show_no_mercy

Your position requires you to not only assume that this one instance out of over 100 instances of Paul's use of "brother" means a literal brother, but to also ignore Paul's overarching metaphor in all of his letters of the family of believers.

The sole inconsistency is defining James the brother of the lord as being James the brother of Jesus. Not only is there ambiguity over what Paul means by "brother" (statistically in favor of it being fellow believer) but there's ambiguity over who Paul is talking about when he says "lord".

How many people were killed by snakes after testing Jesus? Was Jesus present at the Exodos?

Did Jesus write Isaiah 28?

Toto

Nope - another Jesus would be identified as such.

When Eusebius (or whoever) saw fit to interpolate a reference to James as a brother into Josephus, he wrote that James was the brother of Jesus called Christ.

Paul uses "Lord" to refer to god or Jesus. "Brother of the Lord" is ambiguous. "Brother of Jesus" is not.

Steven Carr

'Brother of the Lord' is what some Jews were called. There are instances in the Bible of Jews called 'Brother of the Lord'.

The fact remains that Luke/Acts, James and Jude are written with the obvious assumption that James the church leader was not a brother of Jesus.

So 'brother of the Lord' is prima facie evidence that Jesus had a brother, but it is not conclusive.

spamandham

Which is irrelevant, since arbitrarily excluding pertinent and available information is not a valid historical approach. The purpose of this subforum is not to analyze sound bites, but to try to really dig into the history.

This has already been addressed, not only by me, but by other posters as well. Feigning inattention is not a particularly effective methodology.

spamandham

It also requires that he ignore the other three references to James within the Pauline corpus in which Paul does *not* refer to James as 'brother of the lord". It's quite clear from those three references that Paul is familiar with only one relevant James, so the single instance of "brother of the lord" is not intended to clarify who James is. What then is it's purpose?

Doug Shaver

Yes, of course, but that doesn't say anything. The question is whether "lord" means "Jesus of Nazareth" and "brother" means "male sibling."

We have lots of other sources. We have the entire Pauline corpus to inform us as to what Paul believed about Jesus. If it's reasonable to infer from that corpus that he was not talking about a historical Jesus, then it is reasonable to interpret "brother of the lord" as meaning something other than "sibling of Jesus."

spin

They are not equivalent and you have no reason to assume they were. Would you say "sister of mercy" and "mercy's sister" are equivalents?? You know that the latter case is strange and that's be cause we require a certain sort of head word for the ordinary possessive in English and mercy doesn't fit. What is "natural" in English is not necessarily the case in another language, so you cannot make assumptions like the one you made above.

If "lord" means god, then assuming "the lord’s brother" would simply be wrong, while "brother of the lord" of the lord would still do fine. We have been taught to accept the notion that Jesus is the lord, but is it really the case for Paul?

It is certain that when Paul cites the Hebrew scriptures mentioning "lord" they refer to god. There are two uses of the word κυριος (lord), first, as a title (e.g. he is "lord", the "lord" Jesus, my "lord") and second, as a substitute for a name (e.g. the "lord" said...). The distinction can clearly be seen in LXX Ps.110:1, "the lord said to my lord..."-- the second being titular, the first in place of a name. Although the first is frequently used for Jesus, there are only three secure cases when a Pauline letter talks of "the lord" (ie non-titular usage) referring to Jesus, 1 Cor 2:8b, 6:14 and 11:23-27, all of which give signs of being interpolations (see my blog for the last case). All of these are more important than the discourse they are found in; all are not directly related to the discourse -- good indications of interpolation.

Add to this the fact that when someone writes to an audience, they are usually attempting to communicate, but if the writer uses a term for two separate entities, that writer will surely confuse the audience, for if "the lord" refers sometimes to Jesus and sometimes to god how does the reader necessarily know who is being referred to at any one time? I strongly doubt that Paul ever used the non-titular κυριος to refer to Jesus as well as god. We can be sure of his using it for god, given the LXX as the source.

However, away from Jewish contexts the non-titular κυριος can refer to other entities. Paul, being steeped in Jewish ideas, would use it as a Jew would, to refer to god. The lord said (to my lord).

When Paul talks about the "brother of the lord" in Gal 1:19, he is using the non-titular κυριος. Why should we think that the text refers to Jesus? Do you have problems with the notion of someone being "the brother of god"? Would you have problems with "children of god"? You wouldn't expect them to be physical children of god, would you? We are already alerted to the fact that Paul usually doesn't mean physical brothers when he talks of brothers, but fellow believers.

It is interesting that christians have developed a theory that the family of Jesus turned good after his death, despite the fact that Jesus disowned his own family. This apparently is based on explaining expressions such as "brothers of the lord" and the fact that Jesus we are told had a brother with the very common name of James. However, "the brothers of the lord" (1 Cor 9:5) is used right where one would expect believers, not family: Paul is whinging about apostles, the brothers of the lord and Cephas being able to be accompanied by a wife. It would seem that brothers of the lord was a means of referring to a group of believers. Why shouldn't we expect "James the brother of the lord" to be one of those believers?


spin

gurugeorge

Exactamundo. But couple this with the fact that the "Paul" writings, in and of themselves, are silent on any personal, human, living relationship between this "Jesus" and any of the people he talks about.

This "brother" business is indeed (so far as I can see, and so far as Apostate Abe could see, and so far as JustSteve here can see) the only instance in the genuine Epistles where such a human relationship might even vaguely plausibly be construed. And your post shows what a stretch that is.

I always have in the back of my mind the type of evidence I mean here, something like "James said to me that Jesus had told him ...." If there was anything like that, anything that hints at a human relationship, that would be decent internal evidence of a human being, that would be enough for me to weight things more to the historicist side. But there's nothing like that. To explain that absence away, you have to have a prior theory about Paul's psychology - but what do you base that on? Evidently the circular reasoning that there was a human Jesus, but he was just for some reason unimportant to Paul!

Since there's no external evidence for a human Jesus, then you have to look at stuff in the texts that might "give the game away", that might separate the wheat of a possible historical person from the chaff of religious, mystical and visionary elements. There just doesn't seem to be much of that nature in the texts - and the kicker is, there's less of it the further back you go in the timeline.

So what are we meant to think? One can make up all sorts of plausible reasons why IF there had been a human Jesus we might have had this paucity of human-sounding elements internal in the story.

But then one is slipping away from the standard of trying to find something internal to the texts that stands as evidence.

bacht

Don't forget "Jude the brother of James", supposedly another blood relative of Jesus who never tells us so

By Mark's time they would've all been dead anyway, so he could throw the names around without being challenged by eyewitnesses (assuming he wasn't just writing allegory, in which case we shouldn't take him literally)

Juststeve

gurugeorge and bacht:

Your analysis is borderline reasonable but only if there is no reason independent of Paul to suppose that Jesus had a brother named James. If the only mention of a brother of the Lord” named James was this one in Paul the phrase would be ambiguous. That’s not the case however. There is other evidence that Jesus had a brother James which if believed renders my interpretation of Paul’s words obvious.

This is an example of the lengths MJers need to go to avoid the obvious which in this case Paul is talking about a meeting he had with two men, one being Peter and the other being Jesus brother James, the same James we heard about elsewhere.

Steve