Beyond Dogma! Reclaiming Primitive Christianity Part 1 with Dr. James Tabor on Jesus's Jewish Origins, the Ebionites and the Dead Sea Scrolls: Season 2 Episode 2

Episode Transcript
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(00:09):
All right, welcome to the Pulling the Threads podcast,
where we dig deep into the history, histories, mysteries,
and ideology shaping our world, always with an eye towards
textual criticism and the historical critical method.
Today, I'm honored to get to speak with someone whose
scholarship has challenged mainstream assumptions and
offered fresh perspectives on the origins of Jesus.
Doctor James Tabor Doctor James Tabor is professor emeritus of

(00:32):
religious studies at UNC Charlotte, known for his
groundbreaking work with the Dead Sea Scrolls, the historical
James, Jesus's brother, early Jewish Christianity.
He is the author of the Jesus dynasty, Paul and Jesus and
Restoring Abraham, Abrahamic faith.
All books that I have in my library.

(00:54):
Thank you for joining us to pullsome threads to the deeper story
today. Thank you, Jeremiah, glad to you
can call me James. One correction, I'm not emeritus
at UNC Charlotte. I actually have another position
as a distinguished fellow at Hebrew University.
So I've, I have no connection toUNC Charlotte anymore, but

(01:19):
obviously was there for let's see, 33 years and chair of the
department for 10 years, so. That's quite a long bit of time
to be there. All right.
Well, thanks for that little correction there.
I guess my information was goingoff the Internet, but when?

(01:40):
Somebody retires. Often they assume that you took
the emeritus position, and many do.
Most do. But my retirement was not
retirement. It was almost like taking
another job. And the other job is not Hebrew
University. That's a kind of honorary
position for research. But the other job is I wanted to

(02:03):
go public with my scholarship ina bigger way.
I've done it for years in some ways.
I've had a lot of media presence, as you know, but it's
nice to have your own schedule. And I still work 60-70 hours a
week, but I do it in terms of the things that I want to do and

(02:24):
with my research, my writing, publishing, YouTube channel,
blog, all the rest that you knowabout so.
Yeah, well, it's good to be ableto set your own schedule and and
tap into all that. I think we can come and maybe
discuss some more of what you'redoing near the end here.
But I want to start out, I always like to make it personal

(02:46):
and talk of people's background,where they come from, connect
people with the the personal story a little more and then get
into the nuts and bolts. Let's start with your personal
journey growing up. What was your faith experience
like? Personally, I grew up, my mom
became a Jehovah's Witness when I was 4.
So I kind of had to deal with growing up in that high control

(03:08):
environment. They didn't let you do birthdays
and holidays, and they had a lotof say about what you didn't
didn't do. I'm curious about your spiritual
foundation, perhaps challenges. What led you into biblical
studies, LED you into the study of early Christianity?
Second Temple Judaism for me. Like I said, leaving the cult

(03:29):
was very defining. So it caused me to question all
things, distress, power structures, institutional
religion, and seek historically grounded truth.
What was your experience like? Was there a moment that you felt
you diverge more from traditional Christian orthodoxy?
Kind of. What was your upbringing like?
Yeah, I was raised. I'm the son of a military

(03:52):
officer, Air Force Colonel or Lieutenant Colonel.
So that's important because it means you move a lot and go to
different places. We were stationed in Iran of all
things. That's in the news today.
My father was and went to high school two years in Iran and
England growing up for four years and then various places

(04:15):
the United States. However, our family came from a
strong Texas roots in the Churches of Christ.
The Churches of Christ is nothing like the Jehovah's
Witnesses in terms of just tightstructure, but there are
similarities in that they claim to have restored New Testament

(04:40):
Christianity. They're part of what's called
the restoration movement. Alexander Campbell Barton Stone.
So the Churches of Christ is it doesn't have a control
structure, anything near the Jehovah's Witnesses.
First of all, it has no nationalheadquarters, no national

(05:00):
organization. It's an indigenous movement, an
American movement, but it never claimed to have special
revelation or insights. It's actually a kind of
intellectual movement. Its founders were Alexander
Campbell. These are 19th century figures,
and Barton Stone, and their ideawas kind of enlightenment

(05:25):
thinking, but very conservative.The assumption they're not
historical critical at all. They're aware of higher
criticism, but this is in the 1830s and higher criticism was
just getting started in Germany.So their approach is more learn
Greek and Hebrew particularly know the original language is

(05:46):
very strong. And then if you carefully work
with the New Testament, which supersedes the Old Testament,
the Old Covenant, and particularly with an emphasis on
Paul in the churches of Christ, it's almost as though Jesus
will, he's important of obviously he's the Savior, the

(06:09):
Son of God, everything. They're basically Trinitarian.
But you know, he was under the old covenant and until he died,
anything he said was still part of that original covenant given
to Moses. And now there's the New covenant
starting with Acts chapter 2 andso forth.
So that's how I was raised, but in a group that's

(06:31):
congregationally based like that, with so much diversity
that any congregation, any preacher can sort of be what he
or she wants to be. But it's all he in the churches
of Christ, because they go by Paul, that a woman is not
allowed to teach or preach or whatever there is.
There's flexibility. So you could find a more liberal

(06:53):
church, but liberal might mean something like, oh, they let
women serve the communion, you know, like pass it out or
something like that. Or teach the children,
basically. It's, it's a, it's a very
fundamentalist evangelical movement.
However, like any movement that's over 100 years old, it
starts getting affected socially, culturally, by

(07:15):
modernity, by social changes andso forth, but also biblical
scholarship. So one thing the churches of
Christ have that I'm very thankful for is they have really
great colleges and universities.They tend to be liberal arts.
You might know some of them. David Lipscomb College, I think,

(07:36):
is the oldest Abilene Christian University.
Pepperdine University on the West Coast is near you.
And so because of those kinds ofschools, those are the three
major ones, they have professorswith degrees from Harvard and
Yale and Princeton. And so in the last, say 50

(07:58):
years, when I was growing up, I chose to go to Abilene Christian
University and I loved it. I absolutely loved it.
I majored in Greek and Biblical languages and Bible and history.
And I had teachers from Harvard.There's, they were still pretty
much believers in the kind of evangelical, almost

(08:21):
fundamentalist sense, but they've been exposed to biblical
studies. They took more of an apologetic
stance, but just the fact that you would take a critical course
in the Gospels, but then the emphasis would sort of be, yeah,
they're all these other differences and redaction and re

(08:42):
editing, but God guided at all. And essentially we get what God
wanted and so forth. So there's always this sort of
way of looking at things. So there's a set.
There's a sense in which I'm on a track, as many of my friends
were in those days. This is the 60s of majoring in
Bible, going on for the MA, going on for the PhD.

(09:06):
And I went to the University of Chicago, which is a hotbed of,
you know, the liberal studies and so forth.
And we get affected by it, but in an honest way, I think in
trying to be honest with texts, honest with the history and so
forth. So it's not a matter of losing

(09:27):
the faith as much as over the years, adapting and so forth.
But probably by age, No, I wouldsay 40s.
In my 40s I had my doctorate. By my 30s, I began to not be
affiliated really with any community or anything of that

(09:49):
sort as far as attending church or something like that.
If anything, I've leaned more towards a Jewish understanding
of things. But in part of that came just by
studying the historical Jesus. You know, the shocking news that
Jesus was a Jew and lived and died as a Jew and would have

(10:13):
known more about Pesach and Shavuot and Sukkot than he would
about Easter, Christmas and so forth.
But the Church of Christ is a movement that because they say
we're only going by the New Testament, they have a a a
strain of that already. For example, they're not big on

(10:36):
keeping Pagan holidays similar to your.
OK, Yeah. So there are some similarities,
but by and large they're pretty mainstream evangelical, I would
say, you know. Trinitarian for.
Sins To be saved, you need to bebaptized and accept Christ as
your Savior. You need to, you know, be

(10:58):
receive the Holy Spirit. They're not charismatic in that
technical sense of the American charismatic movement.
No speaking in tongues anything like that.
Age of Miracles is past very rational.
Campbell translated the New Testaments, pretty good
translation actually, for the 19th century.
And he was a scholar, Presbyterian formally.

(11:21):
And their idea was very, I theiridea was ideal.
Let's bring back primitive earlyChristianity.
So in some odd, ironic way, I followed that path.
Now, they would all say, you know, if they looked at me
today, any of them that are stayed with that.

(11:42):
Yeah. But you didn't really accept the
new covenant or you would end upwhere we are.
And I would just have a totally different understanding of
Jesus, of John the Baptist, of James, as you know and, you
know, about my books. Yeah.
So it's sort of the reason I've gone into length here.
Is it sort of an odd way that I left but didn't leave in the

(12:05):
sense that what I'm doing now isactually still part of that
enterprise. And if I could bring Alexander
Campbell back, he could be my fellow scholar and I could talk
to him about it and say, well, you know, we've learned a lot in
the last few years and centuries, or I guess we'd say
decades since you lived. He was like 1830s.

