliation...
) in Jerusalem.
Early life
Eisenman went to Columbia High SchoolColumbia High School (New Jersey)
Columbia High School is a four-year comprehensive regional public high school located at 17 Parker Avenue in Maplewood, New Jersey, which serves students in grades nine through twelve within the South Orange-Maplewood School District, which includes Maplewood and South Orange Townships...
in Maplewood
Maplewood
Maplewood may refer to:Cities, towns, etc.* Maplewood, Indiana* Maplewood, Minnesota* Maplewood, Missouri* Maplewood, New Jersey* Maplewood, Ohio* Maplewood, Portland, Oregon, a neighborhood* Maplewood, Houston, Texas, a neighborhood...
/South Orange, New Jersey
South Orange, New Jersey
-Demographics:As of the census of 2000, there were 16,964 people, 5,522 households, and 3,766 families residing in the township. The population density was 5,945.3 people per square mile . There were 5,671 housing units at an average density of 1,987.5 per square mile...
, but skipped his senior year to take up an acceptance in the Engineering Physics Department at Cornell University
Cornell University
Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...
. In his junior year Eisenman moved, first to Philosophy to study with Max Black
Max Black
Max Black was a British-American philosopher, who was a leading influential figure in analytic philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century. He made contributions to the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mathematics and science, and the philosophy of art, also publishing studies...
, then on to Comparative Literature (John Senior), and then back to Philosophy to graduate in 1958 with a major in Aesthetics
Aesthetics
Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...
and a minor in Physics.
On the road internationally (1958-63)
Eisenman left college and immediately took to the road (it was the time of Jack KerouacJack Kerouac
Jean-Louis "Jack" Lebris de Kerouac was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing, covering topics such as Catholic...
’s On the Road
On the Road
On the Road is a novel by American writer Jack Kerouac, written in April 1951, and published by Viking Press in 1957. It is a largely autobiographical work that was based on the spontaneous road trips of Kerouac and his friends across mid-century America. It is often considered a defining work of...
published the previous year 1957), but now not nationally, internationally. People who knew him then say he was the first to introduce American tennis shoes - substitutes for his college "white bucs" - as white walking shoes to Europe (see the picture at right) and the first American “backpacker” they ever saw (Australians, New Zealanders, and assorted Europeans had been doing it earlier).
Stopping in Paris, he spent the Fall in Alt Aussee in Austria
Austria
Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...
; and from there down to Vienna
Vienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...
, Greece, Athens
Athens
Athens , is the capital and largest city of Greece. Athens dominates the Attica region and is one of the world's oldest cities, as its recorded history spans around 3,400 years. Classical Athens was a powerful city-state...
, and ultimately Hydra Island, where he was entertained by the Norwegian writer and poet Axel Jensen
Axel Jensen
Axel Buchardt Jensen was a Norwegian author. From 1957 until 2002 he published both fiction and non-fiction texts which include novels, poems, essays, a biography, manuscripts for cartoons and animated films....
and his wife Marianne (later immortalized by Leonard Cohen
Leonard Cohen
Leonard Norman Cohen, is a Canadian singer-songwriter, musician, poet and novelist. Cohen published his first book of poetry in Montreal in 1956 and his first novel in 1963. His work often explores religion, isolation, sexuality and interpersonal relationships...
in his song “So Long, Marianne
So Long, Marianne
So Long, Marianne is a compilation album by Leonard Cohen, issued in 1989. It features songs from his first four albums.-Track listing:All songs written by Leonard Cohen except as noted.#"Who by Fire" – 2:30#"So Long, Marianne" – 5:37...
”).
Having been accepted for graduate study in Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley, Eisenman returned to the U.S. via Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
and Cape Cod
Cape Cod
Cape Cod, often referred to locally as simply the Cape, is a cape in the easternmost portion of the state of Massachusetts, in the Northeastern United States...
and ultimately went across the country by Greyhound Bus to San Francisco where he found a room on Russian Hill and tested the scene at North Beach. When he finally went across the Bay to register at UC Berkeley, what he saw reminded him so much of Cornell (Bermuda shorts
Bermuda shorts
Bermuda Shorts, also known as walking shorts or dress shorts, are a particular type of short trousers, now widely worn as semi-casual attire by both men and women...
, bobby socks, fraternities/sororities, etc. – this was a decade before the Free Speech Movement
Free Speech Movement
The Free Speech Movement was a student protest which took place during the 1964–1965 academic year on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley under the informal leadership of students Mario Savio, Brian Turner, Bettina Aptheker, Steve Weissman, Art Goldberg, Jackie Goldberg, and...
there) that he ripped up his computer punch cards right on the Registration line in the Armory and tossed them into a wastepaper basket.
He then hitchhiked back across the country and returned to Paris. From 1959-60, Eisenman stayed at “the Beat Hotel
Beat Hotel
The Beat Hotel was a small, run-down hotel of 42 rooms at 9 Rue Gît-le-Cœur in the Latin Quarter of Paris, notable chiefly as a residence for members of the Beat poetry movement of the mid-20th century -Overview:...
” where he encountered the likes of William Burroughs, Gregory Corso
Gregory Corso
Gregory Nunzio Corso was an American poet, youngest of the inner circle of Beat Generation writers...
, et al., but he was not really interested in these sorts of persons or their scene. All this he documents in The New Jerusalem: A Millennium Poetic/Prophetic Travel Diario, 1959-62, published in 2007 and taken directly from the Free verse
Free verse
Free verse is a form of poetry that refrains from consistent meter patterns, rhyme, or any other musical pattern.Poets have explained that free verse, despite its freedom, is not free. Free Verse displays some elements of form...
notebooks he kept during this period, which he in his "Introduction" and his publishers on the back cover both call "an Anti-Beat Manifesto".
He then went on to Israel
Israel
The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...
and Jerusalem, where he had the epiphany-like experience of encountering his family whom he had previously not known or ever heard of (his great grandfather had gone to Jerusalem at the time of the Turks and was one of the founders of the Bikur Holim Hospital
Bikur Holim Hospital
Bikur Holim Hospital is a hospital in Jerusalem, Israel.-History:Bikur Holim first opened in a residential building in the Old City in 1826. In 1843, the hospital had only three rooms for patients. In 1854, a building was purchased which soon grew overcrowded...
there, while his two oldest sons left him in Istanbul
Istanbul
Istanbul , historically known as Byzantium and Constantinople , is the largest city of Turkey. Istanbul metropolitan province had 13.26 million people living in it as of December, 2010, which is 18% of Turkey's population and the 3rd largest metropolitan area in Europe after London and...
and come directly to America), worked on Kibbutzim in the Galilee
Galilee
Galilee , is a large region in northern Israel which overlaps with much of the administrative North District of the country. Traditionally divided into Upper Galilee , Lower Galilee , and Western Galilee , extending from Dan to the north, at the base of Mount Hermon, along Mount Lebanon to the...
(1960-61 - he had previously worked on John F. Kennedy
John F. Kennedy
John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy , often referred to by his initials JFK, was the 35th President of the United States, serving from 1961 until his assassination in 1963....
’s 1960 Campaign,) and finally went back to join the first Peace Corps
Peace Corps
The Peace Corps is an American volunteer program run by the United States Government, as well as a government agency of the same name. The mission of the Peace Corps includes three goals: providing technical assistance, helping people outside the United States to understand US culture, and helping...
