Did the Christian Church rewrite history?

In the midst of her research on the historical Jesus, scholar Lena Einhorn stumbled upon a surprising find. While reading through narratives of the Jewish revolt by first-century historian Flavius Josephus, Einhorn encountered a number of similarities to the Bible. These parallels—all limited to a short period of time—include an unnamed and mysterious messianic leader strikingly similar to the Jesus described in the Gospels—only he’s not the peaceful miracle worker we know so well.

Significantly, Einhorn found that historical records consistently place these events (which allude to the conspicuous figure in Josephus’s writings) twenty years later than in the New Testament. Twenty years, with precision, every time.

A SHIFT IN TIME explores the possibility that there may have been a conscious effort by those writing and compiling the New Testament to place Jesus’s ministry in an earlier, less violent time period than when it actually happened. In this groundbreaking book, Einhorn argues that when the bible and the accounts of first-century historians are compared side by side, it is clear that the events that shaped the Christian world were not exactly as they seem.

Elements of this emerging hypothesis were included in Einhorn’s previous book,The Jesus Mystery, originally published in Swedish in 2006 and later published in the United States. Much has happened since then and Einhorn has presented her findings in various academic forums. The publication of A SHIFT IN TIME marks the first complete presentation of the full details of the hypothesis and a discussion of its conclusions and inevitable implications.

Lena Einhorn, MD, PhD, is an acclaimed filmmaker, author, and former medical researcher with a PhD in virology and tumor biology. As a filmmaker, she has written and produced multiple medical documentaries for independent production companies as well as for PBS. Later in her career, she branched out into nonmedical subjects and wrote and directed various award-winning dramas and documentaries, including the series From the Shadows of the Past, which explores three historical puzzles, biblical and nonbiblical. In 2007, her first book on the historical Jesus, The Jesus Mystery, was published in English by the Lyons Press. Einhorn’s books have been translated into German (Heyne), Greek (Orfeas), Polish (Czarna Owca), and Swedish (Norstedts).