Amaleq13

It was offered as part of your argument.


Paul doesn't offer a conception of James as Jesus' kin. He offers a phrase that we don't understand but using "Lord" rather than "Jesus" seems like an odd way to indicate a literal sibling relationship with the living man. Especially given the following understanding of Paul's general view:

I didn't offer Origen as a contradiction of Paul but to call into question the "tradition" upon which you rely. If James could be called "brother of the Lord" because of his piety, there need not be any suggestion of literal relationship implied whatsoever even if Origen though this was something Paul believed.

Since Paul doesn't indicate that James was an unusually pious man, I would assume Origen has other sources. Perhaps sources that only refer to James' piety as the reason for the "title". Like I said, we just don't know.

Unless you can establish that these traditions have some basis in reality, your position is as self-evident as it is unhelpful. Your beliefs are also uninteresting in any rational consideration of the evidence unless they are founded on something other than faith. As far as I can see, they are not.

The answers to both your first questions are as blatantly obvious (ie "yes") as they are unchallenged. What Doherty and others argue is that these alleged "indications" are without a reliable foundation.

Your secondary arguments are useless without establishing the primary first. There is no indication in Paul as to when the resurrection appearances happened relative to the "three days".

krosero

Just a short note on a misunderstanding and then I'll give my reply.

I did not offer Josephus' use of the word "brother" to argue for how much time had passed, in Paul's mind, between Christ's appearance and his own vision. I used Josephus to establish the date of Christ's death.

Thank you. And as I read Doherty more, I'll try to confirm for myself that he's not been claiming the complete absence in Paul of words pointing to a recently deceased figure.

Anyone would be wrong to make that claim. Aretas, for instance, is a historical marker. No one disputes that Paul's words about Aretas constitute such -- the debate is about what Paul meant when he said a man called Aretas controlled Damascus, and about whether he was right. The text of Paul, however, carries this historical marker.

Similarly if we set aside what Paul meant when he said that one James was called the brother of the Lord, and the question of whether he was right, the text of Paul's authentic letters still carry historical markers: Jesus Christ and James. The former is claimed to have appeared to a man called his brother (just like Aretas is claimed to control Damascus), whom Paul claims to have met. And by saying that JC and James are historical markers, I don't mean it in the easy sense that the rest of the NT and subsequent centuries of Christian documentation attest to them; I said there was a point to calling them historical markers because they are attested by an independent source, Josephus.

But I don't regard the Josephus debates as winnable, with the current state of the evidence. The only thing I would debate here is a view from one side or the other that their opponents were definitely wrong. That requires a heavy burden of proof.

I see the "brother of the Lord" argument as a similar one, which is why I don't think re-fighting that argument will help here (unless any of us has an original argument). I do know GakuseiDon's arguments on this issue as well as Doherty's, and the debate goes on. I will only reply briefly that I do not see "the brother of the Lord" as a transparent phrase, and have never claimed it to be; I clearly said that "adelphos" (no less than "adelphon") has more than one meaning. My goal here, especially since using JC and James as historical markers cannot tell us very much exactly about Paul's dating, has been simply to point out that Paul's text, as it stands, does contain testable historical markers other than Aretas. The original question, after all, was whether markers other than Aretas existed, presumably ones for which we could provide independent, non-Christian attestation.

Garnet

[derail moment] I read the thread title how do we date the Pauline corpse...

And I thought, "What an odd topic for BC&H."

Dyslexia makes life interesting sometimes. [/derail moment]

spin

And about which Aretas.

"[C]alled" whose "brother"? It seems like you are answering the question without showing how you know.

And the claim about historical markers in the above paragraph is certainly not clear. Someone, who is supposed to have been dead, appears to someone else. How does that make for a historical marker regarding that someone?

I'm not so much interested in the someone else as the someone. How do you relate Jesus in historical space except for a claimed sighting sometime prior to a James having met Paul?

You are not doing what historians need to do, ie relate to the source texts.

