I’m sorry to hear. But thank you for letting me know.

It’s a shame they wouldn’t let him pursue his work.

I can’t speak to that.

This is just more tinfoil hat from Eisenman (who IMO is insane, as I’ve told you before). You should stop reading him. Just for a start, Barabbas and Barsabas are different names, and neither is ever connected to the family of Jesus in any way. So right from the start, we’re in a bath of crazy here. There is no need to heed any of this.

There is plenty to recommend James as Judas. I mistakenly overstated Eisenman’s case, not Eisenman:

“All such ‘Barsabas’, ‘Barnabas’, and “Barabbas’ surnames are important and often connected to the names of Jesus’ family members. ‘Barabbas’, for instance, in the Gospels is something of a stand-in for Jesus himself. He is the man who had been arrested ‘in the Uprising’ for committing ‘treason and murder’ (Mark 15:7 and pars.) for John 18:40, this makes him ‘a Bandit’ (Lestes), the word Josephus always uses when talking about Revolutionaries and the person the crowd is depicted as preferring to Jesus. In some texts he is even called ‘Jesus Barabbas’, thereby correctly recognizing Barabbas as an Aramaic cognomen with the meaning ‘Son of the Father’.

Barsabas has no such ready equivalent in Aramaic, except the ‘Saba’/’Sabaean’ terminology we shall encounter having to do with daily bathing. Barnabas, if it is a real name, and not another circumlocution, would mean something like ‘son of the Prophet’. The point is that such names often overlap the members of Jesus’ family or Jesus himself. For example, Barnabas is often associated with ‘Joseph’, the name of either Jesus’ father or brother. ‘Joseph called Barsabas, who was surnamed JUSTus’, the losing candidate in the ‘election’ to fill Judas’ ‘Bishopric’, as we saw, is an obvious write-in for James the Just. In this regard, the addition of the cognomen, ‘Justus’ to his name and the use of the word ‘Episcopate’ to describe the ‘Office’ he is to fill are determinate.

In other words, we have in these passages at the beginning of Acts an election by lot for some leadership position of the early Church represented here as being because of the treachery and suicide of someone called Judas or ‘the Iscariot’, and the defeated candidate turns out to be someone called Justus — here, curiously this Latin version of Justus’ cognomen is transliterated into the Greek. The victorious candidate, too, like Judas Iscariot himself, bears the peculiarly Maccabean name of ‘Matthias’, even though there is one ‘Matthew’ listed among the Apostles. Even Matthew is alternatively called ‘Levi’ the son of Alphaeus’ in Mark 2:14, ‘Alphaeus’ being another of those names such as ‘Lebbaeus’, ‘Cleophas’, ansd ‘Oblias’, associated with Jesus’ family members. Like the Joseph ‘called Barsabas surnamed Justus’, this Matthias is never heard from in Scripture again except to fill in this somewhat artificial Twelve-man apostolic scheme.”

This is a done deal, Richard. “Judas” is a fictional cover for James. Eisenman is extremely sharp. I know him personally. ‘Judas’ was James in Acts 1 (Eisenman) and he is James in the ‘Betrayal’ (me). The canon is a coverup of James’ Mastership. Eisenman does not understand Mastership, BUT I DO. I HAVE one (Charan Singh). The First and Second Apocalypses of James from Nag Hammadi are the model for the Betrayal. The links are so numerous as to not be denied. But you need to understand Mysticism. Don’t be such a destroyer. You don’t know as much as you think you do. If you want to learn about it, I’m only too happy to teach it to you.

I can barely make sense of anything you just said. But that it contained the word “Eisenman” is worrying. It also looks like a stream of bizarre ad hoc speculations of little merit, represented as facts. It also appears to state factual inaccuracies (Barsabbas is not “son of the father”; that’s “Barabbas”; Bar Sabbas is “son of Sabba [or Sabah]”). And Judas (the name is actually Judah) was an extremely common name. So trying to make hay of multiple people having it is bad reasoning, at least with nothing else to recommend it. So I think you might have been misled by Eisenman’s tinfoil hat here.

This line of investigation is the best one for debunking historicity. If ‘Judas’ was James (inverted tendentiously), what does that say about ‘Jesus’?

There is compelling evidence in Acts…

It seems really dishonest to call it “evidence.” It is fine to say “it says in Acts” or the like, but to call it evidence is just a dishonest use of leading language. William Lane Craig likes to use equivocation tricks like this in his debates, where he starts out with “facts” about the gospels, eg. “the fact that Matthew says Jesus walked on water”), that then subtly segues into fact the fact that Jesus walked on water.

If you accept Acts as “evidence” then you should also accept The Book of Mormon as “evidence” and the Qur’an, etc.

This is not to say that writings can’t contribute to a body of evidence, but a single extremely biased religious writing with a clear agenda that is not corroborated by anything doesn’t really qualify, so it is not just incorrect, but dishonest to call it “evidence.”

Thank you, Richard, for the recommendation of my book. I want to make clear, however, that I am only an amateur. It is true that I am a former Catholic priest and I did teach Sacred Scripture in a traditionalist Catholic seminary in the 1980s. But the circumstances were a bit unusual and involved. I was basically filling a hole until a better qualified professor could be obtained. My training was only the standard seminary education all Catholic priests received back then.

But if any of your readers are hesitant to buy the self-published book of an amateur, my Ignatian thesis (in revised form) can be read for free at the Vridar blogsite. It is laid out in a series of ten posts with title “The Letters Supposedly Written by Ignatius of Antioch.”