(12:27):
And, you know, restoration movement could very well be a
restoration of a kind of an Abrahamic faith rather than the
kind of evangelical Christianitythat you were familiar with.
So you brought up some really good points there.
I find it interesting that it's good that they encouraged you

(12:50):
guys to study the Greek and the Hebrew.
You know, that's a good foundation to have the, the idea
of restoring A primitive faith. And I guess as we get through
this, we'll kind of get back to that.
I mean, I think intellectually Iwas kind of on a similar journey
where truth is what mattered to me.

(13:10):
You know, the Jehovah's Witnesses pretend to be a
restoration movement of the truechurch, whatever.
I I remember a Seminole experience when I was 8 being
told you had to be, you know, part of the faithful and the
discreet slave and you had to know the truth to become part of
the 144,000 to go to heaven. And I and I wanted that, but I

(13:30):
wanted the truth, you know. And so it was like a journey
towards that. It was.
It's good that they made you intellectual, curious and give
you a good foundation, I think. Witnesses because of Russell,
primarily Charles Teds Russell, I actually admire him a great
deal. He, he wasn't a Jehovah's
Witness as you know he's he called, they called themselves
the Bible students. They're still around today not

(13:53):
very many, but his he he he was similar to Campbell.
They they came out in at different places in certain
ways, mainly because of Bible prophecy.
Campbell was a preterist and therefore he would allegorize
all those Bible prophecies that Russell would take very

(14:13):
literally, like is this we're going to return to the land and
so forth. And Russell gave one of the
first sinus speeches in New YorkCity to thousands of people.
It's a famous event in history where he predicted and call for
the return of the Jewish people to the land.
And that was in the 1800s and that was picked up in the

(14:33):
Balfour Declaration and so forth.
But one thing your movement had and it it even keeps it to this
day is that exegesis from the words on the basis of the words
in connection to the words so that you look up text like what
is nephesh in Hebrew? Often translated soul.

(14:54):
But it actually means a an animal breather, a living
breather. I think, you know, I have a
translation of Genesis. I'll hold it up here because
people might like it. And it is based on taking a more
literal reading of the Hebrew ofGenesis with, I get about 1000

(15:16):
notes in it. And so witnesses are taught some
of that, you know, for example, do souls go to shield or do they
go to heaven? And what is resurrection?
And I actually would say that their method, at least going
back to Russell in some ways, was ahead of Campbell because he

(15:37):
tended to go pretty much with Protestant teaching, You know,
that when people die, they go tobe with Christ.
He would be big on quoting Philippians, you know, I'm going
to depart and be with Christ. Whereas the witnesses and the
Russellites would say, no, wait a minute.
There's a way to kind of put that together in different ways,

(16:01):
so. Well, I have to say my
experience with the Jehovah's Witnesses quite different.
Maybe they've evolved, but by the time you know, my mom had
stillbirths sudden infant, she was kind of going through a hard
time when they came knocking on the door.
And that was why this message, if I have something to serve was

(16:24):
appealing to her. You kind of mentioned when you
went to school like they. Went the organization of
Jehovah's Witnesses is so I don't necessarily like to use
the term cult because of my experience with the Branch
Davidians and trying to protect people's religious freedom and
so forth. But let's, let's say a high

(16:46):
demand religion with the centralauthority that's very regimented
and tries to control the thoughts and ideas of the
members and has things like shunning and kicking them out if
they don't go along and so forth.
Yeah. All of that experienced that
first hand. Exactly, that's the negative
side of it. I'm thinking more of the

(17:07):
doctrinal side of some. Well, no, I was going to get
there and I kind of wanted to cover something you were talking
about when you went to college. Well, one, their translation of
the Bible includes intentional doctrinal influential influence
change to the text that in theirGreek Septuagint that I call it
the purple people eater. They're polyglot.

(17:27):
It's, it has the Greek in the transliteration English of the
Hebrew and the Greek New Testament.
It's interesting in it, it, I mean, I don't subscribe to this,
but it, you know, when looking at the text and looking at Greek
John 11, in the beginning was the word.
The word was, you know, in, in most translations, word was God.

(17:50):
In their transliteration they say word was God.
But in their translation, they add a, which for me was one of
those things when I was really, you know, I started my personal
journey and I'm looking at theirfalse prophecies that didn't
happen, their high control, you know, a lot of the things.
And then I start getting into the text and I'm like, yeah,
they just like, I can see where they added words.

(18:13):
They changed things because of their theological bent.
So, you know, I became to distrust them, distrust the
organization. And then I got this fellowship
because I took up martial arts to learn to defend myself.
And growing up in a, you know, somewhat violent home and
violent neighborhood, I felt like protecting myself was an
important thing. But, you know, martial arts is

(18:34):
of the devil, apparently. So I got this fellowship for
that one. But that was actually a good
thing on my journey. But you had mentioned something
when you were going to school. And this is what I experienced
when I went to Bible college 'cause I went to Southwestern
Assemblies of God University. You know, I remember we did in
Old Testament, there was a briefmention.
It was like maybe a paragraph ofthe document hypothesis, but you

(18:58):
know, there wasn't a lot of higher criticism.
And like you said, they'd mention it, but then it
essentially we are defending a statement of faith versus
studying. What does it mean in the
context? What does the language mean in
context? You know, all things should be
took into context. Not like we take, you know, this
verse, that verse and put it together and then force it.

(19:21):
And that was the thing that frustrated me the most when I
was in Bible college, 'cause I'mlike, I'm here to, I want to
learn Hebrew and learn Greek. I want to learn under what it
means contextually. And, you know, so I mean, that
was kind of like an exploration for me.
And I, I just feel like they're,they're trying to force this
thing in. And you're like, maybe some of
those principles reside somewhere, but they're not the
way you're stringing things together.

(19:43):
And that was probably my. Biggest that apologetic very
similarly, but we can study whatthe liberal scholars say, but
here are some of the reasons that it's not the case and so
don't be carried away by it or anything like that.
So but it's not an honest. I remember for the documentary

(20:04):
hypothesis they would always sayOh well that's an idea that if
the name. Yoda, hey, Vava is used, that's
one source. And if it's Elohim, that's
another source. And as you know, that is not at
all what it is, and it has much more content to it.
But we were never told that. So then they would find some
verses where the redactors mix the two and say, see, look, this

(20:30):
all falls apart. A very naive approach to do the
same thing with, say, authorshipof the Pauline letters.
Course, they're all written by Paul, maybe even Hebrews, but
the liberal scholars say that they're different and the
language and ideas are differentin the linguistics.
But we can explain that because Paul grows over the years and

(20:52):
his language changes and the situation changes and therefore
we would expect them to be different.
And yes, there's more organization.
Well, early on there's not. Later there is what's, what's
the big deal? But what they didn't really get
is why many scholars, including me, including I think this that

(21:15):
probably 7 of the letters are more genuinely from Paul's own
hand and the others are reflecting Pauline ideas as they
were developing and evolved. So yeah, I would concur with
that. And IA little later on, I have a
question more directly to that. I don't know, I might like I had

(21:36):
a real struggle because when I was in Bible college, I
definitely got into apologetics.I mean, I even wrote a article
for it was the Christian apologetics resource CARM
ministry on Jehovah's Witnesses and stuff.
But I started to really become frustrated with this forcing
things that just didn't feel contextually right and didn't

(21:56):
feel intellectually honest. And it really just kind of
pushed me away from, you know, I, I was starting to have
debates with my professors and they're like, oh, you think you
should go your own way because I'm like tech contextually,
linguistically, does this say this, does this mean this?
And I, I was given so much pushback on things that I, I was
definitely moving on that the outward from because like the

(22:19):
somebody's got there and very doctrinally you have to follow
their. I think it was their 16
fundamentals, very Pentecostal thing, but that elect
intellectual curiosity. So I kind of want to move to the
next question here, moving alongkind of to your work in the Dead

(22:40):
Sea Scrolls in the Qumran community.
You know that like when we're looking at, you know, we're
talking about, you know, the document hypothesis, how these
texts come together. I think the Dead Sea Scrolls is
full of a lot of very informational things.
You know, we have the, as you know, the formation of

(23:01):
Christianity and Judaism as we know it post Second Temple.
And what became canonized is theTanakh, the Torah.
We became the New Testament, theOld Testament for Christians.
There were other texts in circulation that you're aware of
with the Dead Sea Scrolls. I know you had some exposure to
with the Moses scroll, which maybe considered one of those

(23:25):
sources that when we talk about the document hypothesis, what
got you involved with the Dead Sea Scrolls and you had some
influence on on bringing those texts to light if I'm.
Correct. That's right.
You want to talk a little bit about your.
Exposure. You want to talk about the
movement or how the text came tolight, or both?

