aa5874

Even the Church writers DENY James the Apostle had a human brother called the Lord Jesus and you want ATHEISTS and non-christians to believe the Pauline writings which have been deduced to have been manipulated.

Please, you have NO evidence to support the Pauline writer.

The Pauline writer claimed Jesus was the Son of God in the very same Galatians and that Jesus was raised from the dead.

Don't you see the BIG LIE??

If Jesus was human and was raised from the dead how is it we NEVER heard from Jesus again??

The writers under the name of Paul were LIARS.

They completely forgot that if Jesus was resurrected that Jesus HIMSELF should have preached the Gospel in the Roman Empire and NOT Paul.

Galatians is a BIG LIE.

graymouser

Tertullian, writing in Latin, didn't write "again" in a translation from the Greek. Which is interesting, but in terms of textual criticism it doesn't give us evidence of this. Even attempts at "Marcionite" reconstructions of Galatians include Gal 1:19 more or less as we find it.

Iskander

Aa, he was only answering a request for an explanation. We don’t know what he thinks.

Anyway, Mark speaks of brothers and sisters and a carpenter father in a manner that suggest they were known to be a commonplace family.

Diogenes the Cynic

Mark also has no knowledge of a virgin birth. Neither does Paul, for that matter, or Q or GJohn or Thomas.

Iskander

Yes, Mark is the only Christian text that allows us to ‘see’ the man and his concern for the future of the society in which he lives.


But why would the Roman Church change a verse for the purpose of making the Eternal Virgin Mary an ordinary married Sheila?

EarlDoherty

No, the contradiction is between saying that we don’t have original manuscripts, making certainty, let alone even "some assurance", that a given phrase is original,

between that, and essentially claiming that the extant presence of “brother of the Lord” is virtually a slam-dunk case that there was an HJ.

And between that, and totally ignoring the possibility or denying it on no basis that, even if it was original to Paul, it can only mean sibling of an historical Jesus, and not “brother” in the sense of “brethren,” (with “of the Lord” being moreover ambiguous as a reference to Christ or to God) for which there is plenty of support in Paul’s overall use of the term “adelphos”.

In his usual smug and shallow mode of expression (has he ever provided a single piece of substantive contribution to any debate here?), Steve suggests it’s inconvenient. I don’t find it inconvenient at all, and am quite willing to accept it as original (though I’ll hardly swear to it, since the phrase reasonably fits the look of an inserted marginal gloss—to dismiss feasible possibilities simply because they have no manuscript support would be foolhardy). “Brother of the Lord” is fully understandable as a member of the sect, and the presence of the word “the” defining brother is absolutely irrelevant, as I’ve pointed out in Jesus: Neither God Nor Man (p,62), since it is generally expected in Greek grammatical usage, even if Paul only meant “a brother of the Lord”. Paul is simply identifying for his readers that this James was a member of the sect, “a brother of the Lord”. (I also provided a reasonable analogy in the book to illustrate why Paul could have pointed this out: see note 28.)

Incidentally, 1 Cor. 9:5 contains a reference to “the brothers of the Lord” (as a group, thus the “the”). This, too, has the sound of ‘brethren’ of the sect. That they are referred to distinct from the “apostles” is not a problem, as I outline in JNGNM (p.60-1). The whole “brethren of/in the Lord” could well refer to a core group, the original ‘monastic’ order (whether led by James or not), which then acquired other members dedicated to outside apostolic work. And note in the very same verse, the female version of “adelphos” is referred to: “allowed to bring along a sister (“adelphēn”) wife.” What—they married their sisters? This is universally understood as a female believer within the sect, with no sign that any dramatic distinction is to be made for the succeeding reference to “brothers of the Lord”. Indeed, to convey such a difference, Paul need only have altered his words and said “brothers of Jesus.” A phrase that would be perfectly normal but is never used of something claimed to mean a sibling of a recent human being.

Context also is against Ehrman. Paul in that letter (let alone anywhere else) gives us no hint that James enjoyed any privileged position due to a sibling relationship with an HJ, and only a few verses later (2:6) disparages the whole lot of them in Jerusalem as of no importance, not even recognized by God as important. And that is clinched in 2:7-8 by Paul saying that Peter (and presumably the other ‘pillars’) were given responsibility by God, not by Jesus or by virtue of their association with him, for carrying the gospel to the Jews. Such a context does not support Ehrman’s preferred reading of “brother of the Lord” as “sibling of Jesus.”

And let’s not forget that “brother of the Lord” is one little preposition away from Phil. 1:14’s “brothers in the Lord”, which is universally taken as meaning “brethren in the Lord” in the sense of referring to the members of the sect. So we have the identical word “brother” here unmistakeable as a sect member, and the identical “Lord” as a reference to the object of the faith’s worship with no possible association of sibling. (Whether Christ or God is still ambiguous.) One preposition separates Gal. 1:19 from being unmistakeably a similar reference to a sect member of a divine figure, and yet none of this has any effect whatsoever on Ehrman, Diogenes or Steve (and countless others) and their preferred interpretation. If anything, it is all this alternative evidence for a non-sibling meaning in Gal. 1:19 which is “inconvenient” to historicists, who can only counter it all by largely ignoring it and pretending it doesn’t exist. Probably nothing better speaks volumes about the intransigence of historicism and those who hold to it by any desperate means.

To ignore all this, along with the failure of the letters of James and Jude to make any sibling relationship of the writer to Jesus (almost inconceivable if it were true), is simple closed-minded pig-headedness, an ailment too common in these parts.

Earl Doherty

Diogenes the Cynic

Why would the letters of James and Jude be expected to claim any sibling relationship to Jesus? There is no reason to connect those authors to those Gospel characters except for the names, which were both extremely common.

aa5874

The author of Mark does NOT need a virgin birth for his Son of God. In the 2nd century it is claimed Marcion's Son of God did NOT need a virgin birth but came DIRECTLY from heaven to Galilee at the same time as gMark's Jesus was in Galilee WITHOUT a birth narrative.

aa5874

Why do you make such BLATANT erroneous statement when you ought to know there is NO such statement in gMark???

This is the terryfying problem in this forum.

People here make statements that cannot be shown be correct and do not even admit their blatant mis-leading statements.

There is ZERO mention that Jesus had a human father in gMark.

In gMark, someone asked some questions about Jesus which was NEVER answered by the author.

Mark 6:3 KJV The question itself did NOT even ask about a father of Jesus.

Please, stop the propaganda. This is a serious discussion.

gMark's Jesus had NO known human father, was NOT claimed to have a human father and was identified as the Son of God.

We cannot be going over the same ERRONEOUS propaganda day after day by posters who have been on this forum for YEARS.

Iskander

It is not easy to reconstruct Marcion’ biblical writings, since they were destroyed by his enemies—write Professor Diarmid MacCulloch.

Why are you quoting Marcion in support of your fancy?