A Request For Your Support
On Publishing, Amplification, and the Particular Help the Archive Needs Now
A short time ago I published an article titled, “A Note to the Commonwealth.” This short piece laid out how the Archive works, what it asks of you, and what it does not ask. If you have not read that one, the link is at the bottom of this post and I would recommend starting there.
This essay is a companion to it, and the registers are different enough that I want to name the difference up front.
That post was orientation. This one is a request.
The Archive of the Ebyonim has reached a point in its development where the work itself is largely built. The first volume of The Golden Thread of Tzedek, which we have been calling Who Were They...?, is approximately seventy-five percent through its first draft. Three chapters remain. The architecture is in place. The footnotes are stacking up. The arguments have been pressure-tested across weekly Substack publication, and the readers who have stayed with the project have done what serious readers do, which is to find the load-bearing walls and ask whether they hold.
What I do not have, and what the project now needs, is the institutional infrastructure that turns a draft manuscript into a book a wider readership can actually get its hands on.
That means a literary agent who understands the religious-historical scholarship space and can place a project like this with a publisher equipped to support it.
It means a high-quality developmental editor who has worked with first-century scholarship before, who can read the manuscript with the kind of disciplined attention that catches what the writer no longer sees.
It means a publisher willing to stand behind this project that does not fit neatly into the existing categories of academic monograph, popular religious history, or trade nonfiction, and is doing something at the seam of all three.
I have begun those conversations. I have sent the kind of letter to the kind of independent publisher that careful exploratory letters get sent to in this stage of a project. Some of those conversations are productive. Others are slow. The one consistent piece of feedback I have received, across every conversation, is the same. The work is interesting. The platform needs to grow.
Which brings me to you, and to what I am asking.
What the Industry Actually Looks At
Publishing in 2026 operates on a small set of legible signals. Agents and editors evaluating a project ask questions whose answers can be checked in twenty minutes.
Does this writer have a platform? How many subscribers? What is the engagement rate? Does the work circulate? Do the comments demonstrate a readership that argues with the material rather than scrolling past it? Is there evidence that the audience would buy the book?
These are the questions I would prefer that the industry not focus on. I would prefer the industry asked whether the scholarship was sound, whether the prose was capable of carrying the argument, and whether the project was contributing something the existing literature had not. Those questions are sometimes asked too, but they get asked second. The platform questions get asked first, because the platform questions are the ones that determine whether the second set of questions ever gets asked at all.
I don’t say this to complain about this arrangement. It is what it is.
I am describing it because describing it is the prerequisite my ask.
The Archive currently has a readership that is small relative to the scale of the project and qualitatively excellent. The people who read here read carefully. They argue back. They restack the work where it will be argued with by other careful readers. The conversion rate from drive-by reader to engaged subscriber is unusually high, which I think reflects the fact that the work rewards the kind of attention careful readers bring.
What the Archive needs now is more of you.
Not because more readers would change what the work is. The work is what it is, and would be the same work in front of a thousand readers or a hundred thousand. The platform numbers matter because they are the gate through which the work passes on its way to the institutional infrastructure that gives it the reach it needs.
What the Project Will Actually Deliver
Before going further, it is fair for me to say more about what the work this letter is asking you to amplify is.
Who Were They...? is the first volume of The Golden Thread of Tzedek, and its argument is straightforward to state and demanding to defend. The first century was not a religious landscape with two emerging traditions called Judaism and Christianity. It was a constitutional landscape with dozens of competing communities, each of them an interpretation of the same founding document, each of them producing different consequences in the world depending on which parts of that document they amplified and which they let atrophy.
The book recovers those communities one at a time, each in its own chapter, on its own terms. Some of the names will be familiar. The Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Essenes, the Zealots, the Samaritans, the Gnostics, the Rabbis. Some will be less familiar. The Therapeutae of Lake Mareotis, the Libertini of Roman Jerusalem, the Nasoreans of the Galilean hill country, the Ebionites who refused the Pauline domestication, the Mar Thoma Nasrani who carried the Commonwealth into Kerala fifteen centuries before the Portuguese arrived to burn their books. The Mandeans, who still chant John the Immerser’s liturgy in southern Iraq today and have never bent the knee to either the rabbinic or Christian institutional traditions. The Petrine Christians, the Pauline Christians, the Johannine Christians, and the Thomasine Christians. The Cult of Xristos, which is what the institutional tradition becomes when its covenantal substrate is excavated and the metaphysical apparatus is laid bare.
