. Barbara Theiring made some interpretations of, and propositions about, the New Testament gospels and Dead Sea Scrolls, based on her application of a complicated Hebrew interpretation technique called pesher where it is believed "that scripture is written in two levels: the surface for ordinary readers with limited knowledge, the concealed one for specialists with higher knowledge".
She published 20 yrs of work as Jesus the Man in 1992/3. It was published in two versions:
"Jesus the Man:: New Interpretations from the Dead Sea Scrolls", Transworld- Doubleday
US version - "Jesus & the Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls", Harper-Collins
She has gotta be all right.
She's an Australian.
And wiki reckons she 's a 'non-fiction' writer.
One of her books was the second work I read when I started reading about Christianity.
The first was Dom Crossan's "Life of a Med Peasant".
Did I go from bad to worse?
... she propounded a theory arguing 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 skeptics hold, but were 'deliberately constructed myths'* concealing (yet, to certain initiates, relating) esoteric historic events.
She alleges that they never actually happened (that is, that the events they chronicle were not at all miraculous), as the authors of the Gospels knew.
According to her interpretation of the methods of pesher, which she discovers in the scrolls, the authors of the Gospels wrote on two levels. 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.
* Jesus the Man: New Interpretation from the Dead Sea Scrolls (re-issued in paperback with foreword by Barbara Thiering) Simon and Schuster, New York; November 2006; ISBN 1-4165-4138-1; p. 46
