What did Paul mean by brother(s) of the Lord?
Posted: Tue Feb 19, 2019 8:17 am
Galatians 1:19 (Paul's meetings with Cephas and James) is seen, along with the received mention of James in Antiquities, as a slam-dunk by some historicists. If Paul met Jesus' brother, and then years later Josephus crossed paths with him, then James' brother Jesus was a historical person.
The Antiquities mention is fairly straightforward to defang, because it so obviously depends on a misrecollection by Origen which was accepted by Eusebius and Jerome. Centuries passed, and by golly, the Origen-Eusebius-Jerome version became the only version there is.
Paul's a tougher nut to crack. Papyrus P46 (dated 150-250 CE) and those "earliest and best" manuscripts (looking like Fourth Century) agree about Paul having used the epithet. Although Paul's "...none - except James..." phrasing may seem awkward to some modern readers and therefore suspicious of being a later addition, Paul often uses similar figures of speech, pretended second thoughts.
None of that rules out interpolation, but there's not much foundation for it, either. Hitchens' Razor isn't just for the impious: what can be proposed without evidence can be dismissed without evidence, this time dismissed by the historicists.
That leaves interpretation as the discussable avenue for assessing the force of the evidence. There are plenty of interpretations: kinship readings, non-kinship but still face-to-face religious relationships and - keeping the mythicists in the game - religious relationships that aren't face-to-face.
https://uncertaintist.wordpress.com/201 ... and-james/
Spoiler alert: I don't even bother with Carrier's "brothers of the Lord = brothers = fellow Christians" I'd award that round to James McGrath and move on. It's fair game in the thread, of course. I also omitted the intriguing interpretation by Origen in Against Celsus (1.47). Even though he himself believed that James and Jesus were kin (of some sort), Origen proposed that Paul was referring to a similarity of "virtue and doctrine" between James and Jesus.
The Antiquities mention is fairly straightforward to defang, because it so obviously depends on a misrecollection by Origen which was accepted by Eusebius and Jerome. Centuries passed, and by golly, the Origen-Eusebius-Jerome version became the only version there is.
Paul's a tougher nut to crack. Papyrus P46 (dated 150-250 CE) and those "earliest and best" manuscripts (looking like Fourth Century) agree about Paul having used the epithet. Although Paul's "...none - except James..." phrasing may seem awkward to some modern readers and therefore suspicious of being a later addition, Paul often uses similar figures of speech, pretended second thoughts.
None of that rules out interpolation, but there's not much foundation for it, either. Hitchens' Razor isn't just for the impious: what can be proposed without evidence can be dismissed without evidence, this time dismissed by the historicists.
That leaves interpretation as the discussable avenue for assessing the force of the evidence. There are plenty of interpretations: kinship readings, non-kinship but still face-to-face religious relationships and - keeping the mythicists in the game - religious relationships that aren't face-to-face.
https://uncertaintist.wordpress.com/201 ... and-james/
Spoiler alert: I don't even bother with Carrier's "brothers of the Lord = brothers = fellow Christians" I'd award that round to James McGrath and move on. It's fair game in the thread, of course. I also omitted the intriguing interpretation by Origen in Against Celsus (1.47). Even though he himself believed that James and Jesus were kin (of some sort), Origen proposed that Paul was referring to a similarity of "virtue and doctrine" between James and Jesus.