Magdalenbrother
January 2nd 2005, 02:47 AM
Robert Eiseman's JAMES THE BROTHER OF JESUS:
A Higher-Critical Evaluation
Robert M. Price
Drew University
Robert Eisenman, James the Brother of Jesus: The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Viking Penguin, 1997, xxxvi + 1074 pp., $39.95. ISBN 0-670-86932-5.
http://www.depts.drew.edu/jhc/blueline.gif
IN his recent publications The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered (with Michael Wise) and The Dead Sea Scrolls and the First Christians Robert Eisenman has been threatening/promising to redraw the map of Christian origins and now, by God, he has done it. The breadth and detail of Eisenman's investigation are breathtaking, as are its implications. In James the Brother of Jesus he tells the long-lost tale of formative "prehistoric" Christianity as it emerged from the crucible of revolutionary Palestine and from the internecine hostilities between Pauline and Ebionite Christianities. I call it "prehistoric" because Eisenman reconstructs the events lying before and beneath our canonical histories of early Christianity. His enterprise is in this sense akin to that of Burton Mack, that other great delver into the subterrene depths of religious pre-history. Like Mack, Eisenman discovers a "Christianity" (or perhaps a proto-Christianity, or even a pre-Christianity) for which Jesus had not yet attained centrality. Only whereas Mack sees the initial germ of the new religion as a variant of Cynicism, Eisenman rejuvenates, even vindicates, Renan's old claim that Christianity began as "an Essenism."
In the process Eisenman also vindicates another dictum of Renan, namely that to write the history of a faith, one must needs have belonged to it but belong to it no more. While one still carries the burden of representing the Christian religion it appears to be almost impossible to kick free of the apologetic bias. In dealing with Paul, this means that even critical scholars cannot help presupposing that Paul's message, theology, whatever, must be basically true. Even if one must practice a little sachkritische surgery here and there, e.g., as to the role of women, Paul is still the church's one foundation. At the very least this implicitly Paulinist bias results in what Bruce Malina and others call a docetic approach to the text, an according of priority to the theological abstractions as if they were really the engine of the train and not its epiphenomenal, rhetorical caboose. Even the bold and brilliant E. P. Sanders, who admits, in Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People, that Paul's arguments are usually a mass of inconsistent rationalizations, still grants priority to the conversion experience which he assumes underlies them. Francis Watson gets closer to ground zero in Paul, Judaism and the Gentiles, seeing sociological realities as the tectonic plates upon which Paul's theology slides. But it is left to Eisenman to disengage himself completely from the Pauline cheer-leading team and look at things from the other side.
To anticipate the thrust of the book as a whole, let it be said that Eisenman first draws a portrait of the early community of James as a nationalistic, messianic, priestly, and xenophobic sect of ultra-legal pietism, something most of us would deem fanaticism. As Schweitzer said of the historical Jesus, this is an embarrassment and a disappointment to those who expect the original gospel to look refreshingly modernistic. Eisenman shows how "Jewish Christianity" was part and parcel of the sectarian milieu which included Essenes, Zealots, Nazoreans, Nazirites, Ebionites, Elchasites, Sabeans, Mandaeans, etc., and that these categories were no more than ideal types, by no means actually segregated one from the other like exotic beasts in adjacent, well-marked cages in the theological zoo. Over against this sort of "Lubavitcher Christianity," Eisenman depicts Pauline Christianity (plus its Hellenistic cousins Johannine, Markan, Lukan, etc., Christianities) as being root and branch a compromising, assimilating, Herodianizing apostasy from Judaism. Greek Christianity gives the Torah, and Jewish identity, the bum's rush, just like those allegorizing antinomians Philo argued against, just like Josephus. The Pauline Christ, a spiritual redeemer with an invisible kingdom, is of a piece with the christening of Vespasian as the messiah by Josephus.
