avi

Well, more than a few, actually!

Thank you Don, marvelous summary. Well done. Very instructive, much appreciated.

avi

maryhelena

Not impossible for an alternative reading - or since the wording is ambiguous - for both readings....The Jerusalem church - pre 70 ce? The very idea that there was a Jerusalem church prior to 70 ce is based upon assumption - ie Damascus and Aretes. That storyline, that Paul starts his preaching from around 33 ce to 36 ce is not based upon a consideration of history. It's an assumption, an arbitrary reading of the text. The Damascus and Aretes storyline does suggest that this timeline for Paul is not historical - that Paul has been backdated to this time period in order to place him many years prior 70 ce. A time period in which a 'church' in Jerusalem is highly improbable. Dating Paul's missionary activity post 70 ce does have implications for those who he says came before him. Because if there was a pre-Paul, pre-christian, movement/group prior to 70 ce - it could not have been based in Jerusalem. Jerusalem is the center of Jewish theological activity. It is the logical place to put an origin storyline re early christianity - but the real history, the real historical origins of early christianity can have roots elsewhere. A merger, a fusing, of two separate strands of theological/spiritual ideas rather than a 'natural' follow on - as is the conventional storyline - gives Paul far more scope for innovation. Paul was no follower.
But surely, no need to read this persecution by Paul as being physical. Ideas also get 'persecuted' i.e. they get knocked down, exposed as erroneous, discredited. Today is no different - mythicists are having a field day Whatever were the ideas of the pre-Paul groups - Paul had issues with them. Eventually he sees the 'light' - but that does not mean that Paul became a follower instead of an innovator. Paul is a one man show - he would be far more likely to acknowledge, to show respect to, a blood relationship, a kin relationship to some important figure that preceded him - than to recognize any authority but his own.

Bottom line - the text in question, Gal.1:19 is ambiguous and can be read either way - and maybe that was just the intention of Paul...

aa5874

But, that is exactly what we don't know. The Pauline writings are not believed to be the product of ONE man.

The Pauline writings may be the the product of ONE group of MEN.

In isolation, Galatians 1.19 is ambiguous but as soon as the abundance of evidence supplied by apologetics are taken into consideration then Galatians 1.19 become FICTION.

1. Jesus did not exist.

2. Jesus had no apostles.

3. There was no apostle called Peter in Jerusalem.

4. There was no apostle called James in Jerusalem.

Galatians 1.19 is fiction.

Or assuming Jesus existed.

1. There were only two apostles called James none were called the brother of Jesus.

2. Papias did write that an apostle called James had a brother called Jesus.

3. Origen did not write that an apostle called James had a brother called Jesus.

4. Jerome did not write that the apostle James had a brother called Jesus


Galatians 1.19 can be considered fiction without any reasonable ambiguity.

spamandham

I tend to agree and personally think "Paul's" letters are better dated to the mid/late 2nd century and are backdated. But nonetheless, the argument regarding interpretation of 'brother of the lord' remains.

It's true that Paul's letters may all be later pseudepigrapha, as about half have already been determined to be. But why would that make Christian origins in Jerusalem unlikely? If Christianity was started by gentile god-fearers, Jerusalem makes a lot of sense. Keep in mind that orthodox Judaism did not yet exist, and religious ideas were freely exchanged.


If you don't accept Paul's involvement with the Jerusalem church as stated in the "genuine" epistles, then the 'brother of the lord' bit is spurious anyway, as it only appears in a paragraph in which Paul describes involvement with the Jerusalem church and its leaders. What was the intent of the author of that paragraph? There's no way of knowing if we think the paragraph is spurious.

aa5874

Once the Pauline writings are NOT analyzed in ISOLATION, then it can be proposed that there is a link between Antiquities of the Jews 20.9.1 and Galatians 1.19.

It is ONLY in the forged AJ 20.9.1, for the first and only time, where it can be found that some James had a brother called Jesus the Christ.

And it is ONLY in Galatians 1.19, for the first and only time, where an apostle called James is claimed to be the Lord's brother.

No apologetic source claimed an apostle James was an actual brother of Jesus in the NT Canon outside Galatians 1.19. Authors of the Gospels clearly did not write about any apostle James was a brother of Jesus.

It is very likely that we are seeing signs that the writings of Josephus are used through forgery to historicize the Pauline writers.

maryhelena

Agreed - but once the early dating for Paul is rejected - then Jerusalem prior to 70 ce as a base for early christianity becomes questionable.
Quite - Jerusalem makes a lot of sense - as the base for an origin storyline - but not as a base for a pre-Paul, pre-christian, movement/group. Pre-70 ce a christian movement in Jerusalem? Such a movement would get nowhere in Israel today - and yet its the conventional origin story of early christianity! A crucified messiah/savior figure does not work with Jews today so why would one imagine it would have worked pre-70 ce? - or that those spreading ideas re salvation through a crucified messiah would not be persecuted. (Paul doing a physical persecution would be the standard response....)God did at least stay the hand of Abraham. Salvation rests upon god not upon man nor upon god utilizing a miscarriage of justice for atonement. Human sacrifices - for Jews - hardly a way to gain their interest...Such an idea would be abhorrent! And of course, a spirituality without a secure footing in reality, a spirituality without roots in historical realities, would also be of no interest to Jews. It's the combination, the mix, the history and its prophetic interpretation, evaluation, that is at the core of Jewish theology.

Not so - the brother of the lord bit being spurious if I don't accept a Jerusalem 'church' prior to 70 ce. Whatever 'church' was functioning, or simply existing, or just a set of ideas, at that time, would have a different historical context to the assumed historical context that is the conventional early christian context. To assume, like mythicists, that that community had no historical figure at its base, is simply to assume too much. Reading Paul without gospel glasses, reading Paul with no historical details re his Jesus figure, does not require that those who came before Paul had his Jesus figure as the basis of their own spirituality, their own set of ideas. Jerusalem is the base of the christian origin story. The historical base for the pre-christian, pre-Paul movement/community would be elsewhere. Rejecting Jerusalem as a pre 70 ce base does not negate the idea of some other place being the base for the pre-Paul movement/community.