Group to go into the field. This, curiously enough, trained at the International House at UC Berkeley, so he was back to where he had started out; but while they went on to meet Kennedy on the White House
White House
The White House is the official residence and principal workplace of the president of the United States. Located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., the house was designed by Irish-born James Hoban, and built between 1792 and 1800 of white-painted Aquia sandstone in the Neoclassical...
lawn and to Ghana
Ghana
Ghana , officially the Republic of Ghana, is a country located in West Africa. It is bordered by Côte d'Ivoire to the west, Burkina Faso to the north, Togo to the east, and the Gulf of Guinea to the south...
, he was flown back to New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
because, as he saw it, he was on his way to India and the East not Africa.
Resuming his “Passage to India,” he returned to Paris, and then on to kibbutzim in the Galilee again. The next Spring, after staying in monasteries throughout Israel, and a climactic fight with the future Israeli “Peace Pilot” at the California Café in Tel Aviv
Tel Aviv
Tel Aviv , officially Tel Aviv-Yafo , is the second most populous city in Israel, with a population of 404,400 on a land area of . The city is located on the Israeli Mediterranean coastline in west-central Israel. It is the largest and most populous city in the metropolitan area of Gush Dan, with...
; Eisenman made the last overland run from Cyprus
Cyprus
Cyprus , officially the Republic of Cyprus , is a Eurasian island country, member of the European Union, in the Eastern Mediterranean, east of Greece, south of Turkey, west of Syria and north of Egypt. It is the third largest island in the Mediterranean Sea.The earliest known human activity on the...
, across Turkey
Turkey
Turkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey , is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe...
, Iran
Iran
Iran , officially the Islamic Republic of Iran , is a country in Southern and Western Asia. The name "Iran" has been in use natively since the Sassanian era and came into use internationally in 1935, before which the country was known to the Western world as Persia...
, Beluchistan, and Pakistan
Pakistan
Pakistan , officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan is a sovereign state in South Asia. It has a coastline along the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Oman in the south and is bordered by Afghanistan and Iran in the west, India in the east and China in the far northeast. In the north, Tajikistan...
by bus, train, and boat to India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
, where he ended his journey as a guest of and sleeping in the Jewish Synagogue of New Delhi
New Delhi
New Delhi is the capital city of India. It serves as the centre of the Government of India and the Government of the National Capital Territory of Delhi. New Delhi is situated within the metropolis of Delhi. It is one of the nine districts of Delhi Union Territory. The total area of the city is...
, most of whose members were up in the Simla Hill States because it was high summer and monsoon. He returned to Paris over the Indian Ocean
Indian Ocean
The Indian Ocean is the third largest of the world's oceanic divisions, covering approximately 20% of the water on the Earth's surface. It is bounded on the north by the Indian Subcontinent and Arabian Peninsula ; on the west by eastern Africa; on the east by Indochina, the Sunda Islands, and...
, up the Red Sea
Red Sea
The Red Sea is a seawater inlet of the Indian Ocean, lying between Africa and Asia. The connection to the ocean is in the south through the Bab el Mandeb strait and the Gulf of Aden. In the north, there is the Sinai Peninsula, the Gulf of Aqaba, and the Gulf of Suez...
, and across the Mediterranean.
Release of the Dead Sea Scrolls
From about 1986 onwards, Eisenman became the leading figure in the struggle to release and free the Dead Sea ScrollsDead Sea scrolls
The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of 972 texts from the Hebrew Bible and extra-biblical documents found between 1947 and 1956 on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, from which they derive their name...
. The Scrolls had been discovered from 1948-56 in several waves, but after a suggestive article by literary critic Edmund Wilson
Edmund Wilson
Edmund Wilson was an American writer and literary and social critic and noted man of letters.-Early life:Wilson was born in Red Bank, New Jersey. His father, Edmund Wilson, Sr., was a lawyer and served as New Jersey Attorney General. Wilson attended The Hill School, a college preparatory...
in The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
magazine, editing more or less ground to a halt from about 1959 onwards.
This is not to say the Scrolls were not out. The Israelis had been very forthcoming with the first Scrolls that came into their possession from Cave I. It was the Scrolls from later caves discovered like III-XI, which came in after 1948 and Partition and on-site excavations by persons like Dominican Father Roland de Vaux
Roland de Vaux
Father Roland Guérin de Vaux OP was a French Dominican priest who led the Catholic team that initially worked on the Dead Sea Scrolls. He was the director of the Ecole Biblique, a French Catholic Theological School in East Jerusalem, and he was charged with overseeing research on the scrolls...
, which were the problem. In 1985-86, Eisenman, who had written his first book presenting, as he called it, “A New Theory of Qumran Origins” in 1983 and a follow-up on James as Righteous Teacher in 1985, received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem (also known as “the American School") where Cave I Scrolls had first come in and been photographed in 1947-48.
Ostensibly he was to work on a project Comparing the Jerusalem Community of James the Just
James the Just
James , first Bishop of Jerusalem, who died in 62 AD, was an important figure in Early Christianity...
to the Community at Qumran
Qumran
Qumran is an archaeological site in the West Bank. It is located on a dry plateau about a mile inland from the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea, near the Israeli settlement and kibbutz of Kalia...
, but while at the American Schools of Oriental Research
American Schools of Oriental Research
The American Schools of Oriental Research, founded in 1900, supports and encourages the study of the peoples and cultures of the Near East, from the earliest times to the present. It is apolitical and has no religious affiliation...
(then the Albright Institute) he found that there was nothing he could do – all paths being barred to him. Notwithstanding, he and a colleague, Philip Davies
Philip Davies
Philip Andrew Davies is a British Conservative Party politician. He is the Member of Parliament for Shipley in West Yorkshire.-Early life:...
of Sheffield University, England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
, went in to see one of the curators of the Shrine of the Book and were told uncategorically, “You will not see the Scrolls in your lifetime.” Subsequently he came into possession of the complete computer print-out of all the Scrolls in possession of the Israel Antiquities Authority
Israel Antiquities Authority
The Israel Antiquities Authority is an independent Israeli governmental authority responsible for enforcing the 1978 Law of Antiquities. The IAA regulates excavation and conservation, and promotes research...
, both those before 1967 and those afterwards at the Rockefeller Museum
Rockefeller Museum
The Rockefeller Museum, formerly the Palestine Archaeological Museum, is an archaeological museum located in East Jerusalem that houses a large collection of artifacts unearthed in the excavations conducted in Ottoman Palestine beginning in the late 19th century.The museum is under the management...
and, not three years later, a complete photographic archive of all previously unpublished materials from Cave IV all the way up to Cave XI.
He sent a copy of this computer-generated print-out to the Editor of Biblical Archaeology Review
Biblical Archaeology Review
Biblical Archaeology Review is a publication that seeks to connect the academic study of archaeology to a broad general audience seeking to understand the world of the Bible and the Near and Middle East . Covering both the Old and New Testaments, BAR presents the latest discoveries and...
, Hershel Shanks
Hershel Shanks
Hershel Shanks is the founder of the Biblical Archaeology Society and the editor of the Biblical Archaeology Review and has written and edited numerous works on Biblical archaeology including the Dead Sea Scrolls....
, which created a huge stir in the office and the campaign to free the Scrolls really began in earnest.
