aa5874

You have already said that you have to guess your history of Jesus the man due to uncertainty.

You are not even certain that the Pauline writer did live in the 1st century and you are not certain of what the Pauline wrote.

You are certainly just guessing.

Please look at ALL the verses before and after Galatians 1.19.

You are presenting half-truths.

In Galatians 1.1 it is established that Jesus was raised from the dead. In virtually all the Epistles the Pauline writers established that Jesus was raised from the dead.

The Pauline writer established very early and all over Romans that Jesus was the Son of God who was raised from the dead.

Romans 1.1-4 In Ephesians 3.9, a Pauline writer established that Jesus was the CREATOR of ALL things.

Ephesians 3.9

Please give the full description of the Pauline Jesus.

The Pauline Jesus was the Son of God, the Creator of all things.

spin

Wow, there logic here... somewhere. You assume your conclusion then base your case on it. Does the idea of circularity ring a bell?

The point I was making was simple. The language is certainly christian, but not so obviously Josephan. Having looked at Josephus's usage of these words, he uses καλουμενος much more frequently to add another name than he does λεγομενος.


spin

Doug Shaver

That could make it a good answer -- to some question, but not to the question I asked.

Doug Shaver

It might not be ridiculous on the assumption of Jesus' historicity, but it is at least puzzling on that assumption. If an early leader of a religious sect had been a sibling of the sect's putative founder, one would reasonably expect better attestation of the relationship.

The problem is not that Acts doesn't say it. The problem is that none of the earliest Christian documents says it -- with a single ambiguous possible exception. Paul's reference is not the smoking gun so many historicists insist that it is.

It is plausible that first-century Christians would have disagreed over whether Jesus of Nazareth was God incarnate, or over whether his followers had to keep kosher, or over any other of many issues. It is not plausible, if historicity is presupposed, that first-century Christians would have argued about whether Jesus had a brother named James who was an early leader of the sect or, assuming there was no argument, that they would have treated the fact as an irrelevancy deserving only a cryptic mention if mentioned at all.

That there was some interpolation of Josephus is virtually undisputed, even by fundamentalists. The TF interpolation was so clumsily done that its authenticity is indefensible. It does not follow that every Christian who ever interpolated anything was so incompetent as to be incapable of making his forgery look like the real thing.

Only on the assumption that every interpolator was as stupid as the one who doctored the TF.

Yes, and a competent interpolator would have made sure it did.

I should probably emphasize that I am not arguing "It could have happened, therefore it did happen." All I am presenting here is a counterargument against "It could not have happened."

I am not among those ahistoricists who claims we can be sure of Jesus' nonexistence. My position is, and always has been, that the totality of evidence weighs more heavily for his nonexistence and for existence. To put it another way, my quarrel is not with anyone who thinks it reasonable to believe in a historical Jesus, but with those who think it unreasonable to believe otherwise.

ApostateAbe

OK, then. The question you asked was:

"Who is the earliest Christian writer we know of who unambiguously indicates that he thinks the Jerusalem church was led for a time by Jesus' sibling?"

Answer: Josephus' interpolator.

aa5874

You know nothing about Josephus' interpolator. You do not know when the interpolation was done.

It could have been done in the 4th century.

You assumption that it was an early Christian is flawed since no early Church writer used the "TF" or early AJ 20.9.1 to show that there was a Jerusalem Church where people worshiped a Messiah called Jesus as a God.

There is simply nothing about a Jerusalem Church controlled by a bishop called James in all the works of Josephus.

show_no_mercy

...and when did this interpolator live?

ApostateAbe

You tell me. I figure it would have to be a significant time before Origen, who wrote about Josephus' citation of James around the year 240 CE.

Toto

Except that's not what Josephus wrote about why the Temple was razed. Was Origen hallucinating? Was this interpolated into Origen by the same interpolator who added "the brother of Jesus called Christ?"

ApostateAbe

No. If it was the same interpolator, then you would see consistency, not a difference. You can speculate that it was a different interpolator, but this is looking more and more like a fool's game. Interpolation should be a proposition of last resort when you are trying to support a certain theory, unless of course you have good evidence. It is much more likely that Origen read Josephus somewhat creatively.