Those who came before Paul contributed something - something that Paul enhanced with his own vision, his own interpretation, his own innovation. The question is: If there is no historical Jesus - what was it that those who came before Paul were able to offer him? If Paul is the master of ideas - then what else can they offer him but a historical context in which to root his ideas? It is the historical context, the historical time slot, of those who came before Paul that was of interest to him, re his own ideas. In other words - history and its prophetic or spiritual interpretation. It did not all come out of Paul's head. What was in Paul's head needed to be rooted in historical, physical, realities - otherwise Paul is simply on a flight of fancy going nowhere.

So, yes I accept Paul's involvement with the early pre-christian movement/group - I don't accept that this pre-Paul group was based in the Jerusalem of pre 70 ce. Jerusalem is not high on Paul's agenda - Syria and Arabia are of much greater interest. Paul does not meet the lord who is the brother of 'James' - a lord already dead before Paul's conversion. Paul 'meets' the spiritual Jesus, the Jesus who, in his spirituality, was raised from the dead. Paul is making a theological/spiritual interpretation of the historical time slot in which those who preceded him lived.

aa5874

A Pauline writer did NOT meet a spiritual Jesus before the Fall of the Temple, no such character ever existed.

The Pauline writers are just a bunch of fiction writers.

There was no apostle of Jesus called James, no such character existed.

Galatians 1.19 is FICTION and was used to corroborate the FICTION called Acts of the Apostles where it was claimed that there were thousands of Jesus believers and apostles in Jerusalem prior to the non-historical blinding bright light conversion of "Paul".

The TRADITION of the Church is that JESUS was a God/man who had PHYSICALLY or BODILY lived on earth during the reign of Tiberius.

No such thing ever happened.

There are NO historical sources external of apologetics that show that a God/man called JESUS was even believed to have existed before the Fall of the Temple.

No historical source that can show that BEFORE the Fall of the Temple there was a massive Jesus cult spread out ALL over the Roman Empire where people worshiped a Jew who lived in Galilee as a God with the ability to forgive the sins of the Jews.

The Pauline writings about JESUS are in effect a PACK of LIES. There was no Pauline DOCTRINE about JESUS, a Jewish man worshiped as a God, in the first century, in Judea.

Some other time zone for the Pauline writings MUST be taken into consideration.

The passage in Galatians 1.19 must be linked to the forgery in Antiquities of the Jews 20.9.1 since the claim that an apostle James had a brother called the Lord is NOT even supported by Church.

Iskander

Does Paul say Jesus had a brother?

Yes

spin

Iskander's citing of the OP made me look more closely...
It's not correct in its omission to say tov/tou is supposed to be "the". Greek is a case based language, ie nouns are related to other parts of the sentences via suffixes and the like. τον tells you that the noun is an object, here of the verb "see", ie the noun is what is seen. (The noun also usually indicates the same idea, note Ιακωβον, αδελφον.) του (and κυριου) tells you that the noun controls another noun, as in the English notion of "possessive" and other relationships we use "of" for.

In English we use word order and prepositions to relate nouns to other parts of a sentence. A noun placed before a verb is usually the subject of the verb, the one doing the action (except in passive sentences). In Greek or Latin it doesn't have to precede the verb, the word ending tells the relationship. There is no "of" in Greek because the same information is carried by the case ending. The following I can group by their grammatical case (Ιακωβον τον αδελφον) (του κυριου) and the first tells us of a verb relationship (object of verb) and the second a noun relationship.


spin

spamandham

Sure, today such an idea wouldn't fly, but 2000 years ago Judaism was more like all the other state religions of the day than like modern orthodox Judaism. There were many sects of Judaism with diametrically opposed theologies.

Although I don't think the idea is at all far fetched - it is afterall derived from the Jewish scriptures - I really don't see how the link between Christianity and Judaism can be denied, even if no Jew was ever involved in Christianity. If we propose that Christianity was a purely gentile phenomenon, we are left wondering why it's architects felt the need to prove that Jesus had fulfilled Jewish messianic prophecies.

I don't think it's valid to project modern Judaism back onto the ancients.

It isn't an assumption, it's an argument based on an attempt to best fit all the available data. However, the same could be said of historicism. It really is just rooted in an assumption that Jesus is essentially historical.

All these discussions end up coming down to arguments over 1 or 2 teensy bits of evidence, as if they were some kind of trump cards. Sure, it's useful to try to figure out how these bits of evidence best fit the puzzle, but none of them are the solution to the puzzle individually.

I guess I just don't see it at as at all unlikely that Christianity originated at the epicenter of Judaism. That doesn't mean I buy what Paul says on the matter uncritically, I'm just saying that it doesn't seem valid to exclude the most natural place for it to have developed.

According to Paul, everyone who had seen Jesus saw him in the same way Paul did - as a vision. Although I don't accept 1 Cor 15 as genuine, it nonetheless records the thinking of it's author:

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.

Here Paul suggests that the idea of the death and resurrection is derived from scripture, and that what makes Peter, 'the twelve', 'the 500 brothers', James, and the apostles special is not that they knew a living breathing Jesus, but that the resurrected Jesus appeared to them. Paul makes no distinction between how Jesus appeared to all these people and how Jesus appeared to Paul (which we know is as a vision). I don't know how historicists so easily hand wave this away - the author is plainly telling us that Jesus was only ever known as a spirit and that the idea of the death and resurrection is derived from scripture.