Toto

And the answer is - yes but no help to the argument..

Excuse me, I feel the need to go wash the contamination of this irrational thinking out of my skull.

Is this Benjamin Creme taken seriously by anyone?

Ben C Smith

I guess I was unaware that this possibility, or the possibility of fictional kin, was in dispute.

Ben.

Toto

Then we agree that calling James the "Brother of the Lord" is not evidence of a historical Jesus?

Ben C Smith

We agree that this name in and of itself is not evidence of such.

The issue is, was always, how Paul uses the term and how the Pauline evidence dovetails (or fails to do so) with other texts.

Ben.

spin

How do you "dovetail" the first written use of a term with later possibly erroneous uses of it? You merely manipulate that first use based on the latter usage, just as has happened with the notion of "christ". Christian dovetailing has clouded the significance of the term rather than elucidated it, suggesting the process you describe, Ben C., is bound to fail.


spin

jjramsey

That's a misleading and prejudicial answer to your own rhetorical questions. How is it a manipulation to note that we don't have evidence that "brother of the Lord" was a title but plenty of evidence that Paul called Jesus Lord? Also, why assume without evidence that the later usage is likely to be erroneous?

As for the OP, there is a disanalogy with the Maitreya case. With the case of Jesus, we have Paul meeting in the flesh someone alleged to be a brother of someone who, as Ben C. Smith pointed out, apparently died recently. By contrast, Maitreya is described pretty clearly as a sort of "spiritual" brother, complete with scare quotes around the phrase "eldest brother."

spin

As usual, you come in apologetics blazing and know nothing of the issue.

The question I have asked in the past on the subject of Paul's use of kurios is how can a term be used two different ways (ie to refer to god and christ) without having any contextualizer so that you know the reference?

I don't. One first has to understand what the material means in context before you risk contaminating it with extraneous data.


spin

jjramsey

Poisoning the well. Nice.

Who says that there is no contextualizer? If "brother[s] of the Lord" was a stock phrase that came to mean "brother[s] of the Lord Jesus," then "brother of" would be the contextualizer. Of course, there's that "if." However, in favor of that "if" is

• as I said before, lack of evidence that it was a title,
• plenty of evidence of Paul referring to Jesus as "Lord," and
• later explicit references to James as Jesus' brother by blood.

A more extended version of this line of argument is from Ben C. Smith.

Now if you want to argue that it is more parsimonious to posit a special group of believers called "brothers of the Lord" that somehow left no trace and was universally misinterpreted by Christians, be my guest.

sharrock

Not sure that this contributes directly but it might give some understanding of why the word "brother" is (ab)used so often...

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0909122749.htm

spin

Sorry, but you beat me to it.

Later tradition is little help for understanding earlier tradition.

You cite Ben C.'s reverie as though I'm supposed to be impressed. There is just as little reason to believe that one can divine "brethren of the lord".

If we have references to "brother of the lord" and the "brethren of the lord" then obviously it is false to say they left no trace.

When you are willing, as you are, to mix different parts of a tradition complex then you are liable to get meaningless results.


spin