I don't think you are up with the problem. You seem from all the posts I've read of yours led by your conclusions.

This is a different matter. You need it to mean something (despite your following statements) in order for you to talk about your historical markers.

This attempt at making "JC" a historical marker when you've got no evidence to do so is not particularly useful. Paul supplies no way of dating his Jesus. If we accept Josephus for argument sake for a moment, he was writing in the 90s and was not possible witness to any "Jesus the called christ", was he?

That important difficulties exist with using these texts (including the TF and special interpretations of Paul) precludes using their use in historical argument.


spin

spin

You may be right, though I think one should exclude Jews from finding much work in Caesar's house, due to problems mentioned in our sources, which led for example to removal from Rome. Romans is written to people heavily steeped in Jewish thought, so it is difficult not to think of many of them not being Jews. One could imagine there being the occasional proselyte, but becoming a Jew meant more than just accepting a religion -- it involved being part of the ethnos.

All postdate Phil 4:22, naturally.

I started responding from the top, then after a break, I came back and started from the bottom, and now I'm here in the middle wondering why you've strung all these speculations together. All interesting data mind you, but leading only to speculation.

Of course it couldn't apply to any of the thousands of Narcissuses running around the backblocks of the era.

Only 150 too late, wouldn't you think?

As I pointed out elsewhere, there is all the established history of the period to help.


spin

krosero

This indeed is one the things said in the "brother of the Lord" debate. If you feel that that debate is useful here given how little the JC/James markers can produce, I would just disagree. We'd be arguing over no great gain. You surely know what the answers would be to this question you raise, if you're up on the debates; my own answer would be that Paul's "Lord" when he refers to James is the same Christ referred to in Corinthians. "Lord" can also refer to God, but does it refer to God when Paul speaks of the "brother of the Lord"?

No doubt you have problems with using "brother of the Lord." Well and good.

You seem to have missed my arguments or not read them carefully. Paul relates the appearance of someone supposedly dead to someone living whom he met. We are establishing when Paul thinks that "Jesus Christ" made his appearance -- recently or in the distant past? He seems to think that Jesus died a few days before rising, and that he then appeared to his biological brother, which makes Jesus and James contemporaries in Paul's mind. Of course, Paul could be wrong about ALL this; that's one of the problems with trying to date Paul according to internal claims in his text, as I think AndrewCriddle has been saying. There's a point of diminishing returns in debating anything like Paul's Aretas or his Christ as historical markers.

I can't say that I've had a different perception about you, really. It's not easy to communicate across this divide. But FYI, I certainly have read a lot from both sides on the TF.

I keep saying my attempt doesn't provide much specific about Paul's dating; but as an aside, it did produce a good discussion of the archons and the question of "recently deceased." It brought up those important issues, whatever you think of the quality of my arguments in them.

I do think that texts with problems preclude conclusions; but problems never preclude the making of arguments. At least not unless the arguments are completely dated or useless -- and I know of very few subjects where it does no good at all to take a second look at theories thought to be "old" or "dated." The very act of taking a second look every once in a while can be said to be part of the tradition of skeptical inquiry -- it's one way to keep out of dogma.

Your objection brings up another point, and that's how you know as a historian what happened. I agree FULLY that facts should be the starting point for historical argument. But sticking only to what is problem-free or unchallenged, only to those things that are fully certain, can easily produce a distorted picture, or a picture of radical uncertainty prevailing, since there's a lot of data that is full of problems and under rigorous questioning or challenge. Being only skeptical is a problem; it's also necessary to use imagination to ask how all the pieces, including the problematic and uncertain ones, might have fit together. Skepticism resists the making of connections (for instance, the equation of Paul's James with the one in Josephus); imagination proposes those ways in which they might in fact be connected. The final step is to offer a robust history, with the caveat that it consists of probabilities not certainty.