During his stay at Oxford University as a Senior Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies
Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies
The Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies is an independent institution which is part of the University of Oxford. Its research fellows teach on a variety of Bachelors and Masters degrees in Oriental Studies, and it publishes the Journal of Jewish Studies.-History and Case Statement:The...
and a Visiting Senior Member of Linacre College in 1986-87, a colleague had also passed him a xerox
Xerox
Xerox Corporation is an American multinational document management corporation that produced and sells a range of color and black-and-white printers, multifunction systems, photo copiers, digital production printing presses, and related consulting services and supplies...
copy of 4QMMT
4QMMT
4QMMT , also known as the Halakhic Letter, is one of the Dead Sea Scrolls that were discovered at Qumran in the West Bank. The manuscript is mainly concerned with the issue of the purity of liquid streams, a matter of great debate between the Pharisees and the Sadducees in later rabbinic...
, a document which had been talked about but which no one outside the inner circle had ever been allowed to see. This, too, he freely shared with anyone who wanted to see it as part of the campaign, and, thereafter, it made the rounds.
At this time, too, he brought James Robinson
James M. Robinson
James McConkey Robinson is Professor Emeritus of Religion, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California. He is a member of the Jesus Seminar and arguably the most prominent Q and Nag Hammadi library scholar of the 20th century. He is also a major contributor to The International Q...
– a colleague of his at Claremont University and the Editor of the Nag Hammadi
Nag Hammadi library
The Nag Hammadi library is a collection of early Christian Gnostic texts discovered near the Upper Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi in 1945. That year, twelve leather-bound papyrus codices buried in a sealed jar were found by a local peasant named Mohammed Ali Samman...
Codices (a dispute similar to the Qumran
Qumran
Qumran is an archaeological site in the West Bank. It is located on a dry plateau about a mile inland from the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea, near the Israeli settlement and kibbutz of Kalia...
one) – into the mix and together they took the decision to publish all the unpublished photographs. This amounted to 1785 plates. The original publication (in microfiche form) was supposed to occur in April, 1991 through EJ Brill in Leiden, Holland.
However, a few weeks before publication, Brill's representative had attended a Scrolls Conference in Madrid
Madrid
Madrid is the capital and largest city of Spain. The population of the city is roughly 3.3 million and the entire population of the Madrid metropolitan area is calculated to be 6.271 million. It is the third largest city in the European Union, after London and Berlin, and its metropolitan...
, Spain
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
and mistook the uproar there over Kapera’s publication the year before in Poland
Poland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
of the samizdat
Samizdat
Samizdat was a key form of dissident activity across the Soviet bloc in which individuals reproduced censored publications by hand and passed the documents from reader to reader...
copy of 4QMMT
4QMMT
4QMMT , also known as the Halakhic Letter, is one of the Dead Sea Scrolls that were discovered at Qumran in the West Bank. The manuscript is mainly concerned with the issue of the purity of liquid streams, a matter of great debate between the Pharisees and the Sadducees in later rabbinic...
he had received from Davies for a dispute over freedom of access to the Scrolls generally. Following this, newly-appointed Israeli representatives came to Leiden and talked the Brill publishers out of the Eisenman/Robinson microfiche project and into a newly-conceived one of their own. So Eisenman and Robinson had to fall back on the offices of Hershel Shanks
Hershel Shanks
Hershel Shanks is the founder of the Biblical Archaeology Society and the editor of the Biblical Archaeology Review and has written and edited numerous works on Biblical archaeology including the Dead Sea Scrolls....
and the Biblical Archaeology Society
Biblical Archaeology Society
The Biblical Archaeology Society is a non-denominational organization that supports and promotes biblical archaeology. It publishes Biblical Archaeology Review. Its past publications included Bible Review and Archaeology Odyssey . The Biblical Archaeology Society also publishes books about...
who were unwilling to go to press before October/November of that year.
While all these things were going on, Eisenman had been invited to become a consultant to the Huntington Library in San Marino
San Marino
San Marino, officially the Republic of San Marino , is a state situated on the Italian Peninsula on the eastern side of the Apennine Mountains. It is an enclave surrounded by Italy. Its size is just over with an estimated population of over 30,000. Its capital is the City of San Marino...
, California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
, which had become aware that it had in its archive a collection of photographs of all the Dead Sea Scrolls
Dead Sea scrolls
The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of 972 texts from the Hebrew Bible and extra-biblical documents found between 1947 and 1956 on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, from which they derive their name...
, donated to it by Elizabeth Bechtel. The late William Moffatt, its Director, asked whether he thought the Library should open its archive to all scholars. He was projecting this for September, two months before Eisenman's and Robinson’s own projected B.A.S. Edition. Eisenman encouraged him to do so, though he knew the Library would get most of the credit for breaking the monopoly and Robinson and he very little.
Surveys, groundscans, and excavations
Since 1988, Eisenman has led the Judean Desert Explorations/Excavations Project under the auspices of the Institute for the Study of Judeo-Christian Origins at CSULB he headed. These expeditions included students from CSULB and other institutions. Its aim was to search for possible new caves that might contain scrolls. It was his feeling that, though the BedouinBedouin
The Bedouin are a part of a predominantly desert-dwelling Arab ethnic group traditionally divided into tribes or clans, known in Arabic as ..-Etymology:...
s in their enthusiasm to find artifacts had clearly been in almost all accessible caves, there might have been others, inaccessible to them or hidden in some manner or cave-ins. These were the best possibilities of finding new Scrolls.
In the first expedition, between 1988–89, he and his students were involved in the excavation of a cave a kilometer or two south of Qumran, in which they found some Bronze Age
Bronze Age
The Bronze Age is a period characterized by the use of copper and its alloy bronze as the chief hard materials in the manufacture of some implements and weapons. Chronologically, it stands between the Stone Age and Iron Age...
artifacts, including an arrow that had evidently been shot into the cave, which still displayed its lacquer
Lacquer
In a general sense, lacquer is a somewhat imprecise term for a clear or coloured varnish that dries by solvent evaporation and often a curing process as well that produces a hard, durable finish, in any sheen level from ultra matte to high gloss and that can be further polished as required...
rings and feather marks, an oil jug, and the wooden remains possibly of a plough
Plough
The plough or plow is a tool used in farming for initial cultivation of soil in preparation for sowing seed or planting. It has been a basic instrument for most of recorded history, and represents one of the major advances in agriculture...
.
From 1989-92 Eisenman and his students conducted a walking survey of the entire Dead Sea
Dead Sea
The Dead Sea , also called the Salt Sea, is a salt lake bordering Jordan to the east and Israel and the West Bank to the west. Its surface and shores are below sea level, the lowest elevation on the Earth's surface. The Dead Sea is deep, the deepest hypersaline lake in the world...
shore and its environs from seven kilometers north of Qumran to thirty-five kilometers south, past Wadi Murabba'at
Wadi Murabba'at
Wadi Murabba'at, also known as Nahal Darga, is a ravine cut by a seasonal stream which runs from the Judean desert east of Bethlehem past the Herodium down to the Dead Sea 18 km south of Khirbet Qumran...
, to the Northern limits of Ein Gedi
Ein Gedi
Ein Gedi is an oasis in Israel, located west of the Dead Sea, near Masada and the caves of Qumran.-Etymology:The name En-gedi is composed of two Hebrew words: ein means spring and gdi means goat-kid. En Gedi thus means "Kid spring."...
