Robert Eisenman is the author of James the Brother of Jesus ( 1998 ) and The Dead Sea Scrolls and the First Christians ( 1996 ) and co-editor of The Facsimile Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls ( 1989 ) and The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered ( 1992 ). He is Professor of Middle East Religions and Archaeology and the Director of the Institute for the Study of Judeo-Christian Origins at California State University Long Beach and Visiting Senior Member of Linacre College, Oxford.

He holds a B.A. from Cornell University in Philosophy and Engineering Physics, an M. A. from N. Y. U. in Near Eastern Studies, and a Ph. D. from Columbia University in Middle East Languages and Cultures.. He was a Senior Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies and an American Endowment for the Humanities Fellow-in-Residence at the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem, where the Dead Sea Scrolls first came in.

His first book was Islamic Law in Palestine and Israel from E. J. Brill in Leiden, Holland in 1978 and this was followed by two other books from E. J. Brill In Leiden: Maccabees, Zadokites, Christians and Qumran: A New Hypothesis of Qumran Origins ( 1982 ) and James the Just in the Habakkuk Pesher ( 1984 ).

He was the leader of the worldwide campaign from 1987-1992 to break the academic and scholarly monopoly over the Dead Sea Scrolls, freeing them for research by all interested persons regardless of affiliation or credentials. As a consequence of this, he was the Consultant to the Huntington Library on its decision to open its archives and allow free access to the Scrolls. In 2002-3 he was the first to publicly announce that the ‘James Ossuary’, which so suddenly and ‘miraculously’ appeared, was fraudulent; and he did thison the basis of the actual inscription itself and what it said without any ‘scientific’ or ‘pseudo-scientific’ aids on the very same day it was first made public .

His is the author of The New Testament Code: The Cup of the Lord, the Damascus Covenant, and the Blood of Christ, ( Sterling/Barnes and Noble, October, 2006 ).

His latest book, a collection of travel/road poetry (cosmopolitanized) from 1959-62 with an Afterword on the Six-Day War (April-June, 1967), entitled THE NEW JERUSALEM, and which Eisenman considers his 'Anti-Beat Manifesto,' has just been published from North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, California, in June, 2007.

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