Drawing on the Dead Sea Scrolls and on long-overlooked early church texts, Eisenman reveals the Christianity of Paul as a distortion o what James and Jesus preached. Whereas James and his followers, "zealous for the law" of Moses, were nationalistic and apocalyptic, Paul Hellenized movement promoted itself as a pacifist, cosmopolitan, and based in faith. In an argument with enormous implications, Eisenman identifies Paul as deeply compromised by Roma contacts and James as not simply the leader of Christianity of his day but the popular Jewish leader of this time. By rescuing James from the oblivion into which he was deliberately cast, James, the Brother o f Jesus reveals one of the most successful historical rewrite enterprises ever accomplished.