Robert Eisenman is an American archaeologist, Biblical scholar, historian, and "road" poet. He is most famous for his groundbreaking work on the Dead Sea Scrolls and the origins of Christianity. Eisenman received his B.A. from Cornell University in 1958, an M.A. from New York University in 1966, and a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1971.^[1]

Contents 1 Current position 2 Early Life 3 On the Road Internationally (1958-63) 4 Education 5 Release of the Dead Sea Scrolls 6 Surveys, Groundscans, and Excavations 7 Theories 8 The Importance of the Interpretation of Habakkuk 2:4 at Qumran 9 James as Leader of the Early Church and the Paul/James Split 10 Eisenman the First to Identify Paul as an Herodian 11 Call for AMS Carbon Dating 12 First to Identify ‘the James Ossuary’ as Fraudulent 13 Works 14 References 15 External links

[edit] Current position

He is Professor of Middle East Religions and Archaeology and the Director of the Institute for the Study of Judeo-Christian Origins at California State University Long Beach. Also, he is Visiting Senior Member of Linacre College, Oxford University, and National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem. He also was a Senior Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies.^[2] From 1960-63, he taught at schools in Leicestershire, England, Tel Aviv, Israel, and Florence, Italy.^[3]

[edit] Early Life

Eisenman like his brother, Deconstructionist architect Peter Eisenman (most known for his design of The Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, the Visitor’s Center at Santiago de Compostella in Spain, the Convention Center at Columbus, Ohio, and the Arizona Cardinal Football Stadium), went to Columbia High School in South Orange, New Jersey, but he skipped his Senior Year (like his cousin UCLA Medical School Professor George Eisenman who left Horace Mann two years' early to go to Harvard) to take up an acceptance in the Engineering Physics Department at Cornell (which knew such famous personages as Hans Bethe and Philip Morrison and such sometime participants as Thomas Pynchon ‘59 and John Bierhorst ‘58 ). But Eisenman moved in his Junior Year, first to Philosophy to study with Max Black, and 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.

He was a participant in the demonstrations, documented in Pynchon’s tribute to Richard Farina,^[4] which took place during Senior Week, 1958, the first of their kind in the country (only so intrusive and oppressive had the situation at Cornell become that they were led by Seniors at the point of their graduation) and which anticipated those a decade later in 1968 at UC Berkeley and Columbia to which he was also, strangely enough, a witness but this time not as a participant because, being ten years’ older and wiser, he disapproved of them, since for him they attacked society at one of its most vulnerable and valuable points.

[edit] On the Road Internationally (1958-63)

Eisenman left college and immediately took to the road (it was the time of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road published the previous year 1957), but now not nationally, internationally. Friends say he was the first to introduce white tennis shoes (substitutes for his college “white bucs”) as walking shoes into Europe^[5] and the first American “backpacker” they ever saw (Australians, New Zealanders, and assorted Europeans had been doing it earlier).^[6]

Stopping in Paris, he spent the Fall in Alt Aussee in Austria (where someone he was later to come to admire but knew nothing about then, Theodore Herzl, had spent his summers sixty years before); and from there down to Vienna, Greece, Athens, and ultimately the Island of Hydra, where he was entertained by the highly-regarded Norwegian writer and poet Axel Jensen and his wife Marianne (later immortalized by Leonard Cohen in his song “So Long Marianne,” who not long afterwards followed him up in keeping this company).

Having earlier been accepted for grad 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 there - a fateful decision.

He then hitchhiked back across the country, backpack and all, five days and five nights^[7], and returned, to what for him, had already become “a mecca” or “a moveable feast”, Paris. From 1959-60, Eisenman stayed at “the Beat Hotel” where he bumped up against the likes of William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, et. al.,^[8] but he was not interested in these sorts of persons or their scene. All this he documents in The New Jerusalem: A Poetic/Prophetic Travel Diario, 1959-62,^[9] which was published by North Atlantic Books in Berkeley, California (2007) and taken directly from the free-verse notebooks he kept during this period.

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 Bikkur Cholim Hospital, while his two oldest sons left him in Istanbul and come directly to America^[10]), worked on Kibbutzim in the Galilee (1960-61 - he had previously worked on Kennedy’s 1960 Campaign^[11]), 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. ^[12]

Resuming his “Passage to India,” he returned, as ever, to Paris, and then on to kibbutzim in the Galilee again.^[13] The next Spring, after staying in monasteries throughout Israel, well-documented in The New Jerusalem, and a climactic spirit-reversing fight with the future Israeli “Peace Pilot” at the California Café in Tel Aviv (who threatened to “have his legs cut off” because he had written a poem to “one of his girls,” that is, one of the girls that worked at his cafe^[14]); Eisenman made the last overland run from Cyprus, across Turkey, Iran, Beleuchistan, 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, ^[15] most of whose members were up in the Simla Hills because it was high summer and monsoon. He returned to Paris over the Indian Ocean, up the Red Sea and across the Mediterranean.^[16]

[edit] Education

Eisenman (like Pynchon ^[17]) majored for two and a half years in Engineering Physics (a course theoretically which was to prepare students to enter nuclear physics), graduated 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 N.Y.U. 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 is a Visiting Senior Member of Linacre College, Oxford University, 1979-Present.