, mapping the whole area. In this survey they went into some 485 caves and depressions.
In 1990-91, with the help of author Michael Baigent
Michael Baigent
Michael Baigent is an author and speculative theorist who co-wrote a number of books that question mainstream perceptions of history and the life of Jesus. He is best known as co-writer of the book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail....
and radar
Radar
Radar is an object-detection system which uses radio waves to determine the range, altitude, direction, or speed of objects. It can be used to detect aircraft, ships, spacecraft, guided missiles, motor vehicles, weather formations, and terrain. The radar dish or antenna transmits pulses of radio...
groundscan specialist Tony Wood, he conducted the first radar groundscan of the Qumran plateau, its ruins and, in particular, the top of the various marls, including Caves 4-6 where he felt there was the best chance of finding hidden pockets that previously might not have been visible to the eye. Ground-scanning on the marls and below Cave VI did point to several such pockets and seemingly empty areas in the marls adjourning Cave IV.
In 2001-03, his teams joined an expedition led by Hanan Eshel and Magen Broshi and sponsored by John Merrill and the B.A.S. In the course of this expedition, two of his students, Dennis Walker and Ron Dubay, excavated a small building on the eastern edge of the Qumran Cemetery. They found that it contained bones: two secondary burials (and the next year one primary burial was uncovered beneath this). This was an extremely important find, as was the rare zinc
Zinc
Zinc , or spelter , is a metallic chemical element; it has the symbol Zn and atomic number 30. It is the first element in group 12 of the periodic table. Zinc is, in some respects, chemically similar to magnesium, because its ion is of similar size and its only common oxidation state is +2...
sarcophagus
Sarcophagus
A sarcophagus is a funeral receptacle for a corpse, most commonly carved or cut from stone. The word "sarcophagus" comes from the Greek σαρξ sarx meaning "flesh", and φαγειν phagein meaning "to eat", hence sarkophagus means "flesh-eating"; from the phrase lithos sarkophagos...
found elsewhere in the graveyard, others of his students were involved in uncovering, cleaning, and unearthing. The next year everyone went back to do more work on the enclosure and the bones it contained and to further survey the graveyard at Qumran, which evolved into the first comprehensive map of the Qumran settlement and adjacent cemetery.
In 2004, they had the opportunity to return and investigate the empty areas in the marls of Cave IV, but with little result.
Conspiracy theories
Eisenman's often controversial theories about Christian origins have gained the attention of popular book publishers and conspiracy theorists. According to Jeffrey J. Bütz (2010) Eisenman took quite seriously the claim of conspiracy theorists that there were secret documents buried beneath Father Bérenger Saunière'sBérenger Saunière
François Bérenger Saunière was a Roman Catholic priest in the French village of Rennes-le-Château, in the Aude region, officially from 1885 until he was transferred to another village in 1909 by his bishop, a nomination he declined and subsequently resigned...
Tour Magdala in the French village of Rennes-le-Château
Rennes-le-Château
Rennes-le-Château is a commune in the Aude department in Languedoc in southern France.This small French hilltop village is known internationally, and receives tens of thousands of visitors per year, for being at the center of various conspiracy theories, and for being the location of an alleged...
.
Dead Sea Scrolls
Eisenman contends that the preconceptions of the group of scholars around Father Roland De VauxRoland de Vaux
Father Roland Guérin de Vaux OP was a French Dominican priest who led the Catholic team that initially worked on the Dead Sea Scrolls. He was the director of the Ecole Biblique, a French Catholic Theological School in East Jerusalem, and he was charged with overseeing research on the scrolls...
who first worked on the Dead Sea Scrolls led them to erroneously date the non-biblical, sectarian community documents to the Maccabean period, and to read them as the writings of a serene, retiring community of Essene monks exiled to the wilderness in the course of a dispute with the reigning priesthood of the day led by the "Wicked Priest"/"Spouter of Lying."
Eisenman reads the attitude of these documents as militant, nationalistic and zealous and places them not in the Maccabean period but the later, Herodian
Herodian Dynasty
The Herodian Dynasty was a Jewish dynasty of Idumean descent, client Kings of Roman Judaea Province between 37 BCE and 92 CE.- Origin :During the time of the Hasmonean ruler John Hyrcanus 134-104 BCE, Israel conquered Edom and forced the Edomites to convert to Judaism.The Edomites were integrated...
era (c. 35 BCE to 70 CE and beyond), which means the establishment priesthood that they opposed was the collaborating, compromising, corrupt Herodian priesthood. He sees parallels between the political, religious and ethical stance of these sectarian documents and that of James the brother of Jesus
James the Brother of Jesus
James the Brother of Jesus may refer to:*James the Just,* James the Brother of Jesus , 1997, by Robert Eisenman...
, whom he identifies as the scrolls' Teacher of Righteousness
Teacher of Righteousness
The Teacher of Righteousness is a figure found in some of the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran, most prominently in the Damascus Document. This document speaks briefly of the origins of the sect, probably Essenes, 390 years after the Babylonian exile and after 20 years of 'groping' blindly for the way...
, and sees 'the Wicked Priest
Wicked Priest
Wicked Priest is a sobriquet used in the Dead Sea scrolls pesharim, four times in the Habakkuk Commentary and once in the Commentary on Psalm 37 , to refer to an opponent of the "Teacher of Righteousness." The phrase is generally regarded as a pun on "High Priest" and identified with a Hasmonean...
' and 'the Man of Lying' as two different adversaries of the scroll community, the Wicked Priest being the High Priest
Kohen Gadol
The High Priest was the chief religious official of Israelite religion and of classical Judaism from the rise of the Israelite nation until the destruction of the Second Temple of Jerusalem...
Ananus ben Ananus, James' executioner, and the Man of Lying, St. Paul.
He is critical of the ways radiocarbon dating
Radiocarbon dating
Radiocarbon dating is a radiometric dating method that uses the naturally occurring radioisotope carbon-14 to estimate the age of carbon-bearing materials up to about 58,000 to 62,000 years. Raw, i.e. uncalibrated, radiocarbon ages are usually reported in radiocarbon years "Before Present" ,...
and paleography have been employed to date the Dead Sea Scrolls, and relies instead on the internal evidence, what the texts say themselves. He finds parallels between the James-Jesus
Jesus
Jesus of Nazareth , commonly referred to as Jesus Christ or simply as Jesus or Christ, is the central figure of Christianity...
first century milieu and the scrolls' repeated allusion to "the Star Prophecy", the aggressiveness of the War Scroll and similar documents, the hiding of the Jerusalem Temple treasure as delineated in the Copper Scroll
Copper Scroll
The Copper Scroll is one of the Dead Sea Scrolls found in Cave 3 near Khirbet Qumran, but differs significantly from the others. Whereas the other scrolls are written on parchment or papyrus, this scroll is written on metal: copper mixed with about 1 percent tin...
, the description of foreign armies (the Kittim
Kittim
Kittim in the genealogy of Genesis 10 in the Hebrew Bible, is the son of Javan, the grandson of Japheth, and Noah's great-grandson....
