TedM

I would agree that there is no evidence that the author(s) of Acts knew that one of the brothers rose to power quickly. (Slight correction to what you wrote--it seems clear from various sources (and implied Acts) that James was the top guy, and not one among others.)

I think it is likely however that he knew a lot about James, and wrote more about him, though it no longer exists. Eisenman has argued that the election of Mathias originally was about the election of James to head the church. He has also argued that the stoning of Stephen, witnessed by Paul (then Saul) was actually about an attack on James by Paul!

In any case, I agree with Eisenman at the least that the absence of information about James by the author(s) of Acts is is quite strange, and may well reflect an intentional later editing of the text.

Consider this: James, the first leader of the initial church is never even introduced in Acts. He just appears suddenly for the first time in Chapter 12 "Report these things to James and the brothers", clearly already an important figure, but with no introduction whatsoever. Then in Chapter 15 James makes the all-important decision about Paul's Gentile mission, though again his position is not even explained. The 3rd and last time he is mentioned is in 21:17-18 "When we had come to Jerusalem, the brethren received us gladly. On the following day Paul went in with us to James; and all the elders were present."

James, the first leader of the Church, is greatly minimized in Acts. This seems intentional to me. However, for a document which is giving us the history of the development of the early church, it seems likely that there was once an original passage discussing James' rise to power. Surely there was at least something! If so, that would have been the place to mention more about James, especially a biological relationship. One can reasonably assume that there must have been SOME reason a non-disciple was chosen, which the author of Acts knew about. Of course, that isn't evidence. Just speculation.

ted

stuart shepherd

Galatians 1:19 (King James Version)
19But other of the apostles saw I none, save James the Lord's brother.


Stuart Shepherd

TedM

Hi Stuart. Welcome. I and others here have discussed the Galations reference a number of times, and recently on another thread specifically dealing with it. I agree that this passage and other references to James are worthy of consideration but being the skeptical site that this is, people don't automatically take things at face value here. The OP on this thread appears to be interested in how the author of Acts referenced/perceived James and those he called "brothers", so I doubt that other references will be helpful to answer that particular question.

ted

Doug Shaver

There is only one contemporary source, and that is Paul. No other reference to James's position in the church can be reliably dated even to the same century. Paul does not clearly identify anybody as the top man in Jerusalem. It could have been James, or it could have been someone else, or there might have been no single person with authority over everyone else. The notion that James was some kind of primus inter pares is orthodox tradition, nothing more.

It does seem to be an early tradition. The author of Acts might have unintentionally started it. It seems even likely that he did if, as I suspect, he was not even attempting to write a factual history.

I am aware of no factual evidence that makes it likely.

I haven't read Eisenman, but from everything else that I have read, I have concluded that the book of Acts tells us nothing useful about Christianity's early days. Even stipulating that Luke/whoever was passing on stories that he thought were true, we know nothing about him or his sources. There is a lot in the book that we know can't be true. As for the rest, there is no way beyond rank speculation to separate fact from fiction, even supposing that any of it is fact.

It is not strange except on the conjoined assumptions that (a) James was at some point and for some time the undisputed leader of the Jerusalem church, (b) he was in fact the brother of a historical Jesus of Nazareth, and (c) Luke was writing a history based on sources that should have been reliable. Discard any of them, and there is nothing odd about Acts' portrayal of James.

Orthodox Christianity has always claimed that the document gives us such a history. I think orthodox Christianity has been wrong about that. I think there is about as much history in Acts as there is in Homer's Iliad.

TedM

Re: the minimizing of James in ActsThe earliest evidence we have certainly points to his having a primary role:

Galations: He is one of the top 3 pillars, listed first by Paul when they gave their decision. And, one of the other 3, Peter, changed his ways when men from James went to Antioch.

Gospel of Thomas: Jesus appoints him as his successor to lead the Church

In addition to the implication of Acts, generally believed to have been written by 100AD, the testimony of the later works is unanimous. Do you not think the later tradition retained even a kernal of truth about something which would have been both extremely important, and embarrasing at the same time? From the Catholic Encyclopedia:

If you question whether he was really the first Bishop I think you would need to come up with a good answer for why James, and not Peter was given such a position, since the tradition believed that Jesus declared that Peter was the rock upon which he would build his church. And secondly, why does the author of Acts seem to imply that James was the top dog, yet minimize it at the same time? If Acts was all history, why not play it up James' role as he allegedly plays up Peter?

