Overview

This is Eisenman's original, ground-breaking work in which he criticizes the archaeology and paleography of Qumran as it had been developed by 'the specialists' up to that time and rather offers his own hypothesis-starting with the fact that it was impossible to consider that the Maccabees were the so-called Wicked Priests at Qumran, primarily because everything known about them agrees, for the most part, with the doctrines and positions emanating from the documents known at that time to emanate from the area known as Qumran along the Northwestern part of the Dead Sea and which, for that reason, we call The Dead Sea Scrolls. In addition, he shows rather that the Establishment against whom the Qumran Scrolls were in an almost homogeneous manner directed was rather that of the Herodians and the Priests that owed both their appointment and authority to them and the Roman Governors that in due course either replaced or ruled either through or in conjunction with them. He also starts in this work to build his case for the fact that the individual came to be understood in Early Christian History as James the Righteous and called by everyone James the Just -that same individual known by everyone as as James the Brother of Jesus -had very much in common with the Righteous Teacher described and alluded to in many Dead Sea Scrolls documents. That is why this book, originally published in the early 1980s, was subtitled A New Hypothesis of Qumran Origins. It was necessary to subject both the archaeology and paleography of Qumran-upon which the so-called Establishment or Consensus of Qumran Scholars' had all based both their theories and chronology to thoroughgoing criticism. This he has done, as only someone who originally studied math and physics, could do, in a meticulously masterful fashion. No one has 'laid a glove' on his analysis since. At the same time and in parallel fashion, he starts to suggest that the 'opponent' of this individual in Early Christian History, Paul, had about the same amount of characteristics with the individual these same Qumran Documents are constantly referring to as The Spouter of Lying, the Liar or Man of Lying, or the Scoffer or Jester (not someone to be taken seriously)-but, of course, this is not the same individual as the Wicked Priest whom prestigious Qumran 'scholars' on the highest level insist upon saddling him with because they saw the Wicked Priest and the Lying Spouter described in Qumran Documents as the same individual. Eisenman lays out here in very clear terms that the two individuals denoted as the Wicked Priest and the Lying Spouter were two distinct and absolutely separate persons-this again, despite what some 'scholars' attempt to foist on him in order to try to make him look ridiculous . No, on the contrary, in doing so, they only make themselves look ridiculous. Eisenman is very careful here - the Spouter of Lying is an internal opponent of the Righteous Teacher at Qumran. He denied the Law in the midst of the whole Congregation ! The Wicked Priest - certainly no 'Maccabean'/'Hasmonean' - was rather an Establishment and probably Herodian High Priest, meaning, appointed by the Herodians and their Roman Overlords.

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Robert Eisenman is the author of The New Testament Code: The Cup of the Lord, the Damascus Covenant, and the Blood of Christ (2006), James the Brother of Jesus: The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls (1998), The Dead Sea Scrolls and the First Christians (1996), Islamic Law in Palestine and Israel: A History of the Survival of Tanzimat and Shari'ah (1978), and co-editor of The Facsimile Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls (1989), The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered (1992), and James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls Volumes I and II (2012). Robert is an Emeritus Professor of Middle East Religions and Archaeology and the former Director of the Institute for the Study of Judeo-Christian Origins at California State University Long Beach and Visiting Senior Member of Linacre College, Oxford. He holds a B.A. from Cornell University in Philosophy and Engineering Physics (1958), an M.A. from New York University in Near Eastern Studies (1966), and a Ph.D from Columbia University in Middle East Languages and Cultures and Islamic Law (1971). He was a Senior Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies and an American Endowment for the Humanities Fellow-in-Residence at the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were first examined. In 1991-92, he was the Consultant to the Huntington Library in San Marino, California on its decision to open its archives and allow free access for all scholars to the previously unpublished Scrolls. In 2002, he was the first to publicly announce that the so-called 'James Ossuary', which so suddenly and 'miraculously' appeared, was fraudulent; and he did this on the very same day it was made public on the basis of the actual inscription itself and what it said without any 'scientific' or 'pseudoscientific' aids.

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