What is most satisfying about the book is that even when Eisenman is working with well-worn material, he is able to throw startling new light upon it by finding parallels between familiar documents and much-overlooked sources. For example, many scholars recognize that the ideological conflict between James and Paul is the engine that drives the entire New Testament. But Eisenman is able to show that this conflict is identical to the one between Jewish nationalists and the Roman-back Herodian state, which erupted into the conflagration of the Jewish War over exactly the same issues debated by James and Paul. In fact, while James and Paul were indeed well-recognized ideological leaders, Eisenman is unique in his ability to uncover their integrated activities, which ranged to political and even military affairs.

Paul, in particular, was a political/intelligence operative for the Herodian kings, not only before his famous “conversion” on the road to Damascus, but after as well.

Pickup at Page 10, 2.4.5 Saulos bursts upon scene

Opening Statement and QUESTION

There were two messiah-centered movements that appear in the first century:
1) one focused on a military messiah who would liberate the Jewish nation from the oppression it suffered at the hands of the Romans, and
2) one focused on a spiritual messiah who would liberate all humanity from the burden of its sins?

What is the connection between the two messiah-centered movements?

Eisenman puts forth two answers:

1
The spiritual movement drew lessons and inspiration from the military movement but transformed the substance of the military movement into something more “universal”, more “spiritual”, more “Hellenized”.

2
The archetypal personages of Christianity, John the Baptist, Jesus, Simon Peter, and James were in fact leaders of the anti-Roman resistance. The record of their actual activities was mostly overwritten with reverse significance (the reverse of military being spiritual) by the enemies (Rome, the Herodians, Josephus. and other ideological representatives of Rome) who ultimately defeated them.

The question and answers are of profound importance because Western civilization is a synthesis of Hellenic and Judaic cultures. The synthesis took place by the most violent struggle in which Rome (heir to Hellenic culture) defeated the Jewish rebellion. In the course of doing so, Rome (victors write history, the story, the gospels) was forced to incorporate many elements of the Jewish-Roman struggle into the story, the gospels. There is history refracted into the historical fiction of the New Testament.

= = =

Inescapable: the chronology of the gospels and Acts are backdated by decades to the late 20s / early 30s, to some degree.

The core question of whether to pay the Roman tax became generalized into a question of reestablishing national independence and, at a more fundamental level, securing national identity. The resistance that emerged naturally gravitated to the Maccabean ideas and methods that had previously succeeded at essentially the same tasks. And most probably, underground remnants of the Maccabean priesthood regrouped to lead the struggle. That is, the Zadokites at the center of this struggle were probably linked not only ideologically to the old Maccabean priesthood, but genealogically as well.

But the ideology of this new movement, while firmly rooted in Maccabean traditions, went far beyond it. In particular, while it remained acutely nationalistic, the very scale of the project of taking on Rome (infinitely more powerful at its peak than the Seleucids were in their decline) forced the movement to seek a wide net of allies. This in turn led it to a universalist ideology that was able to rally sufficiently broad forces to conduct a serious struggle against Rome, many elements of which were ultimately absorbed by the Hellenic/Judaic “Christian” literature and culture that emerged from that struggle.

pick up at page 13 of 32
3.2 Main Trends of the Resistance

The Scrolls give a startling picture of James’s ideology, one that is free of both self-censorship and the “selection bias” of
early-Christian commentators who had more direct access to Jamesian material than we had until the Scrolls were discovered. Here I give just a few quotes from the Scrolls, which together give some flavor of what James stood for.

The Essenes and their militaristic Quman War Scroll is connected to the first Christians.

On Last Judgment and Resurrection

“Then Truth, which wallowed in the Ways of Evil in the government of Unrighteousness until the time of the appointed Judgment,
will emerge victorious in the world, and God with His Truth will refine all the works of Man and purify for Himself the sons of men,
perfecting all the spirit of unrighteousness within his flesh and purifying it by means of the Holy Spirit from all Evil actions.
He will pour upon him the Spirit of Truth like cleansing waters [washing him] of all the abominations of lying.” (Community Rule)

“These are the secrets of the Spirit for the earthly Sons of Truth, and the Visitation of all the Walkers in [the Holy Spirit] will be
for healing and healthiness for long days … and eternal joy in a victorious [i.e., eternal] life and a Crown of Glory with the
imperishable clothing of Eternal Light”
(Community Rule).

These passages are loaded with expressions that were prized by early Christians, showing the organic connection between Qumran and the first Christians.