) invading on a much more massive scale than any Hellenistic invasion during the Maccabean period, and the reference to themselves several times as "the Congregation," "Church of the Poor" and Ebionites
Ebionites
Ebionites, or Ebionaioi, , is a patristic term referring to a Jewish Christian sect or sects that existed during the first centuries of the Christian Era. They regarded Jesus as the Messiah and insisted on the necessity of following Jewish religious law and rites...
(“the Poor”), the name of James’ community as described in Early Church literature and Paul. Eisenman lays particular emphasis on the scroll community's description of the Kittim's military and religious practices in their interpretation of Habakkuk
Habakkuk
Habakkuk , also spelled Habacuc, was a prophet in the Hebrew Bible. The etymology of the name of Habakkuk is not clear. The name is possibly related to the Akkadian khabbaququ, the name of a fragrant plant, or the Hebrew root חבק, meaning "embrace"...
2:2-2:4 (the Habakkuk Commentary
Habakkuk Commentary
The Habakkuk Commentary or Pesher Habakkuk, labelled 1QpHab was among the original seven Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in 1947 and published in 1951...
) as "sacrificing to their standards and worshiping their weapons of War", and their reference to Roman
Roman Empire
The Roman Empire was the post-Republican period of the ancient Roman civilization, characterised by an autocratic form of government and large territorial holdings in Europe and around the Mediterranean....
“tax-farming” across the whole of the civilized world.
Interpretation of Habakkuk 2:4 at Qumran
The recourse to an interpretation of Habakkuk 2:4 (“the Righteous shall live by his Faith”), the center piece and real building block of all Christian theologyChristian theology
- Divisions of Christian theology :There are many methods of categorizing different approaches to Christian theology. For a historical analysis, see the main article on the History of Christian theology.- Sub-disciplines :...
both in the Pauline corpus (Romans
Epistle to the Romans
The Epistle of Paul to the Romans, often shortened to Romans, is the sixth book in the New Testament. Biblical scholars agree that it was composed by the Apostle Paul to explain that Salvation is offered through the Gospel of Jesus Christ...
, Galatians, et al.) and in the Epistle of James
Epistle of James
The Epistle of James, usually referred to simply as James, is a book in the New Testament. The author identifies himself as "James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ", with "the earliest extant manuscripts of James usually dated to mid-to-late third century."There are four views...
. He sees as proof positive that these documents were written more or less contemporaneously and at a time when this prophecy
Prophecy
Prophecy is a process in which one or more messages that have been communicated to a prophet are then communicated to others. Such messages typically involve divine inspiration, interpretation, or revelation of conditioned events to come as well as testimonies or repeated revelations that the...
or proof-text was in play.
In addition, he sees the interpretation in the Habakkuk Commentary
Habakkuk Commentary
The Habakkuk Commentary or Pesher Habakkuk, labelled 1QpHab was among the original seven Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in 1947 and published in 1951...
at Qumran, seemingly written in the latter part of the Community’s history and witnessing its fall and the fall of the Jerusalem Temple
Siege of Jerusalem (70)
The Siege of Jerusalem in the year 70 AD was the decisive event of the First Jewish-Roman War. The Roman army, led by the future Emperor Titus, with Tiberius Julius Alexander as his second-in-command, besieged and conquered the city of Jerusalem, which had been occupied by its Jewish defenders in...
(c. 70 CE), as ‘Jamesian’ as opposed to ‘Pauline’. That is, first of all it is confined to “Jews” or, in the language of the Commentary, “the House of Judah,” and second of all, it applies only to “Torah-doing” Jews (“doing” here, the basis of the Hebrew word for “works” throughout the Qumran corpus and also being an extremely important usage in the Epistle of James), that is, it does not apply to “non-Torah-doing Jews” and certainly not "non-Torah-doing Gentiles."
For Eisenman this is a direct riposte and a rejection of the Pauline interpretation of this prophecy, and the basis of the Pauline theology one finds in Galatians and Romans and actually, in fact, seemingly argued against in the extant Epistle of James whether seen as authentic, not authentic, or just part of ‘the Jamesian School’; and, therefore, a definitive chronological indicator for the document as a whole.
Finally, he points to the fact that there are even collections of messianic proof-texts at Qumran which include, for instance, the Star Prophecy
Star Prophecy
The "Star Prophecy" is a Messianic reading applied by radical Jews and early Christians to a text from the Book of Numbers 24:17:...
of Numbers
Book of Numbers
The Book of Numbers is the fourth book of the Hebrew Bible, and the fourth of five books of the Jewish Torah/Pentateuch....
24:17 which Josephus
Josephus
Titus Flavius Josephus , also called Joseph ben Matityahu , was a 1st-century Romano-Jewish historian and hagiographer of priestly and royal ancestry who recorded Jewish history, with special emphasis on the 1st century AD and the First Jewish–Roman War, which resulted in the Destruction of...
, at the end of the Jewish War
Jewish War
Jewish War can relate to:*A shorter title of the work by the Jewish historian Josephus, also known as The Wars of the Jews or Bellum Judaicum.*The First Jewish-Roman War of 66-73,...
, singles out as the reason for the outbreak of the revolt, and even one dedicated to “the Promises to the Seed” or “House of David.” For Eisenman the Dead Sea Scrolls are Messianic, it being not properly appreciated just how messianic the Scrolls actually are. They represent "the literature of the Messianic Movement in Palestine" which he prefers to the usage “Christianity in Palestine".
Though, one might call them “Essene”, one must take the definition for this from what the Scrolls themselves say, not necessarily what others think or say the Essenes were. Hippolytus, for instance, possibly preserving an alternate version of Josephus, thinks there are two or even three groups of “Essenes”, “Zealot” or “Sicarii
Sicarii
Sicarii is a term applied, in the decades immediately preceding the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD, to an extremist splinter group of the Jewish Zealots, who attempted to expel the Romans and their partisans from Judea using concealed daggers .-History:The Sicarii used...
Essenes”, and for Eisenman, this is a better definition of what the Essenes were than the more normative ones people are familiar with. For him the Essenes are what Christians were in Palestine before ‘the Movement’ went overseas and was Paulinized, turning it into the mirror opposite of what it was in Palestine before the fall of the Temple.
For him, Acts
ACTS
Acts or ACTS may refer to:Christianity* Acts of the Apostles , a genre of early Christian literature* Acts of the Apostles, the fifth book in the Bible's New Testament...
confirms this, averring that “Christians were first called Christians” in Antioch
Antioch
Antioch on the Orontes was an ancient city on the eastern side of the Orontes River. It is near the modern city of Antakya, Turkey.Founded near the end of the 4th century BC by Seleucus I Nicator, one of Alexander the Great's generals, Antioch eventually rivaled Alexandria as the chief city of the...
in Syria
Syria
Syria , officially the Syrian Arab Republic , is a country in Western Asia, bordering Lebanon and the Mediterranean Sea to the West, Turkey to the north, Iraq to the east, Jordan to the south, and Israel to the southwest....
in the mid-Fifties AD. As opposed to this, he considers the more historically-oriented sectarian or later documents of the Dead Sea Scrolls to be the messianically inspired literature of a pietist, Law-oriented, and nationalistic Party in opposition to Roman
Roman Empire
The Roman Empire was the post-Republican period of the ancient Roman civilization, characterised by an autocratic form of government and large territorial holdings in Europe and around the Mediterranean....