(23:47):
Or how would you want to start with that?
Kind of a brief overview of a little bit of both.
I don't want to get too deep into it, but just a little bit,
well the. The Dead Sea Scrolls are, we
think, a library. We're not sure how many volumes
were in the library, but usuallywe think of 6 to 800 volumes may

(24:09):
be represented because sometimesyou just have little fragments
or pieces. There are some complete scrolls,
but not many. The best known as a complete
copy of the book of Isaiah, all 66 chapters on a single scroll.
And then there are other documents like the most
important is the community rule,which is actually the order of

(24:34):
the community with with it's called Sarah Kayakad, which
means the order of the community, how to run it, you
might say. And then there's the
Thanksgiving hymns. We think some of those even
written by their leader. We don't know his name, but they
called him the more aesthetic, which means the right teacher.

(24:54):
It's usually translated teacher of righteousness, but I go with
John Reeves's interpretation. He's actually a Dead Sea school
scholar at UNC Charlotte where Itaught.
And that's the idea that it's more aesthetic means the, the,
the he's the teacher of righteousness, of course, but
he's also the right teacher, meaning the true teacher.

(25:17):
And they saw him as the prophet like Moses that's spoken of in
Deuteronomy 18. Many of your viewers will know
that passage or they can look itup that Moses said, I'll raise
up God will raise up a prophet like me.
And remember if it's like him, that's whom the Lord knew face

(25:38):
to face and he actually hears the words of God and so forth.
So it kind of sets things up forlater generations.
Certainly Jesus followers thought he might be that figure.
We always say Messiah, but in the book of Acts Chapter 7, and
I believe one other place that that text of Deuteronomy is

(26:02):
applied to Jesus. So the Dead Sea Scroll group
believes their teacher has ordered things and he's now
brought the final revelation. They're very apocalyptic.
They think that the end is very near.
They're reading the book of Daniel in particular, but they
also have other books that some of your viewers will have heard

(26:22):
of, such as the Book of Jubilees, the Testament of the
12 Patriarchs, some of the booksthat are in the Apocrypha, which
is extra books that Catholic Bibles have and early Christians
also read. But the main thing is they're
very sectarian their way or the highway, basically.

(26:46):
They believe they are the true movement.
God has called them out there. They call themselves sons of
light, children of light, and they believe the rest of the
world are are under the power ofSatan.
They're very fundamentalist in that sense.
They talk a lot about belly owl and Satan deceiving people and

(27:07):
so forth. And they basically it's a failed
movement in the sense that what they most hoped for and
expected, a final apocalyptic battle in which they would be
vindicated, did not come about. Their teacher, we think, was
either died or was killed and they tried to pick up the pieces

(27:28):
in various ways, just like the Jesus movement.
I do have a course online that people can go to.
My blog is probably the way to go to look at everything because
it's easy. jamestabor.com, so ifyou know my name, you can find
it. But I have a course called Jesus
and the Dead Sea Scrolls that anybody can sign up for.

(27:49):
And it goes through all of this in great detail.
And I give you all kinds of documents and resources to
study. So I recommend it if somebody's
interested. But as far as the library of the
scrolls, that's what really thrills us because, you know,
some people call them Essenes. I do think the Essene group that

(28:11):
Josephus, the Jewish historian of the 1st century, as well as
Philo and another Roman writer, Pliny, they do describe a group
called Essenes that roughly has some parallels to the group we
know in the scrolls, but they apparently don't use that name
and we're not even sure what thename means.

(28:32):
One possibility that I'm kind ofattracted to is in Hebrew the
word O seem doers. Remember Jesus talked about
don't be a hearers only, but also doers.
Paul talks about the doers of the Torah.
So if that's where the word comes from, as seen really means

(28:53):
O seem hatura, the doers of the Torah.
I like that idea. I think it probably makes sense,
but to the problem is who cares about the names?
The point is we have their documents we can read.
So the Dead Sea Scrolls have three things.
They have copies of the what we call the Bible or that's not the
Old Testament. Every book except Esther is

(29:16):
represented, but not complete copies.
But there is a Dead Sea Scroll Bible.
I have it right here. It's worth having.
Which do you have one? Of those, you have the same one.
Manuscripts in English, and whenever it differs from the
standard text, the Hebrew text, which is called the Masoretic
Text, there are notes. And if I open it, you'll see I

(29:39):
just randomly pick this page andlook at all those notes and it
will say Dead Sea Scroll copy ofDeuteronomy reads this, but the
Masoretic Text reads that and you'll often hear that the
changes are insignificant. Partly true, partly fiction.
Some of them are very significant.

(30:01):
I've done videos on my YouTube channel like the top 10
differences and you know, Dead Sea, Scroll Bible and the
standard English Bibles today orthe Masoretic.
But that's one thing. The other thing is they had
copies of other books, some of which we don't even have, but
some of which we do have, but not in Hebrew.

(30:22):
And sometimes they have preserved them in Aramaic or
Hebrew like Testament of the 12 Patriarchs.
But Co Jubilee, again, not complete but very valuable.
And then they have their own writings like I mentioned the
community rule, that Damascus document, the Thanksgiving
hymns. So we had that would be more

(30:44):
like their New Testament. You might say, you know this is
their writings, so it's somewhatcomparable to early
Christianity. By the end of the 1st century,
what did they have had their ownwritings.
They also had the Hebrew Bible and the Apocrypha and they were
also aware of books like Enoch. For example, the book of Jude,

(31:05):
as you know quotes Enoch accurately says and Enoch the
7th from Adam prophesied saying so clearly the writer of the
book of Jude, whether it was Jesus brother or not, he says
he's the brother of James and most of us think James is the
brother of Jesus. He claims to be probably the
brother of Jesus and what is he?He's quoting Enoch as scripture.

(31:29):
He says he prophesied saying then he quotes Enoch, the Lord
will come with 10,000 of his Saints and so forth.
So the movements are somewhat similar.
That's what my course is about. If you list the 8 or 10
similarities, which I often do in videos, people can go to my

(31:49):
YouTube channel and find all. You can just search it, Dead Sea
Scrolls, and you'll get all kinds of things.
Dozens of videos. They would.
You would come up with an apocalyptic group who thought
the end was near. They believe their leaders, the
Messiah, the prophet, like Moses, they believe they're in

(32:11):
the last generation. This generation will not pass to
all these things are fulfilled. They practice baptismal
initiation into the group, and not just mikvah in general, like
Jewish rites of purity, but literally initiation.
They have all kinds of other parallels.

(32:33):
They say if you ask them who they are, we're the people of
the new Covenant, New Testament.You know, we even call it the
new the. New Testament.
So there's a lot of similarities, their differences
too, They're pretty strict, muchstricter than it appears that
Jesus and his followers were, particularly on things like how
do you keep the Sabbath? The humorous example I always

(32:57):
give because I worked on this atQumran archaeologically and
discovered the toilets at Qumran.
So outside of Qumran, where theylived out by the north edge of
the Dead Sea, the northwest edge, it's just a little bit
South of Jericho. So if any of your people have
been to Jericho, they probably went to Qumran where the Dead

(33:19):
Sea schools are found in the caves around.
So they have a law that says youcannot use the toilet defecation
mainly inside the camp. You got to go outside the camp.
That's defined AS2000 cubits in one text, 3000 cubits in
another. So if you took a cubit as you

(33:40):
know what foot and 1/2 or whatever, it depends on what you
think a cubit is. It's a good way.
So it's it's a little bit of a walk.
That was their definition of an era of for their.
Yeah, exactly. But you.
Can't. But you can't leave your house
on the Sabbath. So they didn't have the era of
around SO. You couldn't they?

(34:01):
Had to wait. And Josephus actually knows this
and he seems to be chuckling about it, but he says, oh, what
a piety they have. They hold their bowels for the
whole 24 hour period of Shabbat.And so I was able to discover
with an anthropologist, Josiahs,because the toilets have to be

(34:23):
outside the camp and they have to be hidden from the view of
the camp. And it just so happened there on
the northwest. So I thought of this and I got
Joe to go with me because he wasthe anthropologist that could do
the testing. And we began to do soil samples
all in that area northwest of the camp.
And it was like a toxic waste area even after 2000 years.

(34:46):
And among other things, we foundlarvae of tapeworms, not live,
but skeletal larvae, which meansthey they would go out.
You're supposed to bury your waist like the Torah says with
the shovel. But if you have a group doing
that for a period of 150 years, which is the period they lived
out there, you can imagine what it becomes after a while in

(35:09):
terms of so that kind of thing. The best example, if you want to
compare Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls, Jesus actually refers
to them once indirectly when he says if an animal falls in a pit
on the Sabbath and he's talking to Pharisees who have, you would
not help that animal out becausethe Pharisees would say, of

(35:31):
course, you know, saving human life and alleviating pain of an
animal. Maybe the animal broke its leg
and it's in pain. You, you can pull it out.
And he says that like, well, of course you would do that.
Well, if you go out to Qumran, no, they have a specific law
that you do not get an animal out of a pit.