I'm not preaching to you per se, but I am replying to many posts I've seen from you so far in which you've hammered home the point of "what we know" (i.e., what we know with practical certainty). You made a list of things we know, such as the prevalence of Messianism in first-century Palestine. If a modern historical work included that fact as well as a historical life of Jesus, with positive claims about his relationship to James, and this work used Josephus critically or in a limited way but did not throw him out, I'd call that work both responsible and rich. I'd call it far richer than a history book that simply repeated what was known, or took those bare facts to say that the rest must be mythology. Again, I don't know your own arguments about these things, so take this simply as my sharing my philosophy of history. Anyway, in this hypothetical work I would say that its report of 1st-century Messianism would be more certain than the existence of Christ, and that this in turn would be more certain than anything said about Jesus and James. In short: imagination on top of skepticism produces a picture in which some things are more uncertain than others, but the result is richer. It's what I think professional historians are asked to do by their peers and the public (a fact not without its own problems).

This dialectic between skepticism and imagination is something I learned from a skeptical professor in college (someone, by the way, with whom I had no problems; I earned the top grade in his history class). It's also repeated by one of the writers who has most deeply affected me:

"It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas.... If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you.... On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish the useful ideas from the worthless ones" - Carl Sagan, 1987.

This may not tell us where we stand in our debates exactly (I doubt it does), but it's surely food for thought.

Amaleq13

Paul doesn't place the living Jesus in a historical context so he makes a poor historical marker but James could be a potential historical marker for the resurrection appearances. There is, however, nothing in Paul's faith-statement that requires or even implies that these appearances took place immediately after the "three days" described.

If we could independently date this James, we could say that James was a historical marker for Paul's letters. Josephus doesn't help because we can't be sure he is really talking about the same guy. How can we date James?

How does this follow after we've "set aside" what Paul meant by "brother of the Lord"? Seems like you've just kept your assumption while claiming to set it aside. If we truly "set aside" what Paul meant, we are only left with the timing of the resurrection appearances.

See, Josephus is part of your argument about James being the literal brother. The passage is questionable at best so, as I suggested, it does not seem wise to consider it an independent source of information.

You seem to be asking that we set aside our objections to the reliability of your arguments so that we might acknowledge that they are legitimate arguments.

S.C.Carlson

Well, there's a reason why Campbell called the 2 Cor reference "an anchor for Pauline chronlogy.

Campbell's premise is that 2 Cor is a primary source for Paul's life, written by Paul. This is hardly a controversial position. Of course, if 2 Cor is a fake, then the faker's knowledge of the Aretas incident still places Galatians no earlier than the 50s and its lack of edifying detail implies that the faker's intended audience was familiar with it as more or less a contemporary event.

Furthermore, Campbell's argument is based on almost entirely on a close reading of Josephus, esp. AJ 18.109-125. If Acts played any role in Campbell's argument, I can't see it (and it would be inconsistent with Campbell's skepticism over the Acts chronology in his recent JTS article). As for using the gospels to date the Aretas incident, I'm at loss at why this red herring is even mentioned here.

The comment "each of which assumes the veracity of the information in 2 Cor 11" puts the cart before the horse. Paul is competent to testify about events that occurred in his own life, making 2 Cor a primary source. Unless there are credibility problems with it, a primary source (Paul) takes precedence over a secondary source (Josephus) writing more than a half century after the event based on unknown sources of unknown competency. In other words, Josephus's version would have to be especially clear, contradictory, and credible to impeach Paul's first hand account. According to Campbell, however, a careful reading of Josephus does not contradict Paul but actually supports him, even to the point of being able to date the event with precision.

What is called "conjecture" and "wish fulfillment" here is Campbell's interpretation of Josephus's sketchy account that concludess that they do not necessary contradict each other. But even assuming they did, a primary source (i.e., Paul here) is normally credited over an uncorroborated secondary account of a half century later.

The Pauline statement is primary source evidence, and primary sources are the essence of historical criticism.

