Corpus-Paul

[FucciXXV AT aol.com]

In a message dated 4/13/99 12:40:56 PM Central Daylight Time, 
jwest AT highland.net writes:

> Eisenman's views are idiosyncratic (to put it kindly) and he has been
>  virtually completely refuted by those who work on the DSS for a living.  
His
>  notions of James and Jesus are so absolutely unsupportable that there is no
>  one, and I mean no one, who agrees with him.

Even so, I respectfully disagree with Jeffrey Gibson's earlier assertion that 
"James, let alone Eisenman on James" is off-topic.  A major point of 
Eisenman's book is that the Pauline Corpus is to be read as a sort of "music 
minus one" in which the missing voice is James and the DSS, so it seems 
perfectly on-topic.  It's another question entirely whether his theory is 
on-topic but unsound -- which seems to be the consensus.

In any event, I would have assumed James, John, Cephas, and Peter (or 
Cephas/Peter, if it's the same person, which I think is by far the majority 
view but which has always raised a nagging doubt for me personally) would all 
be on-topic, since any reconstruction of Paul's Christianity must take into 
account his relationship with the Pillars in Jerusalem and any doctrinal 
differences with them.

Jim Thorn
Chicago, IL