Of course, these ideas are by no means new. Eisenman is simply filling out the picture in an exhaustive manner undreamt of by S. G. F. Brandon, Robert Eisler, and their congeners. The picture of Jesus in the Greek Gospels, eating with tax-collectors, lampooning the traditions of his people, welcoming sinners and ridiculing Torah piety are all expressions of Gentile anti-Judaism. Only Gentiles utterly without sympathy to Judaism could profess to see such a Jesus as a noble pioneer of a "higher righteousness." In the same way, the New Testament notion that Jerusalem fell because her people had rejected the messiah, when in fact they were fighting a messianic war against the Roman antichrist, must be judged a piece of cynical Hellenistic Jew-bashing. Christianity as it emerges in the Gentile mission is a product of cultural accomodationism, pro-Roman Quislingism, and intentional assimilation. It is a kind of paganized, syncretic, diluted Judaism not unlike the Sabazius cult.
But even this is not the substance of the book. Having set forth the Tendenz of the canonical Greek Christian writings we call the New Testament, Eisenman starts digging. Armed with a hermeneutic of suspicion, in the best tradition, we may add, of F. C. Baur, Walter Bauer, and Elisabeth Sch黶sler-Fiorenza, Eisenman shows us how to crack the codes of theological disinformation, to listen to the long-faded echoes, to find handholds up what had seemed an insurmountable climb to a peak from which to view the hitherto unseen landscape of early Christianity. What are his climbing tools?
FIRST, Eisenman considers a much wider range of historical sources than most think they need to. He plumbs, as we have come to expect, the Dead Sea Scrolls, as well as the Clementine Recognitions and Homilies, the Apostolic Constitutions, Eusebius, the two James Apocalypses from Nag Hammadi, even the Western Text of Acts and the Slavonic Josephus. And Eisenman takes Josephus much more seriously as a source for Luke's Acts than anyone ever has before. All these our author carefully sifts, taking nothing uncritically. Where he differs from most previous scholars is in taking these materials seriously at all as new sources of information, the odd clue here or there, about James and Paul. As Richard Pervo (Profit With Delight) has begun to show, the traditional neglect of these sources and others related to them (e.g., the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles) by supposedly critical scholars is more a matter of canon apologetics than of historical method. Why do New Testament scholars agree that Luke's Acts are legendary and fictitious in large measure梐nd go right on taking the story at face value? Eisenman, on the other hand, realizes that Luke and the Pseudoclementine literature are on more or less a par. Each must be treated with great reserve, yet with the optimism that, like the Oxyrhynchus alligators, somewhere amid all the stuffing one may at last discover a vital bit of information.
Second, Eisenman has developed a keen sense for the "name game" played in the sources. Most of us have sometime scratched our heads over the tantalizing confusions latent in the strange redundancy of similar names in the New Testament accounts. How can Mary have had a sister named Mary? Is there a difference between Joseph Barsabbas Justus, Judas Barsabbas Justus, Jesus Justus, Titius Justus, and James the Just? Whence all the Jameses and Judases? Who are Simon the Zealot and Judas the Zealot (who appears in some NT manuscripts and other early Christian documents)? Is Clopas the same as Cleophas? What's going on with Jesus ben-Ananias, Jesus Barabbas, Elymas bar-Jesus, and Jesus Justus? What does Boanerges really mean? Is Nathaniel a nickname for someone else we know of? And so on, and so on. Most of us puzzle over these oddities for a moment梐nd then move on. After all, how important can they be, anyway? Eisenman does not move on till he has figured it out.
In Thomas Kuhn's terms, Eisenman has decided to start with the recalcitrant "anomalous data" left to the side by the old paradigm and to construct a new paradigm that will make sense of it, and perhaps in the process wind up making new sense of everything else. Eisenman's efforts here recall those of Bart Ehrman in The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, in which he demonstrated that a great many of the textual alterations which critics traditionally weed out of their texts and then ignore can be accounted for as theologically motivated attempts to render the text unfriendly to "heretical" exegesis, a kind of built-in "prescription against the heretics," a booby-trapped text. What had been cursorily dismissed by scholars as a pile of random goofs wound up disclosing an apologetical pattern of redactional alteration. As Collingwood might have said, the variant readings turned out not to be evidence for the original text, but that didn't mean they weren't evidence for something else. And in just the same way, Eisenman has cracked the code of the strange name lists of the New Testament.