As for Campbell's motivation, I have little idea what his faith commitment is, though his skepticism over Acts chronology in his recent JTS piece may foreclose him from being a die-hard inerrantist. Thus, the comment about "models that christian scholars wish to construct" could be too irrelevant to be an ad hominem, but, even so, let's discuss the evidence and logic supporting his arguments, not some uncharitable assumptions about his motivations.

There's only "nothing" if 2 Cor is not evidence. It is; in fact, it is primary source evidence. There are also the corroborating clues in Josephus that Campbell found.

The alternative dating is not problem-free. For example, one problem with an early 1st BCE date for the Aretas incident (specifically, 84-72 BCE) is the unlikelihood of the number and dispersion of Jewish communities presupposed in Paul's undisputed letters (e.g. Romans) before Pompey's conquest of Judea. Another problem is the ease of travel evident in Paul's letters, which fits the first cen. CE much more nicely than the pirate-infested early first cen. BCE. On the other hand, as Campbell argued, the earlier control over Damascus by Aretas III provides adequate motivation for Aretas IV to recapture his ancestor's glory.

Stephen

krosero

That's correct. I argued that according to Paul's text, the appearances of Christ took place at around the time that his brother James must have lived, and that Paul met this James. If we go with biological brother, we get a period between the crucifixion and the appearance to Paul that's something on the order of the possible lifespan of James: he connects Paul and Jesus. If James was born of the same mother and we imagine he was born around the time of Jesus' death, and we make him an old man when he met Paul, we have the lifespan of a man. Or we get a shorter timespan if James is already an adult at the time of the crucifixion.

We could date James using Josephus if we were willing to equate the two men. I am willing to do so, but so far I have not suggested it because I was concerned with Doherty's statements about the "recently deceased," which only concern themselves with Paul's letters.

No, I can't keep my assumption about James and set it aside at the same time. I just identified two steps: Paul's text mentions a James in Corinthians and one in Galatians, with hints that the two men are the same, so we have a historical marker, among others. Next step is to ask what Paul meant and whether he was correct. Two distinct steps.

I had not used Josephus to identify the James in Corinthians when I said that Josephus was not part of my argument. I used Josephus to identify the timing of the crucifixion, by going through the James passage in Antiquities, which mentions a Christ, and then onto the TF, which mentions Christ's name ("tribe of Christians") and Pontius Pilate. That part of my argument did not need to equate the James in Josephus with the James in Paul. It had nothing to do with the use in Josephus of the term "brother", which was what you were critiquing. Then I went on to discuss Paul's sense of how far back Jesus Christ went, using the James that HE mentions. At no point do you need to equate the James in Paul with the James in Josephus, although in your last reply you said it could be done (unwisely) in order to fix James more precisely in time.

So when I said that Josephus provides independent attestation of "Christ" and "James", it was an inexact summary, and your objection here makes sense.

I've argued that Paul's text contains historical markers and a rough chronology. If I said that this proposition should not be rejected as the presupposition of faith or dismissed too quickly, perhaps that seemed like I was pushing my reading as one which had no objections, and that is not what I was doing.

spin

You're reading to much into an audience you have no experience of.

This seems oblivious as to why Campbell was looking at the particular part of Josephus and not where we know of an Aretas who had control of Damascus.

To avoid this confusion spawning you comment of "put[ting] the cart before the horse" I specifically edited my comment to add "in the status quo contextualisation of circa 40 CE, using Acts and the gospels"

Agreed.

The "more than half a century" is partly the purpose of this thread, to question the assumptions on which it lies.

Correct.

Back to the dating assumption.

Yes.

You'll note that my comment was about the scenarios, not Campbell per se.

This is not related to the discourse, but I gather you're still working from not noting the clarification I made to my previous post.

I agree that such a dating is not trouble free and I have not supported such either.

Not when it was in Roman hands. You'll note that when possessions in the area were being handed around, they never included Damascus. Aretas IV taking Damascus would have been direct aggression against a Roman province. Not wise.


spin