Each chapter applies the same diagnostic instrument, what the project calls the Tree Hypothesis, which scores communities along ten axes: four textual roots from the Torah and six lived-response branches measuring how each community actually behaved in the world. The result is a recovered landscape. The polyphony of the first century becomes legible again, and the institutional consolidations that flattened that polyphony into the inherited categories become legible as the political acts they actually were.
The volume closes by reconstructing the figure at the center of all of it, the Galilean prophet whose Jubilee campaign animated the original Commonwealth:
Yehoshua bar-Yosef ha-Tzaddik, Meshach’yah B’nei David.
By that point in the book, the reader has the apparatus to see what the institutional tradition has spent two thousand years obscuring. The chapter does not need to argue. It needs to recognize.
That is what the work delivers. That is what the publishing infrastructure exists to provide.
What Helps, Specifically
In rough descending order of usefulness:
A warm introduction to a literary agent. If you are inside the publishing industry, or you know someone who is, an introduction to an agent who works the religious-history or narrative-nonfiction space would be the single most useful thing a reader could provide. The cold-query process is a slow grinder. A warm handoff cuts months off it. If you have an agent and have read enough of the Archive to think the project might fit their list, please write me. The introduction does not have to come with an endorsement. Just access to the conversation.
A connection to a developmental editor. Particularly one who has worked on first-century scholarship, religious-historical reconstruction, or comparable interdisciplinary work. The kind of editor who can read a 120,000-word manuscript and tell the writer where the argument loses traction or where the structural rhythm fails. If you are that editor, or you know one, please reach out.
A recommendation to a publisher. If you have published a book in this space, or you know an acquiring editor whose list this project might fit, a sentence in a private email to that editor that says you might want to look at what Jeremy Prince is doing on Substack costs you very little and could change the trajectory of this work substantially.
A peer review. Especially from working scholars in Second Temple Judaism, early Christian origins, or adjacent fields. The Archive welcomes critical engagement of every register, and a public disputation from a credentialed scholar who finds the work worth disagreeing with would be more useful than another year of friendly subscriber growth. A Note to the Commonwealth lays out how the Archive handles peer review. The short version is, we welcome it, and we respond to it on the same terms.
A FREE subscription. Free subscriptions matter for the platform metrics that agents and editors check. If you have been reading the Archive without subscribing, subscribing costs you nothing and helps measurably. The Archive does not paywall, and there are no plans to do so. The free subscription is not the prelude to a paid pitch. It is the unit of attention the publishing industry has decided to count.
A restack, particularly to a reader you expect to push back. The Archive grows fastest when essays move into the orbit of readers who are skeptical, careful, and willing to argue. A sympathetic reader who scrolls past contributes less to the project than a hostile reader who engages seriously. If a particular essay landed for you and you can think of someone it might frustrate productively, send it to them.
A comment. Comments are the most public form of engagement on the platform, and they signal to other readers, and to the algorithmic infrastructure that surfaces the work, that the writing is alive and being argued with. Disagree with me in the comments. Tell me what is wrong with the reading. Tell me what I have missed. The Archive’s comment culture is one of the genuine pleasures of running this project, and it is one of the strongest signals I can present to anyone evaluating the platform.
What I Am Not Asking For
I am not asking for money. The Archive does not paywall, does not run pledge drives, and is not soliciting transactional support. The work is freely available because the Covenant it describes is the Commons, and a commons is not built by extracting rent from the people walking through it.
In fact, if you have disposable income for subscriptions, consider upgrading to paid subscribership for incredible agents of justice on Substack like Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez or Fr. Joash P. Thomas or Jessica Friday. Their work deserves support and if I handled currency anymore, I would be paying for their subscriptions (among others).
Additionally, I am not asking for your blanket endorsement.
If the work has not landed for you, please do not pretend otherwise on my behalf.
The recommendation that helps me is the recommendation given honestly, by a reader who has actually engaged with the material and thinks it is worth a colleague’s attention. The recommendation given out of politeness helps no one and erodes the trust the recommender’s name carries.
I am not asking for amplification at the cost of your own discernment. If you have been quiet because you are still working through whether the readings hold, that is exactly the right posture. The Archive rewards patience. Take the time you need.
What I am asking is that, if the work has earned your serious attention, you let your serious attention show in the form the platform can count.
A Final Note on Why This Matters
The reason any of this matters is not that I want to be a published author in some abstract personal sense. The reason it matters is that the manuscript in question makes a set of arguments that the existing institutional accounts have been organized around obscuring for nineteen centuries, and those arguments deserve to land in front of a wider readership than Substack can reach by itself.