(35:53):
So they don't have the kind of thing.
Yeah. So that would show you they, but
they also forbid divorce. And you know what, they quote
Genesis just like Jesus from thebeginning.
It was not. So they actually quote that and
they say, no, originally it was 2, not 3, not 4.

(36:13):
And so they didn't, they weren'tfor polygamy either.
So you know, there's some similarities as far as the
scrolls go, my involvement was early on.
Scrolls were discovered in 194748 through the 50s, but
about 1/3 to 1/4, depending on how you count scrolls because

(36:36):
some of them are fragments, werenever published all the way up
through the 1990s. And there was in the late 1980s
a big kind of cry on among academics, like we need to read
all of the scrolls. But they've been assigned to a
closed committee. No Jews on the committee, many

(37:00):
of them being pretty anti Israel, even though they're
studying the Dead Sea Scrolls inJerusalem at the Rockefeller
Museum, which is at that time where the scrolls were kept
right outside this old city on the north.
And there was just a large outcry to broaden the editorial

(37:22):
committee. And that began to happen before
1990. But various scholars had been
assigned scrolls all over Europeand all over the world really,
but primarily in Europe and, andin the Middle East.
And they were taking a long timeto release them.
They were slowly coming out. So in the 1990s, Robert Eisenman

(37:46):
got hold of the photographs of the unpublished scrolls that had
been made by a philanthropist, Elizabeth Bechtel, as a courtesy
to the scroll committee. Or the after 67, the Israelis
took over the scrolls and thingsbegin to open up.
But even by the 80s, they still weren't out in by 1990.

(38:08):
So the story is that Eisenman was having dinner, I believe,
with Missus Bechtel, and he began lamenting to her.
He's a professor at California State Long Beach.
Now he is emeritus and he said, you know, I work on the Dead Sea
Scrolls my whole career. This is my field.

(38:30):
And particularly on James, the brother of Jesus, in the
parallels between him and the Qumran group.
And we don't have all the scrolls.
And she says, well, would you like a copy?
It's almost like a joke because she had had copies made for
three different universities. I think the Huntington Library,
I believe Oxford had one and maybe another library in

(38:52):
Jerusalem. I don't remember, but she had
also had a copy made for herself.
You know, just like I'm doing this, I'd like to have a copy.
Not that she would read them or use them.
So she gave him the photographs.The way I got involved is he
applied for a job at UNC Charlotte.
We had an opening in Judaic studies.
He didn't end up getting the job, but he brought this big,

(39:15):
thick Samsonite, Samsonite briefcase.
Do you remember those slip open?They're kind of boxed and he had
the photographs in that briefcase.
He said he got in the car at theairport.
I'll never forget. And I'm driving him, you know,
to his interview. Usually have 3 candidates in.
So this he's got, these are two days that he spends with us and

(39:36):
then we decide who we're going to hire.
And he, he pops open the top of it while he's in the passenger
seat and he goes, hey, James, look over here.
Keep your eye on the road. But Glenn, I go to look over
you. He's flipping the photographs,
Prince, and he says, guess what I have here?
And I said, is that the unpublished scrolls?

(39:56):
He goes, yeah, would you like some?
So. So Michael Wise and I and
Eisenman, mainly those two, begin to just publish some, you
know, like, why wait? And so I did publish one of the
scrolls for the first time ever,and it's called the Messianic
Apocalypse. And it does talk about the

(40:20):
Messiah ruling heaven and earth,healing the sick, making the
lame walk, and raising the dead.And it's building off of Isaiah
61, which is that messianic prophecy Jesus read in Luke 4.
The Lord has anointed me to preach good news to the poor and
so forth. And yet that text does not say

(40:42):
raise the dead. However, in Luke 7, which is the
cue source of Luke, these early sayings of Jesus embedded in
Matthew and Luke, when John the Baptist asked through his
disciples, he's in prison. Are you the one or should we
look for another? You read a, you read a scroll

(41:04):
about releasing the captives. Herod Antipas has me locked up
over here at Makaris across the Dead Sea.
How about releasing the captivesif you're the one that's the
background of him saying are youthe one?
And Jesus says go tell John whatyou've seen and heard the blind
see the deaf hear the lame walk.The dead are raised.

(41:26):
He says, well, the dead are raised is not in Isaiah 61.
Yet when Jesus quotes it, he adds that which means he had to
know that scroll. So that was big news bar
magazine published. It was later published in an
academic journal, Journal of Pseudepigraphal Studies by

(41:46):
Charlesworth. And that was big and, and we
violated a kind of academic courtesy there because we got
the photograph and we thought itwas so significant for Christian
scholars to know that that existed, that we just put it out

(42:06):
there in an article. And technically, that was
supposed to be published later whenever this scholar who had
it, I won't give his name, there's no point in saying
anything negative about him. But he had had it for decades
and not published it. So we felt justified in, you

(42:27):
know, trying to advance that. And I've spent a lot of time at
Kurmar, and I've been in the caves, I've excavated there,
been involved in surveys. So a big part of my work has
come from the Dead Sea Scrolls as a parallel apocalyptic
movement. It's got to be exciting to be on
the forefront like that, pushingto bring things out, you know?

(42:50):
Yeah, there's some of the thingsthat that kind of stuck at,
stuck stick out. To me.
It seems like Pauline literature, early Christianity
pulled a lot of ideas from the Enochian text, their view of
angels and demons and apocalypticism and a lot of that
stuff very much influenced by that branch.

(43:11):
I guess that can be found in theDead Sea Scrolls.
You have argued that the Evianites, a Jewish Christian
group, represent the closest reflection to what Jesus family
and followers, likely James, actually believed before Pauline
Christianity took root. And something that I noticed,
one of the the early church fathers made a statement that he

(43:34):
believed that the Essenes, not the Essenes, the Ebianites and
the Nazarenes came out of a group called the Oceans, which I
think is that reference to the Essenes Possibly, Yeah.
And the Ebianites had viewed Jesus as a human prophet who
came to purify the temple. They were vegans because they
didn't want to participate in the on pure temple sacrifice.

(43:58):
And our listeners here are familiar with my critiques of
Pauline's Christianity. As we know the Ebianites, the
Nazarenes, at least the early ones, rejected Paul as a
heretic. And you've already mentioned,
like Eisenman talks about and James, the brother of Jesus,
that there's parallels between the teacher of righteousness and

(44:19):
James's leadership. What?
And you, you started to touch onthose.
What connectivity do you see in in that statement?
Really like how? What evidence?
What's your strongest evidence that the Ebionites or at least
that movement philosophically isthe closest thing to it?

(44:40):
Jesus, his family followers, James and all them likely
believed more so than what the later Pauline and we'll get into
Paul later, but at least the earliest movement.
Where do you get your strongest evidence for that statement?
I would say it's by just tickingoff these parallels and what

(45:01):
makes the parallels so powerful,and I'll, I'll mention some of
the others I haven't mentioned is that none of them would be
true of the Pharisees or the Sadducees, Not a single one of
them. So preparing the way in the
wilderness, yo, from the first gospel, Mark, we think is the

(45:21):
earliest gospel, at least I do. And what does it say?
John the Baptist is preaching? What are you doing preparing the
way in the wilderness? Open the community rule.
What are you guys doing out here?
Preparing the way in the wilderness?
What is that? Isaiah 40, verse 3, a voice
cries prepare the way in the wilderness.
That alone, you know, children of light, children of darkness

(45:44):
in all of Jewish literature, anciently at least I don't know
about modern Jewish literature, The phrase children of light is
only used by Jesus, by Paul and in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
So there you go. You'd think it would be kind of
a nice image. You know, you're children of
white, not darkness. But Paul uses that.

(46:07):
And even though Paul, I don't put within the camp of the
Evenites, the Nazarenes, the Essenes, and whatever you want
to call these Osim group, but heis affected by them and he is a
version still of that wing of the movement.
He leaves the Pharisees. And what has he become?

(46:28):
An apocalyptic Jewish messianist?
Well, very much so. And he tells his followers, you
are children of light, not children of darkness.
That's in First Thessalonians. Jesus also talks about you're in
children of light, walking the light and so forth, but saying
you're part of the new covenant,you're preparing the way in the

(46:50):
wilderness. You are the chosen group called
out from Israel as a whole to bethe special people that are
going to spearhead the coming ofthe Messiah and the end of the
age. All of those things, different
kinds of practices. The Jesus movement set up a
council of 12, kind of it like acabinet.

