I'm not claiming that. That's more of your poor 'logic'.
You (and others) are claiming the various NT James are all one biological brother of Jesus !!!
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The Historical Jesus III
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You (and others) are claiming the various NT James are all one biological brother of Jesus !!!
Eh? On the contrary. I'm saying Jesus is said to have had a brother called James, and if there were other people also called James, so what? He is supposed to have had another brother called Judas. But that is not declared to be same as the evil disciple Judas.
There are two people called Ananias in the NT. The phenomenon of different people with the same name is not uncommon.
When I poked fun at 1 Corinthians 15:6 reference to the 500 brothers as meaning Jesus had a big family that was not quite what I meant.
On a more serious note the Pro-HJ side that believes Jesus was an only child explains these supposed biological brothers as begin half brother or cousins.
Elagabalus
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When I poked fun at 1 Corinthians 15:6 reference to the 500 brothers as meaning Jesus had a big family that was not quite what I meant.
On a more serious note the Pro-HJ side that believes Jesus was an only child explains these supposed biological brothers as begin half brother or cousins.
You must have mistaken us for some other Pro-Hj side. I don't believe anyone has claimed that Jesus was an only child.
Your first paragraph doesn't make sense. Which is par for you.
People like you appeal to it being said that 'Jesus had a brother, James'.
Bu cannot elaborate further than that mere bare assertion.
It's pathetic.
Moreover, brother is as likely or more like to mean 'brethren'
ie. a fellow member of a sect or cult, rather than a sibling or other blood-relative.
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It has been part of doctrine for eons: it's only since a historical-Jesus has been proposed that Jesus having a sibling has become part of the folk-lore.
I have tried reading that a number of times, and I have to confess I really cannot make logical sense of what that sentence says or what it is asking.
However, let's try to take it one a chunk at a time -
The first statement is actually an assumption that Jesus is real, i.e. begining by saying "If Jesus was (were) a fraud....". OK so that is implicitly starting with that assumption that (i) he is real, and (ii) that his actions were dishonest.
And then you ask - would that force us to believe that his known frauds (known because the initial assumption was that he did exist as a fraud), were actually frauds ... but that makes no sense, because that was your starting assumption anyway, i.e. you started by saying "IF Jesus were (was) a fraud ...".
So the answer thus far is that you are not merely forced to accept the fact of fraud, as if it was something you had just deduced, but the fraud is fact because it was defined as a fact by the initial premise.
And then comes a final bit that I really do not understand where you say - would the initial definition of Jesus as a fraud, mean that we should conclude that he was probably real ... but that was the assumption you started with when you began with the wording "If Jesus was (were) a fraud ..."
Well this appears to me as complicated and impenetrable as the previous sentence (discussed above).
First - there are no credible reports of anyone "knowing" him or "knowing a relative of his". And really, neither is it accurate to say that any of the gospel writers or Paul "knew of him"; because again that wording implies that he did exist (you cannot know OF him, unless he exists to be known about). The only thing that those biblical writers "knew of", were just the ancient scriptural prophecies written in deliberately opaque ambiguous language, where they (the biblical writers) were interpreting that scriptural writing so as to assume that it's coded words revealed the name of Jesus as the long awaited messiah ... they did not "know of him", they only "knew of "the scriptural writing.
And then in that same sentence you have "or heard reports of him". But that again is a way of suggesting he was a priori known to exist ; that wording is assuming he did exist. That is - the biblical writers had not so much "heard reports of him" (you can only hear reports "of him" , if he exists). Instead what they were doing was looking in the OT scriptures for coded ambiguous prophecies, because they believed those coded prophecies contained Gods true revelation of the promised messiah (it may be the case that they were doing that mostly through oral traditions of what they thought was in the OT and what they had been told/taught was in the OT, rather than actually having original written scrolls in front of them). By doing that, they believed that like Paul, who constantly insisted that his understanding of Jesus as the dying & rising saviour of God, was indeed known to him "according to scripture", they simply took all sorts of disparate unconnected sentences and words from any of the various books of the OT, and interpreted selected parts of that to mean that the messiah was called Jesus and that he had done all the things claimed in the gospels ...
... they did not have to find any of the detailed gospel stories in the OT, that was probably just added to bring the Jesus stories to life for the purpose of preaching to the congregations - i.e. they simply dreamed up all sorts of realistic settings in which various parts of the OT were said to have happened in much more colourful ways. It's what Carrier was describing as Euhemerism, which was apparently a very popular religious practice from at least 300 BC in that region - that is the figure started off as a belief extracted from OT prophecy, and then realistic sounding stories were simply created in order to place the figure on earth interacting with the faithful ... it was a way of providing the preachers and the faithful with exciting stories that could be understood by everyone and passed on as preaching of "the good news".
But if you are simply asking if the gospels and letters are made useless for any purpose at all, simply because they are myth built around OT prophecy, then no. No, of course they are not entirely useless. They tell us all sorts of things about what certain highly superstitious religious fanatics believed in the early centuries AD.
But what they are useless for, is as credible factual accounts showing a real human Jesus ever known to any of those biblical writers (or to anyone else). They are useless for that, because all those writers make absolutely clear that they had never known any such person as Jesus. Nor do they name anyone else who ever claimed to have met Jesus. But what they do all say, and what has been shown to be fact by authors like Randel Helms (Gospel Fictions), is that they were certainly creating Jesus stories from what they thought was the true meaning of passages in the ancient scriptures.