Pickup at “Construction of Acts of the Apostles,” p. 25/32

The Story in Which Peter Cuts Off the Ear of the High Priest’s Servant
as He Is Arresting Jesus

Jesus’s apostles were armed at least on some occasions.

They were well-trained in arms: the mere fact that Peter was carrying a sword would not enable him to successfully challenge a trained guard: Peter must have been quite
skilled.

Some of Jesus’s followers were called “Zealots” convinced Kautsky that this was a revolutionary group, intimately connected with the actual revolution that challenged Rome.

= = =
The key historical events in the origin of Christianity are really not those from Jesus’s time. Jesus may have been an important teacher, but there were others of this period of at least similar impact and with a similar ideological line (such as John the Baptist, as well as a very large number of other teachers with different lines—Josephus called them “impostors” and “deceivers”) who gained followings at least as wide as that of Jesus.

The events that made Christianity a world-historical force took place after Jesus’s death, when the movement was under the leadership of James. These events are tracked by Acts of the Apostles, not the Gospels. In this sense, Acts is the key document
of The New Testament.

= = =

Eisenman has basically unraveled how Acts was constructed: the second half is essentially a transcription of a legitimate historical account by a participant who, while not completely forthcoming, is primarily interested in giving a living account of his experiences
and does not shy away from including material that is embarrassing to his friend, Paul. By contrast, the first half is a series of parodies of actual historical events that chronicle the activities of James’s movement (the real heirs to Jesus’s teaching) interspersed with reconstructions (usually as accurate as the authors’ information permits) of Paul’s activities. That is, the authors always begin with genuine historical materials and generally try to remain true to the their chronology, but do not hesitate to “create history” when their aims require it. They achieve this through dazzling literary concoctions that, while loosely based on the historical materials at their disposal, radically downgrade the role of James, make it appear that Paul alone understood Jesus’s message, and transform Peter into one who is
ultimately won over to Paul’s viewpoint (contrary to what we know about the real Peter from Paul’s letters).

It is remarkable how valuable an historical guide Acts is once one has deconstructed its method. For example, because Acts tries to stick to the underlying chronology of its sources, it allowed us to recognize that Paul’s trip to Damascus was in the service of Herod the Tetrarch in Herod’s conflict with Aretas, following Herod’s divorce from Aretas’s daughter, which triggered the murder of John the Baptist. That is, Paul’s letter, by itself, told us only that he had been escaping Aretas by being lowered over a wall in a basket, but not when this happened. But because Acts tries to stick to its chronology, we learn from it that this incident took place soon after Paul’s conversion. Thus, Acts places this event in the late 30s C.E., when, Josephus tells us, Aretas and Herod the Tetrarch were in a war over this divorce.

Acts feels confident letting this information slip because it so garbles the meaning of all events that it describes that it assumes the reader will never be able to reconstruct the underlying story.

Paul is likewise circumspect in giving away his Herodian ties, and it would have been impossible to guess them from his brief mention of the basket incident in 2 Corinthians.

Similarly, Acts believes that it is being devilishly clever in its parody of Simon Peter’s confrontation with King Agrippa, thereby making Peter seem like an advocate of Paul’s theology. And, indeed, for 2 millennia, this ploy was quite successful. Nevertheless, by retaining key elements of the story, and placing it in the proper sequence (after Paul’s conversion but before the famine), Acts ultimately lets the cat out of the bag, that Jesus’s “rockiest” supporter was the same heroic opponent of Roman rule who first confronted a king over the issue that eventually precipitated the Jewish War.

= = =

I do not know of any evidence that Paul’s communities did organically grow into the post-Jewish-War Christian movement, which soon began contending for ideological control of the Roman empire.

What we do know is that almost immediately, there were Christian cells high up in Roman society, including right in the Emperor’s household and, indeed, his immediate family. Recall that Domitian murdered a fair number of these in 95 C.E., and was himself murdered 2 years later, probably in retaliation for this. Thus, it appears far more likely that The New Testament was created by would-be “philosopher kings”, who consciously followed the path advocated by Plato in his Republic of creating a set of religious myths that would enable the ruling classes to maintain ideological control over the masses.

There is a huge “gospel” literature, produced over several centuries [for example how Julius Caesar’s funeral where his effigy is raised on a cross becomes the Easter story of Jesus’ body being raised on a cross ], and yes, this is a plausible scenario for creating some of it.

But something generated a level of internecine conflict in the imperial household that actually occurred just 25 years after the War ended. This level of conflict would require that matters of state be at stake. That is, multiple murders and counter-murders would generally imply acute disagreements on how to run the empire. In brief, key people at the highest level of the Roman state concluded that the situation urgently called for fabrication of a new state religion, undertook to create such religion using Pauline “Christianity” as their anchor point, and made enough headway in establishing this religion to 1) invite immediate retaliation by Domitian, and 2) ultimately prevail.

Pick up at p. 29 of 32
Section 7. Jewish War on the Big Canvass

Once (the first half of) Acts is decoded as a consciously fraudulent history of the pre-War Christian movement that was written several decades after the War, and once it is recognized that the resulting fabricated religion immediately penetrated the highest levels of the Roman court, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that this fraud was a “philosopher king” scheme for consolidating ideological control of the Roman state.

= = =

The Jewish War and the rebellions that reverberated from it did not cause this decline, but they did bring into sharp relief the ideological decay that reflected the deep contradictions in the Roman order. For the first time, Rome met an enemy that it could defeat but could not break, who saw beyond torture and death to a future not reducible to their individual existences. [See the book, The Gospel of God: Romans as Paul’s Aeneid by David R. Wallace.]

And distilling these shocking stories from the front, Rome’s more

farsighted representatives must have pondered how their vast empire could be governed and ultimately survive if its enemies possessed such powerful gods, while they themselves worshiped emperors and Olympians.

Understanding, or at least sensing its future, some tackled the problem head on. Of course, these would-be philosopher kings did not have to craft a new state religion from whole cloth, nor would it have been possible to do so. They started with Paul’s worked out theology [See the book, The Gospel of God: Romans as Paul’s Aeneid by David R. Wallace.], which happily was both fanatically pro-Roman and viciously anti-semitic, and which had the additional advantage of having been forged in the practical struggle of proselytizing. But they also recognized that by itself this fairly abstruse warmed over mystery cult would be accessible to only a rather thin stratum.

To attain the kind of visceral power of Jamesian “Christianity”, they did two things.

First, they created a powerful story of the Jesus man-god [using Julius Caesar, man-god] at the center of Paul’s theology, working up a broad variety of source materials to create the Gospels.

Second, they grafted Paul’s meager tale onto the much more compelling story of James’s group, transformed by literary magic into an echo chamber for Pauline theology.

Obviously, their project did not immediately achieve full success. But the power of their creation, rooted at bottom in the power of Jamesian ideology (as well as the bankruptcy of official religion), did enable them to sink roots quickly and did prepare complete success in just 200 years. Ultimately, this required a rather bitter struggle, in which Christianity drew strength from both its high-level connections and the indigenous communities distributed throughout the empire that dated from the first century, communities on both sides of the James/Paul divide. To galvanize all of this strength required bringing the Letter of James (as well as a few other like-minded letters) into the canon, even though this document is completely hostile to Paul.

James had a very strong following to the East, and some Jamesian groups (like the Iraqi “Marsh Arabs”) actually survive until this day. Indeed, an entire kingdom came over to the Christians, perhaps more in the Pauline wing at the beginning, but definitely siding with James [and the other Jewish purist, the historical fiction character, Jesus] and ultimately participating in the rebellion at the end. These allies,

though outside Judea [beyond the Euphrates, Josephus says], were undoubtedly a real reservoir of strength, and it is likely that Queen Helen provided financial support for James’s movement.

Parthia would have had an interest in undermining the stability of Rome and might have subtlety, or not so subtlety, encouraged Queen Helen and others in their support of James. Indeed, when push came to shove in 116-117 C.E., Parthia benefited greatly from dissension within the Roman provinces. No one can say how Parthia would have fared vis-a-vis Rome if there had been no Jewish War, no uprisings in 116-117, and no Bar Kochba revolt.

# End of article #

Every great imperial power must create tools, usually accompanied by an ideology, to secure the loyalty of its subjects. … So, the Romans argued for their own superiority as a civilizing power… But the Romans’ view of their “civilizing mission” emphasized their political and military contributions to a chaotic and corrupt world. Everyone knew that Greece was the home of an older and more respected civilization, but even the Greek philosopher Plutarch recognized that Rome’s political genius had restored peace and order to the world.

ps 44-45 Chapter 3: Ethnic Prejudice in Tacitus, Tacitus’ Annals by Ronald Mellor, Oxford University Press, New York, 2011

The archetypal personages of Christianity, … Jesus, Simon Peter, and James were in fact leaders of the anti-Roman resistance. The record of their actual activities was mostly overwritten with reverse significance (the reverse of military being spiritual) by the enemies (Rome, the Herodians–Agrippa II–Josephus. and other ideological representatives of Rome) who ultimately defeated them.