Dead Sea Scrolls and the First Christians

Professor Eisenman's "The Dead Sea Scrolls" is a must read for the student of religion. It includes an excellent collection of early essays and primary source translations. Professor Eisenman is always original, and his arguments regarding the etymology of "Damascus" alone are worthy reasons to add this to your library.

From this book you learn things that you would never hear sitting in a church pew. It verifies the fact that Christianity is not the true worship and that the earlist believers after Messiah's resurrection were zealous for keeping the Commandments. It also seems apparent that the Book of Enoch and the Book of Jubilees should never been excluded from the Scriptures.

Included in this volume are Professor Eisenman's two ground-breaking works, "Maccabees, Zadokites, Christians and Qumran" and "James the Just in the Habakkuk Pesher," which were first published in the mid-1980's, but were not previously widely available. These classics are a foundation piece of his research on the Dead Sea Scrolls and fascinating for the beginner and scholar alike. Most importantly, these works triggered the debate over the relationship of the Dead Sea Scrolls to Christian Origins, which ultimately led to the freeing of the Scrolls in the early 1990's a struggle in which Eisenman played a pivotal role. Also included are previously unpublished papers and essays written by Eisenman and presented at international conferences over the last decade. In addition, this volume provides new translations of three key Qumran documents, "The Habbakkuk Pesher," "The Damascus Document," and "The Community Rule," available previously in the sometimes inaccurate and often inconsistent renderings by consensus scholars, missing the electric brilliance of the writers of the Scrolls.

Book in excellent condition. Eisenman and Allegro, while not in full agreement, are obviously on the right track. Christianity is known to have begun in Israel by Jews. It is well known by those scholars who are not biased that early Christianity was boxed in by Jews and Rome. They chose Rome. And so anything resembling what Jesus (or what ever the title represents) preached died completely around 325 CE when Rome adopted it. I know Eisenman personally. His analysis is without doubt largely correct.

Eisenman takes a great interest in his work and the importance of getting the scrolls out to the public. Not sensational like the "Dead Sea Scrolls Deception" for it was the work on which the sensational book was written. As much as the Christian church would like to downplay these discoveries, there clearly existed a dichotomy in the New Testament between Paul and James. And only a mass interpolation by scholars could have covered the great difference between the Jewish-Christian and Gentile-Christian doctrinal issues. Good job Robert!