Robert Eisenman, The New Testament Code: The Cup of
the Lord, the
Damascus
Covenant, and the Blood of Christ.
London:
Watkins. 2006.
Reviewed by Robert M. Price.
Readers of the present periodical will not find
themselves altogether unprepared for the arguments of this massive
sequel to Professor Eisenman’s great opus James the Brother of Jesus
(1998). But they will still find plenty of surprises. Before we give
attention to some of them, let us observe that the book is a very great
challenge to read. Those who found James the Brother of Jesus too
long, too redundant, too circuitous, will only find those sins magnified
here. One almost feels Eisenman, like an apocalyptic scribe, wants to
make his readers prove their mettle by working for the pay-off. Reading
the book, despite its very fascinating revelations, must frankly be
called an ordeal. One is inevitably put in mind of one’s adolescent
determination to embark on reading the Bible straight through, only to
get bogged down in Numbers or Deuteronomy. But you are just going to
have to soldier on. It is worth the time. Whether Eisenman is correct in
his apparent conviction that it is necessary to cover every relevant
document, surveying all possible cross references, and doing it again
every time he comes to the same item in the next document, I cannot say.
But he does make his case that there is an inescapable commonality of
terminology and conceptuality, sometimes used ironically or satirically,
between a mass of texts which need to be placed together on a mental map
if one is to grasp the shape of the religious world in which they all
float as continents.
And the first
achievement of The New Testament Code hard won through this
methodology, is the realization that the Dead Sea Scrolls stem from the
mid to late first century CE (equivocal Carbon dating results no longer
even being relevant), and that they represent the sectarian baptizing
Schwärmerei known variously as the Essenes, Zealots, Nasoreans,
Masbotheans, Sabaeans--and Jewish Christians headed by James the Just.
Endless references to the armies of the Kittim and “the kings of the
Peoples” make the date clear even before we get to the catalogue of
terminological and conceptual links between the Scrolls, the New
Testament, and the Pseudo-Clementines. I should say that in all these
comparisons Eisenman has established a system of correspondences fully
as convincing, and for the same reasons, as the Preterist interpretation
of the Book of Revelation by R.H. Charles and others. I just do not see
any room for serious doubt any more. Teichner was right; Eisenman is
right: the Scrolls are the legacy of the Jerusalem Christians led by the
Heirs of Jesus: James the Just, Simeon bar Cleophas, and Judas Thomas.
The Teacher of Righteous was James the Just (though Arthur E. Palumbo,
Jr., The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Personages of Earliest Christianity,
2004, may be right: as per Barbara Thiering, John the Baptist may have
been the first to hold that office, with James as his successor). The
Spouter of Lies who “repudiated the Torah in the midst of the
congregation” was Paul. It was he who “founded a congregation on lies,”
namely the tragically misled “Simple of Ephraim,” converts from among
the Gentile God-fearers who knew no better. The Wicked Priest was Ananus
ben Ananus, whom Josephus credits with lynching James on the Day of
Atonement.
Granted,
Eisenman indulges in overkill, flooding the reader with so many
convergences of language and basic concepts that the unsympathetic
reader may dismiss him as simply documenting a common atmosphere of
belief and language characteristic, not of specific sects (or factions
of sects), but of the period in general. But there is a smaller set of
correspondences which are sharp enough to persuade us that, e.g., 1
Corinthians 10 is using a specific portion of the Covenant of Damascus
(a well-known ancient document, as its presence in the Cairo Genizah as
well as Qumran suggests), namely column III, 2-7 (p. 919), or that the
Habakkuk Pesher means to refute Paul’s use of the famous Habakkuk 2:4
(see pp. 903-904). These comparisons are as telling as that which
persuades us that James 2:14-24 means to refute Romans 3:27-4:5ff.
Ironically,
all these correspondences serve as collateral evidence for a much
clearer basis for identifying early Christianity with the sect of the
Scrolls. Have you ever read the truism that the Scrolls neglect to name
their parent body? And yet their sect is again and again called both
“the Poor” (Ebionim, Ebionites) and “the Way.” These, of course,
are the earliest known self-designations of Christians, as Acts tells
us, long before they were called “Christians”--by outsiders. The refusal
to recognize the identity of the nomenclature, and therefore of the
groups behind them, is astonishing and attests a simple unwillingness to
factor the Scrolls into Christian Origins on such an integral level.
Even so, Eisenman’s reading of the Scrolls tells us much about the dawn
era of Christianity, certainly more than some will want to know. But
with The New Testament Code we have reached a crossroads. Will we
begin to take into account all this new data and move forward along the
indicated lines? Or will we continue to temporize and find new excuses
to isolate our conventional assumptions and play in the pool of Eusebian
apologetics?