A published book reaches readers Substack does not. Reviews in journals that test ideas thoroughly. Library acquisitions. Course adoptions. The slow institutional ratification that lets the next generation of scholars, journalists, and lay readers take a project seriously enough to engage with it.
The Archive will continue regardless. The work that has been published will remain freely available. The remaining chapters will get drafted on the schedule they get drafted on. None of what I am asking is a precondition for the project’s existence. What I am asking is whether the project can grow into the public space it was built for, and whether you are willing to participate in helping it get there.
If the answer is yes, you know what to do. The buttons are below. The comment section is open. The introductions you can make, you can make. The disagreements you have been holding back, please bring them.
If the answer is no, or not yet, that is also a respectable answer, and the Archive will continue to welcome you on whatever terms you bring.
The work is the work. The wager is that it will find its readers. You are how it does.
What I Will Bring Back
The Archive’s standing position is that the Covenant is a commons, and a commons is built by reciprocity. What I am asking from you in this essay is real, and it is fair for me to say what I will be bringing back in return.
When Who Were They...? is published, the readers who carried the work to that point will receive what the work makes possible. Concretely:
A signed and inscribed copy of the published volume, sent at my expense, to any reader who has engaged seriously with the project and wants one. Inscribed however the recipient prefers, to whomever they prefer. If you want the book sent to a friend, a colleague, a teacher, a synagogue or seminary library, a pastor who needs to read it, a daughter, a parent, a study group: I will inscribe and ship it. Tell me where it should go and what it should say.
Advance reader copies, in galley form, to readers who have done the kind of close engagement that makes them useful first reviewers. If you have read a meaningful share of the Archive and you write reviews, run a Substack of your own, or work in a context where your reading would help the book find its readers, please write me. The galleys are how a book moves before it moves.
Live conversations on the Substack pages of readers who host the Archive. If the engagement and amplification this essay is asking for materializes, I will return the exposure by going on your Substack, your podcast, your community space, and doing the work of public conversation in front of your audience. The amplification is a circuit. I want it to keep moving.
Workshop and reading-group visits, by video, free of charge, to any community of readers working through the material together. Synagogue learning circles, seminary classrooms, book clubs, mutual-aid collectives, community land trusts thinking through the Compact’s economic provisions: I will spend an hour with your group. Schedule it whenever it works.
Substantive acknowledgment in the published volume for readers whose disputations, peer reviews, or correspondence have sharpened the manuscript. Named the way you want to be named. Anonymous if you prefer. Substack handle, full name, professional title, however the credit best serves you.
And, for as long as I am the person running this Archive, the standing commitment to actually answer the careful letters. The work has produced correspondents who have changed how I read the texts. That correspondence is among the most valuable parts of running this project, and it does not stop when the audience grows.
These are not rewards. They are the gifts the Commonwealth is owed by the work it has been making possible.
A Word of Thanks Before You Go
Before this essay closes, there is one thing left to say, and it is the thing the rest of the essay was structured around saying.
Thank you. Sincerely. Genuinely. Effusively. Thank you.
The Archive of the Ebyonim is what it is because the readership that has gathered around it has been, from the beginning, the kind of readership a project like this needs and almost never gets. You have read the long essays. You have followed the footnotes. You have wrestled with the defamiliarized names and the unfamiliar grammar and the long arcs of argument that take three or four posts to come together. You have argued back in the comments. You have written privately when the comments were not the right venue. You have restacked the pieces that frustrated you, and you have restacked the pieces that landed, and you have brought the work in front of readers I would never have reached on my own.
What we are doing here is something close to a tightrope walk. The work asks the reader to suspend a substantial amount of inherited framework long enough to consider whether the alternative architecture might hold. That is not a small ask, and the readers who have stayed have done it with patience, generosity, and a willingness to be surprised that I do not take for granted.
The walk has been better for the company. It has been better for the disagreements. It has been better for the corrections that found me before the wrong sentence reached print.
Whatever this project becomes, you are how it gets there.
Thank you for walking with the Archive. Onward, together, unto Jubilee.
The Archive of the Ebyonim welcomes good-faith correspondence and even generous disagreements. Your readership is deeply valued. The Archive does not show preference for praise, nor do we paywall for access.
This is our Covenant, laid out to the Commonwealth of YHWH.
Onward unto Jubilee. For the restoration of everything to the commons of the heavens.
I understand your desire to publish. But the editing process will distort your words. You lose control of the content and means of distribution, pricing and marketing. I urge you to consider contracting each step (developmental editing, formatting, art creation, marketing) yourself. Lulu and Bookbaby offer some of the services, although you will need to work to find your specialists. The publishing world is almost completely rotten.