James the Brother of Jesus: The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls is a 1997 book by American archaeologist and Biblical scholar Robert Eisenman.
He critically reviews the narrative of the canonical gospels drawing on the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Clementine Recognitions and Homilies, the Apostolic Constitutions, Eusebius, the two James Apocalypses from Nag Hammadi, the Western Text of Acts and the Slavonic Josephus.
The central claim is that Jewish Christianity emerged from the Zadokites, a messianic, priestly, ultra-fundamentalist sect, making them indivisible from the milieu of contemporary movements like the Essenes, Zealots, Nazoreans, Nazirites, Ebionites, Elchasites, Mandaeans, etc.
Chronologically, the book moves the events reflected in the gospels closer to the First Jewish-Roman War than usual, identifying a Herodian named Saulus, active during the siege of Jerusalem, with Paul the Apostle (Saul), and considers the identification of Simon Peter, with Simeon bar-Cleophas.
[5] Géza Vermes also criticised the thesis within the context of reviewing the book Eisenman co-authored with Michael Wise The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered, published in The Times Literary Supplement (1992).