How often we have heard that “American is fundamentally a Christian nation, founded on Christian principles”? Even though such assertions are considered naive by historians, particularly as mouthed by the Pat Robertsons (700 Club), James Dobsons (Focus on the Family), and Glenn Becks (Fox News) of the world, there still seems to be, in the back of our minds, a sense that our country, with its stereotypical  “White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant” ethos, is somehow essentially “Christian” in its cultural/religious roots.

In a provocative and challenging new book Bruce Feiler, bestselling author of Walking the Bible, Abraham, and Where God Was Born, calls all of this into question. Feiler’s unexpected choice for the one whom he calls “America’s Prophet,” is neither Jesus Christ nor the Apostle Paul–but Moses!

The title of the book says it all:  America’s Prophet: Moses and the American Story (Morrow, 2009). What Feiler argues is that Moses is our real “founding father,” and his dominant influence has been largely forgotten and missed by those looking back from the 20th and 21st centuries. The publisher’s blurb offers a nice summary:

The exodus story is America’s story. Moses is our real founding father.

The pilgrims quoted his story. Franklin and Jefferson proposed he appear on the U.S. seal. Washington and Lincoln were called his incarnations. The Statue of Liberty and Superman were molded in his image. Martin Luther King, Jr., invoked him the night before he died. Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama cited him as inspiration. For four hundred years, one figure inspired more Americans than any other. His name is Moses.

In this groundbreaking book, New York Times bestselling author Bruce Feiler travels through touchstones in American history and traces the biblical prophet’s influence from the Mayflower through today. He visits the island where the pilgrims spent their first Sabbath, climbs the bell tower where the Liberty Bell was inscribed with a quote from Moses, retraces the Underground Railroad where “Go Down, Moses” was the national anthem of slaves, and dons the robe Charlton Heston wore in The Ten Commandments.

“Even a cursory review of American history indicates that Moses has emboldened leaders of all stripes,” Feiler writes, “patriot and loyalist, slave and master, Jew and Christian. Could the persistence of his story serve as a reminder of our shared national values? Could he serve as a unifying force in a disunifying time? If Moses could split the Red Sea, could he unsplit America?”

One part adventure story, one part literary detective story, one part exploration of faith in contemporary life, America’s Prophet takes readers through the landmarks of America’s narrative—from Gettysburg to Selma, the Silver Screen to the Oval Office—to understand how Moses has shaped the nation’s character.

Meticulously researched and highly readable, America’s Prophet is a thrilling, original work of history that will forever change how we view America, our faith, and our future.

For Feiler Moses is more than an unacknowledged hero of the imagination of our founding fathers, but his is the unseen hand that has much to do with almost everything we assume is normal and given about American and our magnificent dream. But more than that, Feiler proposes that recapturing the story of Moses has the potential to unify our country by reminding us of our most inspirational national dreams, that potentially at least we all share.

I have found the book compelling, inspiring, and gripping. I have been reading it off and on now through the course of two very busy weeks and find it hard to put down. Bruce and I were interviewed in back-to-back programs on Israel National Radio late last year on the show “Landminds.” The programs are archived and you can listen here.

Sometime in Spring, 2006 I was browsing one of the local bookstores here in Charlotte and came across a title that seemed to jump of the shelves–The Brother of Jesus and the Lost Teachings of Christianity by Jeffrey Bütz. In thumbing through the book I immediately realized that the brother in question was none other than James the Just, head of the Jerusalem Nazarene movement following the death of Jesus. I was aware, of course, of Robert Eisenman’s well known book, James the Brother of Jesus and John Painter’s valuable study, Just James, as well as several edited volumes on James by Craig Evans, Bruce Chilton, and Jacob Neusner. In fact, in our field of Christian Origins it seems that James, marginalized and forgotten for centuries, was having a bit of a renaissance. I had never heard of Jeffrey Bütz but decided to get the book anyway and see what it might offer. To say I was pleasantly surprised would be an understatement. My own book, The Jesus Dynasty had just been published and dealt substantially with James the brother of Jesus. I quickly realized that Bütz and I had independently come to many of the same conclusions and we began to exchange e-mails, eventually met, and even spent time together in the Jerusalem, digging at Mt. Zion and hanging in the Old City where Bütz was doing research on his next book, just out, with the provocative title The Secret Legacy of Jesus: The Judaic Teachings That Passed from James the Just to the Founding Fathers.

