Jesus the Man: New Interpretations from the Dead Sea Scrolls is a book written by the Australian biblical scholar and theologian Barbara Thiering.

Using a decoding tool that the author calls the "pesher technique", she purports to have uncovered evidence in the Gospels themselves that effectively contradicts the story they narrate of Jesus and his mission.

[2] From the New Testament gospels and Dead Sea Scrolls, Thiering constructs a new history of early Christianity which she contends was hidden in pesher coding.

Thiering finds that the biography of Jesus hidden in the New Testament shows him to have been born in Qumran, an Essene community beside the Dead Sea, in March, 7 BC.

Robert E. Van Voorst summarizes Thiering's account of the life of Jesus as follows: He was born out of wedlock to a woman of Qumran's royal-priestly line, befriended outcasts, and performed no miracles.

In March, 17 AD, he was initiated at the age of 23, and took a political stance in favor of his spiritual "father", Annas the high priest, "who taught peace with Rome and the promotion of Gentiles".

Thiering examines each of the miracles in the New Testament and finds in them nothing miraculous, but rather events marking turning points in the history of "the Fig Tree", as the movement was called.

[3] Wright notes that Thiering's new ideas about Jesus's family life were first aired in 1990 on an Australian TV show broadcast on Palm Sunday.

[6] Wright argues that Thiering is correct to emphasise the humanity of Jesus and to place him in the context of expectations of dramatic divine intervention in history.

Wright agrees with Thiering that Jesus offered "a new way of working out what it meant to be the loyal people of God—a way, specifically that avoided the violence that was so endemic in their society".

[5] Florentino García Martínez, the editorial secretary of the Revue de Qumran, has called her work "science fiction", disconnected from all historical and literary reality.

For my purposes this theory must be considered altogether initially outlandish, given the scientifically definitive dating (based mostly on paleographical and on radiocarbon techniques) of the scrolls to a period well before the birth of Christianity (Thiering, 1992).