Well in respect of the highlight, that really is the start and finish of this entire subject. Because as dejudge will quickly point out to you (and of course he is right about this particular point) - that biblical Jesus is actually the only Jesus that was ever claimed by anyone at the time.
The so-called Historical Jesus (HJ), is not by any means the same figure described in the bible.
Instead the so-called HJ is a concept which was eventually invented around 1800 by biblical scholars, theologians and Church writers, as a response to the fact that by that date science was beginning to convince educated people that the miracles which were so central to the biblical claims and so ubiquitous throughout all the gospel writing, could not actually have ever been true. And by that same date, the first sceptical writers were pointing out that not only were the gospels not in fact written by any actual personal named disciples (as had long been believed by most people), but that a side-by-side comparison of g-Mark and g-Mathew in particular, showed that the individual gospels were not independent writing (as they were once believed to be), but that instead they were all copying from one-another.
At some fairly early stage it was also becoming clear, that contrary to earlier beliefs and contrary to the claims of the Church leaders, the earliest gospel texts that actually existed, were not as universally claimed (and still often claimed even now in these threads), from the 1st century within just a few short decades of the lifetime of Jesus (the idea being to place the gospels as close as possible to the time of Jesus, because once they get to about 100 years after the events then they rapidly lose credibility), but instead in the case of extant readable/useable gospels they are most probably from the 4th to 6th century and later (in fact mostly later than 6th century), and where the earliest copy of Paul's letters is in fact P46 which is usually dated to circa 200 AD (though it could be 100 years later that that).
So that was the reason for what dejudge will tell you was the first of three very protracted attempts to, in effect, invent a completely new non-biblical Jesus called a "Historical Jesus". And according to dejudge, none of those three attempts actually ever succeeded in finding a Historical Jesus.
But whatever you think about that (i.e. about the three periods of attempts to discover/create a HJ), what does seem to be a fact, is that (as I say) - the biblical Jesus was universally believed, miracles and all, up until about 1800 by which date science and certain sceptical writers had began to show that the biblical Jesus could not possibly be a real figure.
But if you simply ask - is it possible that there was a real man of some kind who was in some way the basis of the biblical Jesus stories, then the answer is both Yes and No.
"Yes" in the sense that of course it is possible, because it does seem that there were vast numbers of fanatical street preachers around Judea in the 1st century, and since "Yehoshua" was apparently not an uncommon name (though it is in fact a Theophoric word meaning to "cry an appeal to the saving powers of Yahweh"), so on that simplistic level, then yes of course there might have been some real person behind the biblical stories.
However, there is also reason to answer that same question in the negative, "No". Because we now know that all four of the gospel writers, and especially the most important two and the most relied upon, i.e. g-Mark and g-Mathew, were certainly creating Jesus stories by fanciful use of various passages in OT scripture, using what biblical scholars themselves know very well as a method called "fulfillment citation", i.e. deliberately looking for any scriptural passages which they could assume to mean Jesus as the messiah (e.g. the book of Zechariah, the book of Isaiah, and quite possibly the much later writing (probably late 1st century AD) known as "The Ascent of Isaiah"), and simply weaving realistic tales of earthly situations in which the extracted messiah story could be placed amongst the people of the region (i.e. extracted from scripture ... a process that Richard Carrier says was known as Euhemerisation, and which was apparently very commonly used in that region by various religions since the influence of Greek rulers circa 300 BC onwards).
Those are my thoughts (the stuff above), plus the thought that I am overdue for reply to gDon in respect of what Carrier says about the book of Zechariah (something that will take up several hours, if not half a day).
The last sentence is gibberish. This does NOT refer to members of a sect or cult.
Matthew 13:55 Is not this the carpenter's son? Is not his mother called Mary? And are not his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and Judas?
This is about a biological family. And in Mark 3 Jesus contrasts his brothers on the one hand with his followers on the other.
Mark 3:33. And he answered them, saying, Who is my mother, or my brethren? 34 And he looked round about on them which sat about him, and said, Behold my mother and my brethren! 35 For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother.
Matthew 13:55 Is not this the carpenter's son? Is not his mother called Mary? And are not his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and Judas?
This is about a biological family. And in Mark 3 Jesus contrasts his brothers on the one hand with his followers on the other.
Mark 3:33. And he answered them, saying, Who is my mother, or my brethren? 34 And he looked round about on them which sat about him, and said, Behold my mother and my brethren! 35 For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother.
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Who appointed you arbiter of all things Jesus and James?
Besides, that's a bare assertion. You're good at those, aren't you?
I illustrate it with incontrovertible evidence from Mark supporting my point. Substantive comment would be useful, but not vituperation.
Yet
the same is = the same as [my brother, and my sister, and mother]
ie. brethren .... lol
No it doesn't mean that. It means: whoever does the will of God, that same person (rather than biological relatives) is my brother, or sister or mother.
Yes, bethren. As Chrysostom confirms ^
"Confirms"? You mean, is required by religious prejudice to assert. Chrysostom and the others said that, because they had developed a dogma about the eternal virginity of Mary and the divinity of Jesus, and didn't want Jesus to be a Jewish human being.
On the matter of Jewish human beings in the opinion of Chrysostom, read http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/chrysostom_adversus_judaeos_01_homily1.htm. I will not weary readers of this thread by citing that monstrous, obsessive, repetitive diatribe with which Chrysostom disgraced himself.
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