Bernard Muller

to Spin,
The fact Paul never met HJ does not mean HJ did not exist. But he met his brother, the next best thing! (I know you will dispute that item but I do not).
I am glad you accept Paul needed a human Jesus for his theology. But certainly that does not prevent this Jew to have existed. If he had invented him, if his audience did not know previously about HJ, Paul would have been subjected to a barrage of questions. But there is no trace of that. Instead he made points based on a human Jesus (as in Gal3:7-4:7, as shown below) as if he was already completely accepted (as does the author of Hebrews).
From my website http://historical-jesus.info/djp2.html
Talking about sacrifice, it would have been highly preferable to have Jesus decapited (as for any animals offered in Jewish or Gentile sacrifices) rather than crucified. And a no_sin_Jesus only appears in 2Cor5:21 (out of the 7 Paulines), as far as I know. Obviously Paul was not insisting on it.

"church of God", for "the whole world collection of believers" also appears in:
and
There is nothing wrong into providing probable reasonable motive(s) for any action by anybody. As long as theories are not based on probable (but not stated) motives. Police detectives address the motivation issue for any crime by a suspect. Reasonable motive(s) prove that an action is explicable, that's it.

Duvduv

Of course "seed of David" and "seed of Abraham" wouldn't mean much in a literal sense if there was no information that the Christ ever had any human parents.

One would think that the author of the epistles would want to clear up the issue strongly and not leave ambiguities about "born of woman" which itself says NOTHING about any Davidic ancestry.

What makes sense in the overall context, however, would be that "seed" is not meant in a literal sense even in the Greek (unless it was an interpolation).

If the author(s) of the epistles thought it was of overwhelming importance that the Christ was a literal descendant of King David and Abraham, he/they would have provided SOMETHING of a genealogy and a mention of his mother and HER NAME, the only possible descendant of David.

On the other hand, since the authors of gospel genealogies knew that Joseph wasn't his father, why didn't they explicitly indicate the only possible genealogy, that of MARY, and just forget about Joseph and his genealogy altogether?!

In that case the genealogy must have originated before the virgin birth, and the orthodox just thought it was too impressive to be ignored EVEN if Luke and Matthew disagreed on whether Joseph descended from Solomon or Nathan. Of course the immediate reaction would be "Who cares about Joseph's genealogy anyway? Just ignore it!"

aa5874

Well, apologetic sources that mentioned the relationship between the supposed Jesus and the alleged Apostle James have DENIED that James the Apostle had a human brother called Jesus Christ.

You must be reminded that Paul claimed he met someone but could NOT remember how.

2 Corinthians 12:2 KJV Without corroboration the Pauline writings cannot be accepted as historically reliable when even YOU are arguing that there are INTERPOLATIONS in the supposed letters of Paul.

Duvduv

Well, good old Justin Martyr mentioned his "Old Man" who he couldn't or wouldn't name, give any information about or describe, despite his having been the source of Justin's Christianity. Reminds me of how the author of Galatians couldn't bring himself to tell his all important readership in Galata where Paul (himself) had been persecuting Christians. Why do these writers like to be so cagey about such important information?!

Bernard Muller

to Duvduv,
In Gal3:7-4:7, there is no need to have that woman as a descendant of David. There is no need to name that woman. What's important for the argument is that Jesus was incarnated as a descendant of Abraham, from a woman (as any other humans) and as a Jew.
"seed" = 'sperma' is used often in Paul's seven epistles, and with the meaning of human descendant of (either by blood or adoption), in Ro1:3, 4:13, 4:16, 4:18, 9:7, 9:8, 11:1; 2Cor 11:22.
In Rom 11:1 and 2Cor 11:22 Paul considered himself a seed of Abraham.
You are assuming many things here and making arguments from silence, and from that drawing conclusions.
First, I do not think descendant of David was important for Paul.
Descendant of Abraham was. But Jesus, as a Jew, could be assumed to be a descendant of Abraham, "logically".
There were, in these days, no official records to trace the extended descendance for most people, if not all. But that did not prevent anyone to make claim, either for themselves or others (as long as they were human!).
While in Jerusalem, I met a Rabbi who said he was a descendant of Moses. And nobody was laughing or asking for proof!
I do not see why Mary should have been named by Paul, more so when descendance, in the Jewish system, was always going through the male line.

