Doug Shaver

References to his brothers are not the only relevant data.

Given an assumption that he was real, his having brothers is the only parsimonious way to make sense of assertions that he had brothers. Without that assumption, however, there are plenty of other ways to make sense of the same assertions when those assertions are evaluated together with all the other data pertaining to Christianity's origins.

Julian

You refer to the law of large numbers a lot. Unfortunately, it doesn't apply here. When you are dealing with myths and basic storyline components, the number of variants doesn't come close to what is necessary for the law of large numbers to come into play. The parallels are obvious and easily ascribable to human nature, no appeal to coincidence is necessary. All that is required is to strip the narrative down to its basic components.

Julian

Amaleq13

My comment was in response to what I consider to be a naive and uncritical dismissal of the clearly questionable, albeit ultimately successful, efforts made by Christians in the 2nd century and beyond to establish their version of the faith as "orthodox".

No Robots

The story from Eusebius is that they were just farmers, at least until after their appearance in front of the Emperor. The implication is that it is this appearance that stimulated their lionization by the Church. (Lionization? Isn't that what Domitian was threatening them with? Honestly, I kill myself)


You wouldn't believe the hoops that some Christians go through to prove that Jesus had no siblings. They don't want anything to suggest that Mary ever had carnal relations. The Church, early and later, never particularly wanted to highlight Jesus's earthly kin. Eusebius's willingness to even report the story from Hegesippus is a credit to him. Did you know that he was briefly excommunicated for Arian sympathies? I think the plain evidence of Jesus's earthly nature was unavoidable in the documents, and that Eusebius was a brave scholar to have accepted that evidence.

I'm suggesting that when Hegesippus/Eusebius is cited to corroborate Paul, you shift the debate to a radical, improvised denial of the new evidence. To be logical and rational, you should first evaluate the connection between Paul and Hegesippus/Eusebius.

jjramsey

That depends. Notice that I mentioned ambiguity as well. One can make up for a lack of variants by not being too picky about what constitutes a parallel or a similarily among the variants.

I would halfway agree. A lot of myths are about what people are interested in: love, hate, sex, death, power, food. (Not an exhaustive list!) There's a lot of ways to talk about those things, but still opportunities for sharing a story element or two.

The problem is that what really happen is not a stripping down of a narrative into an outline, but a force-fitting of an outline onto a story, a la Procrustes.

Amaleq13

I question how closely you've been following the thread since this does not appear to describe the discussion or my participation at all. For one thing, you seem to be suffering from the misapprehension that I deny Jesus walked on earth. And I certainly don't need advice from you about logic or rational thought, thanks all the same. Neither Hegesippus nor Eusebius "corroborate" Paul. They had been offered as corroboration of a particular interpretation of a Pauline phrase and as corroboration of a particular conception of James.

There is nothing radical nor improvised about anything I said with regard to the 2nd century struggle to attain the status of "orthodoxy".

No Robots

What I'm saying is that you have one rather abstruse theory to explain away Paul's references to Jesus's kin, and then a completely different theory to explain away the references in Eusebius. Does it not strike you as strange that you need two completely separate and convoluted theories to explain something that requires no theory at all if we accept both sets of references at face value?

Amaleq13

Your apparent lack of comprehension for what I've written notwithstanding, if Paul's references are not to Jesus' kin and Eusebius' references are based on faulty assumptions obtained from a story of unverified historicity, I would think that more than one explanation would necessarily be involved. You are, of course, free to embrace a more simplistic view.