His working hypothesis is that the confusions, alterations, and obfuscations stem from an interest in covering over the importance, and therefore the identity, of the desposyni, the Heirs of Jesus, who had apparently functioned at least for Palestinian Christianity as a dynastic Caliphate similar to the Alid succession of Shi'ite Islam or the succession of Hasmonean brothers. It is a commonplace that the gospel texts treating Jesus' mother, brothers and sisters either severely (Mark and John) or delicately (Luke, cf., the Gospel according to the Hebrews) are functions of ecclesiastical polemics over their leadership claims as opposed to Peter and the Twelve (analogous to the Companions of the Prophet in Sunni Islam) or to outsiders like Paul. It is equally well known that the Synoptic apostle lists differ between themselves and between manuscripts of each gospel. Why? Eisenman connects these phenomena with another, the confusion arising among early theologians over the siblings of Jesus as the doctrine of Mary's perpetual virginity became widespread. They had to be harmonized with the dogma, so brothers and sisters became cousins, step-siblings, etc. And characters became sundered. Mary suddenly had a sister named Mary because the mother of James, Joses, Simon, and Judas could no longer also be the mother of Jesus. And so on.
The Gospels give prominence to an inner circle of three: Peter, John son of Zebedee and John's brother James. And Galatians has the Three Pillars in Jerusalem: Peter, John son of Zebedee, and Jesus' brother James. What happened here? Surely the gospels' inner group of three is intended as preparatory for the Pillars, to provide a life-of-Jesus pedigree for the Pillars. But then why are there two different Jameses? Mustn't they originally have been the same? Eisenman says they were, but certain factions wanted to play up the authority of the shadowy college of the Twelve against the earlier authority of the Heirs and found it politic to drive a wedge between James the brother of Jesus and the Twelve, so James becomes James the Just on the one hand and James the brother of John on the other.
Another attempt to distance James the Just from the Companions of Jesus was the cloning of James the Just as James the son of "Alphaeus," which name Papias says is interchangeable with "Cleophas," who happens to be the father of Simeon, James' successor as bishop of Jerusalem and his brother as well. And eventually James the son of Alphaeus and James son of Zebedee both replace James the Just in the circle of disciples. Meanwhile, Thomas has similarly undergone mitosis into Judas of James, Thaddaeus, Theudas (=Thaddaeus + Judas), Lebbaeus, and Judas Iscariot. Simon the Zealot is Simon bar Cleophas and may be Simon Cephas as well.
Eisenman has worked out a complex and coherent grammar of these processes of what Derrida would call "slippage along the chain of signifiers." His theory of the doubling of characters and names here is close to that of Rene Girard, a spontaneous methodological parallel (see my article, "In the Beginning Was the Deed: A Neo-Girardian Approach to the Passion Narrative," Forum, 9 [September/December, 1993], 257-303). Eisenman ends up with a much-reduced circle of "the Twelve," most of them being aliases and replacements for the brothers of Jesus. This will outrage some, but other readers will find the theory ringing true against the otherwise odd fact that the Twelve are such shadowy non-entities in the New Testament.
Third, Eisenman brings to bear on the narratives of Acts the model of a "mix and match" redactional technique whereby Luke is seen to have composed his stories by recombining the salient features of very different stories from his sources. When Luke finishes, only bits of either the paradigmatic or syntagmic composition of the originals are left, but there is enough to recognize the one as the mutation of the other. This is the procedure used recently to great effect by a number of scholars, not least John Dominic Crossan (who shows the Passion Narrative to be built up from various Old Testament proof texts), Randel Helms (who in Gospel Fictions shows case after case of a gospel story's derivation from a similar Septuagint story), and Thomas L. Brodie (who unscrambles numerous Lukan tales into their original Deuteronomic components). Eisenman's originality at this point lies not in the technique but rather in his willingness to take seriously Luke's use of Josephus as a source. (Again, this is something no one who wants an early date for Luke or a historical basis for Acts is likely to consider seriously, but then we have another case of apologetics masquerading as criticism.) And Eisenman's redactional analyses of Luke on Josephus provide but one of the major advances of James the Brother of Jesus. It seems not too much to say that the book ushers in a new era in the study of Acts. This is not to say, however, that Eisenman limits his use of the technique to Luke's use of Josephus. Far from it: he is able to distil traditions from various sources and to identify them in their new guises in Luke-Acts and elsewhere in the New Testament. I propose now to provide summaries of a few of Eisenman's reconstructions, showing in broad outline what he sees Luke (or others) having made of originally quite different traditions.