Eisenman
recapitulates the basic outlines of his discoveries about James’ role as
obscured by Acts. The election of Matthias to replace Judas Iscariot is
a mask for the election of James the Just to replace the absent Jesus as
his caliph (the root reference behind the epithets of both “James
of Alphaeus” and Simeon bar-Cleophas,” both meaning the
same thing). James’ name, a la Noth’s redundancy principle, remains in
the text, albeit shouldered aside, in the guise of the other nominee for
the job, “Joseph bar-Sabbas Justus.” (Why even retain the name,
unless there is another purpose?)
James
bar-Zebedee is another fictive double for James the Just, and his
elimination in Acts 12:2 is merely the dropping of the mask before James
the Just can appear in his own name in chapter 15.
James was a
rainmaker like Elijah, Honi the Circle-maker, and Hanan the Wise.
Nathanael is another mask for James. Jesus finds him, conspicuously,
sitting beneath a fig tree, the posture of rain-makers, as they waited
(in a gesture of anticipative, imitative magic) for their prayers to be
answered. And Jesus tells him he will, like the Genesis Jacob,
witness heaven open, revealing the Son of Man, which Nathanael does not
see in John but which James does see, at his martyrdom, according to
Hegesippus.
James’
stoning to death after proclaiming his vision of the Son of Man standing
in heaven has been (as Hans-Joachim Schoeps first noted) changed into
the martyrdom of Stephen after announcing the same vision.
But Eisenman
adds more. For instance, he argues that the resurrection appearance of
Jesus to James the Just in the Gospel according to the Hebrews is the
origin of both Luke’s Emmaus Road story and John’s Doubting Thomas tale.
Here is the ostensible original:
Now the
Lord, when he had given the linen cloth to the servant of the priest,
went to James and appeared to him, for James had sworn that he would not
eat bread from that hour wherein he had drunk the Lord's cup until he
should see him risen again from among those who sleep. And he said to
him, "Hail!" And he called to the servants, who were greatly amazed.
"Bring," said the Lord, "a table and bread." He took bread and blessed
and broke and gave it to James the Just and said to him, "My brother,
eat your bread, for the Son of man has risen from those who sleep."
In the Emmaus
story, Jesus appears to a pair of disciples who are pointedly not among
the twelve. One is named Cleopas and is therefore to be identified as
Simeon bar-Cleophas. He is, of course, one of the brothers/Heirs of
Jesus, as is James. And then who must his companion be? James himself!
His name and Simon’s (deferred till Luke 24:34, so as to make him into
Simon Peter) have been changed because of the factional rivalry
between the Heirs and the twelve. The climactic detail of Jesus being
recognized in the act of breaking bread echoes the same gesture in the
Gospel according to the Hebrews version, in which the risen Christ calls
for bread to break the fast James had sworn not to break till Jesus
should rise again. In the Thomas story (John 20:24-29), Jesus appears to
a figure who is listed among the twelve, as we now read it, but it is
obvious that he is not one of them, as the narrator has just said Jesus
previously appeared to the twelve with no hint any of them but Judas
Iscariot was absent. Thomas, though subsequently counted as one of the
twelve, is only one of many doublets in that group, his namesake being
another of the Pillars, Judas Thomas. And like James in Hebrews, Thomas
has made a vow that is satisfied by the appearance of the risen Jesus
(“Until I place my hand in his side and my finger in the wounds…”).
Given the
rapid succession of events involved, it would certainly appear that
James’ execution was the trigger for Jesus ben Ananias, the mad prophet
predicting Jerusalem’s demise, to begin his doom-crying. We already knew
Origen read a text of Josephus which said the people blamed the fall of
Jerusalem on the death of James. It is ironic that Origen piously
harrumphs that they should have traced the disaster to the execution of
Jesus instead, because, as Theodore J. Weeden has shown beyond
reasonable doubt (The Two Jesuses, a monograph published as
Foundations and Facets Forum New Series 6/2, Fall 2003), Mark and
John both based their gospel passion narratives on Josephus’ account of
Jesus ben Ananias. Eisenman similarly suggests that Mark has replaced
Jesus ben Ananias’ prophecy with one attributed to Jesus Christ, the
Olivet Discourse, which was the signal for several of the “Essene”
groups, including the church of the Pillars, to flee Jerusalem while
they had the chance, leading to their fanning out through Pella to
farther fields.
Eisenman’s
broadest goal is to show how the Greek gospels are products of a
Paulinized, Hellenized, completely non-Jewish retrofitting of the
tradition. The underlying reality must be speculatively pieced together
by comparisons between gospel materials and apparently related texts
from the Mishnah and Talmud, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Josephus, and
Ebionite sources. Very often, all we may find is a series of sets of
motifs that seem to have, as he puts it, “reverberated” between
documents and traditions, forming very different stories as the motifs
gradually combined into various “multicellular organisms” of different
sorts. Eisenman spends the first several hundred pages trying to reel in
these minnows and to reconstruct the schools of fish they used to swim
in.
