historia wrote:What are you talking about? Throughout Paul's letters he regularly refers to all Christians as brethren in Christ. But James -- and only James -- is referred to as the brother of Jesus. This is not the "Catholic version" of anything.
Matthew 13:55 and Mark 6:3 :
Is not this carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judes and Simon?
It's safe to say the term was loosely getting thrown around all over the place.
The Catholic site you quoted is eager to show that the term 'brother' in Greek can have a wider meaning of 'cousin' or other close kinsmen (to protect the Catholic doctrine of Mary's perpetual virginity). But that doesn't fundamentally change the issue. If Jesus didn't exist, he would not have had a mother or kinsmen of any kind.
I agree that they would be eager, but they gave
examples of how the SAME Greek word was used in different contexts. This fact is independent of the Catholic church's motives and therefore stands on its own with some merit to it.
Hercules didn't exist, so why did he have a virgin mother by the name of Alcmena?
p.s. if Jesus did by your standards then we can only accept Hercules did too because there's more to show for Hercules than Jesus anyways.
Clearly? How so? Just because you can invent a motive doesn't mean you can now operate as if that motive is true. You've given us no good reason to believe this at all.
I agree, but by the same token you haven't shown me why this couldn't be the case.
Up until this point, you've been saying that some vague set of "churches" and "cults" made the claim that their "founder" was the "brother of Christ."
Correct, which is the same people that left behind the Gospels as we know that the Apostles mysteriously didn't leave anything behind themselves.
But what you're now saying is that James himself must have made this claim. So James intentionally lied about this? This is not "decades" after Jesus lived, but years. Wouldn't his opponents know that Jesus didn't exist? Wouldn't they know that he therefore couldn't have had been his literal brother?
Wrong, I didn't say James made the claim. It was the communities from where the Gospels came from that claimed this.
The 'opponents' knew just as much as the ones making the claim -
nothing - because it can't be shown that these authors were witnesses.
There is no doubt that Josephus' reference to Jesus in Antiquities 18.3, as it exists today, cannot have been original to the text. (Note that a majority of scholars actually think Christian scribes expanded an original reference to Jesus in the text rather than invented the current text out of whole cloth.)
But that is irrelevant here. The reference to James above comes from a completely different section of Josephus' writing in Antiquities 20.9. This reference is universally accepted by scholars as authentic.
Did Josephus identify James by the brother of Jesus reference? - It is commonly argued that Josephus likes to identify for the readers sake a freshly introduced figure by some sort of explanatory description. This is his first (and only) reference to James, and thus the identification of Jesus as his brother serves this purpose. There are a number of potential flaws in this position.
Even if the observation about Josephus habit is valid, this does not reveal what Josephus may originally have written to identify James. (In a moment I will detail what may be a couple of possibilities.) There is no certainty that the identifying phrase as it stands now must have come from Josephus pen, for he may have described James by some other reference which was subsequently changed by a Christian copyist. That the latter was the case is suggested by the fact that the second part of the extant phrase is suspiciously identical to the one which concludes Matthew 1:16 (ho legomenos Christos: the one called (the) Christ, though the Josephan phrase is in an oblique case: tou legomenou Christou). The same phrase also appears in John 4:25.
http://jesuspuzzle.humanists.net/supp10.htm
Christians always seem to be involved in one way or another when it comes to Josephus.
But you're saying they purposefully mislead people into thinking that Jesus was an actual human being. How is that not lying?
How can you blame them of lying if they never witnessed anything but merely took on what they heard from word of mouth?
Stories evolving is completely different to telling a blatant lie outright.
But evolution from what? It's easy to see how legends can accrue around an historical person. We see that all the time in ancient and pre-modern texts.
But what you're arguing for here is that Jesus didn't exist at all. There is no evolution in that case. You're advocating parthenogenesis, the creation of a person and a religious movement out of nothing. That's very hard to believe.
You haven't refuted my perfect example at all, which is Hercules. I have shown you over and over how Hercules is no different but for no apparent reason he can be dismissed on a whim.
http://atheistforums.org/thread-12505.html
Here's a thread I wrote up on the reasons why Hercules is more believable than Jesus.
Absolutely. But we rarely have this luxury when it comes to ancient history.
Most of what we know about ancient history comes from sources (and in many, many cases just a single source) written decades, if not centuries, after the events they describe, by people who were not eyewitnesses (and therefore based on "hearsay").
You imagine that the sources that we have for Jesus are somehow unique and unusual in this regard, and therefore there is something suspicious about them. But this is the norm for ancient historical sources. This is what we expect to see.
You also imagine that Josephus is some kind of objective "secular historian," so that if he mentions something it's golden and we can trust it. But if Luke -- who is just as much an "historian" as Jospehus -- mentions something, it's now somehow biased, unverified, and must be doubted.
Scholars and historians don't take what Josephus and other "contemporary historians" have to say at face value. And they certainly don't discount what Luke and the other Christians have to say out of hand.
I never said Josephus can be trusted. On the contrary, it's already been shown that his work that we're discussing has been tampered with by Christians. If it wasn't for this, then yes I would have trusted him because we have someone else's view on Jesus. As it stands though, it doesn't count for anything and what we have left is a one-sided argument.
Yes, exactly. What you're missing, though, is that this cuts both ways. When the gospels record events that actually run counter to the bias of their authors (and they do), we can be reasonably certain that they are recording actual history.
Couldn't agree more. When we see that one community cuts off the advantage of another's by having the so-called 'brother OF Christ' as their founder by making Jesus trash his family, we can see that they are reflecting the political climate of the time.
Because we can apply a critical analysis to the text. This is precisely what historians have done to the gospels.
Good on them. I can't help but see this as being the same to reconstructing the life of Spiderman based on the single source we have which are the original comics.
This is simply not true. You clearly have not read the scholarly literature on the historical Jesus.
Ok fair enough.
Yes, it tells me that you haven't spent very much time looking at ancient historical sources.
This is par for the course for ancient history. It's simply a function of the great cost of producing and preserving ancient text. And nothing else. It certainly doesn't give us cause to doubt the existence of Jesus.
Muhammad's witnesses had no problems whatsoever with this. The 12 (and later on 11) most fortunate people in the eyes of Christians, the ones who witnessed and spent time with the Creator himself couldn't even leave a memo saying "Jeezuz wuz 'ere". No, instead we have the 4 'best sounding' Gospels after ~40 years and the church decided it would be best to give them names which can't be verified to see how they got to that conclusion.
I can't be more sincere in expressing how disfunctional the NT is with reality. All across the board it's always one step behind from being somewhat credible in its claims.
Mark mentions Jesus' resurrection in 16:1-8.
I saw this coming from a mile away. Have a read for yourself what we can conclude up to verse 8. An empty tomb and a young man (or angel, depending on if you feel like believing in the supernatural that day) making claims of a resurrected Jesus. Evidence for this claim?
No. The juicy stuff i.e. evidence is what gets added on in the form of verses 9-20. No resurrected Jesus to be found. It doesn't get any more faith shattering than this to be honest.
I didn't really mean to get involved in the discussion, just to add a little to Historia's excellent comments. Like I say, it's a topic which seems to come up every few months - and I learned much of what I know about the bible a while back from discussions on a different forum dominated by Jesus-mythicists.
