My name is Jeremy Prince, and I’m a public scholar, writer, and mendicant based in Ojai, California. I manage a project called the Archive of the Ebyonim, which is most of what you’ll find me doing these days.
My path to where you’ve discovered me was not at all a straight one. I spent two decades in global supply chains, the movement of goods across distances, the logistics of who gets what and when and at what cost, and I carry advanced study in history and philosophy alongside it.
That combination tends to surprise people, but it’s the key to everything I do.
What it brings to scholarship is a tendency to look at ancient movements and see not theological abstractions floating somewhere above history, but rather tangible systems of community and survival. People trying to feed each other. People trying to last.
So that’s the work in a sentence: I’m trying to recover the suppressed history of the first-century Levant. I’m especially interested in stripping away the layers of Hellenization that turned Yehoshua into something his earliest followers wouldn’t have recognized, and in the surprising economic radicalism of the people who gathered around him. When I read the Sinai Compact and the ancient principles of Jubilee, debt release, the restoration of land to the families who’d lost it, I see communities deliberately organizing against the extractive economies pressing in on them. The whole project bends toward connecting those ancient principles to modern structures, and it’s beginning to take shape as a historical trilogy, the first volume of which is a forthcoming book called Commonwealth. For me, writing is an act of restoration. I’m trying to strip away the ecclesiastical translations and revive the radical heartbeat underneath them, the one that belonged to the dispossessed.
Which brings me to that word, because I should tell you what kind of person you’re reading.
I’m what the medieval world used to call a mendicant, and what the ancient Yahwists of the Levant called an Ebyon: a dispossessed one. This is a word that carries far more than it first appears to, and I’ll keep unfolding it for you across these essays, but the short version is this: I live without a personal income and with radically few accumulated possessions. I live in the Ojai Valley of California, in a life organized around service and a deliberate refusal of scarcity-driven accumulation. I don’t pay for the truck I drive. My phone mostly doesn’t work. I give fifteen or twenty hours a week to a local organization that feeds seniors and shelters the vulnerable, and most of what’s left I pour into research and into the writing to which you’ve found your way.
I won’t pretend this arrangement arrived on some calm, well-lit afternoon, because it didn’t. It came out of a real collapse, a season when the life I’d built was coming apart faster than I could hold it together. But here’s the distinction I’ve come to hold onto, and it matters more than almost anything else I could tell you about myself: poverty is something that happens to a person, while dispossession is something a person chooses, and then builds upon. I chose dispossession from the gnashing teeth of poverty. What I have now isn’t a wreck dressed up in gentler language. It’s a structure of living, and I renew it on purpose, every single day.
And that career I mentioned, the one in supply chains, turns out to be the most useful thing I can hand you as you start reading. Because when I began working through these ancient texts in earnest, I couldn’t stop noticing the machinery underneath them. The commodities. The customs houses. The granaries, the tax collectors, the client kings. A whole material world the devotional traditions had quietly painted over and called scenery. The dispossessed life and the way I read these texts are really the same instrument, just pointed in two directions. One is the practice, the other is the excavation, and the Archive that I steward grows out of the exact place where the two of them meet.
The One Idea Underneath It All
So let me tell you the one idea that everything else rests on, because if it lands, the rest of the Archive will make a kind of intuitive sense, and if it doesn’t, none of it will.
Here it is. When you sit down with the Hebrew scriptures, the very first decision you make is a translation decision, and it’s political before it’s ever linguistic. If you read the Covenant as a religion, it will keep producing religions. If you read it as a constitution, it produces commonwealths. That’s the fork in the road, and almost everyone is walked down the first path before they’re old enough to know there was a second.
Take the word itself. B’rit, the Hebrew we render as “Covenant,” doesn’t mean a contract you sign or a vow you exchange at an altar. At its root, b’rit means to cut. In Genesis 15, the covenant is a corridor of split animal-halves with a path of blood running between them. In the body of Abraham ha-Ivri (”the one who crosses borders”), it’s a permanent mark, a scar he could still read decades later. A b’rit cuts bodies. It’s physical, it’s binding, and it’s nothing at all like the polite abstraction the English word has become.