I read the manuscript in draft form and found this latest work by Bütz both fascinating and provocative. On the face of it the thesis of Reverend Jeffrey Bütz’s new book might strike one as far-fetched if not downright absurd, namely that the “true teachings” of Jesus were passed in some underground fashion, down through the ages, and ended up shaping the vision of the Founding Fathers as they forged the principles and ideals of the United States of America. Over the past decade the bookstores have been full of new titles claiming to reveal at last some lost, forgotten, suppressed, hidden, “underground” stream of Christianity, with connections to various esoteric traditions within Western history. The titles speak for themselves: Holy Blood, Holy Grail, The DaVinci Code, The Hiram Key, The Templar Revelation. Few of these works have received the attention, much less the academic endorsement, of mainstream historians, and probably for good reason. They are often long on speculation and short on hard evidence. It would be a mistake for readers to classify Bütz’s latest work in this genre. In contrast, it is a serious work, in touch with mainstream scholarship, and characterized by full references to original source materials.

Admittedly the trail Bütz follows, from Jesus to Jefferson, is a faint one, with many dead ends, twists, and turns. After all, groups such as the Ebionites, the Desposyni, the Elkesaits, and the Cathars are hardly household names. Bütz’s imaginative but careful consideration of evidence pays off and results in a fascinating thesis that informs the very roots of our American culture.

The book is divided into three parts. Parts I and II, making up about two-thirds of the whole, deals with the roots and history of what Bütz calls “Jewish Christianity.” The term refers to those original Jewish followers of Jesus, led by James the brother of Jesus, who continued in their Jewish beliefs and practices, rejected Paul and the Nicean Church, and according to most scholars continued into the late 4^th century, particularly in areas east of Palestine. These followers of Jesus valued the royal “bloodline” of the Jesus family, whether that of Jesus himself, if he was married with children, or that of his brothers and immediate family. Indeed, Bütz argues that these successors of Jesus and his brother James can properly be viewed as a type of “Caliphate,” in many ways similar to the Shiite branch of Islam. Bütz further argues that these “Nazarenes” set up a provisional government with their own Sanhedrin led by James as high priest, and the Twelve apostles as a kind of inner ruling cabinet. Bütz further locates the operations of this sectarian “government,” on the southwest hill called Mt Zion where both Armenian and Catholic traditions place the “throne” of James, the “Upper Room,” and the house of Mary and the Jesus family.

By far the majority of scholars who have dealt with this branch of “Jewish Christianity” have tended to trail things off in the late 4^th century where most of our records seem to terminate. Bütz take things much farther, and herein lays the special value and contribution of his work. Not only does he pick up on the “Ebionite” trail through an obscure sect of southern Mesopotamia known to us as the Elkasites, but in Part III of his treatment he convincingly traces the key characteristics of this original “Jewish Christian” perspective into early Islam as well. Although the chapter on Islam is somewhat of an excursus, Bütz returns to his more linear story line as he moves from the Elkasites through the Cathars, and thus to the Templars and earliest roots of Freemasonry. It is these last one hundred pages of his book that Bütz truly offers the reader, and in my estimation, the academic world as well, the skeletal framework of a wholly new perspective on the ideas that were most influential upon our Founding Fathers. Here I have in mind specifically the ways in which they imagined America as a sort of New Jerusalem/Promised Land. Other historians have touched on this sort of biblically based idealism, but I think Bütz might be the first to suggest there is an actual current or stream of influence running back into antiquity. I for one find it rather convincing. The history of ideas always remains a tenuous enterprise with no definable terminia post/ad quem, but as Jonathan Z. Smith, the most eminent history of religions used to put things—even an exaggeration in the direction of the truth is progress. I believe that Reverend Bütz has provided us with new perspectives waiting to be tested with subsequent review and consideration. I for one am grateful to him for the opportunity to consider this innovative approach to understanding the roots of our American founding and its ideals.

A story is just breaking tonight around the world regarding the text found by Prof. Garfinkel at Elah over a year ago. It has apparently now been deciphered and dated and can be reliably put in the 10th century BCE, the time of the “Monarchy.” This is a major breakthrough in terms of the debate between the “minimalists” who argue the Biblical narratives are post-Exilic and those who maintain that we have texts at least 500 years earlier.

See the Eureka press release with photos here.