The rest of your post deals with the gospels. Let's keep it in the perspective of Paul.

Duvduv

Well, then you are saying that the Christ figure, although described in relation to David in Romans and not to Fred, Sam or Phil, is not interested in the davidic messiah but only Abraham, whereby according to his logic a believer in the salvation of Christ is himself a descendant of Abraham, though not the promised "seed" (in the singular probably in Greek as well as Hebrew). Despite the fact that seed is generically meant to refer to the Jewish people, the offspring of Isaac and then Jacob.

As far as genealogies are concerned, the gospels themselves show that genealogy was important, and in fact R. Shimon ben Azzai in the Jerusalem Talmud makes a reference in Tractate Yebamoth 4:13 to the genealogy of "someone" (plony almony) who is sometimes thought to be Yeshu ben Pandera, though I don't agree with this. And of course we see in the Book of Ezra and even in Genesis itself how important genealogies were.

spin

Very true.

But this isn't. It's pure apologetics, based on an ignorance of the use of both "brother" and "lord". This ignorance is due to the retrojection of later usage into Paul for the non-titular "lord" and a willfulness to not read what Paul generally meant when he used "brother", ie a believer.

Even Acts doesn't know anything about a James in charge of affairs in Jerusalem who was the brother of Jesus. (Does anyone make the connection before Origen?)

That divergence should tell you the popular view of Gal 1:19 wasn't worth mentioning.

And that doesn't stop you from saying the obvious either. I don't know if Jesus existed, but then I think that's the only sensible position: just as we don't know if Saint George, Saint Nicholas, King Arthur or Robin Hood existed either--but we don't find ourselves compelled to fall over our feet trying to get in line to believe they did, as we do with Jesus.

Umm, sorry? His audience certainly knew 1) about the Jewish religion and 2) about messianism. So they were half-educated. Besides, we don't know what they asked Paul. It's not the subject of the letter to the Galatians.

That wouldn't be an argument from..........., from silence, would it?

The same silence. Nothing comes of nothing, Cordelia.

We have no idea what communications Paul had with the Galatians. We merely have one letter that is trying to deal with a particular conflict between his Jesus and the others' torah praxis. (This is a notable contrast Paul's christ crucified and the necessary Jewishness of those others.) What we do know is that the torah people were swaying the Galatians away from Paul's Jesus gospel.

Oh, deary me. You're making things up.

Umm, how would Jesus' act on the cross work to save people from their sins, had he been a sinner??

If you had read other posts in this thread, you'd know that I think this is a poor interpretation. This is what I said:

[T2]Paul is talking to the Corinthians. The obvious reference in the passage is the church of god that is at Corinth. He's not talking about Jews around the world, nor Greeks around the world, but those that the Corinthians come into contact with. If you Corinthians go to the assembly give no offense to those you find there.

Then we get Paul making a general comment a little later in 1 Cor 11:16, "we have no such custom, nor do the churches of God". What happened to the singular?[/T2]

You need to consider the statement six verses earlier. He's already talked about the congregations (εκκλησιαι) of god and yet do you really want him to be talking about the universal one congregation of god, forgetting what he'd just said?

1 Cor 11:22 is talking about the congregation in Corinth. Some are not treating the communal meal with enough respect, so Paul asks them if they despise the congregation, the particular congregation in Corinth.

Oh, yes there is... when that "probable reasonable motive" is functionally your opinion.

Working on prior examples and guesswork and being wrong enough times.

