aa5874

You're so late!

EarlDoherty

It never ceases to amaze (and amuse) me that great debates on the Jesus question can be conducted which hinge on a single word, sometimes even a relatively insignificant word. Like “the”! I don’t know how many times I have heard an argument that it doesn’t matter what the weight of evidence on the mythicist side is (‘Spam’ rightly calls it “mountains of evidence”) or the lack of certain evidence on the historicist side, “the brother of the Lord” is all that’s needed. Or, the appearance of the word “flesh” can only mean one thing.

The amusing element here is that we are arguing over the presence and role of the definite article in a certain phrase. That article (together with the phrase itself) is first witnessed to in a manuscript written at a time which is almost two centuries after the original. How secure is anything in a NT text, let alone a simple article, which is that far removed from the presumed autograph? How confident can we be that the whole phrase was not simply a marginal gloss meant to differentiate this James from the Gospel apostle James at a time when a scribe dependent on the Gospels might have sought to eliminate what he saw as a potential source of confusion? How can a decision be made about something as momentous as the existence of Jesus based on such a slender reed? And yet it’s done all the time.

It is also amusing that “brothers in the Lord” (Phil. 1:14) can be agreed to mean only one thing, brothers in the sense of brethren, and yet a simple change of preposition to “brothers of the Lord” is alleged to completely change the meaning of the word “brother” to sibling. In 1 Cor. 9:5, “the brothers of the Lord” are supposed to be male siblings of Jesus, and yet in the same breath, the “sister” (adelphēn) is not the female sibling of Jesus but a female believer (who also in this case is the wife of the apostle).

Anyway, let’s assume that the definite article, together with the entire phrase, is authentic. I used to think that Galatians 1:19 meant a title for James, “the brother of the Lord,” as head of the Jerusalem church. Now I very much doubt it. Ben rightly asks, are “the brothers of the Lord” in 1 Cor. 9:5 co-leaders, a collective Chairman of the Board? In fact, I cannot imagine that Paul’s phrase, assuming it is authentic to him, can in any way be meant to single out James. After all, it is the same wording. How would the Galatians understand it as meaning the head of the church? Did Paul write the word “ton” in big caps?

I now think that there is no special significance to the presence of the definite article in the 1:19 phrase. After all, the language contained no indefinite article, and while Ben might like to agree or disagree with me on this, I think the grammatical apposition of “Iakōbon” and “adelphon” requires the insertion of the article between them in any event. Thus, the phrase does not single out James as any special member of the group (even if he were the leader), but simply designates him as belonging to that group known as “brethren of/in the Lord.”

Look at Romans 16:21. “Greetings from Timothy, my fellow worker,” (Timotheos ho sunergos mou). Does the presence of the article (ho) mean that Timothy was Paul’s only fellow-worker, or that he was the head of those workers? We know he was neither. In the same verse: “Lucius and Jason and Sosipater, my kinsmen,” (hoi suggeneis mou). Are they the only kinsmen Paul has? Are they special? He is simply identifying them as his kinsmen, yet he uses the definite article, where we don’t need one in English (and in fact it's misleading). In 1 Cor. 16:12, Paul refers to “Apollos the brother” (Apollō tou adelphou). Apollos is not being singled out as some kind of special brother. Most translations render it “our brother Apollos”.

Why would Paul have felt he needed to identify James as one of the brethren of the Lord? I don’t know. Just a bit earlier he has referred to Peter without identifying him in the same way. But perhaps his readers were more familiar with Peter than they were with James. Perhaps there was another James attached to the Jerusalem circle who was not a member of the original sect known by the name. Who knows? If I was involved in the Teamsters Union, and had contacts with the Head Office in Detroit (?), and wrote a letter to someone detailing my visit to that group, I might refer at one point to the Teamsters members in general, and at another point mention I had lunch with Joe, and also met Frank, a Teamsters member, later that day. The person I’m writing to knows Joe and that he is a member, but needs to have it pointed out that Frank is also a Teamsters member. Paul’s language wouldn’t have had the luxury of an indefinite article, and, as I suggested, the definite article would have to have been inserted between “Frank” and “Teamsters member” no matter what he was or was not implying.

