He is currently professor of Middle East religions, archaeology, and Islamic law and director of the Institute for the Study of Judaeo-Christian Origins at California State University Long Beach.

Before this, Eisenman spent five years "on the road" in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East as far as India, encapsulating all these things in his poetic travel Diario (1959–62), published in 2007 by North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, California and called The New Jerusalem, in which he describes the San Francisco "Beat" scene in 1958–59, Paris when still a "moveable feast", working on kibbutzim in Israel, the Peace Corps, and several voyages on the overland route to India.

[1] His brother is deconstructionist architect Peter Eisenman – best known for his design of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, the Visitor's Center at Santiago de Compostela in Spain, and the Arizona Cardinal Football Stadium.

Eisenman grew up in South Orange, New Jersey and went to Columbia High School in Maplewood, but skipped his senior year to take up an acceptance in the Engineering Physics Department at Cornell University.

Having been accepted for graduate study in Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley, Eisenman returned to the U.S. via Paris and Cape Cod and ultimately went across the country by Greyhound Bus to San Francisco where he found a room on Russian Hill and tested the scene at North Beach.

– this was a decade before the Free Speech Movement there) that he ripped up his computer punch cards right on the Registration line in the Armory and tossed them into a wastepaper basket.

From 1959 to 1960, Eisenman stayed at "the Beat Hotel” where he encountered the likes of William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, et al.,[7] but he was not really interested in these sorts of persons or their scene.

[9] He then went on to Israel and Jerusalem, where he had the epiphany of encountering members of his family of whom he had previously never heard (his great grandfather had gone to Jerusalem at the time of the Turks and was one of the founders of the Bikur Holim Hospital there, while his two oldest sons left him in Istanbul and came directly to America[10]), worked on Kibbutzim in the Galilee (1960–61 – he had previously worked on John F. Kennedy's 1960 Campaign,[11]) and finally went back to join the first Peace Corps Group to go into the field.

[13] The next Spring, after staying in monasteries throughout Israel, and a climactic fight with the future Israeli "Peace Pilot" at the California Café in Tel Aviv;[14] Eisenman made the last overland run from Cyprus, across Turkey, Iran, Beluchistan, and Pakistan by bus, train, and boat to India, where he ended his journey as a guest of, and sleeping in, the Jewish Synagogue of New Delhi,[15] most of whose members were up in the Simla Hill States because it was high summer and monsoon.

The Scrolls had been discovered from 1948 to 1956 in several waves, but after a suggestive article by literary critic Edmund Wilson in The New Yorker magazine,[17] editing more or less ground to a halt from about 1959 onwards.

In 1985–86, Eisenman, who had written his first book presenting, as he called it, "A New Theory of Qumran Origins" in 1983[20] and a follow-up on James as Righteous Teacher in 1985,[21] received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem (also known as "the American School") where Cave I Scrolls had first come in and been photographed in 1947–48.

He sent a copy of this computer-generated print-out to the editor of Biblical Archaeology Review, Hershel Shanks, which created a huge stir in the office and the campaign to free the Scrolls really began in earnest.

[26] At this time, too, he brought James Robinson – a colleague of his at Claremont University and the editor of the Nag Hammadi Codices (a dispute similar to the Qumran one)[27] – into the mix and together they took the decision to publish all the unpublished photographs.

[30] While all these things were going on, Eisenman had been invited to become a consultant to the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, which had become aware that it had in its archive a collection of photographs of all the Dead Sea Scrolls, donated to it by Elizabeth Bechtel.

[37] Eisenman claims that the preconceptions of the group of scholars around Father Roland De Vaux who first worked on the Dead Sea Scrolls led them to erroneously date the non-biblical, sectarian community documents to the Maccabean period, and to read them as the writings of a serene, retiring community of Essene monks exiled to the wilderness in the course of a dispute with the reigning priesthood of the day led by the "Wicked Priest"/"Spouter of Lying.

[43] The recourse to an interpretation of Habakkuk 2:4 ("the Righteous shall live by his Faith"), the center piece and real building block of all Christian theology both in the Pauline corpus (Romans, Galatians, et al.) and in the Epistle of James he sees as proof positive that these documents were written more or less contemporaneously and at a time when this prophecy or proof-text was in play.

[47] Finally, he points to the fact that there are even collections of messianic proof-texts at Qumran which include, for instance, the Star Prophecy of Numbers 24:17 which Josephus, at the end of the Jewish War, singles out as the reason for the outbreak of the revolt, and even one dedicated to "the Promises to the Seed" or "House of David".

[55] This proposal was contained in a series of letters to John Strugnell, Eisenman wrote with Philip R. Davies of Sheffield University in England and copied to Amir Drori, the head of the Israel Antiquities Authority.

[56] Not two months after he and Davies made this request to the Antiquities Authority, to which they attached a recent article about AMS radiocarbon techniques, it announced its intention to run just such tests.

For his part, the Jewish historian Josephus makes it clear that those he is calling "Essenes" (as opposed to these same Herodians, Sadducees, and Pharisees) participated in the uprising, willing to undergo any torture or any form of death rather than "eat things sacrificed to idols" or "break the Law.

"[61] For Eisenman, these "Nazoreans", (נצרים) "Zealots", (קנאים) "Zaddikim" (צדיקים) or "Ebionim" (אביונים) were marginalized by a Herodian named Saul (Paul) and the gentile Christians who followed him.

A presentation seeming to represent the interests of the Herodian dynasty in Palestine, as well as the intention to extend its influence into Asia Minor and further East into Northern Syria and Mesopotamia.

[65] Proof is also found in Josephus' picture of a curious member of the Herodian family, an individual he also calls "Saulos" who shares many characteristics in common with "Paul" in New Testament portraiture.

Eisenman was the first to publicly claim that the James Ossuary was fraudulent when it originally surfaced in October 2002, doing so on the first day the story appeared in news articles published by the Associated Press and op-ed pieces in the Los Angeles Times.

Moreover, as Eisenman wrote in his op-ed, he would have been much more impressed if the first part of the inscription had said "“James the son of Cleophas,” “Clopas or even “Alphaeus”",[68] which is how individuals connected to this family were known in Palestine in this period and not the more theologically-consistent Joseph, which "is what a modern audience, schooled in the Gospels, would expect, not an ancient one".