The silence is still strange without a biological relationship. This is a book attempting to detail early Christian history. The book implies that James is an important early leader, to whom other were to report, and whose judgement was followed at the first council in Jerusalem. He is the one Paul sees first along with "the elders" when he later goes to Jerusalem again. He appears to be the top guy in Jerusalem. The author writes a fair amount on Peter and John, yet says virtually nothing about James, who he is or where he comes from. You don't think that is strange? Especially for a book that you think relied on the author's imagination? He could have made up whatever he wanted to about the guy, right? And, if based in truth, there surely should have been lots of stories pertaining to James in Jerusalem which were retained in the tradition among the Christians in Judea.

If it was unreliable, as you believe, then all the more reason Luke didn't need to know a lot about this James in order to write a lot about him. He could have made up whatever great-sounding stories he wanted to to support the early tradition. Yet he didn't. Why?

ted

Doug Shaver

I am not disputing that within the Christian community in mid-first-century Jerusalem, a man named James held some kind of leadership position.

Whether, and to what extent, that document can be relied on for any historical data depends entirely on whether Jesus of Nazareth was a real person.

As a guiding principle, I assume nothing about the factual content of any tradition, secular or sacred. Traditions may contain much truth, only a little truth, or none whatsoever.

The church may assume that the surviving testimony of early Christians was highly reliable, and the more so the more it approached unanimity. I don't.

He could have been the first bishop, for all we know. All I'm questioning is the claim that we can be sure he was.

I have said several times that I don't doubt James was a leader of the Jerusalem church. Paul makes it obvious that he was. But Paul makes it just as obvious that Peter also was a leader. I agree that there are suggestions in Paul's writings that James outranked Peter in some sense, but they are only suggestions, and I would not assume in any event that Paul's reporting on their relationship and interactions was strictly accurate.

We know exactly how that tradition got started. The declaration is contained in one of the canonical gospels -- Matthew -- so of course the tradition had to incorporate it. But the historical reliability of the canon was itself a product of tradition. There is no good evidence for the supposition that any of the gospels contain any real history.

I haven't spent a lot of time trying to figure out the author's purpose in writing Acts. From your observation, though, I would infer that whatever his purposes were, they did not include presenting a clear explanation of who was in charge of the Jerusalem church.

Most Christians have always assumed so. I believe they have been in error.

No, he could not. Ask any novelist whether they feel free to write whatever they want to about their characters.

Your reasoning here seems inconsistent. If Luke intended to write a history based on sources he thought were credible, then he did not feel free to make things up. Whatever he wrote was whatever his sources told him. Then question then becomes, not why Luke wrote what he wrote, but why his sources believed those things.

TedM

But it does reflect the same tradition found elsewhere about James. And, it is considered by some to be earlier than Acts. The earlier the tradition to the actual event, the more likely it is true in general.

Ok. I think certain things such as proximity to the actual event and the number and diversity of corroberating documents, and the criteria of embarrassment or offhand statements in general can be used as a guide to determine the likelihood of truth. So, we simply have a different bar for making a judgement of truth.

I agree that can't be sure. But given all known data, including how James is presented within Acts, it looks highly probable. As such, I would expect that the author of Acts would have had access to more information--or traditions--about James than what is in the current version of Acts. I therefore suspect that an original description of who James was was changed or discarded.

We have good reasons for the author of Acts to have known more and been motivated to write more about James, and we have good reasons for later revisions to have taken out certain information about James, leaving us with what is now there--3 brief mentions of James in an implied role as church leader, without any further information. Without these motivations, the absence of information in Acts about James is strange to me. With them, it makes sense, as does the lack of description of James as being one of the brothers of Jesus.

ted

Malachi151

I'm adding this to my JM book, I think it's a pretty good lock against the claim that "the brother of the Lord" mentioned by Paul meant that James was a literal brother of Jesus (if its not an interpolation):

In Acts of the Apostles the travels of Paul are discussed as well as the actions of James, and in Acts of the Apostles James is never called a brother of Jesus. Literal brothers of Jesus are also mentioned one time in Acts, but none of their names are given. In addition, the term "the brothers" is used several times to talk about some group of people, which seems to include James.

