dog-on

Or someone mistook the Origen comment (the brother of Jesus called Christ) as having actually been in Josephus and simply fixed their own copy.

ApostateAbe

This is what I mean when I say that interpolation should be a proposition of last resort. You can see possibilities for interpolations almost everywhere, and you can shape your speculations about interpolations around your own arbitrary theory, but it should be much preferable to choose the theory that best fits the evidence, with the least number of head scratchers and unlikely speculations.

show_no_mercy

The "best evidence" is that the language used in both 18.3.3 and 20.9.1 is not Josephan. You don't seem to be able to address that Josephus never uses the word "christ" except for the two times that he talks about the Jesus of Christianity. Yet "Jesus called Christ" is demonstrably Christian language.

Not only that, but according to Christian tradition, James the Just was specifically not a breaker of the law but a Judaizer - which is why he earned the title "Just". This passage is all sorts of confused. The simplest explanation is that it's a scribal note inserted into the body of the text.

aa5874

You do not have original documents of Origen's or Josephus' works. All the documents in the possession of the Church could have been interpolated or manipulated at any time before they were made public.

It is just absurd for to try to pretend that you know when Josephus was manipulated.

Toto

This means that you are prepared to stand on your head (metaphorically) and produce all sorts of ad hoc speculations in an attempt to make sense of documents that you don't fully understand.

We know that Christian documents were subject to interpolation, forgery, innocent mistakes, theologically motivated rewrites. We are pretty sure that scribes fixed scripture for consistency, as most editors do. Why should interpolation be the last resort? It need not be the first resort, but why the last? Especially where the language is unique for Josephus and the theology is contrary to everything we think we know about him.

You are forced to imagine that "some groups of Christians would believe things that the canonical writers did not" that were not recorded anywhere except in Josephus - or "they just didn't write it down. Some Christians apparently developed myths about James that were noteworthy, and other Christians did not."

aa5874

But, Papias has already dealt with the matter. According to Papias, Jesus did not have a brother who was a bishop called James

The mother of James the bishop was not the mother of the supposed Jesus and Joseph was not the father of the son of God it was the Holy Ghost.

Once ApostateAbe decides to use Origen, then he cannot ignore Papias who according to the Church, wrote long before Origen and perhaps very close to Josephus.

ApostateAbe cannot ignore Origen's description of Jesus.

This is "De Principiis" under the name of Origen describing Jesus.

The claim that James the bishop of a Church in Jerusalem had a brother called Jesus the Lord has been disputed even within the Church and, in any event, Jesus the Lord was not human. Jesus was God before Creation but only assumed flesh according to Origen.

Solo

No, actually the Reformation apologists had it right when responding to the Devil's Harlot, who sneered at the notion of Josephus writing ludicrous Xian agitprop. They said: The un-Josephan manner of the passages proves their miraculous origin. Josephus was writing these lines under the guidance of the Holy Spirit..... in spite of himself !

Jiri

Doina

I have sort of posted this before, but I was not able to resolve the issue, and I still have not resolved it, nor have I given up on it (always a bad sign).

It appears to me that some versions of myths or references to various "james" are actually related to versions of Indo-european myths about Yama, a deity whose name is often interpreted as "twin" in many Indo-European languages. There is an article about the Indo-European versions of this here.
http://pierce.yolasite.com/yamamyth

It is very clear that no one, in or out of the church can make any sense of which St. James is which. The RCC has a tendancy to postulate at least 2, one the brother of the lord, one the brother of John and one to be Santiago. (There are many, many others, including St. James Sawn Asunder who is certainly a christianized version of the Zoroatrian/Persian form of the pagan god Yima, later Jemshid, Jems).

Keeping in mind that the name we refer to as James (in English and for that matter Seamus in Gaelic) is actually supposed to be a form of the name Jacob (in Hebrew, or Jacobus in Latin). My question some time ago was, when is the earliest a form of the name like "James" actually appears in a western language, and the answer is, the earliest I have found so far is San Jamys which appears in one of the pilgrim songs of King Alfonso, dating to about 1100 CE, and sung in a form of Spanish. It is probably a form of a name Sanctos Geminos, the holy twins, who had a church in northern France, on the road to Santiago. The church is built on the site of a pagan temple to the Dioskuri, pagans whose name is actually Greek, but who were widely known under that name in Latin speaking areas.

My thought is that the James in the bible may have originally been called James or something like that, not Jacobus, especially in a langauge like Armenian or Syriac, but I cannot any thing to support this. If anyone has access to better sources on early texts that support this or not, I would love to hear about it.

In the process of working on this, I found that the IE myth was borrowed directly into Ugartic, about 1300, and is found in the Psalm 74 in the bible.
http://pierce.yolasite.com/wsemyama

Doina.

show_no_mercy

The name Jacob goes back to Genesis 25, where it is rendered as יַעֲקֹב‎ (yod-ayin-qof-bet:yaq'b) which means "heel" or "leg-puller". This is from עקב‎ (ayin-qof-bet) "seize by the heel", "circumvent", "restrain", a wordplay on עקבה‎, iqeb'h, "heel". The Greek LXX which was translated sometime in the 3rd century BCE spells it out as phonetically as possible using Greek letters - Ιακωβ[ος]. "yod" is usually rendered as "iota" (I), this case "ayin" as "alpha" (A), "qof" as "kappa" (K), and "bet" as "beta" (B).

Nowhere in the NT or in Josephus is the literal word "James" written. It's always what we would pronounce as "Jacob" in the Greek.

ApostateAbe

Toto, it is about what theory requires us to metaphorically stand on our heads the least. The chain of reasoning so far has been that Galatians 1:19 could possibly refer to a religious metaphorical brother, except that Josephus refers to James as a literal brother. Wait a minute, Josephus could have been interpolated, except that it only moves the source of the meaning onto the interpolator, who wrote between 90 CE and 240 CE, the time Origen wrote about the citation of James by Josephus. Wait a minute, Josephus could have been interpolated to fit the mistaken views of Origen. That, or Origen may have been interpolated to align with Josephus.

Can you really tell me with a straight face that such a line of speculation counts as an argument for what Galatians 1:19 really means? If you have evidence, such as the anachronistic language in Josephus, that's great. So, OK, spin claims that Josephus uses a Greek word translated as "called" in English that Josephus doesn't often use to refer to humans. I don't have access to the Greek text of Josephus, so I have no way to check. All I know is that Josephus uses words that are translated as "called" plenty of times to refer to human beings. Moreover, spin has not explained to us why he thinks one word or the other would be more appropriate to refer to Jesus as "called Christ," and I take that as important, because intent gleaned from the context is far more important than the intent gleaned from the pattern of usage of a word. Do you have access to the Greek text of Josephus by any chance?