[1] In books and journal articles, she challenged Christian orthodoxy, espousing the view that new findings present alternative answers to its supernaturalistic beliefs.
Thiering claimed to have discovered, from her specialty study of the pesharim of the Dead Sea Scrolls, their semiotics, and their hermeneutics, a "pesher technique" for decoding the New Testament stories.
[2] The theory argues that the miracles, including turning water into wine, the virgin birth, healing a man at a distance, the man who had been thirty-eight years at the pool, and the resurrection, among others, did not actually occur (as miracles), as Christians believe, nor were they legends, as some sceptics hold, but were "deliberately constructed myths"[3] concealing (yet, to certain initiates, relating) esoteric historic events.
For the "babes in Christ," there were apparent miracles, but the knowledge of exact meanings held by the highly educated members of Gnostic schools gave a real history of what Jesus actually did.
Thiering's thesis attracted some controversy in the media when Jesus the Man was published in 1990, and her ideas have not received acceptance by many of her academic peers.
In a response to a letter Thiering wrote to The New York Review of Books objecting to a review by Géza Vermes, Vermes outlined the academic reception of her work stating: "Professor Barbara Thiering's reinterpretation of the New Testament, in which the married, divorced, and remarried Jesus, father of four, becomes the "Wicked Priest" of the Dead Sea Scrolls, has made no impact on learned opinion.
"[4]In 1993, N. T. Wright, New Testament historian and former Bishop of Durham, wrote:[5] It is safe to say that no serious scholar has given this elaborate and fantastic theory any credence whatsoever.
It is nearly ten years since it was published; the scholarly world has been able to take a good look at it: and the results are totally negative.James F. McGrath, an Associate Professor in the Religion and Philosophy department at Butler University in his 1996 review of the book states that Thiering's thesis lacks proof, and that she herself acknowledges that the pesher of the Revelation of St. John is her own composition.