Acts 21 is actually describing the same event that Paul wrote about in Galatians 1. Nowhere in Acts does the author state that James is the brother of Jesus, and in the passage that describes Paul's meeting with James, the author says that Paul met with the brothers, clearly not literal brothers of Jesus, and with James. Though parts of Acts are written in a first person style, such as Acts 21, it is doubtful that the author of Acts was actually present for any of this. Acts was probably written some time between 90 and 130 CE, using a combination of the letters of Paul and other sources. The Harper Collins NRSV Study Bible has this to say about the authorship of Acts:

The parts of Acts that are written in the first-person plural may or may not actually be real first hand accounts, but what is certain is that the introduction of Acts is definitely not a first hand account, and the introduction of Acts is the only place that mentions literal "brothers" of Jesus. This is in a scene closely following the ascension of Jesus into heaven.
But let's look at this introduction and mention of Jesus' brothers more closely:

This part of Acts is the author's retelling of tradition, this is not even a potential eyewitness account. Here the author clearly shows James not to be a brother of Jesus. The author lists the names of the apostles starting with those who are considered "pillars" of the Christian movement. The first three apostles he lists are Peter, John, and James. The James that he lists is the James who is considered a pillar. We see these same names listed by Paul in Galatians:

After the author of Acts lists the apostles, he then says that they joined Mary and the brothers of Jesus. Mary and the brothers are clearly a different group of people, whom the apostles are said to have joined with. This is the one and only mention of literal brothers of Jesus in Acts. This makes it certain that the author of Acts does not consider James the pillar to be a literal brother of Jesus, because James the pillar is listed among the apostles. The author of Acts clearly indicates that James the pillar is James the apostle, who is defiantly not a literal brother of Jesus.

Perhaps more important than all of this, however, is the context of Paul's passage itself. In the passage Paul is saying very strongly that his message comes from Jesus directly by revelation and that he didn't get his message from anyone else, and he says that he had his gospel before he went to Jerusalem, where he only met with Cephas (Peter?) and he saw none of the other apostles... oh, except for James.

He then swears that what he is saying is true, but he isn't swearing that he met the brother of Jesus, he is swearing that he didn't meet with anyone else. James is mentioned here as a minor figure and with no real concern. Wouldn't Paul have something more to say in his letters about a literal brother of Jesus?
In Galatians 2 Paul goes on to insinuate that James was leading people astray.

Aside from the one mention of James in 1 Corinthians 15, this is all that Paul ever says about James. Paul mentions him in Galatians 1 as an afterthought, and then here as a pillar from whom wrong minded Jews came.
All of this hardly makes sense if James is the literal brother of the most powerful being in the universe, or one of the most powerful beings if Paul did not see Jesus as God himself. Paul called James "the Lord's brother", and if this means the literal brother of Jesus Christ, who is an eternal being that just abolished sin and transcended death, then Paul would certainly have talked about this person in some manner differently than what we see from him. If nothing else, if Paul thought that Jesus was a real person and that this was his real brother he surely would have conveyed some information about the life of Jesus from this brother of his, but Paul treats James no differently than Peter and the other apostles, indeed he views him as lesser than Peter (Cephas).

In order to maintain that the James that Paul mentioned as a pillar is a literal brother of Jesus, and not instead the James who is listed among the apostles, one would have to hold that no one else in the 1st century made this relationship clear, even in the several writings where it would have been appropriate to do so.

Against the claim that Paul clearly shows the James who was a pillar of the movement to be a literal brother of Jesus we have the following pieces of early Christian references to this same James:

• The Gospel of Thomas - James is not called Jesus' brother
• The Epistle of James - "James" does not call himself Jesus' brother
• The Epistle of Jude - "Jude" does not call himself, or James, Jesus' brother
• Acts of the Apostles - James is not called Jesus' brother

In fact, in most Bibles you will find that these mentions of James are always linked to being the brother of Jesus via footnotes that point to the passage in Galatians, because that is the one and only passage that seems to support this reading. Nothing else in the Bible supports the idea that the James who is an important figure is a literal brother of Jesus.

Given that all of the other early sources speak against this James being a literal brother of Jesus, and given the nature of Paul's mention of this James, it is inconceivable that Paul is calling James a literal brother of Jesus. If that James was a literal brother of Jesus it seems that none of the other early Christians realized it, and indeed the author of Acts contradicted it.

Solo

Actually, the text of Acts 1:16 has Peter address his audience as ανδρες αδελφοι or 'men [who are/and] brothers'.

Paul's letters confirm the commonality of the 'brother' designation in the churches.

Jiri

Malachi151

Does that change anything about the reading or affect my point in any way? (A serious question by the way. I wish I knew Greek )