/Herodian
Herodian Dynasty
The Herodian Dynasty was a Jewish dynasty of Idumean descent, client Kings of Roman Judaea Province between 37 BCE and 92 CE.- Origin :During the time of the Hasmonean ruler John Hyrcanus 134-104 BCE, Israel conquered Edom and forced the Edomites to convert to Judaism.The Edomites were integrated...
rule in Palestine which uses the language as “Sons of Zadok
Zadok
Zadok was a high priest of the Israelites in Jerusalem after it was conquered by David.Zadok may also refer to:*Rabbi Zadok, tanna of the 1st-century CE*Zadok the Priest, an 18th-century coronation anthem by Handel...
” (in some vocabularies, “Sadducees
Sadducees
The Sadducees were a sect or group of Jews that were active in Ancient Israel during the Second Temple period, starting from the second century BC through the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD. The sect was identified by Josephus with the upper social and economic echelon of Judean society...
”) or “Zaddikim (צדיקים),” a derivate usage, in referring to itself or even “Messianic Sadducees”, as opposed to “Herodian Sadducees” pictured in both the New Testament
New Testament
The New Testament is the second major division of the Christian biblical canon, the first such division being the much longer Old Testament....
and Josephus.
Call for AMS carbon dating
With his attempts to get free access to the Scrolls, Eisenman was the first to call for AMS carbon dating of the Scrolls. The reason for this was simple. Since he and others like him could not have free access to the Scrolls, the Israel Antiquities AuthorityIsrael Antiquities Authority
The Israel Antiquities Authority is an independent Israeli governmental authority responsible for enforcing the 1978 Law of Antiquities. The IAA regulates excavation and conservation, and promotes research...
could at least do something like AMS carbon testing of the unpublished Scrolls. This proposal was contained in a series of letters to John Strugnell
John Strugnell
John Strugnell, was born in Barnet, Hertfordshire, UK. At the age of 23 he became the youngest member of the team of scholars led by Roland de Vaux, formed in 1954 to edit the Dead Sea Scrolls in Jerusalem...
, Eisenman wrote with Philip Davies
Philip Davies
Philip Andrew Davies is a British Conservative Party politician. He is the Member of Parliament for Shipley in West Yorkshire.-Early life:...
of Sheffield University in England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
and copied to Amir Drori
Amir Drori
Amir Drori was an Israeli general, founder and the first director general of the Israel Antiquities Authority.-Military career:Amir Drori was born in Tel Aviv in 1937 and graduated from the IDF's Junior Command Preparatory School in Haifa. He was drafted into the Israel Defence Forces in 1955,...
, the Head of the Israel Antiquities Authority
Israel Antiquities Authority
The Israel Antiquities Authority is an independent Israeli governmental authority responsible for enforcing the 1978 Law of Antiquities. The IAA regulates excavation and conservation, and promotes research...
.
This transpired in the following manner - at the same time that he was writing for access to the unpublished copies of the Damascus Document
Damascus Document
The Damascus Document or Damascus Rule is one of the most interesting texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls because it is the only Qumran sectarian work that was known before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls....
in the Scroll corpus (the one everyone had been using up till then was from the Cairo Genizah of 1896-7), Eisenman hit upon the idea of asking for AMS carbon dating of the Scrolls. Though he knew there had been earlier carbon dating of the Scrolls, this was to prove their authenticity and nothing had been done since the new method known as “AMS” had been developed. Though he realized that even the new method would not be precise enough to determine actual dates - the margin of errors being too large - his wish was to use it to test the claims of paleography by "relative dating," that is, earlier vs. later in the same test run.
Not two months after he and Davies made this request to the Antiquities Authority, to which they attached a recent article about AMS radiocarbon techniques, it announced its intention to run just such tests while neglecting to mention from whom the initial suggestion had come. But he and Davies had also included in their letter to the IAA a caveat, that “Opposition Scholars” be included in process because it was they who felt the most need for the tests and they who could identify which documents should be tested. As it transpired, they were completely frozen out of the testing, the results of which were uneven and on the whole rather “skewed.” Nor was any attention paid to testing the paleographic arguments of “earlier vs. later”.
For Eisenman, the problem was that those tests, and the later ones, sought to achieve “absolute dating”. He and Davies felt that this was impossible to achieve, given the narrow chronological parameters of the Qumran documents, and that the best it can be done was "relative dating."
It was neglected too the FBI Crime Lab discoveries, that tests of this kind usually came out either to reflect or reinforce the preconceptions of those conducting them. This was why it would have been better to include “Opposition Scholars" in the process, in particular, those who had actually proposed conducting the tests in the first place; and, finally, to take into consideration that all such tests involved “interpretation” of the labs doing the testing – some of them, the very same ones that had conducted the widely-disputed testing of the Turin Shroud.
James
As far as Eisenman is concerned, James the JustJames the Just
James , first Bishop of Jerusalem, who died in 62 AD, was an important figure in Early Christianity...
, the individual Paul
Paul
Paul may refer to:*Paul , a given name or surname -Christianity:*Paul the Apostle Paul may refer to:*Paul (name), a given name or surname (includes a list of people with that name)-Christianity:*Paul the Apostle Paul may refer to:*Paul (name), a given name or surname (includes a list of people with...
actually refers to as either "brother of Jesus" or “the brother of the Lord,” is the historical character who exhibits the most in common with “the Teacher of Righteousness
Teacher of Righteousness
The Teacher of Righteousness is a figure found in some of the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran, most prominently in the Damascus Document. This document speaks briefly of the origins of the sect, probably Essenes, 390 years after the Babylonian exile and after 20 years of 'groping' blindly for the way...
" pictured at Qumran and he considers that these events are the ones vividly portrayed in the Habakkuk Commentary. Historically speaking, it is this character who led the “Opposition Movement,” including Essenes, Zealots, Sicarii
Sicarii
Sicarii is a term applied, in the decades immediately preceding the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD, to an extremist splinter group of the Jewish Zealots, who attempted to expel the Romans and their partisans from Judea using concealed daggers .-History:The Sicarii used...
, and/or Nazoreans - even Ebionites
Ebionites
Ebionites, or Ebionaioi, , is a patristic term referring to a Jewish Christian sect or sects that existed during the first centuries of the Christian Era. They regarded Jesus as the Messiah and insisted on the necessity of following Jewish religious law and rites...
- and who, as “Zaddik" (צדיק), i. e., “the Zaddik of the Opposition Movement,” about whom all these groups revolved until his death at the hands of the High Priest
High priest
The term "high priest" usually refers either to an individual who holds the office of ruler-priest, or to one who is the head of a religious caste.-Ancient Egypt:...
Ananus ben Ananus in 62 CE as described both in Josephus and Early Church literature. For him, the popularity of James and the illegality of the manner of his death at the hands of the Herodians, establishment High Priesthood, and Pharisees
Pharisees
The Pharisees were at various times a political party, a social movement, and a school of thought among Jews during the Second Temple period beginning under the Hasmonean dynasty in the wake of...
in 62 CE set the stage for and possibly even triggered the First Jewish Revolt against the Rome
Rome
Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...
in 66-73 CE - to say nothing of the fire in Rome
Rome
Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...
, not long afterwards which, aside from his probably having set it himself, Nero
Nero
Nero , was Roman Emperor from 54 to 68, and the last in the Julio-Claudian dynasty. Nero was adopted by his great-uncle Claudius to become his heir and successor, and succeeded to the throne in 54 following Claudius' death....
was reported to have blamed on “Christians.”