Now do the same thing to the phrase most people think they understand best. Malkuth d’Shmayya. Your bibles call it “the Kingdom of Heaven,” and the instant you hear it, your imagination builds a celestial monarchy, a throne in the clouds, the same shape as a European kingdom just relocated to the sky.
That picture is almost exactly upside down.
Malkuth is closer to “central government,” and Yehoshua is using the word against itself, hanging it on something with no throne, no capital, no standing army, nothing that a legion could march in and decapitate. Shmayya, the “heavens,” was never an elsewhere in the Hebrew imagination; it’s the dimension where things actually flourish, where tzedek (justice) and dror (emancipation) are operative rather than promised. Put it together and you get something I render as the Commonwealth of the Heavens: a distributed federation of communities, governed by practices of common table and by assemblies of hospitality rather than by king, where the Covenant’s intended flourishing is genuinely happening: daily bread, forgiven debts, and a flourishing life radiating outward like a node in the Olam ha-Tzeh - this predatory ever-present world.
And this is the claim I’ll spend whole books defending, so I’ll just state it plainly here and let it sit. What Yehoshua ha-Netsari (“the Guardian”) inaugurated was not a new religion. It was a restoration of the oldest one, the Sinai constitution recovered after a thousand years of monarchy and priesthood had silted over its surface. That constitution was an anti-extraction operating system, and its mechanisms were concrete, not sentimental: Shemitah, the cancellation of debts every seventh year; Yovel, the return of land to the families who’d lost it every fiftieth; the protection of the widow, the orphan, and the ger (the resident foreigner) written into clause after clause. It was engineered, from its first syllable, to make it impossible for a permanent class of winners and a permanent class of losers to harden inside the community.
All of this finally tells you who the Ebyonim were, the people this whole Archive is named for. They were not so much a fringe heretical sect that lost an argument with the early institutional church. Instead, this project reads them as the original Jerusalem Commonwealth, the Dispossessed running the Sinai Compact in its operative, daily, edible form. They wore the name Ebyonim, “the dispossessed ones,” not as a lament but as a vocation, because Deuteronomy had promised a community ordered rightly would have no anawim (those crushed by poverty) in it at all.
So when I use the word Commonwealth, that’s what I mean. Not a church. Not a creed. A constitution for a society that refused to extract, and a wager that we can still read the source code.
A Walk Across the Workshop Floor
If you’ve read this far, you’ve probably gathered that the Archive of the Ebyonim is not a single project. It’s something more like a workshop floor, and I want to walk you across it so you know where you’re standing.
The Archive is the home of all the projects I’m about to show you. It’s where I do my public scholarship out in the open, with the work-in-progress left visible rather than tidied away. It’s where I test my more radical and speculative theologies, the readings I’m not yet sure of and want to think through in daylight. It’s where I float plans and proposals for the cooperative enterprises and neighborhood designs I’m trying to build. And it’s how I actually meet you, the readers, the interlocutors, the people who write in to push back. The whole thing runs on a single wager: that the constitutional history of the Sinai Compact has been obscured rather than lost, and that recovering it is work best done in public, with the door propped open.
The essays sort into seven beats, and the quickest way to read here well is to know what kind of trust each one is asking of you.
The Record is the forensic spine. These are the rigorously sourced, primary-source-heavy reconstructions, the essays whose claims are built to hold up under scholarly pressure, with the confidence carefully calibrated and the speculative stretches flagged as such. Meditations works the same material in a looser register, thinking out loud, asking what happens if you read a text another way for an evening; read these as conversation, not verdict. Shuva B’rit is where I publish the Archive’s own translations of biblical and Second Temple texts, trying to recover the covenantal grammar that Greek and Latin mediation flattened. The Speculations are the highest-risk readings, the ones that hold ancient scripture and contemporary physics in the same hand, and they’re marked from the door as hunches pursued in good faith rather than settled doctrine. Orientations, the lexicon of the Archive, lays out plainly what I mean by the contested terms, the reference posts you can reach for when a word in another essay is doing more work than you can track. Ungovernable turns toward the present and asks what cooperative covenantal infrastructure could actually look like in this century. And A Divine Revolution is the narrative arm, where the scholarship becomes story, and the voices the canonical traditions left out get to speak.
