Rev Butz has here made a decent tour of the historical phenomenon of "Jewish" or "primitive" Christianity, and how it appears to have been smothered by Saul/Paul's Greek mystery religion. Although this is written for the educated layman, it does help to have a grasp of the sources available concerning Jakob ha Tzaddok, James the Righteous, James the Lesser, James the Greater, and James of Jerusalem; it helps the argument considerably if you suspect that Stephen the Protomartyr was actually James, the early church fathers finding too much import in the holiness of James, yet unwilling to discard as noncanonical the tale of his death at the hands of Saul and the "Libertines" at the steps of the Temple.
Missing, and a whole new can of worms already radically addressed by Dr Robert Eisenman, is whether James actually domiciled in Jerusalem or was the leader of the camp at Qumran. This is perhaps the reason for another book, and will lay out for the future several avenues of research which will only be completed once that copy of Hegesippus is found on Patmos. I am unsure that the religion of James *was* salvationist Christianity, seeming rather to be an evolution of Judaism. 'Justification by Work' has been criticized almost since it was expounded in the Epistle of James (which contains only three specific Christian references which *might* have been Lukan/Pauline interpolations in an authentic document), yet has an intuitive logic which many find lacking in the 'Justification by Faith <alone?>' of Paul (see Kay Shelemay's theory on the origins of the Falasha Jews of NW Ethiopia). It seems unlikely that James was not the leader of a discrete population of piety which viewed the Law of Moses as their guide to life.
One might expect such a community to end its devotion with an exhortation to "do good unto all, while we recommend it more especially to the household of the faithful"
-except that comes from the Closing Charge FreeMasons must recite before leaving lodge.
hmmm, perhaps the 'lost teachings' DID survive the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE.
Jeffrey Butz writes that understanding James, the brother of Jesus, is the *most* important key to understanding Jesus. *And* the mainstream Protestant view of Jesus has gone in the wrong direction because of the primary assumption that Martin Luther correctly read his experiences back into Paul's epistles. Did the Catholicism of Luther's day teach the equivalent of the Judaism of Paul's day? Butz argues that early Protestant reformers did indeed misunderstand the Judaism of the time of Jesus. So Butz argues that to truly understand the Judaism of the time of Jesus is to understand the way it was understood by James, the brother of Jesus.