(47:13):
You know, we would say today thepresident has a cabinet.
So Jesus had a a group of 12 that would be his advisors and
partners and ruling the 12 tribes of Israel.
The Teacher also had a group of 12.
He also had expectations that all the tribes would return and

(47:33):
the messy messianic age would begin.
The temple would be cleansed. I think there are a lot more
parallels than people recognize because our gospels are not pure
Evianite documents. They've been affected, as you
know, by by Paul as well, but they still have a strata and a

(47:55):
level here and there that still reflects that early movement.
So I think Eisenman's correct that there is a broad movement,
let's say about 100 years beforethe time of Jesus, down through
the destruction of the temple in70 and maybe into the bark bar
period, 135 / 100 year period inwhich you almost 200 years or

(48:22):
even 200 years if you go to the end of the 1st century, in which
this messianic movement, he calls it the messianic movement
in Palestine. Eisman calls it the messianic
movement in Palestine. I prefer not to use the word
Palestine just for modern reasons, because it's become so
crazy for people today. They wouldn't know what you're

(48:43):
talking about, the messianic movement in the ancient land of
Israel. And what are they doing
particularly? They're looking at Daniel and
the Book of Enoch, as you mentioned, and they're forming a
kind of, as it's been called by scholars, Enochian Judaism.
Satan is big angels, principalities, powers, heights,

(49:07):
depths, the kind of thing. So Paul is into that world.
He, he knows some of that. He's baptizing people and so
forth. But the problem with the
Gospels, I, I have a book calledPaul in Jesus, for example, I
think you know that book and I have the, I think the opening
chapter is called Christianity before Paul.

(49:29):
And then maybe the second or third chapter is called reading
the New Testament backwards. And what I meant by that was
don't go with Matthew as the first and Mars Mark is the 2nd
and thinking, oh, I want to get to Jesus 1st.
And then later I'll get to the church in Paul because Jesus
came first, because the accountsof Jesus are written by people

(49:53):
that are already influenced by Paul.
So you have to use critical methods to try to get at earlier
layers of the gospels. And many scholars do that, not
just me. But what we do come up with is a
different kind of understanding of Jesus that's not really
Pauline. And you wouldn't have the virgin

(50:15):
birth and you wouldn't have eating and drinking the body and
blood of your deity. You wouldn't have any of that
kind of thing. You wouldn't even have baptism.
The way Paul understands it is this kind of new birth of the
Holy Spirit and becoming a Christian.
You, you might have baptism as an initiation right into the

(50:37):
community like Qumran. So there are important parallels
and I, I think of it in terms ofa stream, Jeremiah, kind of a
stream of movements. So if you have the Pharisees,
the Sadducees, maybe the Zealotsthat are more political, but
they're not exactly a separate movement because they can

(50:58):
overlap. And then you have this other
stream that ends up being reflected in the Dead Sea
Scrolls and the Jesus movement, particularly with John the
Baptist and James and the so-called Ebionites, which just
means the poor ones, that's whatthey call themselves.
Unfortunately, what we know of the Eve unites comes from their

(51:22):
enemies. And so it it's we can, we can
pull out a lot. You already mentioned several
elements. Another element you didn't
mention that might be in the NewTestament, I think, is this idea
of the Hebrew Bible has been corrupted with false pericopes
or sections on animal sacrifice and temple worship, and that's

(51:47):
been added later. And they had no knowledge of
modern critical studies. But guess what critical scholars
today would say? Yes, that's called the priestly
source, you guys. And whenever we have the
priestly source, that's the kindof thing they're into.
Basically from Exodus 25 throughalmost the end of numbers, well

(52:12):
into numbers, you know, you've got all of these regulations
about temple rituals and sacrifices and how to carry out
the sacrifices. So that would be all the book of
Leviticus except for the Holiness code, parts of the
Holiness Code, chapter 1718, nineteen maybe might not be
priestly, but most people think it is.

(52:33):
So the evenites are on to something.
They they are, they already see layers.
And the reason I said it might be in the New Testament is if
you read the parable in Matthew of the Wheat and the tares, it's
in chapter 13, talks about the word of God being sown into the
world, the word of God, that would be the law of the

(52:53):
prophets. And then somebody sowing tears
and it getting mixed together. And the idea is just don't try
to uproot it because at the judgement those false seeds will
be, you know, rooted out. They'll become obvious.
And you get kind of that hinted at in the teachings of John the

(53:18):
Baptist, that God is going to come like a threshing, A
thresher. He's going to separate the good
from the chaff and burn the chaff up.
It's a different analogy, A harvesting analogy, but it's
very similar. So it could be that embedded
even in the New Testament or these ideas that could be

(53:40):
evianoid ideas. Another one I think is in the
Gospel of Mark where Jesus is inthe temple and he is asked what
is the great commandment of the Torah and he answers by quoting
the Shema right? I mean this is about the most

(54:01):
Jewish thing you can do. The great commandment is here, O
is will. The Lord our God is 1 and you
love the Lord with all your heart, mind, soul and spirit and
so forth, all your strength. And then he says, and the second
is love your fellow as yourself.And then the guy who asked him
is not a skeptical critic. He's actually seems to be

(54:24):
learning spiritually. He says, teacher, that is right.
And if we followed those, we would not need all of these
burnt offerings and sacrifices. And Jesus says you're not far
from the Kingdom of God. That's in Mark, Mark 12.
And that's the only place in Mark where Jesus come commended

(54:46):
anyone for spiritual understanding.
Read the book of Mark. Nowhere does he ever say to
anybody, you got it, you got it.You're you're getting what the
Kingdom is. But when a guy finally says, you
know, if you love God and love your neighbor, wouldn't that
kind of be it? And all of this other stuff we
wouldn't even need. And Jesus says, you're right,

(55:07):
you know, you're not far from the Kingdom.
So that's so that survives rightthere in Mark.
And it's repeated in certain ways by Matthew and Luke and
even by Paul, who quotes, you know, love God, love your
neighbor. So, you know, those elements are
embedded in the New Testament. But it takes our critical

(55:30):
scholarship. Today is a kind of a sifting
process we're trying to sift out.
I got a course coming up. It's not done yet, but I do it
with Myth Vision podcast, Derek Lambert, and the new course is
called Christianity Before Paul.It's going to be really big.
People. I, I know people are waiting for
this and I'm going to just read text.

(55:53):
Not going to give you all my ideas, Just going to read text
and we're going to, I'm calling it Christianity and scare
quotes, of course, but because Iwant to attract people to go.
What? What do you mean before Paul?
It's a chapter in my book, Christian Before Paul is where I
got it. And I want to say, well, we have
evidence of a movement that mostChristians have never heard of

(56:16):
that might be more faithful to John the Baptist, Jesus, James
and all the apostles, including Peter, then what we've come to
think was their real message. And that would be shocking and
revolutionary. And yet I think there's a
growing understanding that that might be the case.
So that's that's big with me. That's most of what I do.

(56:40):
I mean, I do archaeology, I do history.
Even got involved with the the David Koresh crisis and trying
to help the FBI with translatinghis worldview coming from the
Adventists and the Branch Davidian movement, which by the
way have some of these same kindof similar apocalyptic messianic
ideas. This stuff is still around as

(57:02):
you know. And so I work a lot on I guess
if you ask, So what am I really trying to do in my work now that
I'm retired or have made a transition in my career?
I'm not teaching full time. I taught at three major
universities and now I'm not doing that anymore.

(57:23):
So what am I trying to do? I'm trying to help.
I think the same thing you're doing.
They're trying to further the understanding of the public of
primitive Christianity, if you want to call it that.
And isn't this strange that you and I in some funny way, would

(57:44):
be doing what our twin heritage is claimed to do?
Maybe. It sent us on this path you.
Know and Russell and, and who is, who's the Rutherford and
those guys rather, I think Russell more than Rutherford.
They'd go, no, no, we need to goback to the original teaching
and well, it's kind of what we're doing now, but we're using

(58:07):
scholarly tools now. We're not just reading the King
James Version and looking up words and Strong's Concordance.
We're trying to ask about layersof things and traditions and
you're pulling the thread is a good idea.
I mean, it really fits because you start pulling that
vegetarian thread, that anti sacrificial thread, all of a

(58:29):
sudden you see, wait a minute, in the wilderness Jeremiah says
God never commanded sacrifice. So why are we reading about
sacrifice in some of these passages in Leviticus when it
says that he never commanded it?This is Jeremiah Chapter 7.
And that takes us back to textual criticism and exactly

(58:50):
sources and all that stuff. You know it's sources and
that's. What I want to do, I, I mean,
it's always, it's fired me up for years is to so I've written
this book. You mentioned it, but this is a
new edition. You might not have seen it has a
similar cover, but it's nice. It's printed more in color now.
It's called restoring Abrahamic faith and you can get it on

(59:13):
Amazon and paperback only the paperbacks out now.
But what I this is just published last month, May 18th.
And what I try to do there is tosummarize the essence of what
that faith would be, but not so much picking Messiah and say,
well, I'm under the Jesus camper.