A Higher-Critical Evaluation
Robert M. Price
Drew University
Robert Eisenman, James the Brother of Jesus: The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Viking Penguin, 1997, xxxvi + 1074 pp., $39.95. ISBN 0-670-86932-5.
http://www.depts.drew.edu/jhc/blueline.gif
IN his recent publications The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered (with Michael Wise) and The Dead Sea Scrolls and the First Christians Robert Eisenman has been threatening/promising to redraw the map of Christian origins and now, by God, he has done it. The breadth and detail of Eisenman's investigation are breathtaking, as are its implications. In James the Brother of Jesus he tells the long-lost tale of formative "prehistoric" Christianity as it emerged from the crucible of revolutionary Palestine and from the internecine hostilities between Pauline and Ebionite Christianities. I call it "prehistoric" because Eisenman reconstructs the events lying before and beneath our canonical histories of early Christianity. His enterprise is in this sense akin to that of Burton Mack, that other great delver into the subterrene depths of religious pre-history. Like Mack, Eisenman discovers a "Christianity" (or perhaps a proto-Christianity, or even a pre-Christianity) for which Jesus had not yet attained centrality. Only whereas Mack sees the initial germ of the new religion as a variant of Cynicism, Eisenman rejuvenates, even vindicates, Renan's old claim that Christianity began as "an Essenism."
In the process Eisenman also vindicates another dictum of Renan, namely that to write the history of a faith, one must needs have belonged to it but belong to it no more. While one still carries the burden of representing the Christian religion it appears to be almost impossible to kick free of the apologetic bias. In dealing with Paul, this means that even critical scholars cannot help presupposing that Paul's message, theology, whatever, must be basically true. Even if one must practice a little sachkritische surgery here and there, e.g., as to the role of women, Paul is still the church's one foundation. At the very least this implicitly Paulinist bias results in what Bruce Malina and others call a docetic approach to the text, an according of priority to the theological abstractions as if they were really the engine of the train and not its epiphenomenal, rhetorical caboose. Even the bold and brilliant E. P. Sanders, who admits, in Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People, that Paul's arguments are usually a mass of inconsistent rationalizations, still grants priority to the conversion experience which he assumes underlies them. Francis Watson gets closer to ground zero in Paul, Judaism and the Gentiles, seeing sociological realities as the tectonic plates upon which Paul's theology slides. But it is left to Eisenman to disengage himself completely from the Pauline cheer-leading team and look at things from the other side.
To anticipate the thrust of the book as a whole, let it be said that Eisenman first draws a portrait of the early community of James as a nationalistic, messianic, priestly, and xenophobic sect of ultra-legal pietism, something most of us would deem fanaticism. As Schweitzer said of the historical Jesus, this is an embarrassment and a disappointment to those who expect the original gospel to look refreshingly modernistic. Eisenman shows how "Jewish Christianity" was part and parcel of the sectarian milieu which included Essenes, Zealots, Nazoreans, Nazirites, Ebionites, Elchasites, Sabeans, Mandaeans, etc., and that these categories were no more than ideal types, by no means actually segregated one from the other like exotic beasts in adjacent, well-marked cages in the theological zoo. Over against this sort of "Lubavitcher Christianity," Eisenman depicts Pauline Christianity (plus its Hellenistic cousins Johannine, Markan, Lukan, etc., Christianities) as being root and branch a compromising, assimilating, Herodianizing apostasy from Judaism. Greek Christianity gives the Torah, and Jewish identity, the bum's rush, just like those allegorizing antinomians Philo argued against, just like Josephus. The Pauline Christ, a spiritual redeemer with an invisible kingdom, is of a piece with the christening of Vespasian as the messiah by Josephus.
Of course, these ideas are by no means new. Eisenman is simply filling out the picture in an exhaustive manner undreamt of by S. G. F. Brandon, Robert Eisler, and their congeners. The picture of Jesus in the Greek Gospels, eating with tax-collectors, lampooning the traditions of his people, welcoming sinners and ridiculing Torah piety are all expressions of Gentile anti-Judaism. Only Gentiles utterly without sympathy to Judaism could profess to see such a Jesus as a noble pioneer of a "higher righteousness." In the same way, the New Testament notion that Jerusalem fell because her people had rejected the messiah, when in fact they were fighting a messianic war against the Roman antichrist, must be judged a piece of cynical Hellenistic Jew-bashing. Christianity as it emerges in the Gentile mission is a product of cultural accomodationism, pro-Roman Quislingism, and intentional assimilation. It is a kind of paganized, syncretic, diluted Judaism not unlike the Sabazius cult.
