spin

Yes, I missed the "(and by extension... James)." I don't see how you can claim the extension though. I think you are claiming that someone whose father was unknown was allowed into the temple.

You don't provide any reasoning for assuming that "lord's brother" means Jesus and it cannot be inferred from Gal 1. Acts doesn't call James the brother of Jesus or the brother of christ or even the brother of the lord. The Clementine Recognitions doesn't seem to agree with you either. Your claim of typical action doesn't seem to have been that typical.

I can understand that this simple grammatical problem is a concern to you. The basic notion is simple: it seems extremely strange that out of the blue a convoluted and complex adelphonymic relationship is used to qualify a figure in Josephus. It is a fronted qualified unusual qualifier. You go to exaggerated lengths to find examples you can bend to try to lessen the strangeness of the phrase in context.

Examples of this claim prior to Josephus?


spin

Ben C Smith

1. Unknown to Josephus.
2. Where is James allowed into the temple? Or are you bringing in hagiographic legend as found in Hegesippus?

You have lost the trail here. I do not need to argue about the phrase brother of the Lord for my points on this thread to stand. All that is necessary is to point out that James the just is not typically called son of Joseph (or whoever).

If the Josephus reference is genuine, then it is practically a surety that brother of the Lord means brother of Jesus. You cannot presume that it does not mean that unless you first rid Josephus of this reference; and, since that is the very point at issue, you cannot do so without arguing in a circle.

What you need to be typical is identifying James by his father; can you show that?

This is not a grammatical problem. I daresay you have misused the word grammatical.

This sentence of yours is quite convoluted. The phrase in Josephus is not at all convoluted.*

* Actually, one particular part of the phrase is a bit convoluted; the phrase James was his name stands grammatically apart from the sentence, and in English we would have to use parentheses or a dash to enclose it. Why are you not arguing that this was the interpolation? It is cleanly removable, very easily understood as a marginal note, and it would remove all your objections about the identifiers preceding the name.

Paul, writing to a Roman church, calls Jesus Christ.

Tacitus says that the Roman crowd under Nero called the sect Christians after their founder. (Yes, I know you reject this reference; but it is one of the bases of my claim, and I am not bound by your positions, especially ones that you have argued so inadequately as your stance on Tacitus.)

(There is also the Pompeii inscription, but I will not press this since I cannot at present access the information I might need to verify its genuineness and accuracy.)

But these are not needed for my point. In order to argue that Josephus cannot have known to say that Jesus was called Christ (id est, that this is an anachronism), you have to prove that Jesus was not called Christ by the Romans before Josephus. For it is logically possible that the Josephus reference is our first evidence of Jesus being called Christ by the Romans (later confirmed in abundance by Pliny and others). The only way to remove Josephus as this kind of evidence is to first prove the inauthenticity of the reference.

Ben.

spin

That's assuming your conclusion.

Clementine Recognitions.

Who are your independent Jewish sources?

I work on the notion that Paul doesn't use kurios for two different referents without contextual marking. The absolute use indicates the god of Israel. I'll leave the conjectures.

Why? because your claim of typical isn't typical?

Syntactic issues are considered grammatical in common usage.

More arcane sounding than convoluted. It analyzes easily, given the phrase it refers to.

This is nice sophistry, trying to turn the ostensible focus of the phrase into a hypothetical addition. All you are doing is heightening the problems of what you are trying to defend. You need to face the fact that the passage is dealing with James and by the phrase you defend making James seem less important structurally you should see that you are grossly weakening your own case.

Paul writes to everyone calling Jesus christ. But have I misunderstood your original comment ("that is indeed what the Romans called him")? I thought the reference to Romans was not inclusive of christians.

Tacitus is writing in the 2nd c. The passage features so many anomalies -- many already discussed here including the error of Pilate's rank and a horrid alliteration from one of the best orators of his time --, that it seems strange that you should try to parade it as genuine.

It doesn't exist. It might have once, but we have no possibility of verifying anything about it.

I'm not calling it an anachronism. I'm asking you to justify what you assume, ie that the Romans referred to Jesus by the name "Christ", so as to justify your explanation regarding the supposed use of the Matthean "Jesus called Christ" by Josephus.