(59:35):
I'm under this camper, that camp.
But what are the essential insights and teachings if you
took this approach to the HebrewBible and particularly the Torah
and the prophets? Not that the writings aren't
important, but the prophets are very important as well to kind

(59:55):
of get at this. And then you get all kinds of
passages that Jesus quoted. I desire mercy, not sacrifice.
And people don't read that carefully enough.
You know, I think it's the verb Kaphats.
I, I desire. What do I really want?
I want. Loving kindness, not sacrifice.

(01:00:16):
It's actually in Hebrew rather than you know, and then
Jeremiah, I didn't command you for sacrifice, but that
sacrifice stuff gets wrapped into the blood of Jesus and
people get so wedded to it, particularly Christians, that
you just got to have all that slaughter of animals, even
though some of the numbers have to be ridiculous like and they

(01:00:39):
slaughtered 3000 bulls. You know that day.
Well, if you just figure out howmany per minute that would be
just becomes crazy. And there would be so much
refuse and blood and so forth that would stop up the kids run
for the next 6 months and cause disease epidemics to break out.

(01:01:00):
But we know a lot of that stuff is not valid.
But I'm interested in I mean my guys are and I've added the
women now too because I have another book not out yet, but
you can pre-order it. This is just kind of a review
copy called the Lost Mary. So my new panoply is Mary, the

(01:01:21):
mother of Jesus, Jesus, John theBaptist, James, and all the
followers that came after James and begin to say let's preserve
this ancient way. And I would put Mary Magdalene
in there. From what we know of her, we
don't know much about her, but she seems to be close to Jesus

(01:01:43):
and to be intimate with the family and so forth.
So in some of the apocryphal texts we do get her speaking
more and teaching a kind of essence of the faith.
So I'm still drawn to that very much personally as well as, but
I don't go to the synagogue, I don't go to any church.

(01:02:07):
We have our family practices that we do in a kind of a loose
way. But I would say most of my
academic approach is reflective of what I'm interested in.
And so these are the things thatI'm very interested in.
Yeah, I want to. I have some questions directing

(01:02:28):
us down to answer a couple of these questions.
I want to ask you a little bit more about the Ebionites.
Kind of little preface for me. When I look at the early
Ebionites, I kind of connect them to the earliest movement.
I think they're, you know, we find Simeon who's seceded after
James and then I think it was Jude and Simeon.

(01:02:49):
We were on 1/13. He was the leader of the
Ebionites. I know some may put the
Nazarenes before the EB Nights. I think the EB Nights were the
earliest group, the Nazarene split.
I don't know when it comes to the Nazarenes.
You know, we have that statementin Acts that calls Paul the
ringleader, the Nazarenes. I don't know if there's a

(01:03:09):
splinter group of the Nazarenes,but there's an interesting
factoid that I connect is that within the Talmud and rabbinic
writings, they refer to Christians as Nazarenes.
And for me I placed the Nazarenesplit what I would say with the
Ibianites, just as I track it about the time of like 90 when

(01:03:29):
they the institution of the Berkut homonym the benediction
against heretics. Because those that followed Paul
would have been considered heretics by the early Evianites
by the majority of the Jewish Christians in the 1st and 2nd
century. I don't really find Paul finding
favor until Marcia Knight finds his writings and then the Proto

(01:03:50):
Orthodox response to that. So he doesn't start to become
popular until the mid to late 2nd century and as his theology
takes off for the Romans and what becomes Catholicism and or
Orthodoxy, he becomes important later and that's that.
That so much isn't the thing I'mcurious about at this point.

(01:04:12):
You mentioned the the Sanhedrin has Sanhedrin Hagad Dole, the 12
leaders and they had in Qumran and and possibly with James and
his community. You know really your book Paul
and Jesus and Bart Ehrman's books when I was getting into
textual criticism. We're very kind of
transformative on searching and looking in this direction.

(01:04:35):
You you did the preface to the secret legacy of Jesus, which
traces James teaching is always to the founding fathers of
America. For me, I got as far as the
foundings of Islam as a clear line of like their, you know,
Jesus was a prophet, not the sonof God.
You know, the the I I So my question right here is like how,

(01:05:00):
how far do you trace the influences of Ebianites?
And then I want to come back with a question more about the
early text, but how far and where do you trace?
That I certainly wouldn't go to the founding father.
I think Jeffrey Boots's book is worth reading.

(01:05:21):
But Jefferson and those guys, they're, they're mixing it with
enlightenment thinking and so forth.
And they're not going to be fondof eating and drinking the body
and blood of your God and thingslike that.
And they're, they're trying to form a kind of a rational
Christianity. But Jeffrey's book is worth

(01:05:42):
reading and I was glad to write the preface for it.
But I think as far as Sabbath observance, which could be 1/7
day, Sabbath observance could be1 sign.
The Adventists and other Sabbitarian groups have been
able to trace that kind of thing, depending on how you read

(01:06:05):
some of these sources into the Middle Ages and into the, into
the 161718 centuries in England and so forth.
But to really get a kind of a full blown Evie night teaching,
I, I think you're right. It, it tends to go E not West
and it tends to go down into theArabian Peninsula.

(01:06:30):
And certainly Eisenman actually has worked on this some more
than anybody, probably because his actual PhD is in Islamic
studies, not in Christian studies.
And I think he's right that, youknow, Muhammad originally was
for the Sabbath, and then he changed it to Friday.
He was for praying toward Jerusalem.

(01:06:51):
And when the Jews rejected his message, according to the
stories we get, he kind of turned against them and changed
things. But he's probably influenced by
by these kinds of groups, but it's getting very fuzzy at that
point. But Epiphanius, who writes in
the 4th century, he seems, he certainly reports on them, He

(01:07:14):
hates them, but he has some documents and information about
them and he separates the two groups.
I don't think there is a easy way just to separate the names
though. The the way it's usually done is
the Evianites don't like Paul and the Nazarenes.
You're OK with Paul and I think that works as a kind of a

(01:07:36):
shorthand for the complexity of it all, but we just don't have
exact sources to figure out. Like 2 streams going down.
But Paul is clearly with Marcionand and post Marcion material
and formation of a New Testamentthat's so dominated by those 13
letters and the book of Acts andthe book of Luke that it's

(01:07:58):
becoming this new thing that is just so different from the
movement originally. But the hallmarks are the thing,
you know, what are the markers? And they would be similar to
some of the markers of Qumran. The Messiah is not God, the size
of human being. Jesus, they did think was the

(01:08:21):
true prophet, the final one who came.
I think they are always going tobe apocalyptic, even if the
delay delay delay N doesn't come.
But one of the things you may have noticed in Epiphanius.
I don't have it handy here, but I would have to get electronic
copies. We don't need to look right now,

(01:08:42):
but in the earlier chapters of Epiphanius when he's listing sex
of the Jews before he gets to Evenites and Nazarenes much
later. So have you found the the
section on the Nazarenes that hehas?
This is pretty Christian and he describes them as very much, I

(01:09:05):
would call them protoebianites, but he calls them Nazarenes.
So I think it has to do with just the way that word is being
used. I usually trace it to Netser,
the branch, and Isaiah 11 where the branch comes from the stump
of Jesse. So it's another way of saying

(01:09:27):
messianic groups, but messianic in the more original Tanakh
sense of Messiah, where there's no idea ever that he's the third
person of the Trinity or he's God Incarnate or anything like
that. That develops in other ways
throughout Judaism down to our own time, you know, pre

(01:09:47):
existence and all that. But very much the idea that he's
a human being as a human father.And the vegetarianism is a
attempt to go back to Eden, forbidding divorce, even though
Moses allowed it. You get these these kind of that
the that the Hebrew Bible has been infiltrated, particularly

(01:10:10):
the Torah with these priestly temple ideas that God did not
originally give. Those are some of the markers,
but they're hard to detect now. I took a copy of First Peter,
for example, which has been pollenized, I think.
And what I did is I just went through and anytime there was a

(01:10:34):
distinctive kind of doctrine of Paul or reference to something
Paul would clearly say, you know, like something like he
cleansed us by the blessed precious blood of Christ or
something like that. I just sort of marked it out
just as an experiment. And you know what, I found it
fits so perfectly without those passages.

(01:10:56):
Like you'd think like you couldn't do that with Romans.
You know, like I'm going to takeRomans or say First
Thessalonians or and I'll take out the Jesus stuff.
Try to go through the layers of redaction and get to a more
original text. Yeah, and I was just an
experiment. I did it with my Patreon group.
Yeah, just for fun. I'm telling you, it's a pretty

(01:11:17):
powerful letter. It reads almost exactly like
James Amazing, got household rules and so forth.
So in the Book of Revelation, I've also done that and I
published that one on my blog, apre Christian version of the
Book of Revelation. And that that's a really good
document to study the pre Christian version.

