bacht

Okay you win, I'm a no-nothing, thanks for your help :Cheeky:

No Robots

animated version

No Robots

Of course, that should be "know-nothing." Hoist by me own petard, I am.

Joan of Bark

I don't think it's farfetched; I just think the evidence favours a HJ. If Jesus was simply a fabrication based on Hebrew scripture, he would be a more consistent character.

Roger Pearse

[deleted]

Doug Shaver

OK. In your judgment, what is the probability that the James to whom Paul referred was the same person to whom the authors of Matthew and Mark referred, and how do you reach that judgment without presupposing anything about the historical reliability of the gospels?*

As for the referent of "brother," do you think it would be relevant to examine all of Paul's writing to count his uses of the word and variations thereof, and then note how often the reference was to a male sibling and how often it was to some other relationship?

*I should think it obvious that if the gospels are presupposed to contain some residue of factual history, then debate about Jesus' historicity is automatically rendered moot.

Doug Shaver

Translation: Logic be damned, my mind is made up.

show_no_mercy

I don't think I'm arguing for a "fictional" Jesus, I have no opinion on the historicity of "Jesus the Christ" - I guess I would be agnostic about this person's existence. But I think my point still stands: in order to find a "historical" Jesus, you have to assume the Jesus you want to find and then crop out that evidence for him out of all the documents about "Jesus". From the Talmud, canonical and apocryphal epistles, canonical and apocryphal gospels/homilies, "secular"/pagan, etc.

All of these sources present vastly different "Jesuses" and I don't think there's any way of objectively finding a "historical" Jesus without the methodology ultimately being circular.

No Robots

More like: You can lead a horse's ass to the living waters, but you can't make him think.

ApostateAbe

The two sets of passages (Matthew 13:55, Mark 6:3 + Galatians 1:18–19) are mutually corroborative, meaning that they both reinforce the same conclusion. You don't need to presuppose the truth of either passage before reaching the conclusion that they are both authentic with respect to the existence of James the brother of Jesus. You find a footprint in the mud of a crime scene, and you find a boot uniquely matching the footprint in the main suspect's house. Any explanation that creates an alternative source for either the footprint or the boot is now more unlikely. You don't have to assume the authenticity of either the footprint or the boot.

You make the point that Paul much more often uses the word "brother" in a religious sense, and I think that is a good point, and that point has a severe limitation: Paul didn't often talk about a man born of the same parents as someone else, and he didn't need to. If he did, then he would use the word, "adelphos" (brother), because that was really the only word for it. At best, you can say that both meanings are equally likely. But, to get a better estimate of likelihood, you would need to look at the passage in question. Which meaning makes more sense to you?

"Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas, and tarried with him fifteen days. But other of the apostles saw I none, save James the Lord's brother."

Paul used the phrase, "the Lord's brother," because there were many men named "James" (it was a common name) and he needed to specify which James he was talking about. Two of the twelve disciples were named James!