Most of your post I was either aware of or I think are at least plausible arguments against an HJ.
However, I think, in the above you misrepresented my view a bit. I do think it is significant that the writings of Josephus have come down through Christian copyists and the earliest version we have only dates from about 1000AD (I'm taking what you say here as true). And I think it is at least a legitimate argument against one of the pieces of evidence that supports the existence of an HJ. I just don't seem to think the argument is quite as strong as you do. Your argument seems to be that Christian copyists had a bias to insert at least the "who was called Christ" phrase so they did. I just think they might not have also.
As to the existence of this proto Ebionite (Craig B's term) sect in the Palestinian area that you say is referred to in the DSS:
Doesn't this provide some support for a part of the standard secular narrative for the origin of Christianity in that it provides evidence for a sect similar to the one that Paul claimed to exist and interact with? And if that sect existed, it isn't a big leap to think that such a sect could have included an HJ, James and Peter that Paul mentions.
OK, well I was not trying to misrepresent what you had said. On the contrary I was replying to you (rather than to some others) for the opposite reason of respecting and appreciating the open minded stance that you are taking (and also in the Shroud thread).
But what I am trying to emphasis is that; if all we know of the relevant writing attributed Josephus, actually comes to us from 11th centuries copies, then it's highly dangerous to refer to that as if were actually coming from whatever Josephus may or may not have written in 100AD.
So the reason I'm saying that argument is not merely strong, but actually overwhelming, is that when attributing this to Josephus, what we are really doing is attributing it to 1000 years of repeated copying by Christian religious believers. And remember we talking only about the 4 word half-sentence "James, the Lords brother".
As evidence, coming from religiously interested Christians themselves 1000 years after the event that is objectively worthless.
In any case, Jospehus is highly unlikely to have personally known anything about any so-called “brothers” of Jesus. Really we are talking about the sentence coming, not from Josephus, but from the extant copies of Paul, which afaik are believed to date from around the end of the 2nd cent. – 3dr cent. