As both Davies and Eisenman point out, the oldest, and most reliable books of the New Testament are NOT those at the front, the Gospels and Acts, but the letters, or "epistles," of Paul - or at least, those that were really written by Paul. (Some are thought to be spurious.) But, while these tell us a good deal about Paul, they do not say much about Jesus. Eisenman says: "Only two historical points about Jesus emerge from Paul's letters: firstly, that he was crucified at some point - date unspecified…, and secondly, that he had several brothers, one of whom was called James (Gal. I:19). In fact, taking the brother relationship seriously may turn out to be one of the only confirmations that there ever was a historical Jesus." There are, of course, other Gospels than the 4 that have been included in the New Testament. Which ones got in and which ones were left out was not decided until about 300 years after the crucifixion of Jesus - and so, obviously, decided by people who had no real knowledge of which were more accurate (if we can use that term at all). In the Gospel of Thomas - which was found at Nag Hammadi in Egypt at about the same time the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in Palestine - Jesus's disciples ask him, "After you have gone who will be great over us?" and Jesus replies, "… go to James the Just for whose sake Heaven and Earth came into existence." This is only one of several indications that James was considered by early Christians to be the successor of Jesus - not Peter, from whom the Catholic popes claim to have inherited their power. Although, according to Eisenman, Peter (Anglicized Greek/Roman), alias Cephas (Aramaic), alias Simon (Anglicized Hebrew) might well have been another brother of Jesus and might thus have been James's successor. He is the only other "apostle" that Paul mentions in his letters, besides himself and James. (Peter seems to have served as an intermediary or messenger between James and Paul on at least one occasion.) And after the death of James and the destruction of the Temple, the Jews/Christians at Rome - the capital of the Empire - might have considered themselves to have been the logical new center of the movement. According to Church tradition both Peter and Paul died at Rome during the persecutions under Nero. Incidentally, Eisenman says that the so-called "Christian" martyrs, thrown to the lions etc., should more accurately be called Jewish rebels, or Zealots. And he has quite a bit to say about equating the Zealots, or Sicarii, with the Jewish Christians of whom James was the leader. Unraveling who James was is a long and complicated task, requiring too much explanation of background and terminology - much of which I am not all that familiar with myself. Suffice it to say that Biblical scholars generally recognize that James, whom Paul describes in Galatians as "the brother of the Lord," was the head - one could say "bishop" or "archbishop" - of the early "believers" at Jerusalem. He and Paul were often at loggerheads. In fact, it was probably Paul - or Saul, as he then was - who, before his conversion, pushed James down the steps of the Temple at one time, severely injuring him. Paul admits, himself, in his epistles, that before his conversion - which happened a few years after the crucifixion - he had persecuted the believers. At this point, I have to mention another book: The Works of Josephus. This is just one of several editions available from various publishers. Flavius Josephus was a Jew - actually Joseph ben Matthias, the son of a priest. He was born about the time that Jesus supposedly died, and took part in the revolt against Rome but then changed sides. He then served as an interpreter, advisor, and interrogator of Jewish prisoners for the Roman General, Vespasian, gaining the general's favor by turning the Jewish prophecy that a world ruler would come out of Judah - the same prophecy that was applied to Jesus - and applying it to Vespasian himself. After all, the prophecy didn't say that the ruler would be a Jew! And soon thereafter, just as Josephus had "prophesized", Vespasian became the Roman Emperor, leaving his son Titus to complete the subjugation of Judea. Josephus was adopted by Vespasian, took the Romanized name by which we now know him, and wrote both a history of the Jewish revolt, and a history of the Jews, which is usually known as The Antiquities. He also wrote an autobiography and an essay answering some scholars who had questioned his other works. His books, all of which are included in this volume, are the only real sources of secular history of Palestine during the era when Christianity got its start. I bring up Josephus now because Eisenman thinks a man Josephus refers to as "Saulus" was the same person as the Saul/Paul of the New Testament. If he is correct - and I suspect that he is - then Paul was a member of the large Herodian family that ruled much of Palestine and surrounding areas, as stooges for the Romans, throughout this era! He would have been a grandson of a sister of Herod the Great and a first cousin of Herod Agrippa I, another king of Judea! I might here summarize