Table of Contents

Preface

Abbreviations

Just James: The Death of a Legend

Part I: The Gospels, Acts, and the Letters of Paul

The Gospels: James and the Family of Jesus

Acts: James as Convert or Foundation Leader?

The Letters of Paul: Paul and James

James, Peter, Matthew, and Paul: Diversity and Conflict in the Two Missions

Part II: Images of James in the Early Church

Tradition in Eusebius: James the Just, Brother of the Lord, First Biship and Martyr

The Nag Hammadi Library: James as a Successor to Jesus and Repository of Secret Tradition

The Apocrypha and Later Christian Evidence: Bishop of Bishops and Bulwark of Truth

Jewish Christianity, the Righteous Sufferer, and the Epistle of James

Excursus: Robert Eisenman's James the Brother of Jesus

Bibliography

Index of Biblical and Ancient Sources

Index of Modern Authors

Index of Subjects

About the Author

John Painter is Professor of Theology and St. Mark's National Theological Centre, Charles Sturt University, Canberra, Australia. He is the author of Mark's Gospel: Worlds in Conflict (1997), The Quest for the Messiah (2d ed., 1993), Theology as Hermeneutics: Rudolf Bultmann's Interpretation of the History of Jesus (1987), Reading John's Gospel Today (1980), and John: Witness and Theologian (1975).

D. Moody Smith is George Washington Ivey Professor Emeritus of New Testament at The Divinity School, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.

Reviews

Painter (theology, St. Mark's Theological Centre, Canberra, Australia) has taken on the same task here as Robert Eisenman in his James, the Brother of Jesus: The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls (LJ 1/97): to rescue James the Just from the obscurity that history forced on him. For both authors, the stream of early Christianity that became orthodoxy suppressed the true importance of James. Painter sees traditions outside of and later than the New Testament (Eusebius and Gnostic and apocryphal writings) as providing a corrective and thus reads the gospels, Acts, and epistles in light of them. However, he does not appeal to the Dead Sea Scrolls. In fact, he takes issue with Eisenman's identification of James with the scrolls' Teacher of Righteousness (and Paul the Apostle with "the spouter of lies"). Painter may find more readers agreeing with him than does Eisenman, because he doesn't stretch the imagination quite so far, but not all will want to stretch even this far. Lacking the passion of Eisenman's, this work is more appropriate for acadmic collections.‘Craig W. Beard, Univ. of Alabama at Birmingham Lib.