Robert Eisenman

Eisenman majored for two and a half years in Engineering Physics (a course which was intended 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 I. Katsh from New York University in 1966.[2] He received a PhD 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.

He is professor of Middle East religions, archaeology, and Islamic law and the director of the Institute for the Study of Judeo-Christian 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.

Eisenman grew up in South Orange, New Jersey and went to Columbia High School in Maplewood, 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 with John Senior, and then back to Philosophy to graduate in 1958 with a major in Aesthetics and a minor in Physics.

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. People who knew him then say he was the first to introduce American tennis shoes – substitutes for his college "white bucks" – as white walking shoes to Europe (see the picture at right)[3] and the first American "backpacker" they ever saw (Australians, New Zealanders, and assorted Europeans had been doing it earlier).[4]

Eisenman before the Parthenon, December 1958

Stopping in Paris, he spent the fall in Alt-Aussee in Austria; and from there to Vienna and down to Greece, to 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.[5]

He then hitchhiked back across the country[6] and returned to Paris. From 1959 to 1960, Eisenman stayed at "the Beat Hotel” where he encountered the likes of William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, et al.,[7] 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,[8] 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".[9]

He then went on to Israel and Jerusalem, where he had the epiphany of encountering members of his family of whom he had previously never heard (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 came directly to America[10]), worked on Kibbutzim in the Galilee (1960–61 – he had previously worked on John F. 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 City 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 to Paris, and then on to kibbutzim in Galilee again.[13] 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;[14] 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,[15] 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.[16]

Eisenman claims that the preconceptions of the group of scholars around Father Roland De Vaux 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."[38]

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, Paul the Apostle.

He is critical of the ways radiocarbon dating and paleography have been employed to date the Dead Sea Scrolls, and relies instead on his interpretation of the content of the scrolls despite this being at a clash with scientific consensus.[39] He claims to find 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,[40] the description of foreign armies (the Kittim) invading on a much more massive scale than any Hellenistic invasion during the Maccabean period,[41] 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 by Paul.[42] 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.[43]

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 theology 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.[44]

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'.[45] 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."[46]

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, Eisenman claims, a chronological indicator for the document as a whole.[47]

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".[48] 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.[49] 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.[50] 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.

With his attempts to get free access to the Scrolls, Eisenman claims he was the first to call for AMS Carbon dating the Dead Sea Scrolls[51] (the earliest carbon dating tests – non-AMS – were performed 14 November 1950 on a piece of linen from Qumran Cave 1, producing a date range being 167 BCE – 233 CE.)[52] Libby had first started using the dating method in 1946 and early testing required relatively large samples that were destroyed, so testing on scrolls only became feasible when methods used in the dating process were improved upon.[53] F. E. Zeuner carried out tests on date palm wood from the Qumran site yielding a date range of 70 BCE – 90 CE.[54] In 1963 Libby tested a sample from the Isaiah Scroll, which gave a range between 200 BCE – 1 CE.[55] This proposal was contained in a series of letters to John Strugnell, Eisenman wrote with Philip R. Davies of Sheffield University in England and copied to Amir Drori, the head of the Israel Antiquities Authority.[56]

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. Eisenman was not mentioned as having initiated the tests. He and Davies had included in their letter to the IAA a caveat, that "Opposition Scholars" be included in process because they claimed it was they who felt the most need for the tests and they who could identify which documents should be tested.[57] Nevertheless, Eisenman and Davies were not included in the testing process. Eisenman disputes the findings of these tests.[58]

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",[59] 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.[60] 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 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."[61] For Eisenman, these "Nazoreans", (נצרים) "Zealots", (קנאים) "Zaddikim" (צדיקים) or "Ebionim" (אביונים) were marginalized by a Herodian named Saul (Paul) 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".[62]

Eisenman identifies Paul as a Herodian, calling attention to Paul's peculiar version of Judaism. A presentation seeming to represent the interests of the Herodian dynasty in Palestine, as well as the intention 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.[63] Offered as proof is Paul's salutation (if authentic), at the end of the Letter to the Romans, where he sends 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").[64]

Proof is also found in Josephus' picture of a curious member of the Herodian family, an individual he also calls "Saulos" who shares 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.[65]

Finally he found Herodian traces 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 Idumeans, 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.

Rounding out 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 the genealogies[66]). This "nephew" has unfettered entrée to the Commander of the Roman garrison in the Tower of Antonia who, in turn, saves Paul from “Nazirite oath-taking" “Zealot”-like Jewish extremists who take an oath "not to eat or drink till they have killed Paul" (Acts 23:12–35). Eisenman identifies this individual as Julius Archelaus, the son of Saulos' sister, Cypros. Finally, consider Paul's Roman citizenship; the philosophy of paying the Roman tax to Caesar; and placing the Roman Law above the Jewish Law as an expression of "the Righteousness Commandment" of "loving your neighbor as yourself" (Romans 13:1–10).

Eisenman was the first to publicly claim that the James Ossuary 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[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 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 29 September 2002, 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.[69]