spamandham

You are ignoring the importance of primacy. If Paul really did write when scholars typically say, then he wrote a minimum of decades prior to Josephus or the gospels. If he really did travel about establishing churches and distributing his gospel, then the NT gospel writers should have been familiar with his writings, and probably whoever Josephus got his information from about Jesus would have been familiar with Paul's writings as well.

The gospel mentions of James, and Josephus' mention of James are then not primary, but could easily be derived from Paul rather than from a general knowledge of Jesus having a brother named James.

Underlying your argument from consilience, is the assumption that these sources are independent.

ApostateAbe

I am sorry that I seemed to be ignoring that argument. I dealt with many arguments, including that one. I said that we expect the documents that depended on Paul to believe the same as what Paul expressed, so the theory that "brother of the Lord" is not the literal brother of Jesus as expressed in the gospels is even more unlikely than without the hypothesis that the synoptic gospels depended on Paul. If Paul instead meant a group of Christians who thought themselves godly or whatever, then we expect that the Christians who read Paul soon afterward would understand that meaning.

That is why consilience remains important. If the interpretation of one phrase in one early Christian writing is questionable, then we can use other early Christian writings to clarify the meaning. The viewpoint of some of the opposition, that the early Christians misinterpreted their texts willy-nilly, necessitates the view that consilience is useless in New Testament studies generally. Of course, it is possible that Christians really did misinterpret their own texts this way and that way, and maybe we really have no choice but to toss out consilience as a criterion, but you need evidence or else those speculative criticisms count for little. Anything can be possible, which means that any sort of evidence for what really is the most probable theory can be undercut any way you prefer. If you ask me, that should not be the way we make decisions about history. What is your methodology?

Toto

Consilience seems to have some use in the sciences, where different areas of reseach point to the same underlying theories.

I don't see that it has any particular use when you have two Christian documents from different areas, different sects, and different times. If your research had independently confirmed the same facts in each, that would be an example of consilience. But when your research has not confirmed the fact that you want in document A, using or misusing document B to interpret it is not consilience - just an unjustified assumption.

ApostateAbe

OK, yeah, that seems to be the same criticism that I had just now addressed.

aa5874

Well apologetic sources that was claimed by the Church to be after Paul did clarify that the apostle James was just simply called the Lord's brother but was NOT a literal brother. Several apologetic sources say that James was the son of ALPHAEUS and the SISTER of the supposed mother of Jesus.

James the apostle was NOT a sibling of the LORD Jesus.

Now, if you INSIST that the Gospels did mention that Jesus had a brother called James, you MUST also accept the Gospels' description of Jesus.

Jesus was the child of a Ghost of God, the Creator of heaven and earth, was God, who walked on water, transfigured, was raised from the dead and ascended through the clouds. Even in the Epistles, Paul described the LORD Jesus in similar fashion.

Galatians 1.19 is irrelevant.

And if you INSIST that the Jesus in Josephus' "Antiquities of the Jews 20.9.1
i.s the same Jesus in the Gospels then the same applies you MUST accept that Jesus was a child of the Ghost of God.

Galatians 1.19 is also irrelevant

Contrary to the OP, Galatians 1.19 has no negative effect on mythicism at all

Toto

You mean this?

Ideally, you should use other writings from the same time and place, whether Christian or non-Christian.

You don't need to assume that Christians misinterpreted their texts willy-nilly. You just need to recognize that meanings change over time, and that Christians have always reinterpreted their texts in light of their current circumstances. You can see all these processes operating today.

It looks like you are trying to shift the burden of proof again.

I think you need to use common sense and you need to recognize where there is not be enough surviving evidence to actually come to a conclusion. You seem to be strangely reluctant to do that.

After all, if your most probable theory only has a probability of being true of 2%, it might be more probable than a theory with a chance of 1%, but still not very likely.

Solo

The linguistic issues that are relevant here are semantics and neologisms. I am not changing the subject; it was Paul (likely him) who started to throw new poetic symbols and hyperboles around accepted terms like "lord", "son of God", "resurrection" in a new scheme which appealed to certain elements in the urban populations. How would an educated Greek-speaking Jew of Paul's time react to ideas like: I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. Gal 2:2 . It would have been evident to sober, rational, well-mannered people that Paul was not crucified, that no son of god ends up on a cross, and therefore it was unlikely Paul knew anyone worthy of such designation, let alone someone who would so love Paul that he would sacrifice himself for the likes of Paul by utterly debasing himself, and throw away God's precious gift of life.

And yet this kind of gibberish (I am no Greek scholar but I bet that the word 'συσταυρoω' did not have usage in the context that Paul gave it) had meaning for someone, in places where Paul lived and spread his ideas. People understood that Paul did not really mean to say he was co-crucified with Jesus, but that he was going through periods of deep depression and self-torture, and that he believed he was going to be richly rewarded for his steadfast holding onto the lord - who came here like Paul, and was a nobody like Paul - in the hereafter. And they would figure out that when Paul talked about the lord who was the spirit (2 Cr 3:18) he was referencing the grandeur and the mortification they themselves had experienced "in the lord". In short I don't think they would have nearly as much difficulty to understand Paul creative neologisms as you suppose. Their experience was shared.


I don't recall any but I can cite the posts in which you accuse others of eisegesis.

Jiri

spamandham

Yes, I screwed up.

It seems to me that there is ambiguity if read in isolation, but we are looking for the best translation given all information. Even if there were complete ambiguity on the matter, Paul uses brother and sister in every other instance to refer to fellow believers. That by itself makes a strong case for that same meaning in this instance.

What is the justification for presuming otherwise?

spin

When you feel like talking about the issue you were supposed to when you cited my question, do let me know. Here is is again...

Basic subject: two referents for the same reference, how does the person being communicated with distinguish referents in the communication?

We are dealing with the implications of the use of the non-titular κυριος and the apparent fact that the Pauline usage appears to have two referents in 1 Corinthians -- I say apparent, because those instances I have specifically delineated I find hard to believe Paul wrote.

Now there are two factors I have mentioned that reflect on this apparent usage. The first is that the use of θεος and of the non-titular κυριος were used in Paul's time and before as normal regular means of talking about the god of Israel even within the same sentence, a linguistic usage Paul was born into. The second is the fact that the non-titular κυριος for Jesus seems restricted to 1 Corinthians. These should give you pause from continuing to accept the promiscuous use of language people are accusing Paul of.

Paul seems very capable of using metaphor, but that doesn't relate to this challenge to the reader's ability to get the referent from any given use of the non-titular κυριος. Metaphor works when you can see it happening, as you have pointed out.

Do you need a dictionary?


spin

spamandham

I know you said that, but I countered with a concrete example of this very same group of people doing exactly the opposite. Early Christian texts - the gospels more so even than Paul - depend on Jewish scriptures, yet they do not express the same ideas, and are instead hostile to Jewish ways.

When we read Paul's letters to the exclusion of the gospels, we end up with a different Christianity than if we read the gospels to the exclusion of Paul. To me, it is clear the gospel authors had a different version of Jesus they were peddling rather than Paul's version. This being the case, it is not appropriate to presume they form a cohesive set of thoughts, even though a catholicizing movement later glued them together.

Misinterpretation can be accidental or intentional. The gospels are *clearly* representing a human Jesus, whereas Paul is not clearly doing that.

For better or for worse, as a general rule, it seems that we should interpret texts according to how they appear chronologically, since that's how they were written. Paul was not familiar with the NT gospels as far as I can tell, but it seems like the NT gospel writers should have been familiar with Paul's work.