As you were claiming that, independently from the reference in Josephus, the Romans called Jesus Christ, you need to show that this was in fact the case, independently from the reference in Josephus. Otherwise all we have is another unfalsifiable claim.


spin

Ben C Smith

In my scenario, Josephus knows of James but (probably) does not know his father. In your scenario, Josephus knows about neither James nor his father. You and I agree that Josephus (probably) did not know who his father was.

Your objection requires that Josephus must know the father of James if he knows James at all. My pointing out that this requirement is unreasonable is not assuming my conclusion; it is nullifying your objection.

Ah, so instead of importing hagiography from Hegesippus you are importing it from the even later pseudo-Clementines.

Sources for James not being typically called the son of Joseph:

James 1.1.
Jude 1.1.
Paul (in Galatians; confer 1 Corinthians).
Hegesippus.
Acts.
Thomas 12.
Gospel of the Hebrews.
Apocryphon of James.
Apocalypses 1 and 2 of James.
Clement of Alexandria.

Even Origen, who mentions Joseph, does not use Joseph to identify James; he calls him and his siblings the brothers of Jesus, and mentions Joseph only when commenting on Matthew!

Sources for James being called the son of Joseph:

Matthew 13.54-58 = Mark 6.1-6 = Luke 4.16-30, sort of.

Perhaps you can add to this list.

None of which has thing one to do with whether or not Josephus could have divined a patronymic for James from what he is usually called.

Answer the question. Can you show that James was typically identified by his father?

If you want to call my claim atypical, fine, even though he is called that by Paul, Hegesippus, and others. The point is, has always been, that James is not generally called by the name of his father.

Prove me wrong or move on.

Answer the question, spin. Why not remove James was his name?

You need to answer the question.

I am asking you a question. Asking you a question does not weaken my case, though your putting such a notion forward suggests that yours is too weak to defend.

I said Romans. I meant Romans. Roman Christians are Romans.

What is strange is your misunderstanding that we are not debating Tacitus here; been there, done that. It is enough to point out that one of your objections to the James reference in Josephus depends on the inauthenticity and/or gross inaccuracy of this passage in Tacitus.

I do not logically have to show any instance of the Romans (or people writing for the Romans) using this name of Jesus before Josephus; if the Josephus reference is genuine, it is such an instance. This is the point you are missing, and it is elementary. If you are to use this particular argument of yours against the reference, you have to prove that Josephus could not have known that Jesus was called Christ.

I did so. I gave you Paul (writing to Romans) and Tacitus telling us that the Romans under Nero knew of Christ. You reject the latter as an interpolation and the former on who-knows-what grounds.

But the point I am stressing here is that I do not need Paul or Tacitus. It is your argument for inauthenticity, so it is up to you to show that Josephus could not have known about Christ. Can you do that? Because, again, if the reference is authentic, then of course it is evidence that he did know about Christ.

Think of it this way. Pliny refers to Christ. Is it up to the one arguing for authenticity to prove independently how he came by that knowledge? Of course not. If the text is authentic, then it is on its own accord evidence that he had such knowledge. Rather, the burden is on the one using knowledge of Christ as an argument against authenticity; such a one must prove that Pliny could not have known about him. If such proof is not forthcoming, then no argument has been made at all either for or against either side.

Ben.

Solitary Man

Ben: From memory, it mostly had to do with how Hebrews views the covenant and how it played in with the destruction of the Temple. I'll see if I can get something together for you.

spin

I understand that Josephus knows about James in the passage. He is essential to the functionality of the passage. I don't understand what you are imputing.

What? I require no such thing. It is evident that he knows James.

This is further confusing me.

Oh, so you date the Clementine Recognitions even later. I don't know how you date it thus, but this is all about the possibility of James being in the temple as two independent traditions indicate. The stuff about Jesus being known to Jews by a title and that title ("christ" no less) somehow being a a way to nominate which James for Jews seems absurd. This doesn't mean that Josephus needs to know his father. In fact I argued that the passage may simply have been "a certain man named James and some others..."

Were these Jewish writers and were they referring to James the just?