But even this is not the substance of the book. Having set forth the Tendenz of the canonical Greek Christian writings we call the New Testament, Eisenman starts digging. Armed with a hermeneutic of suspicion, in the best tradition, we may add, of F. C. Baur, Walter Bauer, and Elisabeth Sch黶sler-Fiorenza, Eisenman shows us how to crack the codes of theological disinformation, to listen to the long-faded echoes, to find handholds up what had seemed an insurmountable climb to a peak from which to view the hitherto unseen landscape of early Christianity. What are his climbing tools?
FIRST, Eisenman considers a much wider range of historical sources than most think they need to. He plumbs, as we have come to expect, the Dead Sea Scrolls, as well as the Clementine Recognitions and Homilies, the Apostolic Constitutions, Eusebius, the two James Apocalypses from Nag Hammadi, even the Western Text of Acts and the Slavonic Josephus. And Eisenman takes Josephus much more seriously as a source for Luke's Acts than anyone ever has before. All these our author carefully sifts, taking nothing uncritically. Where he differs from most previous scholars is in taking these materials seriously at all as new sources of information, the odd clue here or there, about James and Paul. As Richard Pervo (Profit With Delight) has begun to show, the traditional neglect of these sources and others related to them (e.g., the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles) by supposedly critical scholars is more a matter of canon apologetics than of historical method. Why do New Testament scholars agree that Luke's Acts are legendary and fictitious in large measure梐nd go right on taking the story at face value? Eisenman, on the other hand, realizes that Luke and the Pseudoclementine literature are on more or less a par. Each must be treated with great reserve, yet with the optimism that, like the Oxyrhynchus alligators, somewhere amid all the stuffing one may at last discover a vital bit of information.
Second, Eisenman has developed a keen sense for the "name game" played in the sources. Most of us have sometime scratched our heads over the tantalizing confusions latent in the strange redundancy of similar names in the New Testament accounts. How can Mary have had a sister named Mary? Is there a difference between Joseph Barsabbas Justus, Judas Barsabbas Justus, Jesus Justus, Titius Justus, and James the Just? Whence all the Jameses and Judases? Who are Simon the Zealot and Judas the Zealot (who appears in some NT manuscripts and other early Christian documents)? Is Clopas the same as Cleophas? What's going on with Jesus ben-Ananias, Jesus Barabbas, Elymas bar-Jesus, and Jesus Justus? What does Boanerges really mean? Is Nathaniel a nickname for someone else we know of? And so on, and so on. Most of us puzzle over these oddities for a moment梐nd then move on. After all, how important can they be, anyway? Eisenman does not move on till he has figured it out.
In Thomas Kuhn's terms, Eisenman has decided to start with the recalcitrant "anomalous data" left to the side by the old paradigm and to construct a new paradigm that will make sense of it, and perhaps in the process wind up making new sense of everything else. Eisenman's efforts here recall those of Bart Ehrman in The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, in which he demonstrated that a great many of the textual alterations which critics traditionally weed out of their texts and then ignore can be accounted for as theologically motivated attempts to render the text unfriendly to "heretical" exegesis, a kind of built-in "prescription against the heretics," a booby-trapped text. What had been cursorily dismissed by scholars as a pile of random goofs wound up disclosing an apologetical pattern of redactional alteration. As Collingwood might have said, the variant readings turned out not to be evidence for the original text, but that didn't mean they weren't evidence for something else. And in just the same way, Eisenman has cracked the code of the strange name lists of the New Testament.