Michael Servetus (aka Miguel Serveto) is surely one of the most remarkable men of history, though he is largely unknown in general circles. He was born in Spain in 1511 and died in 1553, at age 42, burnt at the stake as a heretic by John Calvin’s Geneva Council. He was a brilliant scientist and his field was primarily medicine, but it was his theological views that led to his universal condemnation by both Catholics and Protestants. Servetus rejected the doctrine of the Trinity, and although he maintained belief in the virgin birth, he denied that Jesus was God. He was fluent in Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, and in his primary work, De trinitatis erroribus (“On the Errors of the Trinity”), he ably argued that the Bible itself, in neither Old Testament nor New Testament, supported the subsequent Trinitarian notion of Jesus as God.

There is a bit of buzz on the Internet these days, among Christian evangelical circles, regarding a modern writer who calls himself “Servetus the Evangelical,” who has penned a new book titled The Restitution of Jesus Christ. The author, who has chosen to remain anonymous, is apparently a well-known Evangelical Christian. He plans to divulge his true identity on September 29, 2011, the 500th anniversary of Servetus’ birth. You can visit his website at servetustheevangelist.com, where you can read excerpts of the book, purchase the whole, or try your hand at guessing the author’s identity based on clues posted on the first of each month.

I obtained a copy of the book and I have to say I am much impressed. It runs 600 pages, is thoroughly researched and documented, and fully in touch with the massive amount of scholarly discussion currently available on the “Christology of the New Testament.”

Our modern “Servetus” has stirred a bit of buzz on the Web, mostly negative, by those who either question his motives for remaining anonymous or harshly dismiss him as a heretic and apostate. My guess is his critics have not bothered to examine his arguments. You can hear an interview with the author, complete with disguised voice, at Truth Matters.

Whoever the author is, he has surely done his homework, and given his staunchly conservative stance on the inspiration of the New Testament documents, his attempts might well end up having quite an impact on the growing “biblical unitarian” or “One God” movement that is making significant inroads within a variety of evangelical Christian circles. See the following links for a few examples:

http://focusonthekingdom.org/

http://kingdomready.org/

http://www.christianmonotheism.com/

http://www.biblicalunitarian.com/

This summer, join us as we host this exciting seminar series in the beautiful, idyllic setting of St. Olaf College, JULY 5 – 11, 2009. Just 35 miles south of Minneapolis and St. Paul, St. Olaf is set on a hilltop overlooking historic Northfield, MN, a charming, two-college town with a welcoming community. This BAS vacation seminar takes place within the beautiful and restorative setting of the college’s award-winning architecture nestled in a 300-acre woodland. During the week-long seminar, Biblical scholars Dr. James Tabor and Dr. Tina Wray will illuminate the compelling and mysterious world of the Bible in a series of 18 lectures. This unique program provides you with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn from and interact with two of the most eminent scholars in the field in a relaxed and friendly atmosphere. Both Tabor and Wray will be fresh back from digging in Israel at Mt Zion.

Biblical Controversies, Conundrums and Characters:
Sorting through all the Evidence

LECTURES BY DR. TINA WRAY

Hazardous Duty: Life for Women During Biblical Antiquity
What Makes a Good Girl Good and a Bad Girl Bad? Good Girls in the Hebrew Bible
Don’t Say the F-Word: Watch Out for Those Forbidden Foreign Females!
Don’t Lose Your Head: Biblical Women as Executioners
Complicated Liaisons: An Exploration of Unusual Male/Female Relationships in the Bible
Where the Devil Did the Devil Come From? Satan’s Childhood
Monsters, Bogeymen, and Demons: Chaos Creatures in the Ancient Near East
Ah, They Grow Up So Fast! Satan’s Adolescence and Adulthood
It’s a Little Warm in Here: The Evolution of Hell

LECTURES BY DR. JAMES TABOR

Dead Messiahs Who Don’t Return
Parting of the Ways: When Did a New Religion Called Christianity Begin?
The Making of a Messiah
Tracing the Last Days of Jesus: The Latest Archaeological Evidence
Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls—What can We Say in 2009?
Surprises on Mt Zion: Understanding Ancient Jerusalem
Counting Time: Biblical Chronology & Calendars Made Simple
What Does the Bible Really Say about Death, Afterlife, and Resurrection?
The Paul Dynasty

See the BAS Web site for complete details as to cost and registration and further background on Tabor and Wray:

http://www.bib-arch.org/travel-study/st-olaf-2009.asp (more…)