He was a National Endowment of the Humanities Fellow at the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research, Jerusalem, Israel, 1985-86 and, in 1986-87, he was a Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Research, Oxford, England.

[edit] 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 Scrolls. The Scrolls had been discovered from 1948-56 in several waves, but after a suggestive article by literary critic and perceived ‘Communist Fellow-traveler’ Edmund Wilson in The New Yorker magazine,^[18], editing which was proceeding at a snail’s pace, anyhow, more or less ground to a halt and little of a positive nature was being done because of the curtain of secrecy that had perceptively come down from about 1959 onwards.^[19]

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.^[20] 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^[21] and a follow-up on James as Righteous Teacher in 1985,^[22]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.^[23]

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 Albright 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.” It was at that time that Eisenman vowed to himself that he would.^[24] 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 was also made over to him.

Realizing that monopolies only thrived on secrecy and could not abide free access, he sent a copy of this computer-generated print-out to the Editor of The Biblical Archaeological Review, Hershel Shanks. Though no one ever responded with an acknowledgement or any thanks to him (he had not sent it anonymously), he was later apprised how this had created a huge stir in the office and the campaign to free the Scrolls really began here.^[25]

During his stay at Oxford University as a Senior Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew and a Visiting Senior Member of Linacre College in 1986-87, a colleague had also passed him a xerox copy of “MMT,” a document which had been talked about but which no one outside the inner circle had ever been allowed to see. This, too, he decided to freely share with anyone who wanted to see it as part of the campaign he had embarked on and feeling that monopolies could not survive the free exchange of information.^[26] and, thereafter, it made the rounds in a manner even he could never have envisioned, illustrating just how many scholars felt deprived by the regime of secrecy and selective sharing that previously prevailed.^[27]

At this time, too, he brought Prof. James Robinson – a colleague of his at Claremont University in Claremont, California, who was then teaching for him, and the Editor of the Nag Hammadi Codices ( a dispute similar to the Qumran one)^[28] – 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 E. J. Brill in Leiden, Holland, who had published both Eisenman’s and Robinson’s earlier books.

However, a few weeks before publication, its representative had attended a Scrolls Conference in Madrid, Spain and mistook the uproar there over Prof. Kapera’s publication the year before in Poland of the samizat copy of MMT he had received from Prof. 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.^[29]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.^[30]

Simultaneously, while all these things were going on, Eisenman had been invited to become a Consultant to the Huntington Library in San Marino, California near his home who, by then, 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. This caused a moral quandary for him and he has described the chagrin he felt, when asked by the late William Moffatt, its Director, whether he thought the Library should open its archive to all scholars. He was projecting this for September, two months before his and Robinson’s own projected B.A.S. Edition. His answer was an immediate and unhesitating, “yes,” though he knew they would get all the credit for breaking the monopoly and Robinson and he very little; but in the world of scholarly monopolies these were the necessities that fate dictates.^[31]

[edit] Surveys, Groundscans, and Excavations

Since 1988, Eisenman has lead the Judean Desert Explorations/Excavations Project under the auspices of the Institute for the Study of Judeo-Christian Origins at C.S.U.L.B he headed. These expeditions included students from C.S.U.L.B. and other institutions. Its aim was to search for possible new caves that might contain scrolls. This was before the release of the Scrolls in 1991-92 so his philosophy was: “since they wouldn’t show us any Scrolls, let’s see if we can find new Scrolls.” It was his feeling that, though the Beduin 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.

With this approach in mind and with the help of author Michael Baigent^[32] and radar groundscan specialist Tony Wood, in 1990-91 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^[33] and, in 2004, they had the opportunity to return and investigate these further, but with little result.^[34]

In conjunction with this and along with these groundscans, 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.^[35]

In 2002-3, 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, discovered a burial enclosure at the Head of the Qumran Cemetery.^[36] This was an extremely important find, as was the rare zinc sarcophagus below this and seemingly facing up to it 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.^[37]

In their first expedition in 1988-89, he and his students were involved in the excavation of 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 and went into the Israel Museum, an oil jug, and the wooden remains possibly of a plough.