His working hypothesis is that the confusions, alterations, and obfuscations stem from an interest in covering over the importance, and therefore the identity, of the desposyni, the Heirs of Jesus, who had apparently functioned at least for Palestinian Christianity as a dynastic Caliphate similar to the Alid succession of Shi'ite Islam or the succession of Hasmonean brothers. It is a commonplace that the gospel texts treating Jesus' mother, brothers and sisters either severely (Mark and John) or delicately (Luke, cf., the Gospel according to the Hebrews) are functions of ecclesiastical polemics over their leadership claims as opposed to Peter and the Twelve (analogous to the Companions of the Prophet in Sunni Islam) or to outsiders like Paul. It is equally well known that the Synoptic apostle lists differ between themselves and between manuscripts of each gospel. Why? Eisenman connects these phenomena with another, the confusion arising among early theologians over the siblings of Jesus as the doctrine of Mary's perpetual virginity became widespread. They had to be harmonized with the dogma, so brothers and sisters became cousins, step-siblings, etc. And characters became sundered. Mary suddenly had a sister named Mary because the mother of James, Joses, Simon, and Judas could no longer also be the mother of Jesus. And so on.
The Gospels give prominence to an inner circle of three: Peter, John son of Zebedee and John's brother James. And Galatians has the Three Pillars in Jerusalem: Peter, John son of Zebedee, and Jesus' brother James. What happened here? Surely the gospels' inner group of three is intended as preparatory for the Pillars, to provide a life-of-Jesus pedigree for the Pillars. But then why are there two different Jameses? Mustn't they originally have been the same? Eisenman says they were, but certain factions wanted to play up the authority of the shadowy college of the Twelve against the earlier authority of the Heirs and found it politic to drive a wedge between James the brother of Jesus and the Twelve, so James becomes James the Just on the one hand and James the brother of John on the other.
Another attempt to distance James the Just from the Companions of Jesus was the cloning of James the Just as James the son of "Alphaeus," which name Papias says is interchangeable with "Cleophas," who happens to be the father of Simeon, James' successor as bishop of Jerusalem and his brother as well. And eventually James the son of Alphaeus and James son of Zebedee both replace James the Just in the circle of disciples. Meanwhile, Thomas has similarly undergone mitosis into Judas of James, Thaddaeus, Theudas (=Thaddaeus + Judas), Lebbaeus, and Judas Iscariot. Simon the Zealot is Simon bar Cleophas and may be Simon Cephas as well.
Eisenman has worked out a complex and coherent grammar of these processes of what Derrida would call "slippage along the chain of signifiers." His theory of the doubling of characters and names here is close to that of Rene Girard, a spontaneous methodological parallel (see my article, "In the Beginning Was the Deed: A Neo-Girardian Approach to the Passion Narrative," Forum, 9 [September/December, 1993], 257-303). Eisenman ends up with a much-reduced circle of "the Twelve," most of them being aliases and replacements for the brothers of Jesus. This will outrage some, but other readers will find the theory ringing true against the otherwise odd fact that the Twelve are such shadowy non-entities in the New Testament.
Third, Eisenman brings to bear on the narratives of Acts the model of a "mix and match" redactional technique whereby Luke is seen to have composed his stories by recombining the salient features of very different stories from his sources. When Luke finishes, only bits of either the paradigmatic or syntagmic composition of the originals are left, but there is enough to recognize the one as the mutation of the other. This is the procedure used recently to great effect by a number of scholars, not least John Dominic Crossan (who shows the Passion Narrative to be built up from various Old Testament proof texts), Randel Helms (who in Gospel Fictions shows case after case of a gospel story's derivation from a similar Septuagint story), and Thomas L. Brodie (who unscrambles numerous Lukan tales into their original Deuteronomic components). Eisenman's originality at this point lies not in the technique but rather in his willingness to take seriously Luke's use of Josephus as a source. (Again, this is something no one who wants an early date for Luke or a historical basis for Acts is likely to consider seriously, but then we have another case of apologetics masquerading as criticism.) And Eisenman's redactional analyses of Luke on Josephus provide but one of the major advances of James the Brother of Jesus. It seems not too much to say that the book ushers in a new era in the study of Acts. This is not to say, however, that Eisenman limits his use of the technique to Luke's use of Josephus. Far from it: he is able to distil traditions from various sources and to identify them in their new guises in Luke-Acts and elsewhere in the New Testament. I propose now to provide summaries of a few of Eisenman's reconstructions, showing in broad outline what he sees Luke (or others) having made of originally quite different traditions.