Ben C Smith

You may be right. But I do not wish to jump the gun and turn an extremely limited statistical argument into a positive statement against historicity. After all, what have we checked? Both Testaments and one work of Josephus. We have (TTBOMK) not even begun to check the Antiquities, the Life, or Against Apion, nor have we looked at Philo, the apocrypha, the pseudepigrapha, the Mishnah, the Talmud (use with care, of course), or any of the papyri other than Yadin 12. Not to mention possible pagan or Christian references to Jewish individuals.

Perhaps it is only because I have Bauckham in hand right now, rereading his insightful book Jude and the Relatives of Jesus (or via: amazon.co.uk), but at present I am inclined to accept the historicity of the (names of the) brothers of Jesus (especially James and Jude, of course, but also Simon and Joses and an unknown number of sisters, as these seem quite incidental).

Ben.

Toto

Why are the sisters anonymous or incidental? Women in general seem to have been important players in very early Christianity. Does Bauckham have any ideas?

Ben C Smith

Sorry for the delay, Toto. I have been away from the internet for three days.

The sisters are anonymous in Mark, and Bauckham does not to my knowledge give an opinion as to why except to note that the female disciples named in the gospel traditions must have held more influence than the sisters of Jesus (see page 8).

However, the sisters are not necessarily anonymous in other gospels. The gospel of Philip states that the mother, the sister, and the companion of Jesus were each a Mary. And the infancy gospel of James has an abrupt mention of a Salome whom Bauckham takes to be a sister of Jesus. Later authors (like Epiphanius) did name two of the sisters Mary and Salome. See especially pages 5-19, 37-44.

If I might add my own two cents, I might suppose that Mark possibly expected his readership to know who at least some of the named brothers were (Paul apparently knew who they were, after all), just as he seems to expect his readership to know who Rufus, Alexander, James the less, and Joses are, but perhaps his readership did not know (of) any of the sisters.

Who gets named and who does not get named is always interesting in the gospel traditions.

Ben.