(01:11:39):
But that one the interpolators are very light handed as they
just it'll say the kingdoms of the world have become the
kingdoms of our Lord, our Lord, meaning Yodhe vahe Hashem and of
his Christ. You know, well, I don't mind
that, but when you say end of our Lord Jesus Christ, see, so

(01:12:03):
if you just take out Jesus and of his Christ, you begin to see
that the I'm talking about the middle part of the Book of
Revelation from chapter 6 through chapter say 20.
The Christianized stuff is lightly laid on.
You see what I mean? It it's sprinkled on.
You can actually just pull it right off and the text reads

(01:12:26):
very coherently. It's amazing.
Flows more with Daniel and stufflike that.
More like Daniel. It's more like probably EB night
eschatology with the beast and the false prophet.
And remember the references thatare kind of odd about who are
the people of God, those who keep the commandments and then
it says and have the testimony of Jesus.

(01:12:48):
See how that's so you take that out.
All of a sudden, blessed are those who keep the commandments.
But what does it say now? And I think the King James
blessed are those who wash theirrobes in the blood of, of Jesus,
you know, so you get these interpolations.
So the enterprise overall is to try to get back to that.

(01:13:11):
As far as how long it went, I would think into the certainly
the second, third, and 4th centuries after that, when
Sabatarianism, which is a good marker, begins to crop up again
after the Niceum church and the Chalcedon church has really
stamped down on any kind of Judaizing, as they call it.

(01:13:35):
I think then it mainly crops up by people doing what we're
doing, reading the 10 commandments, thinking what
Jesus was Jewish and he talked about the Sabbath is made for
people, not people for the Sabbath.
So some of the same arguments that Sabbaterians today would
make who try to hold to the New Testament but still claim that

(01:13:59):
the 10 commandments are intact. For example, in the Book of
Revelation in Chapter 11, the heavens are open and the Ark of
the Covenant is open. Well, what is the covenant, the
testimony, the ark of the testimony, And what is the
testimony? The 10 words?
So you don't picture the ark of heaven being open and you read
the 10 words and one of them says remember Sunday and keep it

(01:14:23):
holy as the day of our Lord, right.
It wouldn't have read like that because it's the ark of the
testimony, meaning the testimonyMoses got it Sinai and that
connects. Then you mentioned the Moses
scroll. For your viewers that don't know
what that is, there is a Dead Sea scroll that was discovered

(01:14:44):
in the 1800s eighteen 70s was sold to an antiquities dealer
and he then brought it to the attention of European scholars
in 1883. They initially began to wonder
if it could be authentic. Remember they've never heard of
Dead Sea Scrolls. But slowly they began to argue

(01:15:06):
things like, well, it couldn't have lasted this long.
We don't have any records of books from that area being
preserved like that was supposedly found in a cave up
well Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1940s.
So Moses Shapiro was the antiquities dealer.

(01:15:27):
He was shamed and called a forager and kind of run out of
town. You might say first in Germany,
then in London, England. But if if you begin to study
into it, I would recommend Ross Nichols book called the Moses
Scroll. That's absolutely the book to
read because it's an easy to read survey of the whole story.

(01:15:49):
And many of us are beginning to wonder, maybe that was an
authentic Dead Sea Scroll, but it wasn't accepted because, you
know, nobody believes those things could exist.
Well, what would it be? It looks like it's claiming to
be an earlier copy or representation written in Paleo

(01:16:12):
Hebrew, not in later Herodian script.
That's an indicator right there.Of what's called the valediction
of Moses, the last speech of Moses, it's all in the first
person. If you look at Deuteronomy, read
through the early chapters of Deuteronomy and look for the
word I when Moses is speaking. I did this and I did that, and

(01:16:35):
the Moses scroll is all first person.
So many of us have wondered if that could be a witness to a
kind of version of the Torah of Moses that maybe was discovered
in the time of Jeremiah. And it guess what?
No sacrifices. It quotes the Shema and it says

(01:16:58):
what are the 2 commandments? Love God, love your neighbor.
Then it has the 10 commandments and then the cursings and
blessings are all built around the 10 commandments.
It's almost too good to be true.And you think, wow, I just
quoted Mark 12 where Jesus basically says that to this guy.
And here we have a scroll that witnessed to that and

(01:17:20):
unfortunately say, well, why don't we all read it and talk
about it because it's disappeared.
But we have very good transcriptions that we can
actually reconstruct it even in Hebrew because a couple of
scholars of that time cap records, which we now have of

(01:17:40):
all most of the fragments of that scroll.
So Ross Nichols in the back of his book reconstructs it in
Hebrew and then gives you a translation.
I'm pretty excited about it. And we're on the trail of that
scroll. We want to find the scroll, have
it carbon dated. And one of the scholars who's
really the most academically qualified is Edan Dershowitz in

(01:18:07):
his book you can read free. It's a very academic book, but
it's on his academia.edu page. Edon IDAN Dershowitz, you can go
get that book. Download is the PDF.
And it's very academic. But I know some of your viewers
study Hebrew and they can dig into this.
So he and I and another scholar named Matthew Hamilton and Ross

(01:18:31):
Nichols, we're all working on the Shapira Scroll and we think
we, we're going to find it. I don't think it was, it's lost,
but nobody would throw it away. I don't think it's destroyed.
We have good. We've, we traced it down to a
certain town in England and the last owner that had it.
And that's where Ross's book trails off.
But we have new evidence since then.

(01:18:53):
And if we can find it, then we can have it carbon dated.
And if it's carbon dated, you know it's ancient, then you know
that's going to be huge news because it could be the oldest
copy of the Torah in existence. Wouldn't that be something?
That would be all right. So I feel like we are kind of
touching on some very similar threads here.

(01:19:14):
Pulling the thread there is centuries of, you know, we're
kind of textual criticism looking at original sources.
We you know, when it comes, we'duse the term Christianity and
and that's what we come out of you, you there was a A blog you
had done following Jesus out of Christianity.

(01:19:36):
This journey for me, I felt likeI did the same thing following
the text out of Christianity. For me the most influential
writings are really the Clementine recognitions and
homilies. Looking into the text of the DDK
and other epistles and gospels, understanding there is more than
just what was in the New Testament.

(01:19:57):
And then the earliest Christianslike you know, say the
Ibianites, they only had the Torah and maybe a Hebrew gospel
in the writings of Peter and James.
But they may not be the what we see in the New Testament.
I feel like in the New Testamentepistles, just like the gospels,
we have it. Just like the gospels, we have a
cue source I feel like. You kind of talk about there

(01:20:18):
might be original text for whether it's Pauline epistles,
Peter, James. The text that stuck out to me
the most was the Epistle Peter to James in the James's
recognition, which is clearly a tourist centric Judaism that
talks about the 700 or the 70. It talks about receiving from

(01:20:43):
Moses. And it very much sounds like
Piquet a vote to me. The way that it's written in in,
you know, I'm I was going through a process of D
converting to Christianity, converting to Judaism at the
time. And I'm like, Jesus was a Jew
and his followers were Jews and they converted people to
Judaism. You know, what's so sacrilegious

(01:21:05):
about following him down this path when that's what he did?
And you touched on this point and and this is kind of where it
goes where you, you said Jesus followed the Torah up to his
death. But Christianity then this whole
new thing was invented later. And I we'll get into that next
time. I don't want to touch on Paul.
I just want to finish, wrap it up with the text of the

(01:21:26):
Evianites that we have echoes ofthe Clementine recognitions
homilies, you know, some of these other Jewish Christian
text. Are these real memories of a
Jewish Christian movement or an attempt, later attempt, to
reclaim the authority of James? I think they do reflect some

(01:21:47):
memories. When you get into the
biographical details, like Jamesbeing thrown down the steps by a
Paul figure and that kind of thing.
You have to wonder, you know, isthat kind of narrative, you
know, Eisenman says. That's built Steven, the Steven
stories built off of that and soforth.

(01:22:08):
I find that more speculative. But if you try to reduce it to
core ideas, they're they fall into place very logically.
And the main idea would be if I am the follower of Jesus, do I
go by those who knew Jesus afterthe flesh, as Paul calls it, and

(01:22:32):
he says we no longer know Jesus after the flesh.
Second Corinthians. OK, do I go by that or do I go
by visionary experience of a figure like Paul or Simon Magus
if if he's disguised as Paul? And that's a huge issue because

(01:22:53):
the argument very clear in the Clementines is, you know, if I'm
going to go by a vision, what ifthat vision is either
fraudulent, like the person saysthey were told this, but maybe
they just want power or something, or who are they

(01:23:13):
talking to? You know, maybe they really had
a vision, but maybe it's Satanic, you know, maybe it's
from the Evil 1. And all of these groups believe
in, you know, forces of evil, forces of good operating in the
world, as many people do today. And so I think that's
fundamental to that material. So that you would ask, what did

(01:23:39):
Jesus teach in the earliest strata?
And you would want to collect together texts like the
Dedicate. I mean, how is it possible that
we have an early Christian writing that claims to be the
teaching of the 12 apostles? And there's not an ounce of
Christianity in it. Anything that you would call

(01:24:00):
Christianity, creedal Christianity, right?
No virgin birth, no body and blood of Jesus, no baptism in
the sense of Pauline baptism. How is that even possible?
Like who? Where did that come from?
What? It's letter of James.
Here's the brother of Jesus, thehead of the movement, whether he

(01:24:22):
wrote it or didn't write it. You know, the point is it's a
James Ian letter coming to us and it mentions Jesus twice,
once in the opening and once when he says don't hold the
faith of our Lord Jesus in vain.Well, as you mentioned, Pierre
Ki vote the Lord, the master teacher, the rabbi, don't hold

(01:24:46):
the faith that our master taughtus in vain.
That's nothing Christological, right?
He didn't say. He might even say the Lord Jesus
Christ. I don't know, but that would
just be an expansion of the Greek.
But what is he saying? Oh, if a rich man's in your
synagogue, synagogue and Greek and a poor man, why are you

(01:25:08):
giving the rich man a better seat than the poor man you know,
and so forth. And you go through the whole
letter, 5 chapters and you thinkI could put this along with
Pierquet, a vote in the Mishnah and there wouldn't be a single
thing in it that somebody wait aminute, how did that thing get

(01:25:29):
in there? We don't want any Christian
stuff in this. You know, in the Mishnah it's
sayings of the Fathers, but it'sfrom the Jesus movement.
Now how's that possible? Luther knew it.
So he says it's a story epistle and he wants to put it in the
back and small print. He said it has no gospel in it.
Boy, was he right. Wow, Think of that, Luther.

(01:25:52):
Martin Luther said James has no gospel in it.
James has no gospel in it exceptthe gospel of maybe Isaiah 61.
To preach good news to the poor,set free the captives, pay your
labor's fair wages, things like that, and establish justice and
righteousness in the earth. So I think, you know, I'm

(01:26:16):
finding that this from this book, restoring Abrahamic faith
particularly, there's a lot of interest in this.
I think it's kind of a movement within many, many people that
just kind of wake up and they want to go back to a more
Hebraic, I like the word Hebrew rather than Jewish, more Hebraic

(01:26:37):
understanding of Jesus and the movement.
And they can honor Jesus as the figure that he was, a kind of
prophetic figure, I like to say.My view of Jesus is he's the guy
in whom Hashem was well pleased.That's my favorite description
of Jesus. I think Hashem looked at Jesus

(01:26:59):
and said, wow, I think we're getting there with this guy, you
know, and I think you probably thought that about Amos and
Hosea and Jeremiah and some of the others that they kind of get
it, You know, what does the Lordrequire of you?
It's in Deuteronomy, you know, Moses says in Deuteronomy, what

(01:27:19):
does the Lord require of you? And it says to love him, to
follow his ways to. And this stuff just kind of
surfaces very easily. And the doctrinal Nicean
Chalcedon stuff just kind of floats away.
Now, I'll end with this though, because in my early days, and it

(01:27:40):
sounds like you went through this too, it's like, oh,
everybody go to the synagogue, you know, go to the synagogue.
Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, whatever.
The Jews have it all. The problem with that is a
cultural gap. My sister converted Orthodox
Judaism. She doesn't necessarily follow
every halachic thing anymore, but she had an Orthodox

(01:28:02):
conversion. That's fine.
Lots of other friends of mine have converted, but I think for
many people coming out of a kindof more messianic interest in
early Christianity, the New Testament, the synagogue is not
necessarily the home. It could be a place you would
go, but a lot of times people are going to have a different

(01:28:27):
experience because they will come with this learning Greek in
Hebrew and studying all these books in this avid interest in
the Torah, portions of para shotin the after Raz and you know,
exigy and they go to the synagogue and nobody's doing
that. You know, I'm not saying there

(01:28:49):
aren't any classes in a synagogue where you would study
with the rabbi and so forth. But it's not they, they think
it's going to be like a Jewish church, you know, where you'll
go to the synagogue and everybody will be talking about
the Torah portion today. No, they're not going to be
talk. Chances are they're not going to
be talking about that. Nothing against it.
The average church is the same way.

(01:29:10):
If you go to any church today, the main conversation after
church probably won't be the preacher's sermon.
It'll be all kinds of things like, Can you believe this
weather? And you know, what are you guys
going to do Friday night? Oh, we're having a hay ride or
what? You know, it's just, this is
just people. So a lot of people are looking
for something that would be moreauthentically Hebraic,

(01:29:38):
Abrahamic, Ebionite, but not necessarily Judaism in its
different forms. And I'm not discouraging anybody
from visiting the synagogue. I go to the synagogue quite
often. I, I love it.
I love to go there. I like to have many friends.
I speak at synagogues, but as a group, I recommend Ross Nichols

(01:30:02):
very much in his teachings. I don't know if you teach on
Shabbat or weekly, but Ross Nichols has the Horeb Institute.
You can find it on YouTube. HOREB name is Mount Sinai and
Ross is a really wonderful teacher and you would enjoy if

(01:30:23):
you're just looking for somebody's going to be digging
into all this stuff. He and I share a lot of the same
views. He would sure, many of your
views and he, he's as a criticalapproach to the Hebrew Bible,
but he also loves the Bible as you and I do, you know, he's not
ready to throw it in the trash bin.
And so I would recommend him. Really, I, I'm not into

(01:30:50):
recommending groups, but if somebody has a group that's
trying to follow this quest and these paths, you know, I'm all
for it. So my problem with group, most
groups are, it seems like you always tend to get into the
sociology of who's the leader, who's dominant, What is it to be

(01:31:14):
a member? How are things kind of ordered
and enforced? And I think a lot of us wouldn't
end up where we were unless we had more of an independent
streak. You know that we unless you find
a home where you feel like the things going on in that group
are questing and seeking and open and free.

(01:31:39):
Yeah. So, well, I think people have to
find their own way. I mean, I would, I would never
abdicate that People do what I do.
I try to share information on a journey that I found miracle for
myself. I really want to get into some
of these, move in this direction.
Next time, since we're going to,we're going to have to do a
follow up on this. Doctor Tabor, thank you for
sharing your research and showing us how your faith and

(01:32:02):
the way you've wrestled with thetext it where it's LED you and
kind of your journey here. Some of your, you know, pretty
important insights and things you brought to the world.
Next time I would like to explore some more of what you
are doing and where you're going.
I do want to get into Paul a little bit, but definitely more
of what you're doing with the restoring Abrahamic faith.

(01:32:23):
And I do want to discuss some ofthe stuff that, you know, with
the Waco involvement and contextualize maybe some of
that. But, and you've mentioned some
of the things you would do, but as a, you know, finishing out,
is there any projects, anything that you want to direct people
in to, you know, follow along, connect with you right now?

(01:32:44):
I think just the YouTube channel, I did a, I put up a
video yesterday and today on theShroud of Turin and, and
yesterday I did the tomb of the Shroud, which I discovered was
Shimon Gibson in the year 2000, which is an authentic 1st
century Jerusalem tomb in which the only burial shroud ever

(01:33:06):
found was located and studied and carbon dated to the 1st
century. And so on my YouTube channel or
my blog, you're going to find a lot of interesting things like
the archaeology of the movement and what do we know from
archaeology and things about tombs and ossuaries.

(01:33:29):
And I've excavated all over the land of Israel.
I've had a 30 year career as a tech scholar, but also doing
archaeology. So I think just use the YouTube
channel you. It's pretty well organized.
You'll see the categories. I have a whole series on Bible
prophecy have a whole series I call Jesus Archaeology.

(01:33:53):
I have 3 online courses. I told you there's going to be a
fourth one. My blog, jamestabor.com, is a
good guide to all the other things that I have, and there
there's a lot out there I'm trying to share through YouTube
and my blog and speaking and writing and so forth, the fruits

(01:34:14):
of what I've learned as an academic scholar in this field
for the last 40 years. So I'm putting it out there.
Yeah, I definitely appreciate that.
I do want to discuss some of that archaeology stuff next
time, if we're able to. OK.
We'll plan another session. You let me know your schedule
and it was great being with you.So thank you for being patient

(01:34:39):
because we've been scheduling this for a long time.
And it has. Glad it would finally worked
out. That's all for this episode of
the Pulling the Threads. If you enjoyed this
conversation, subscribe, share and join us next time.
And keep pulling those threads of history, faith and culture.
Keep questioning, keep digging, and we'll see you soon.
Thank you, Doctor Tabor. None.

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