Controversial Interview on Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls - Robert Eisenman

Wikipedia:

Robert Eisenman (born 1937) is an American biblical scholar, historian, archaeologist, and poet. He is currently professor of Middle East religions, archaeology, and Islamic law and director of the Institute for the Study of Judaeo-Christian Origins at California State University Long Beach.

From about 1986 onwards, Eisenman became the leading figure in the struggle to release and free the Dead Sea Scrolls.

An excerpt from the interview with Robert Eisenman in the video below (10:54 – 19:25):

“Most of the scholars of the scrolls don’t go anywhere except “is this word correct, is that word correct” the paleography, the handwriting. They don’t know they’re covering anything up. They don’t recognize anything here as familiar to them in the Christianity that they know, but they don’t know that the Christianity that they know was actually a Greco-Roman production that had very little to do with what was going on in Palestine at the time. 

. . .They were trying to say that the scrolls weren’t Christian because, as I was telling you, you can’t have a document that says hate the sons of the pit, that is preaching a final Apocalyptic war against all evil on the earth, that thinks the holy angels are warrior angels, that they have to be totally pure, . . .they think they don’t have enough power to deal with the might of the Roman Empire, they need the holy angels who are warrior angels to join their camps as they call them where they’re living in order to defeat the might of Rome. They want to defeat the might of Rome. 

Now, this is not Christianity as we know it. This is messianism in Palestine. These hosts of warrior holy angels and the men of the scroll community are going to be led by the Messiah in this final Apocalyptic war against all evil on the earth. So what is supposed to happen in their view? And this is in the war scroll, the war of the sons of Light against the sons of Darkness. Nobody who’s a believing Christian can say this is a Christian document. They just wouldn’t recognize it as such. But it’s a messianic document. 

And that’s what I tried to begin to clarify. I didn’t know it either. But as I taught this material and I began to read through it, and I knew the establishment’s reigning theory of scroll studies I began to see that these did not fit the picture of the materials that I was teaching in my classes. So what I was finding is that in the scrolls, and it’s fairly consistently so, the scrolls are really pretty consistent, they don’t have a document that’s opposing another document, the whole mindset is more or less the same across the spectrum, is that they’re very aggressive, apocalyptic messianism. So I started calling this the Messianic movement in Palestine. 

I even went further. And this is more recently. I got more sophisticated. The documents of the scrolls were speaking about the sons of Zadok, who was the High Priest in David’s time. Zadok can also translate into Hebrew as zdk, as righteousness. So they were playing around with these concepts; righteousness, priesthood, high priesthood and so on. Since the group in Josephus, the historian of the period, that is supposed to represent the priesthood are called the Sadducees, coming from the word zadok, and you can see that the Sadducees in the New Testament are supposed to be the priestly class. 

The only problem is the Sadducees in the New Testament, or the Gospels shall we say, are collaborating Sadducees. Sadducees collaborating with the Herodian upper class monarchy imposed upon Palestine by the Roman Empire and the Roman army. So King Herod came into power with the defeat of the Maccabees, the ones that the Jews celebrate Hanukkah for. The defeat of the Maccabees in the 40-30 B.C., they had taken over sometime in 60-80 B.C. So by that time the Herodian family, which was not even a Jewish family, actually came from Gaza partially and partially across into Edom, Petra, was a mixture of that background, but it became Judaized in order that they could become kings in Palestine. 

So Herod himself was one of these people, and he was converted to, quote, “Judaism.” But this was nothing like the dead sea scrolls Judaism. It was a Pharisees kind of Judaism. That’s why most people think of Judaism as Pharisee Judaism. And the New Testament thinks of Judaism as Pharisee Judaism. And the Sadducees are the high priests, but they’re not all the high priests.There’s opposition high priests.

Now the academic establishment, that was in control of the scrolls, were more interested in translating the documents and didn’t really come to terms with the meaning of the documents themselves. So when they saw the term ‘Sons of Zadok’ there it didn’t ring a bell to them that these could be Sadducees. How could these documents be Sadducees? No, no, no. These are Essenes. But, you see, they’re opposition Sadducees. They’re Sadducees following the Maccabees who were thrown out of power and went into exile. But they do claim Zadokite Sadducee descent. But they are aggressive, anti-Roman, anti-Herodian, anti-Establishment, pro-Temple, form of Sadducism. So I started calling these messianic Sadducees.

Video Title: Controversial Interview on Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls- Robert Eisenman. Source: Faith Overhaul. Date Published: September 26, 2018. Description:

In-depth interview with Dr. Robert Eisneman 2018. Dr. Eisenman is asked detailed questions and provides direct responses to historical events and groups that have been misrepresented by mainstream doctrines about Jesus, James, Paul, the expected Messiah, and prophesied apocalypse.Dr. Eisneman is a key player in getting information out to the public about the content and context of the Dead Sea Scrolls writers, and the community of Messianic followers and Zealots for YHWH (God). These were the priests that were overthrown during the Hellenisation of Judea. Details are deep and the relevance is critical to our understanding of what went on with the communities that were active during the time of the Messiah Jesus, the disciples (Zealots) and Paul. Finally how we got the gospels and new testament writings after the dust settled.