The most
straightforward set of cases cluster about the gospel transformation of
stories of neo-Joshua prophets and Samaritan messiahs leading their
flocks of four hundred or four thousand or five thousand into the
wilderness to witness a miracle which will commence the liberation of
the messianic age. When Jesus is shown multiplying food for such crowds
in the wilderness, we certainly have gospel reworkings of these stories
originally recounted of Theudas the Magician, the unnamed Egyptian
prophet, and the Samaritan messiah whose followers Pilate ambushed on
Mount Gerizim. The secondary nature of the gospel versions is evident
from the fact that Palestine contained no genuine deserts such as the
stories require. But the connection is even more manifest from the fact
that John’s version pointedly raises the question of whether Jesus
should be made king by force—only to dismiss it (6:15). Thus also Paul
is asked whether he is not the Egyptian who led the Sicarri out into the
desert (Acts 21:38), to give him the opportunity to deny it.
And remember,
“Theudas,” as in the Nag Hammadi Apocalypses of James, is another
version of Thaddeus. Eisenman also makes Theudas a version of Judas
Thomas. Was it he who promised to make Jerusalem’s walls collapse? As
for the Samaritan Pilate killed, he must have thought himself the
Restorer (Taheb), and Eisenman sees a refracted glimmer of this
hero when Peter resurrects Tabitha in Lydda, all the more since
the Samaritan messiah’s followers rallied at Tirathaba. Speaking
of Lydda, Rabbinic tradition tells us of the crucifixion there of a
Messiah ben Joseph who was named either Doetus or Dortas
(originally perhaps the messianic Dositheus of Samaria), who
shows up cross-dressing at Lydda as Dorcas, Tabitha’s other
name!
All this
represents a bowdlerizing of precisely such traditions, “cleaned up” for
the gospels, i.e., for Gentile consumption. Much less straightforward
(which is perhaps why Eisenman takes so incredibly long tying the ends
together, and that pretty loosely) is another set of stories sharing
DNA, and not necessarily dominant strands). Hang on. First there is the
story in Mark 7:24-30 and Matthew 15:21-28 in which a Syro-Phoenician
woman (a Gentile) begs a reluctant Jesus to heal her devil-possessed
daughter back home. Demon exorcism is the ostensible topic, but the
story turns on the issue of dining at table and of the proper dinner
guests’ food falling off the table to the dogs. Eisenman implies that
the story means to deal not just generally with the Gentile Mission
(true enough as far as that goes), but specifically with the issue of
Jewish-Christian table fellowship with Gentiles. The reader is to think
of how “what Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons, not to God”
(1 Cor. 10:20). But Jesus, allowing that Gentile “dogs” may eat what
falls from (Jewish-) Christian tables, seems to resolve the issue in a
manner acceptable to the author of 1 Corinthians 10:25: “Eat whatever is
sold in the meat market without raising questions of conscience.”
That would
also seem to be the/an underlying issue in Luke’s version of the same
story, the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. Here the dogs that
greedily devoured crumbs falling off the table in Mark and Matthew have
become those who lick the wounds of the skeletal Lazarus, who wishes he
might eat the scraps from the rich man’s table. He has taken the place
of both the dogs and the daughter. Luke derives his canines from the
dogs who came to the Rich Man ben Kalba Sabu'a’s door but always went
away not "wanting to be filled" as in Luke’s substitution, but
rather the opposite: always "filled."
Especially in view of Scott Morshauer’s exegesis of the parable in a
recent issue of this periodical, it is evident that the Gentile taint of
the Syro-Phoenician mother has become the Idumaean taint of Dives, since
he patently stands for the faux-Jewish scofflaw Herod Antipas. (She has
also become the sinful woman in Luke 7:36-50, whom Jesus defends against
“Simon the Pharisee,” i.e., the historical Simon Peter as depicted in
Galatians 2:11ff and Acts 10:14.)