[edit] Theories

Eisenman contends that the preconceptions of the group of scholars that first worked on the Dead Sea Scrolls led by Father Roland De Vaux, Frank Moore Cross, Father Joseph Milik, et. al., ignored the First-Century provenance of many of the documents represented by the corpus of the Scrolls instead seeing most as belonging to the Maccabean Period. According to him, this made it impossible to make any sense out of the Scrolls. ^[38] By contrast Eisenman sees several important parallels between the Scrolls and what for lack of a better designation (since for him there was no ‘Christianity’ in Palestine in this period) is called ‘Christian’ origins in Palestine and across the Mediterranean

The reason for this was that, while the Scrolls were militant, aggressive, apocalyptic, and zealous - even nationalistic (certainly not apolitical as some would attempt to portray them playing off a mistaken idea of ‘peaceful’ or ‘retiring Essenes’ or even as ‘a monastery’^[39]), they were being pictured as opposed to a Maccabean Priesthood which, for all intents and purposes, exhibited these same attributes and whose Leader, Establishment scholars contended, was designated “the Wicked Priest” - not to mention “the Liar”/”Spouter of Lying”/“Scoffer,” etc. (see, for instance, G. Vermes who criticized Eisenman in the Introductions to his later versions of translations of the Dead Sea Scrolls on this basis, when this was his way of seeing things not Eisenman’s, while at the same time using it to belittle Eisenman’s identification of Paul possibly as ‘the Man of Lies’/ ‘Spouter’/“Comedian” at Qumran when Eisenman is, in fact, very definite in all his works in separating “the Man of Lying” from “the Wicked Priest” whom he definitively sees as two different adversaries^[40]).

It is, according to Eisenman, therefore impossible to make any sense out of the historical documents at Qumran unless one puts the so-called ‘sectarian’ or ‘non-biblical’ documents (that is, those for the most part never seen before) in a later period most would refer to as “Herodian” (c. 35 B.C. to 70 C.E. and beyond) - certainly after the Roman conquest and the downfall of the Maccabean family. This means that the Establishment Priesthood, which all Scrolls appear opposed to, was ‘the Herodian Priesthood’ and not ‘the Maccabean.’ Then, of course, everything becomes sensible, including the title of “the Wicked Priest” responsible for the death or destruction of the character famously dubbed in the Scrolls ‘the Righteous Teacher’ or ‘Teacher of Righteousness,’ and much else.

This he intuits from ‘the internal evidence’ of what the texts say themselves and not the ‘external’ (such as palaeography, alleged archaeology, and carbon dating which, though he was the first to call for, he severely criticizes^[41]), including repeated allusion to ‘the Star Prophecy’ (Numbers 24:17),^[42] the aggressiveness of the War Scroll and similar documents, the hiding of the Temple treasure as delineated in the Copper Scroll, the description of the foreign armies invading the country (the Kittim) in a manner much more massively than any Hellenistic one such as either the Seleucids or Ptolemies could be pictured,^[43] the reference to themselves several times as “the Poor” (the name of James’ Community as described in Early Church literature and Paul) in numerous contexts and even “the Congregation” or “Church of the Poor’ in the Psalm 37 Commentary,^[44] and, most definitive of all, the description of their military and religious practices in interpretation of Habakkuk 2:2-2:4 in the Habakkuk Commentary as “sacrificing to their standards and worshipping their weapons of War” - to say nothing of, in the same exegesis, the reference to Roman “tax-farming” across the whole of the civilized world.^[45]

[edit] The Importance of the Interpretation of Habakkuk 2:4 at Qumran

Of course, the very 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’ Theology both in the Pauline corpus (Romans, Galatians, et. al.) and in the Letter of James; he sees a proof positive that these documents were written more or less contemporaneously and at a time when this prophecy or proof-text was in play.^[46] Moreover, in addition, he sees the interpretation in the Habakkuk Commentary at Qumran, a document named after that Prophet and one of the few found almost completely intact - and one seemingly written in the latter part of the Community’s history witnessing its fall and, contemporary with this, the fall of the Temple (c. 70 C.E.), as ‘Jamesian,’ meaning that is, as opposed to ‘Pauline,’^[47] that is, first of all it is confined to “Jews” or, in the arcane 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 Letter of James), that is, it does not apply to “non-Torah-doing Jews” and certainly not “non-Torah-doing Gentiles.”^[48] For him this is a direct riposte and a rejection of the Pauline interpretation of this same prophecy – and the basis of the Pauline theology one finds in Galatians and Romans and actually, in fact, seemingly argued against in the extant Letter 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.^[49]

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 “War,” and even one dedicated to “the Promises to the Seed” or “House of David.”^[50] For him, therefore, the Scrolls are ‘Messianic,’ it being not properly appreciated just how ‘Messianic’ the Scrolls actually are. Put in another way, 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” should one wish, 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.^[51] For their part, 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 (whichever “Antioch” or wherever this was) in the mid-Fifties C.E.^[52] 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,” a derivate usage, in referring to itself or even “Messianic Sadducees,” if one prefers, which he does, as opposed to “Herodian Sadducees” pictured in both the New Testament and Josephus.