One last thing about how this place runs, because it shapes everything.
There’s never a paywall for content or for engagement; the work is free because the Covenant it describes is a commons.
Moreover, I do my very best to show no preference for praise. And good-faith disagreement isn’t just tolerated here, it’s the most useful thing you can bring me. I’ll say more about that near the end. For now, let me show you what all these beats are actually building toward.
Three Arms of One Excavation
Everything on that workshop floor is feeding three larger structures. I think of them as three arms of one excavation: the scholarship that reconstructs, the scholarship that prosecutes, and the storytelling that dramatizes. I want to introduce you to all three, because once you see how they fit together you’ll understand what the Archive is really for.
The first arm is the one closest to finished, and it’s the reconstruction. It begins with Commonwealth: A First Century Excavation, the book I’m shopping to agents and independent publishers right now. Commonwealth takes the wildly polyphonic world of the first-century Levant, the Sadducees and Pharisees and Essenes and Zealots, the Samaritans and Therapeutae and Nasoreans, all the factions that Josephus flattened into a tidy handful, and reads them not as competing religions but as rival answers to a single constitutional question:
What do you do with the Sinai Compact under totalizing Roman occupation?
Out of that, Yehoshua and the movement around him emerge in their actual proportions, an indigenous covenantal uprising of the Dispossessed. The second volume, Apostolos: Paul Against the Twelve, takes up the rupture that Commonwealth can only sketch. After the founder’s death, the movement faced a question it couldn’t dodge: stay the Torah-faithful, materially demanding Commonwealth the Jerusalem leadership had inherited, or become something a Roman audience could swallow without alarm? Apostolos reads Paul as the deliberate architect of that second path, and it reads the letters of Ya’akov (James) and Kefa (Peter) and the rest as the testimony of the people he was arguing against. The third volume, Dispossessed: The Radical Ebionite Insurgency, has the longest reach of the three. It follows the remnant of that original Jerusalem assembly into the centuries after the fracture, the Ebyonim and Nasoreans branded as heretics by a rapidly Hellenizing church, as they carried their scroll-centered, fiercely monotheistic tradition south and east into the Arabian interior. Founding, capture, survival underground: one continuous argument across three books.
The second arm is more pointed, and frankly more combative. Where the first trilogy reconstructs what the Commonwealth was, this one prosecutes the question of how it was contained. It opens with The Parthian Connection, which recovers something two centuries of New Testament scholarship has had in plain sight and declined to read as strategy: the world Yehoshua was born into wasn’t a Roman world with a Jewish problem at its edge, it was a contested seam between two superpowers, Rome and Arsacid Parthia, locked in a cold war neither could win. That stalemate produced jurisdictional gaps, and the covenantal resistance lived inside them. Read the geopolitics first, and texts you thought you knew start to disclose things theology can’t see; the magoi who arrive at Herod’s court stop being three kings with a star and become what the institutional record says they were, a kingmaking caste of the Parthian state carrying portable, untraceable capital to a rival claimant. The second volume, Canons and Creeds, follows the containment to its conclusion. It argues that the New Testament canon and the Nicene creed were not the organic flowering of theology but coordinated administrative enclosures, conducted across four centuries: a textual enclosure that turned the surviving alternative literature into contraband, a doctrinal enclosure that relocated the movement’s center of gravity from terrestrial politics into abstract metaphysics, and an institutional enclosure that spiritualized debt into a metaphor for sin until the Jubilee disturbed no actual creditor. The third volume, Kingdoms and Churches, carries that story into its long institutional aftermath throughout Western Christendom. It’s the furthest out on my horizon and the least settled, so I’ll say only that it asks what the enclosed tradition became once it had been fully fused to imperial power, and leave the details for when the work is further along.