Being explicable doesn't mean that the given explication is correct. I worry that you give your opinions of what is reasonable as though they verge on evidence.

judge

As usual you only give half the story. And so you resort to your usual insults (calling others ignorant).
Paul uses the term brother or sister of a believer only on occasions when he is clearly addressing them as member of the community of believers.

As in Romans 16

However you are unable to provide any sensible idea of who the "brothers of the Lord" are in Corinthians. obviously in this instance it cant mean "believer".

Nor can you explain why in Galatians 1 Paul just prior refers to Jesus as Lord (Kurios) .

And why he also several times in the immediate vicinity uses theos to refer to god.

Yet somehow, by some strange logic , you want Paul to mean Jesus when he says Lord (Kurios) elsewhere in galatians (chapter 1 , the immediate vicinity) and to mean god when he uses Theos 6 times in galatians 1, but suddenly confuse his readers by changing and using Lord (Kurios) for god in that one verse becuase it suits your theory, :constern01:

LegionOnomaMoi

This argument is based on a misunderstanding of greek, linguistics, and methods of identification. Since Fillmore et al.'s 1988 paper on idioms, the view that a "lexicon" composed of individual words was sufficient when combined with a grammatical component has been all but abandoned, even with in the dying field of generative linguistics (see e.g., Jackendoff's most recent works, particularly The Architecture of the Language Faculty). Most linguists reject the componential model entirely.


The point, however, is that one cannot simply say adelphos=adelphoi except that it refers to more than one. We're talking about a time in which people shared first names more than they do today, but lacked surnames. In greek (like latin) the standard method of identification was to use a construction "X, the Y of Z" where X and Y shared the same case, and Z was a genitive construction. The most common forumula was identification through kin, and specifically the father: "X the son of Y." However, place of origin, title, other kin connections, etc., were also used (for some of these, the formula became "X of Z" or "X the Z"). The point, however, was to establish that this particular X was different from another with the same name. Thus "Apollonius the Roman" would hardly be sufficient, as it would describe a high too many people. Apollonius of Tyana, however, was sufficient.

Paul uses adelphoi repeatedly just as english speakers do today to describe everything from a other members of a biker gang to fellow ODA members in one's SF company. However, he does not use the singular in the same way, and in particular he does not use the specific formula found in Galatians: Iakobon ton adelphon tou kuriou (James the brother of the lord).

This is the standard identification construction: X the Y of Z. "The lord" is how Paul refers to Jesus. And this james is identified and distinguished from others by his kinship connection.

It's exactly the same construction we find in Josephus: ton adelphon...Iesou only Josephus (who was not a christian), doesn't call Jesus "lord" and identifies him using the participial construction legomenos Christos. However, the formula is still there. He uses the same formula a few lines later to identify a Jesus, the son of Damneus. That's how people could refer to someone named Paul or Jesus or Mark or whatever ensure their audience knew whom they were speaking of.

Bernard Muller

Judge did beat me on "sister". From my website:
Acts does mention James as the leader, but, I agree, does not declare him a brother of Jesus. However Acts mentions brothers of Jesus going to Jerusalem (1:14). That does not take away that James as not being a brother of Jesus.
There is enough evidence in the Pauline epistles to show Paul knew about a HJ. And he did not give extraordinary attributes to that HJ, on the contrary.

With Gal3:7-4:7, I made a positive argument that his audience had to know about the existence of a HJ, as Jew from human origin. No silence here.
Why do you have to go into these complications? Church of God means Christians, generally, churches (plural) means Christian congregations in several cities. Sometimes "Church of God" is followed by "which is in Corinth" as in 1Co1:2. That shows that "Church of God" needs to be specified when applied to the Christians of one city.
Do not worry! I agree with your first point. The more you find reasonable motives to explain an action the better! That proves an action is not far-fetched. That does not prove the motive you propose is the right one.

And following leads up to they go to a dead end, then testing other leads, etc.
Wrong sometimes, but right most of the times.