[edit] James as Leader of the Early Church and the Paul/James Split

As far as Eisenman is concerned, James the Just, the individual Paul actually refers to as either "brother of Jesus" or “the brother of the Lord,”^[53] is the historical character who exhibits the most in common with “the Righteous Teacher" 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,” 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 C.E. as described both in Josephus and Early Church literature.^[54] 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 C.E. set the stage for and possibly even triggered the First Jewish Revolt against the Rome in 66-73 C.E. - 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.’^[55] For Eisenman, these “Nazoreans,” “Zealots,” “Zaddikim” or “Ebionim” were marginalized by an 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 deconstructs 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.”^[56]

[edit] Eisenman the First to Identify Paul as an Herodian

Hand in hand with these theories went Eisenman’s understanding that Paul’s version of Judaism was so peculiar that, more than anything else, it seemed to represent the interests of the Herodian family both in Palestine and as it sought to extend its influence into Asia Minor and further East into Northern Syria and IMesopotamia. He covered this in a series of papers and books beginning in 1984^[57] 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”).^[58]

He also found it in Josephus’ picture of a curious member of the Herodian familiy, 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 (though one the surface anyhow 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.^[59]

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, etc.” also expressed in Corinthians (9:19-27). and 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 hadto 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^[60]), 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.

[edit] Call for AMS Carbon Dating

Hand and hand with his attempts to free up access to the Scrolls, Eisenman was the first to call for AMS carbon dating of the Scrolls.^[61] The reason for this was simple. Since he and others like him could not have free access to the Scrolls, the Israel Antiquities Authority 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 Prof. Philip Davies of Sheffield University in England and copied to Amir Drori the Head of the Israel Antiquities Authority.^[62]

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.^[63]

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.^[64] 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 palaeographic arguments of “earlier vs. later,” but rather absolute dating was sought.^[65]

The point was that all such tests, these and the later ones that were done, sought to achieve “absolute dating” – just the thing Eisenman and Davies felt it impossible to achieve given the narrow chronological parameters of the Qumran documents. They thought the best that could be hoped for was "relative dating." All neglected, too, what the FBI Crime Lab had recently discovered, 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,” the “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.^[66]

[edit] First to Identify ‘the James Ossuary’ as Fraudulent

Eisenman was the first to pubically identify ‘the James Ossuary’ as 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^[67] 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.^[68]

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 the 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” or “Just One,” which was also how James was known by everyone in Palestine at this time too according to Eusebius.^[69]

[edit] 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.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• http://roberteisenman.com - Robert Eisenman's web site, with a link to his lectures and conferences in youtube.
• 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 -his 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.

v • d • e Dead Sea Scrolls Topics Texts 4Q106 · 4Q107 · 4Q108 · 4Q175 · 4Q240 · 4Q252 · 4QMMT · 4Q448 · 6Q6 · 7Q5 · The Book of Mysteries (1Q27 and 4Q299-301) · Community Rule (1QS) · Copper Scroll (3Q15) · Damascus Document (CD) · Genesis Apocryphon (1QapGen ar) · Habakkuk Commentary (1QpHab) · Isaiah scroll (1QIsaa) · Nahum Commentary (4QpNah) · The Rule of the Blessing (1QSb) · The Rule of the Congregation (1QSa) · The Secret of the Way Things Are · Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice (4Q400-407) · Temple Scroll (11Q19) · Thanksgiving Hymns (1QH) · War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness (1QM) Places Qumran · Qumran Caves · Qumran Cemetery  · Ein Feshkha · Kohlit · Secacah · Wadi Murabba'at Issues Essenes · Sadducees · Carbon Dating  · Yahad Ostracon  · Pesher  · Calendrical texts  · Tanakh at Qumran · Teacher of Righteousness · Wicked Priest · Dual messiahs Scholars John Marco Allegro · Joseph M. Baumgarten · Frank Moore Cross · Philip R. Davies · André Dupont-Sommer · Robert Eisenman · Katharina Galor · Florentino García Martínez · Norman Golb · Jonas C. Greenfield · Gerald Lankester Harding · Yizhar Hirschfeld · Ernest-Marie Laperrousaz · Jodi Magness · Józef Milik · Bargil Pixner · Elisha Qimron · Lawrence Schiffman · Solomon H. Steckoll · Hartmut Stegemann · John Strugnell · Eleazar Sukenik · Emanuel Tov · John C. Trever · Eugene Ulrich · Roland de Vaux · Géza Vermes · Yigael Yadin Other Shrine of the Book · The Orion Center · École Biblique · Discoveries in the Judaean Desert · Mar Samuel · Muhammed edh-Dhib