Authors like Josephus were not even born at the time of Jesus, so any mention they might have made of Jesus can only be hearsay obtained from what had once been said by earlier generations of Christians themselves (there are no other earlier sources except the biblical writing itself)...
Josephius lived from
ca. CE 37 to
ca. CE 100. James is supposed to have died either in CE 62 or 69. So, he was a contemporary of Josephus. It's also reasonable that he might have second hand knowledge of people and events happening a bit before he was born. If I speak to a veteran of World War II, must I really corroborate what he tells me of his experience with newsreel footage etc. before I can accept his reasonable story? Now, if he tells me he got to the Normandy invasion by walking on water across the English channel, that's another story. So, it's not that unreasonable for Josephus to refer to a man who was "spoken of" as the Christ. He could easily have picked up this information from many sources.
The one thing that damages the credibility of the "who was called Christ" clause for me is that Josephus says nothing else about Jesus, nothing like the paragraph on Theudas, for example. ..
Sure, re. the dates given for the life of Josephus vs. the lifetime of James. I was not arguing about that. Though, when we quote any of these dates it would not surprise me if many of the dates were in fact way out.
The above (from me) was just a completely general comment to say that the writing of Josephus is really no use as a reliable source for anything about Jesus, because firstly - Josephus was not even supposed to be born until after Jesus was thought to have died, in which case it would be physically impossible for Josephus to personally know anything about Jesus, and that includes any possibility of Josephus knowing that Jesus had ever confirmed what anyone might later claim about being his actual brother.
We could speculate that Josephus might have personally met James, and that James himself had told Josephus that he was the brother of Jesus. But that seems highly unlikely, and afaik there is certainly no evidence that Josephus ever met James. Also, claims of that sort would not necessarily be true anyway - lots of people probably claimed to know Jesus or to be his brother etc.
Similarly, we could speculate that Josephus might have once met Paul, and that Paul could have told Josephus that James was the brother of Jesus. But again, that seems highly unlikely, and afaik there is no evidence for that at all. And if it comes to that, even Paul might not really have known who had ever met Jesus or who if anyone was really his family brother.
Far more likely is that by the time Josephus was writing circa.95AD, Christians of the time had got the idea of James as the Lords brother from the earlier writing of Galatians circa.55AD. So that by c.95AD Josephus was merely writing what was commonly said as hearsay by Christians at that time.
Or perhaps even more likely - by the time Christian copyists were producing the first of our existing copies of Josephus around 11th cent. AD, those copyists, ie any of the copyists since the date of Papyrus P46 c.200AD, were relying on what had by then appeared in the P46 copy with the words “the Lords brother”.
Also of course, we do not actually know what, if anything, later authors such as Josephus ever wrote about James or Jesus, because all we have under the name of those authors are copies written by Christians themselves around 1000 years later..
True enough. However, by the same token we can't know from such copies if
anything he said was true. If we are going to accept the general veracity of his manuscript, then we need specific reasons for rejecting any particular. These abound in the TF, as well as in Josephus' mention of the iron gate Alexander the Great built in a pass in the Caucasus mountains or his story that Moses, while prince of Egypt, conquered Ethiopia and married an Ethiopian princess named Tharbis. Beyond reasonably recent events, going back to the time of the Maccabean kings, he's reasonably reliable. For ancient history, he uses hear-say. I see the "who was called Christ" clause as fairly reasonable, but I also accept that it might have been an innocent add-on by a later scribe who "knew" it referred to the Christian Jesus. ..
Well just as a brief comment on the above - afaik, Josephus writes a great deal about all manner of people and events, but he says very little about Jesus. So it’s not as if later Christian copyists needed to change huge tracts of text about Jesus. All the copyists needed to do was to add a few small explanations about what they later believed had once happened to Jesus and James. And it seems they had 1000 years or more in which to do that.
That's not credible or reliable evidence that James was the actual brother of Jesus. That’s only evidence that later Christians were repeating what had been attributed to Paul as early as circa. 55AD.
I don't think there's any great doubt that Paul wrote Galatians. One thing in the letter that points to it being valid is its unvarnished presentation of a nascent religion already riven by factions, as opposed to the picture painted in the Book of Acts.
One individual author “Paul” may have been responsible for 7 of the 13 Pauline letters, but that does not mean that same single author wrote the three words “the Lords brother” which apparently appears in the copy P46 dating from around 200AD. By that date, and in what is definitely a later copy (not anything original to “Paul”), various “corrections” may have been added by any number of copyists who thought they were adding important extra clarifications.
But that’s apart from the fact that the reference may never have been intended to mean a family blood brother anyway, but just a brother in faith. As I said earlier - Paul apparently never mentions that ever again, and James himself in his own gospel apparently makes no such claim at all.
I’m not saying it couldn’t happen. But, just that one single insertion of three somewhat ambiguous words, appearing in a Christian copy about 150 years or more later, and where Paul never says any more about that, and where James himself never mentions it, cannot be taken as reliable evidence that this “James” or anyone else was actually the family brother of Jesus Christ. And especially not if we are relying on the writing of ancient religious fanatics who were constantly claiming miracles and the supernatural etc, in an age of profound ignorance and lack of any critical checking and corroboration of the kind that any of us would do for such statements today.
riest: