John Painter, an Anglican, is a professor of theology at St. Mark's National Theological Centre at Charles Sturt University in Canberra. A regular contributor to international biblical and theological journals, he is the author of Mark's Gospel: Worlds in Conflict; The Quest for the Messiah; Theology as Hermeneutics: Rudolf Bultmann's Interpretation of the History of Jesus; Reading John's Gospel Today; John, Witness and Theologian; 1, 2, and 3 John; and more than 100 chapters and articles in scholarly books and journals. Painter lives in Canberra, Australia.
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.
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