For his part, the Jewish historian Josephus makes it clear that those he is calling “Essenes” (as opposed to these same Herodians
Herodian Dynasty
The Herodian Dynasty was a Jewish dynasty of Idumean descent, client Kings of Roman Judaea Province between 37 BCE and 92 CE.- Origin :During the time of the Hasmonean ruler John Hyrcanus 134-104 BCE, Israel conquered Edom and forced the Edomites to convert to Judaism.The Edomites were integrated...
, Sadducees
Sadducees
The Sadducees were a sect or group of Jews that were active in Ancient Israel during the Second Temple period, starting from the second century BC through the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD. The sect was identified by Josephus with the upper social and economic echelon of Judean society...
, and Pharisees
Pharisees
The Pharisees were at various times a political party, a social movement, and a school of thought among Jews during the Second Temple period beginning under the Hasmonean dynasty in the wake of...
) participated in the uprising, willing to undergo any torture or any form of death rather than "eat things sacrificed to idols" or "break the Law." For Eisenman, these “Nazoreans,” (נצרים) “Zealots,” (קנאים) “Zaddikim” (צדיקים) or “Ebionim” (אביונים) were marginalized by a Herodian named Saul (Paul of Tarsus
Paul of Tarsus
Paul the Apostle , also known as Saul of Tarsus, is described in the Christian New Testament as one of the most influential early Christian missionaries, with the writings ascribed to him by the church forming a considerable portion of the New Testament...
) and the gentile Christians who followed him. This version of Christianity
Christianity
Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...
, as it later emerged from a gentile milieu as led by Paul, transformed the apocalyptic militancy of the Ebionite/Essene Zaddikim into a universalist peaceful doctrine. In this manner, Eisenman sees the doctrine of Christianity
Christianity
Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...
as largely the product of Pauline dialectic
Dialectic
Dialectic is a method of argument for resolving disagreement that has been central to Indic and European philosophy since antiquity. The word dialectic originated in Ancient Greece, and was made popular by Plato in the Socratic dialogues...
and apologetics
Apologetics
Apologetics is the discipline of defending a position through the systematic use of reason. Early Christian writers Apologetics (from Greek ἀπολογία, "speaking in defense") is the discipline of defending a position (often religious) through the systematic use of reason. Early Christian writers...
. In so doing, Eisenman attempts to recover the authentic teaching of Jesus and/or James from the obscurity into which it seems to have been intentionally cast by resultant orthodoxy. As he puts it at the end of James the Brother of Jesus, once you have found the Historical James, you have found the Historical Jesus
Historical Jesus
The term historical Jesus refers to scholarly reconstructions of the 1st-century figure Jesus of Nazareth. These reconstructions are based upon historical methods including critical analysis of gospel texts as the primary source for his biography, along with consideration of the historical and...
or alternatively, “who and whatever James was so too was Jesus”.
Paul as an Herodian
Hand in hand with these theories went Eisenman’s identification of PaulPaul of Tarsus
Paul the Apostle , also known as Saul of Tarsus, is described in the Christian New Testament as one of the most influential early Christian missionaries, with the writings ascribed to him by the church forming a considerable portion of the New Testament...
as a Herodian
Herodians
The Herodians were a sect or party mentioned in the New Testament as having on two occasions — once in Galilee, and again in Jerusalem — manifested an unfriendly disposition towards Jesus .In each of these cases their name is coupled with that of the Pharisees...
, based on the view that Paul's version of Judaism
Paul of Tarsus and Judaism
The relationship between Paul of Tarsus and Second Temple Judaism continues to be the subject of much scholarly research, as it is thought that Paul played an important role in the relationship between Christianity and Judaism as a whole...
was so peculiar that, more than anything else, it seemed to represent the interests of the Herodian Dynasty both in Palestine
Palestine
Palestine is a conventional name, among others, used to describe the geographic region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, and various adjoining lands....
and as it sought to extend its influence into Asia Minor
Asia Minor
Asia Minor is a geographical location at the westernmost protrusion of Asia, also called Anatolia, and corresponds to the western two thirds of the Asian part of Turkey...
and further East into Northern Syria
Syria
Syria , officially the Syrian Arab Republic , is a country in Western Asia, bordering Lebanon and the Mediterranean Sea to the West, Turkey to the north, Iraq to the east, Jordan to the south, and Israel to the southwest....
and Mesopotamia
Mesopotamia
Mesopotamia is a toponym for the area of the Tigris–Euphrates river system, largely corresponding to modern-day Iraq, northeastern Syria, southeastern Turkey and southwestern Iran.Widely considered to be the cradle of civilization, Bronze Age Mesopotamia included Sumer and the...
. He covered this in a series of papers and books beginning in 1984 and found the proof of this in Paul’s own salutation (if authentic), at the end of his Letter to the Romans, where he sent his greetings to his “kinsman Herodion” (i. e., “the Littlest Herod”) and “all those in the Household of Aristobulus” (the putative son of Herod of Chalcis
Herod of Chalcis
Herod of Chalcis , also known as Herod V, was a son of Aristobulus IV, and the grandson of Herod the Great, Roman client king of Judaea. He was the brother of Herod Agrippa I and Herodias....
and the ultimate husband of the infamous Salome
Salome
Salome , the Daughter of Herodias , is known from the New Testament...
– in fact, their son was “the Littlest Herod”).
He also found it in Josephus’ picture of a curious member of the Herodian family, an individual he also calls “Saulos” who actually seemed to have many characteristics in common with “Paul” in New Testament
New Testament
The New Testament is the second major division of the Christian biblical canon, the first such division being the much longer Old Testament....
portraiture. Not only was this “Saulos” involved in an appeal of sorts to “Caesar
Caesar (title)
Caesar is a title of imperial character. It derives from the cognomen of Julius Caesar, the Roman dictator...
,” he was also involved in violent behaviour in Jerusalem (although on the surface, at a somewhat later time); and it was he who made the final report to Nero
Nero
Nero , was Roman Emperor from 54 to 68, and the last in the Julio-Claudian dynasty. Nero was adopted by his great-uncle Claudius to become his heir and successor, and succeeded to the throne in 54 following Claudius' death....
in Corinth
Corinth
Corinth is a city and former municipality in Corinthia, Peloponnese, Greece. Since the 2011 local government reform it is part of the municipality Corinth, of which it is the seat and a municipal unit...
about the Roman reverses in Jerusalem which resulted in the dispatch of his best general Vespasian
Vespasian
Vespasian , was Roman Emperor from 69 AD to 79 AD. Vespasian was the founder of the Flavian dynasty, which ruled the Empire for a quarter century. Vespasian was descended from a family of equestrians, who rose into the senatorial rank under the Emperors of the Julio-Claudian dynasty...
from Britain
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
.
Finally he found this in Paul’s own outlook, his philosophy of “winning“ or being a “Jew to the Jews, a Law-keeper to the Law-keeper and a Law-breaker to the Law-breaker” also expressed in I Corinthians 9:19-27. In his own identification of himself as of “the Tribe of Benjamin
Tribe of Benjamin
According to the Hebrew Bible, the Tribe of Benjamin בִּנְיָמִין was one of the Tribes of Israel.From after the conquest of the land by Joshua until the formation of the first Kingdom of Israel in c. 1050 BCE, the Tribe of Benjamin was a part of a loose confederation of Israelite tribes...