Is he referring to James the brother of Jesus?

Were any of these Jewish writers?

Origen, a Jew?

This is a perverse comment to what you were responding to. I provided background to the fact that you cannot equate "brother of the lord" with "brother of Jesus", rendering the reference in Pauline literature of little use to you.

The question seems unjustified and unreasonable. I never claimed that James needed to be referred to by a patronymic. Lots of people are referred to in Josephus's texts without a patronymic. I did claim that the fronted reference to Jesus is unique in the context, which you confirmed when you argued that I should complain about the reference to James. I also claim that the reference to the Matthean "Jesus called christ" in Josephus is unreasonable.

We don't have a clue how James was typically referred to. We merely have the christian tradition. If James has been dragooned into christianity (in a way similar to John the Baptist), then the christian tradition is worthless.

Doh! Prove your unfalsifiable claim wrong, eh? You know, unfalsifiable, hence, useless.

[QUOTE=Ben C Smith;5068183]Answer the question, spin. Why not remove James was his name?
I have answered the question. Who exactly was stoned?

And I did, when I said the passage was about James. If you cannot supply another named topic than that supplied by the passage, really why did you bother to ask? Someone and some others were sent off to be stoned. That someone was named James. Got anything better to offer?

Questions often entail presuppositions as is the case with yours.

You have a text from a Jew from Cilicia writing to Roman christians. That doesn't say anything about the Roman christians. We don't know how the text was received.

One has to so frequently give kitchen sink responses, especially when you are using a questioned passage to defend another questioned passage.

When all these passages are up for inspection, it makes no sense to try to defend one with another.

This is trivial, in that you have rendered unfalsifiable. It just so happens that it could be the first and therefore there were no previous examples, so there is no way to check your claim.

I have already given clear indications that Josephus avoided the word, that the word had a specific meaning to a practising Jew, that a dead Jesus would not have been able to carry the word.

I said that Tacitus, if the passage were genuine, was writing in the 2nd c. which is no help for your claim. Paul is not a Roman.

I've argued that Josephus would not have used the term, given his religion and his avoidance of the term from his source texts. The messiah was a hot issue and you can see Josephus's methods of managing it -- by total omission. You must see that calling someone christ as a name, especially someone dead, would have been an abhorrence to Jews -- and Josephus prided himself for being a Jew.

Get back to us when you can get beyond the "if".

In a vacuum, I'd have to agree with you. But I perceive a systemic problem, one I've already outlined with regard to widespread orthodox corruption to use Ehrman's term. It's a bit like the situation of unprovenanced artefacts, in that there have been such problems that all unprovenanced artefacts are held in suspicion, even though some may even be kosher. The opportunity for corruption of texts, either innocent corruption or not, has been so great over the centuries, that we must hold all passages in early pagan literature with suspicion.

If we were dealing with a pagan writer, I think you may have had more of a case. But we are ultimately returning to Josephus's supposed use of the term "christ" and we must consider his Jewish background for what it should tell us about a Jew using the term.


spin

Doug Shaver

The "thoughtlessness" and "cleverness" are your characterizations, not mine. In the final analysis, our disagreement is still over plausibility. You think my portrayal of how the scribe could have been thinking is implausible. I do not.

Ben C Smith

Let us return to the big board here:

This (second) reason of yours has force only if you can prove the exceptions (that you yourself offer) false. You offer three exceptions:

1. The father is unknown.
2. The brother is well-known.
3. The brother has already been talked about.

If the TF has a genuine core, then exception 3 is true, game over. But I am happy to stipulate for the sake of argument that the TF is entirely forged.

So we are down to exceptions 1 and 2. It is up to you to eliminate these exceptions, or else your (second) issue with the passage has no force at all.

Can you prove that Josephus should have known the father of an otherwise unknown James? No. In your reconstruction of the text Josephus mentions James only, without reference to his father. Can you prove that Josephus should have known the father of the NT James? No. You have offered no evidence that the NT James was typically known by a patronymic.

Can you prove that the brother of the NT James is not well-known? No. You have to get rid of Tacitus and Suetonius in order to even make room for the possibility, but even so your work is not done, since you cannot show that Romans did not know Christ by the time of Josephus as they certainly did slightly later.