what Davies says about Paul's name: In Hebrew and Aramaic - another Semitic language that was then the dominant one in Palestine - his name was Shaul, which we Anglicize as Saul. Thus he was named for the first king of Israel, and it means "chosen." He was, evidently, at some point during his missions, adopted by a Roman official. Had his name, Shaul, been transliterated directly into Greek, the dominant language of the eastern part of the Roman Empire, it would come out Saulos. But in Greek this was a pejorative term for an effeminate man - meaning something like "sissy." Paulus, in Latin, means "short," but that is not so objectionable, and there is some testimony that Paul actually was short. It may well have been the name or the cognomen of the Roman who supposedly adopted him. Transliterated into Greek it became Paulos, which I don't think meant anything in particular and so was less distasteful than "Saulos". The book of Acts refers to him as Saul as long as he is in areas where Aramaic was spoken, but as soon as he goes to Cyprus, where Greek was spoken, he becomes Paul, and remains so thereafter. As I mentioned, Paul was not converted to what we now call Christianity until some years after Jesus's crucifixion, and never claims to have known him before that. He says only that he had some sort of vision of a bright light and heard a voice, which he took to be that of Jesus, saying, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?" Within a few years after that he had become a self-appointed apostle to the Gentiles - that is, the non-Jews. If Jesus really did survive the crucifixion, it might actually have been him that Paul encountered; and the shock of seeing him alive after the Romans had supposedly killed him might have been the "religious experience" that converted Paul into a believer. There is no room here to get into the question of the "Resurrection" of Jesus, except to note that even the Gospels admit that he was taken down from the cross much earlier than was normally the case. Josephus casually mentions at one point in his history of the Jewish uprising, that, and I quote, "the Jews used to take so much care of the burial of men, that they took down those that were condemned and crucified, and buried them before the going down of the sun." What the book of Acts only hints at, because it focuses so on Paul, is that, just after the crucifixion, there was a group of Jewish believers in Jerusalem, the leader of which was James, the brother of Jesus, or, as Paul refers to him in one of his letters (epistles), James the Brother of the Lord. James is mentioned in Josephus's book Antiquities of the Jews (Ch. 9) as "the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ." In 63 AD - perhaps 30 years after the crucifixion - after one Roman procurator of Judea had died and his replacement had not yet arrived, the Jewish High Priest, Ananus, took advantage of this power vacuum to accuse James of breaking the Jewish Law, and had him stoned to death. Stoning, incidentally, was the punishment for blasphemy. Until it later became a heresy, many early Christians were said to believe that it was this judicial murder of James, and not the earlier one of his brother Jesus, that led God to "abandon" his chosen people and allow his temple to be destroyed a few years later. This was based on a belief in the power of one righteous man to protect the multitude. You may be familiar with the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Old Testament: Abraham, whose nephew, Lot, is in one of those wicked cities, argues with the angels who are on their way to destroy them. Surely you wouldn't destroy them if there were fifty good men who would die along with the evil thousands. Well, maybe not. Or even if there were only ten… etc. They finally got down to one - namely Lot - but that wasn't enough, and the cities were destroyed (though Lot was warned in time to get out). Eisenman thinks that James and his followers might have thought, based on this precedent, that by being as righteous as they possibly could be themselves, they were sheltering all of Jerusalem, and particularly the Temple, from harm. Thus James's cognomen "the Just" or "the Righteous." But once James was out of the way, there was nothing to keep the "sinners" from getting their just deserts. Eisenman sees James as sort of an alternate or would-be High Priest - just as British political parties, when they are out of power, have a "shadow cabinet". The actual High Priests at this time were appointed by the Romans or by the members of the Herod family - a practice that was, of course, against Jewish law and custom. Here I have to bring up another of Eisenman's theses. And I apologize for having neither the time nor the expertise to present the evidence for it. But he equates the so-called Jewish-Christians of Jerusalem with the group who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls. The so-called experts who monopolized the Scrolls for decades claim that they come from a time about a century before Jesus, but they base this on very flimsy evidence, having mostly to do with styles of handwriting.