” (Romans
Epistle to the Romans
The Epistle of Paul to the Romans, often shortened to Romans, is the sixth book in the New Testament. Biblical scholars agree that it was composed by the Apostle Paul to explain that Salvation is offered through the Gospel of Jesus Christ...
11:1 and Philippians 3:5), a claim he might have felt Herodians, as Edomites, were making for themselves, and his founding “a Community where Greeks
Greeks
The Greeks, also known as the Hellenes , are a nation and ethnic group native to Greece, Cyprus and neighboring regions. They also form a significant diaspora, with Greek communities established around the world....
and Jews could live in harmony, etc.,” where there were “no foreign visitors,” as well as in the easy access he seems to have had to positions of power, and his own Roman citizenship.
To complete his arguments, Eisenman cites the matter of an unidentified “nephew” of Paul, seemingly the son of Paul’s sister, resident in Jerusalem (Cypros married to the Temple Treasurer Helcias? – see his genealogies at the end of The New Testament Code and James the Brother of Jesus,) who has unfettered entrée to the Commander of the Roman garrison
Garrison
Garrison is the collective term for a body of troops stationed in a particular location, originally to guard it, but now often simply using it as a home base....
in the Tower of Antonia who, in turn, then saves him from “Nazirite
Nazirite
In the Hebrew Bible, a nazirite or nazarite, , refers to one who voluntarily took a vow described in . The term "nazirite" comes from the Hebrew word nazir meaning "consecrated" or "separated"...
oath-taking” “Zealot”-like Jewish extremists who take an oath “not to eat or drink till they have killed Paul” (Acts 23:12-4) – Eisenman identifies this individual as Julius Archelaus, the son of this Saulos’ sister by the name of Cypros above. Nor is this to say anything further about his Roman citizenship or his own philosophy of paying the Roman tax to Caesar and seemingly placing Roman Law
Roman law
Roman law is the legal system of ancient Rome, and the legal developments which occurred before the 7th century AD — when the Roman–Byzantine state adopted Greek as the language of government. The development of Roman law comprises more than a thousand years of jurisprudence — from the Twelve...
above Jewish Law as an expression of “the Righteousness Commandment” of “loving your neighbor as yourself”
Great Commandment
The Great Commandment, or Greatest Commandment, is an appellation applied to either the first, or both, of two commandments which appear in , and...
in Romans 13:1-10.
First to call the James Ossuary fraudulent
Eisenman was the first to publicly claim that the James OssuaryJames Ossuary
The James Ossuary is a 2,000-year old chalk box that was used for containing the bones of the dead. The Aramaic inscription: Ya'akov bar-Yosef akhui diYeshua is cut into one side of the box...
was fraudulent when it originally surfaced in October, 2002 and he did this on the first day it appeared in news articles from AP
Associated Press
The Associated Press is an American news agency. The AP is a cooperative owned by its contributing newspapers, radio and television stations in the United States, which both contribute stories to the AP and use material written by its staff journalists...
and op-ed pieces as in the Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
on the basis of what the inscription actually said and not on the basis of ‘scientific’ or ‘pseudo-scientific aids like those of palaeography
Palaeography
Palaeography, also spelt paleography is the study of ancient writing. Included in the discipline is the practice of deciphering, reading, and dating historical manuscripts, and the cultural context of writing, including the methods with which writing and books were produced, and the history of...
or patina
Patina
Patina is a tarnish that forms on the surface of bronze and similar metals ; a sheen on wooden furniture produced by age, wear, and polishing; or any such acquired change of a surface through age and exposure...
analysis.
In the first place, when he actually saw the ossuary
Ossuary
An ossuary is a chest, building, well, or site made to serve as the final resting place of human skeletal remains. They are frequently used where burial space is scarce. A body is first buried in a temporary grave, then after some years the skeletal remains are removed and placed in an ossuary...
at the AAR/SBL
Society of Biblical Literature
The Society of Biblical Literature, founded 1880, is a constituent society of the American Council of Learned Societies , with the stated mission to "Foster Biblical Scholarship"...
Conference in Toronto
Toronto
Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. It is located in Southern Ontario on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A relatively modern city, Toronto's history dates back to the late-18th century, when its land was first purchased by the British monarchy from...
three weeks later, it was clear there were two separate hands on the inscription, the second patently more cursive. Secondly, even if the “Jacob the Son of Joseph” part were authentic (there being plenty of ossuaries of this kind available around Jerusalem), the second “Brother of Jesus” part would have to have been added a substantial amount of time later, either in antiquity by a pious pilgrim or in modern times, by a not-very-sophisticated forger because at the time (62 CE), Jesus – if he existed as such - would have been no more well known in Jerusalem than his putative brother James, and probably far less so; so there would have been no need to add such a rare cognomen
Cognomen
The cognomen nōmen "name") was the third name of a citizen of Ancient Rome, under Roman naming conventions. The cognomen started as a nickname, but lost that purpose when it became hereditary. Hereditary cognomina were used to augment the second name in order to identify a particular branch within...
except to please believers.
Moreover, as he said in his Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
op ed of 10/29/02, he would have been much more impressed if the first part of the inscription had said “son of Clopas’/‘Cleophas’/‘Cephas’ or some such thing, which is how individuals connected to this family were known in Palestine
Palestine
Palestine is a conventional name, among others, used to describe the geographic region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, and various adjoining lands....
in this period and not the more pat or theologically-consistent “Joseph”; or if the second part had simply added the cognomen “the Zaddik” (הׂצדיק) or “Just One,” which was also how James was known by everyone in Palestine at this time according to Eusebius.
Works
- Islamic Law in Palestine and Israel E. J. Brill, Leiden (1976).
- Maccabees, Zadokites, Christians and Qumran: A New Hypothesis of Qumran Origins E. J. Brill, Leiden (1984).
- James the Just in the Habakkuk Pesher E. J. Brill Leiden (1986).
- A Facsimile Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls (with James Robinson), Biblical Archaeology Society (1991).
- The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered (with Michael Wise), Penguin USA (1992) ISBN 1852303689.
- James the Brother of Jesus: The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls (1997) ISBN 1842930265.
- The Dead Sea Scrolls and the First Christians (1996) ISBN 1852307854.
- The New Testament Code: The Cup of the Lord, the Damascus Covenant, and the Blood of Christ (2006) ISBN 1842931865.
- The New Jerusalem: A Millennium Poetic/Prophetic Travel Diario 1959-1962 (2007) ISBN 1556436378.
External links
- Robert Eisenman's web site
- http://www.csulb.edu/centers/sjco/ Robert Eisenman's articles, interviews and reviews of his books.
- http://www.youtube.com/user/EisenmanLecture Eisenman's Dead Sea Scrolls lectures and courses
- http://www.youtube.com/user/EisenmanontheRocks Interviews on site at Qumran
- http://www.youtube.com/user/EisenmanTalks An assortment of Eisenman's talks and TV appearances
- http://www.youtube.com/user/Eisenmania Eisenman before non-Christian Groups, etc.
- http://thestar.com.my/lifestyle/story.asp?file=/2010/12/5/lifebookshelf/7478493&sec=lifebookshelf Robert Eisenman: Man of New Ideas