I might point to one other example of interest. In Ephesians 6:21 we have: “Tychicus, the dear brother and faithful servant in the Lord,” (Tuxikos ho agapentos adelphos kai pistos diakonos en kuriō). Again, here the “the” does not signify some special significance for Tychicus, he is simply “a” dear brother and faithful servant in the Lord. Moreover, we have here a singular “brother” who is associated with the phrase “in the Lord” and is clearly not a sibling of the Lord. One wonders whether the genitive case would have been used had not another phrase intervened between “brother” and “Lord”. It certainly looks to me as though “brothers of the Lord” and “brothers in the Lord were essentially interchangeable and meant the same thing. To have two so very similar phrases in use and yet supposedly bear vastly different meanings does not commend itself as sensible. Verse 23 even has “Peace to the brothers.” The word “brothers” is so pervasively used throughout the epistles to refer to the members of the sect, and yet we are to believe that in two cases referring to the same type of character it had to mean sibling? Sorry, I don’t buy it.

Earl Doherty

aa5874

And then we still have ask who was the Lord. Who was Paul"s Lord? Could Paul's Lord have a physical brother?

I think Paul's Lord's Father was spiritual, a supernatural entity.

I think Paul's Lord was the offspring of the Holy One.

Now, James? Is NOT James the offspring of the Holy One, too, is he NOT the Lord's brother?

Paul could not remember how he met the Lord, did he forget he did not remember how he met James?

Who told James he was the Lord's brother, was it not Mary? Then James and the Lord may have been conceived the same way, by the Holy Ghost.

I think brothers can have the same father.

Huon

James Chapter 1 :
"James, the servant of God and of our Lord Jesus Christ..."

This James can be any sort of Jacob.

aa5874

I hope you realise this may be a diiferent James, James the servant of the Lord.

James, the servant of the Lord may have written after the Lord's brother died.

And Jude, an author, who claimed he had a brother called James, also said he was a servant of Jesus.

Jude 1.1 Paul was mistaken, he met a servant of the Lord?

Paul couldn't remember how he met the Lord!

And it is interesting to note that both Jude and James never mentioned that they were brothers of the Lord, but servants of Jesus.

Huon

Yes.
Yes.
One Judas an one Jacob were brothers, and servants of Jesus, why not ?
This is another question.

aa5874

Everything about the Lord, Paul and James are questionable.

spamandham

If not for the similar reference to James as brother of Jesus in Josephus, it would be easier to dismiss 'James the brother of the Lord' in Galatians. Although I'm not convinced the James reference in Josephus is authentic. But if it is, this demands an explanation. I don't believe Josephus would have referred to James as Jesus' brother in the same sense Paul might have (unless Josephus was just confused due to all this brother talk - imagine that!).

Does my memory serve me correctly in recalling that you've argued against the authenticity of that Josephus' James reference in the past?

EarlDoherty

It certainly does. In fact, I devote a good chunk of my new website article on Josephus to debunking the authenticity of the reference to Jesus in Antiquities 20, and see its "James" as almost certainly not referring to the Christian James. You might want to check it out. The article is a very long one, an extremely detailed study of both Jesus references in Josephus, and including an indepth look at Robert Eisler's alleged reconstruction of that infamous physical description of Jesus we've all heard so much about. ("Josephus On the Rocks")

Incidentally, the corroboration actually works in the opposite direction. If serious doubt can be cast on the phrase in Antiquities 20 as authentic to Josephus and thus a Christian interpolation, this would lend weight to viewing the identical phrase in Galatians 1:19 as also a Christian interpolation. (Of course, the two positions on the latter passage are mutually exclusive, but there's nothing wrong with covering both bases.)

I am disappointed that Ben has not seen fit to comment on my new analysis of "the brother of the Lord" in this thread. He has a habit of doing that, unfortunately, when he no longer has a counter to opposing arguments, he simply disappears. He did that recently when I answered his persistent challenge to address the Revelation and Ascension of Isaiah texts concerning their supposed references to the Neronian persecution as allegedly reported by Tacitus. I think the new evidence from the Acts of Peter were probably the clincher and could not be countered. Perhaps he has taken refuge in his 'conceptually different universe' and is incommunicado.

I will assume that his silence has confirmed my contention about "the" brother of the Lord. After all, he is one of our best Greek linguists.

Earl Doherty

Doug Shaver

I see nothing improbable about the Galatians reference being an interpolation, but it's not clear to me how the inauthenticity of Josephus makes it any likelier than otherwise.

It seems to me that a good way to account for Christians' coming to believe that James was Jesus' brother would be to suppose that Paul did refer to him as "brother of the lord," though intending to use it as a honorific rather than an observation about his kinship with Jesus. When Christians later came to believe in a historical Jesus, they would have paired the phrase with the gospel assertion that Jesus had a brother named James and reached the obvious conclusion.