Eisenman points out that the Scrolls show the exact same point of view and use the same terminology as did these early Christians. For instance, both groups referred to themselves, among other things, as "The Poor" - thus putting a new light on Jesus telling one man to go and give all he had to The Poor - and both called their movement "The Way" - which, if I'm not mistaken, is the literal meaning of the Arabic word "Islam."
In fact, more than once, Eisenman hints that Mohammed possibly got much of his theology from a remnant of this group, which still exists in the Middle East and is called the Ebionites - which means "The Poor."
Further, Eisenman identifies the "Teacher of Righteousness" mentioned in the Dead Sea Scrolls with James ("The Righteous") himself. Another figure mentioned often in the Scrolls is the "Wicked Priest", presumably the Ananus who had James stoned to death. And another is "The Liar," whom Eisenman equates with none other than Paul!
For, you see, James and Paul had very different beliefs. The difference between their two viewpoints can be illustrated by paraphrasing something Mark Twain once said:
Twain said, When you get to Heaven you'll have to leave your dog outside. Because admission to Heaven is by invitation only. If it was based on merit, the dog could go in - but you'd have to stay outside!
Now, that is Paul's version of Christianity: that admission to Heaven is by invitation only. Or, at least, only for those who "believe." James would have said it was by merit. (That is, by adherence to such rules as would make it a very lonely place!) This, however, is a vast simplification of both points of view. But the argument still continues among theologians to this day about the relative merits of Faith and Works.
Anyway, Paul was preaching to the Gentiles, few of whom - however much they might want to join his movement - were willing to submit to circumcision or Jewish dietary and other restrictions. Paul argued that they didn't have to; that belief in Jesus was enough, because the rules were all changed now - there was a New Deal - or a New Covenant (which was the original title of the New Testament).
James said, no, the old rules still apply. It isn't enough just to talk the talk; you also have to walk the walk. And it is probable that the New Testament book The Epistle (or Letter) of James was probably a circular sent out by James or his community at Jerusalem to believers in other parts of the Roman Empire, including those founded by or visited by Paul, to try to "correct" what they had heard from Paul and telling them that it was not enough just to "believe."
(Incidentally, there were probably, at that time, more Jews living outside of Palestine than in it. King Herod Agrippa I once bragged to his old friend the Emperor Claudius that there wasn't a city in the empire that didn't have Jews in it.)
Actually, I doubt if either Paul or James believed in an afterlife in some ethereal "Heaven". Paul obviously believed that Jesus would be returning very soon and all believers in him would then live happily ever after, right here on earth. Only years later, when Paul was dead and Jesus still had not returned, did Christians turn to a belief in a spiritual afterlife.
And it's doubtful that James believed in even that kind of immortality. He was probably only concerned about getting the Romans and their Herodian lackeys out of Judea, and especially away from the Temple.
This is another of Eisenman's theses: That the family that included Jesus and James and probably Peter, who might have been another brother, and Judas, also probably another brother, was the leaders or coordinators of various groups of Jews who were opposed to the Romans and Herodians! And they probably played an important part in the revolt that led to the destruction of the Temple and even of the later revolt by one Bar Kochba a couple of generations after that, in 135 AD. As a result of this later revolt, the Romans banned all Jews from Jerusalem and even changed its name to Aelia Capitolina.
In early Christian tradition, this family or group is known as "the Desposyni". I don't know enough Greek to say what that means, other than that the resemblance to the word despot might indicate it has something to do with leadership.
It was another two centuries before Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. During those years - say, 10 generations - few people, organizations, or writings that were critical of the Romans were allowed to survive.
So what we have to understand about both Christianity and modern Judaism is: that what they are now is descended from what was able to survive the Romans! Paul's version of Christianity was apolitical. "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's" it has Jesus say.
But one group that did not survive - except, possibly, as the tiny Ebionite sect - is the group now known as Jewish (or primitive) Christians; that is, James's form of Christianity. But the militant Islam that we now find ourselves - meaning the West - beset by, might very well be the spiritual and theological heirs of James, the Brother of Jesus, who in his day was also anti-Western - that is, anti-Roman!
And I might conclude with another quote from Eisenman's book: "Who and whatever James was, so was Jesus."