The third arm is the one people don’t expect from a scholar, and it might be the one I love most. A Divine Revolution is the narrative project, a sweeping saga that retells the ancient and medieval world from the bottom up. It runs across thirteen codices, from the fall of Bronze Age Sumer to the age of the Crusades, and its method is closer to archaeology than to fantasy: it takes the texts and the languages and the scholarship seriously, then uses them to dig up the people that the official record left out and hand them back their voices. There’s no single hero. The point of view rotates through everyone caught in the events, each one certain they’re in the right, so that you’re never simply told whom to cheer. Two volumes are far enough along to name. A Divine Revolution: The Exodus tells the oldest liberation story in the Western imagination as a grounded political thriller, the man we remember as Moshe (Moses) reframed as a crown prince who learned the machinery of empire from the inside and then turned it against itself. A Divine Revolution: Minos does the same to the birth of the Olympian gods, reading them through the old idea that the gods were once mortal rulers, and setting their origin in the violent collapse of the Bronze Age Aegean. The saga is also built differently from most stories: it’s a cooperative creative house, owned by the people who make it, designed to practice the same Jubilee economics its stories are about. Which is, I admit, the whole point. A project that told these stories while running on extractive terms would be arguing one thing and doing the opposite.
Three arms, then. Reconstruction, prosecution, dramatization. They look like separate enterprises, and on a shelf they’d sit in three different sections of the local bookstore. But they’re really three registers of one excavation, every one of them tracing the same golden thread of tzedek running through time, the recurring insistence that domination is not destiny.
What I Hope You'll Find Here
So what do I hope you take from all of this, if you stay and read a while?
I’m not looking to convert anyone. I’m not building a membership roll, and I’m not asking you to sign anything. What I’m hoping you’ll find is closer to three habits of attention, and I’ll be honest that they ask something of you.
The first is patience for complexity. This material is genuinely tangled, and I’ve made a decision not to flatten it into something more convenient than it actually was. An essay here might ask you to hold four Hebrew words in your head at once, or to sit with a reconstruction I can only rate as probable rather than proven. I try to earn that patience by explaining myself as I go, and by telling you plainly how confident I am at each step. But I won’t hand you false clarity, because false clarity is exactly the thing the institutional traditions have been selling for two thousand years, and I’d rather give you the real difficulty and trust you to carry it.
The second is a willingness to be surprised. Reading here means running into moments where something you took as settled turns out to have been a choice. A translator’s choice, a council’s choice, an emperor’s choice. The Greek that handed you “the Lord” buried a Hebrew verb. The Latin that handed you “religion” buried a constitutional practice. Those discoveries can be disorienting, even a little vertigo-inducing, and I try to walk you through them with care rather than just yanking the floor out from underneath you. All I ask is that you let yourself be surprised, instead of reaching for the familiar explanation simply because it’s familiar and established.
The third is what I’d call practical seriousness, and it’s the one I care about most. None of this is theology in the abstract.
The Compact was a pattern of practice, something called an orthopraxy.
In my reading, the Covenant is an actual way of organizing how people fed each other and forgave each other’s debts and refused to let anyone fall permanently to the bottom. Patterns of practice get tested by being tried. So if something here lands, in a community land trust, a mutual-aid network, a worker cooperative, even just the way you keep your own household ledger, that’s the conversation I most want to have. The proof of this work was never going to be an argument anyone won. It’s a life that’s visibly being lived.
Which leaves the question the whole Archive is finally pointed at, and I’ll just hand it to you rather than answer it for you. If the Covenant really was an operating system for a society that refused to extract, and if we can still read the source code, then what would it actually mean to start running it again? Not someday, not in a restored Temple or a perfected world, but here, in whatever small patch of ground your own life happens to occupy?
An Open Door
So here’s my invitation, and it’s a simple one.
If anything in all of this has caught at you, become a free subscriber to the Archive of the Ebyonim. There’s no tier above it, no paywall waiting a few essays in, no second class of reader. You’ll just get the work as it comes, across all seven beats, and you’ll be able to watch the three arms take shape in something close to real time.
And if you want to talk, I genuinely do. Write to me at ebyonim@protonmail.com, or send me a direct message right here on Substack. Tell me where you think I’ve got it right, and tell me where you think I’ve got it wrong, because the second one is worth more to me than the first. This work sharpens by being argued with, not by being applauded, and the readers I have are the only peer review pool I have. I take that seriously.
The bread is on the table. The cup is still being passed. The assembly is still being constituted, one person at a time, and you’ve already found the door.
Onward unto Jubilee. For the restoration of everything to the commons of the heavens.