If you cannot disprove your own exceptions, then your (second) objection has no force. That is what I am saying.

Yes, but I had not realized that you had arbitrarily limited the list to Jewish writers only. That is a distraction on your part. Can you show that Josephus should have known the patronymic for James instead of the adelphonymic?

If we have no clue how James was typically referred to (except from Christian sources), then your (second) issue with the passage is moot. He may well have been typically referred to as the brother of Jesus, for all you know, since you cannot show otherwise.

The (unnamed) brother of Jesus called Christ. Josephus sometimes leaves the main participant unnamed.

Claiming that the passage is about James is avoiding my question to you, which was about treating James was his name as the interpolation, not the other stuff.

But I already know why you would treat this as unacceptable. It all comes down for you to Josephus using the term Christ. The other stuff about patronymics, adelphonymics, and fronting are window dressing to fill out a list; you have only one objection of any substance at all, and one makes a poor list.

Then get on with it and point out the presuppositions my question entailed. If you do not like them, you can always answer as I did for the TF in your third exception, for the sake of argument.

I appreciate your caution. I really do.

I simply think you have added bogus reasons to proper caution.

Ben.

spin

The reason why I asked you for Jewish sources for your claim from silence that James was not typically called son of Joseph (or whatever) was that reference to the father was the commonest way to qualify a person in Jewish tradition. It's not a strongly Greek tradition, so we wouldn't expect gentile christians to use it, for their traditions lay elsewhere. Instead of providing what I asked for waffled out a long list of irrelevant christian sources which can't support your initial claim. Josephus was a Jew and he frequently used patronymics. For your claim to have any hope you'd have to show that other Jews didn't refer to James either with such a patronymic or by some epithet such as "the just".

You can't claim that James's father was unknown to the Jews of his day: you can only show that he is functionally unknown to us and that christians, probably because of their religious commitments, referred to James as the brother of Jesus, just as we have Jude,_brother_of_Jesus, though christian usage is irrelevant for a Jews knowledge and behavior.

If you want to claim, to support the use of "brother of Jesus called christ", that the TF had a historical core, one which specifically included "christ" as a name (to match the use in AJ 20.200), we will have to stop this conversation, until you've made your case, for you cannot introduce it here until the claim has been substantiated. This simply iffing stuff to support your position won't get us anywhere.

It seems that you also need to show that the TF, which already shows signs of corruption, was in the text, so that you can appeal to the use of a brother who'd already been mantioned to support AJ 20.200's mention of Jesus.

You have made a substantive claim that Jesus was called christ by the Romans. When challenged on this you cited Tacitus and Paul to the Romans. I pointed out that Tacitus was irrelevant being to late, while Paul to the Romans was irrelevant because that only indicated Paul's behavior not any Romans. You are left not able to back up the claim at all.

Next you've tried to claim that "named James" makes a better candidate for an interpolation for it seems more like it was inserted in the passage in your convoluted thought, though it reflects Josephus as a writer more than a nameless brother. I've already given sufficiently similar examples, as in "a certain Galilean man, named Judas", BJ 2.8.1, and "a certain Jewish merchant, named Ananias, AJ 20.2.3. The structure is common enough in Josephus. Have you got even one example in the Josephus corpus of an anonymous brother of anyone as topic of a passage, as you would have it with the one who was stoned by Ananus?

I did appreciate your efforts to shift the burden.


spin

Ben C Smith

I have repeatedly refused to use the TF to support the James reference or vice versa. Peter Kirby made a very good argument on his site that they can each stand or fall alone, and I agree with him.

He is writing about the crowd under Nero. Nero preceded Josephus in time.

Yes, I found at least two examples while searching for other things. But I do not remember where they are.

You claimed that it was an issue for Josephus to refer to James by his brother. It cannot be an issue, on your own list of exceptions, unless you can show that Josephus should have known who his father was and that Josephus should not have known who Christ was. You can do neither. It is your claim, not mine, so the burden is yours. You have not met that burden on this thread, so your (second) issue is moot. It is not actually an issue.

Ben.