Diogenes the Cynic

Your questions make no sense. There was no one saying Jesus did NOT have biological siblings until the 3rd Century, and it was adopted by the orthodoxy, so why would expect to see anyone object to it? It would have been heretical to defend literal siblings at that point.

Diogenes the Cynic

Is there anyone in the first two centuries who denies that Jesus is a lizard person? No one thought he wasn't a lizard person?

jdboy

So in the 3rd century the church denied the truth of it's own history? And yet left in the obvious evidence that Jesus had a family and a sibling named James.

Huon

Everybody could note that these three theories do not mention "brethren" (belonging to the same organisation - or church), but the discussion is about children of the same father, Joseph, and Mother, Mary of Joseph, or cousins, Clopas and Mary of Clopas.

Diogenes the Cynic

Yep. This is a problem why?

jdboy

It's not a problem, it's just confirmation that they did not consider the jesus story anything but fiction. There is nothing to defend as history.

Diogenes the Cynic

No, it means that by the time perpetual virginity had become doctrine, the Canonical Gospels were already too well known to do anything about.

EarlDoherty

I said anything BUT that it was “a slip of the pen”. I’m saying that the two phrases are extremely similar, lacking (in English) only a common preposition. The first of your quotes above is contradicted by Phil. 1:14, because the latter contains both the word “adelphos” in conjunction with a reference to being such in relation to “the Lord” and a universally accepted meaning of "adelphos" as member of the sect, not a sibling. In my books, that makes them similar, with Phil. 1:14 disproving your contention about Gal. 1:19 and pointing to both phrases meaning essentially the same thing, whether it’s a dative of genitive use of “the Lord.”

The presence of Phil. 1:14 at the very least disproves the contention that Gal. 1:19 has only one “plain meaning.”

And you don’t like my explanation for 1 Cor. 9:5. Tough. New Testament research, and historical research generally, constantly makes deductive suggestions when faced with questions surrounding the text, suggestions which try to draw on various considerations within the record and proposing solutions that are supposedly reasonable. If everything but one aspect fits a theory, then you try to come up with a reasonable solution to that one aspect. You don’t toss out all the rest of the crafted theory. This is what anti-mythicists do all the time. In the face of a powerful case within the epistles that they know of no historical Jesus, historicists seize on one or two possible anomalies and bleat: but this and that have no other “plain meaning” and thus all the rest of your case and the arguments that go with it are simple bullshit.

Neutral historical research doesn’t operate that way.

Of course, what historicists are engaged in is anything but neutral historical research.

Earl Doherty

Iskander

Yes, the word ‘brethren’ as an explanation is a cynical ploy and it is a crude one at that.

Mark says clearly that Jesus had sisters and brothers .

jdboy

Yes, the story was understood and well known as fiction. There was nothing to change.