Lazarus will
meet us again in John 12, at a feast served by his sisters Miriam and
Martha, at which Miriam anoints Jesus with perfume, as did the sinful
woman of Luke 7. And these two ladies stand for a pair of supremely
wealthy daughters in Talmudic tradition. One of these was Miriam,
daughter of the rain-maker Nakdimon, the other Martha, daughter of the
Sadducee Boethus. Miriam was so spoiled that she required a daily budget
of 400 dinarii just for perfume. Whenever she walked to synagogue, her
servants laid a path of richly embroidered cushions for her to tread
upon so that her dainty feet might never touch the dirty ground. (The
cushions were then given to the poor.) The expensive perfume has become
that “wasted” upon Jesus (instead of being sold for the poor) by the
unnamed woman (Mary Magdalene) in Mark and Matthew, Luke’s “sinful
woman,” and Mary in John. The cushions have become the clothing spread
in his donkey’s path by Jesus’ fans on Palm Sunday. Nakdimon is
Nicodemus who joins Joseph of Arimathea to bury Jesus, smearing him in a
fantastically huge amount of funeral perfume (John 19:39).
The
anticipated stench of Lazarus, thought to be dead (or actually dead but
soon-to-be-revived) derives from another reek arising from a tale of
Johanon ben Zakkai, who made his escape from Jerusalem, being passed
through the Roman lines as a corpse in a coffin. To simulate the stench
of decomposition, the Rabbi had to carry a mouthful of dung. But,
despite the stench, he sprang alive from the coffin. The filthy smell
reminds us of Paul’s reckoning his former, spotless record of
Torah-observance as mere dung (Philippians 3:8) when compared to
Christian devotion without the law. The latter would be symbolized by
the perfume with which Jesus is anointed, and which fills the “house”
(i.e., the inhabited world) with the anointer’s fame. And of course,
unenlightened Jews can be expected to recoil at the sweet savor of
gospel preaching as if it were the stench of decomposing flesh (2
Cor.2:14-16). Again, when we read of Jesus filling the pallid Jewish
ablution jars with heady Christian wine in John 2:6-11, we are to think
of the many cisterns filled in a time of drought by the rain-making
prayers of the hasid Nakdimon. Not bad, but not wine.
Whence the
black comedy in Matthew 27:3-10, in which the pious hypocrites of the
Sanhedrin, having just delivered the Son of God to death, scruple over
what to do with Judas’ returned bounty money? Hmmm, they cannot put it
back into the treasury, but there’s nothing stopping them from putting
it toward a cemetery for indigents! Eisenman traces this one to a
Rabbinic report to the effect that Eliezer ben Hyrcanus approved of a
legal opinion ascribed to Jesus that, should a pious Jewish prostitute
donate her evening’s wages to the temple, they might, instead of being
rejected outright, be used to buy a new commode for the High Priest!
(Think of Mark 7:18-19, “Whatever goes into a man from outside cannot
defile him, since it enters not his heart but his stomach and so lands
in the toilet, which renders all things clean,” as well as 1 Cor.
6:12-19, which uses the same motifs a bit differently.) Judas Iscariot
corresponds to the harlot with her hire, which he casts back into the
temple just as she donated it (implying that she had been paid the same
money by the priest whose privy it will now buy—just as it rented her
private parts!). And think of John 13:29-30, where Judas leaves to
collude with the Sanhedrin and some think he is off to make a holiday
contribution to the poor. He is, since the money he has received
from his evil masters is going to end up paying for a burial place for
the poor!
The utter
transformation of Jamesian Torah-Christianity into a Gentile mystery
religion is epitomized by the subtitle of this book. It represents a
Pauline esoteric reinterpretation of the judgment language of the
Scrolls, paralleled in Revelation 14:9: "Whoever worships the Beast and
his statue and allows a mark to be imprinted on his forehead or his
hand, he shall choke on the wine of the fury of God, mixed full strength
in the cup of his rage!” (Cf. Isaiah 51:17; Jeremiah 25:15-16; 49:12;
51:7.), plus the Qumran jargon of “the New Covenant in the Land of
Damascus.” Paul employs a homophonic pun between the Hebrew “Dam-Chos,”
or Blood-Cup (or Dam-mashek, “giving blood to drink”) and
Damascus (the retreat of the James community). In his communion meal he
administers the “New Covenant of the Cup of Blood” of the Christ. If one
fails to discern this allegorical reference to the saving, sacramental
body and blood of Christ (thinking obliviously only of “Damascus” as
Jamesian Christians would), one winds up instead drinking of the cup of
the wrath of God, the classic fate of the enemies of God.
The New
Testament Code
enables us to see not only how wholesale a Hellenization overtook
Christianity, far beyond anything Harnack ever envisioned, but also the
absolute rage of Torah-Christians who understood Paul as Antichrist and
apostate. For the first time, they are not made to look like horned
villains and sinister opponents of a noble Pauline gospel. Eisenman’s
monumental work stands as a new milestone in the progress of New
Testament research. As much as some might wish it otherwise, we can now
never turn back from his revelations, great and small, any more than we
dare retreat from the ground gained by Strauss, Baur, and Bultmann.
Indeed, it is among the ranks of these scholarly titans that we must now
enroll Robert Eisenman.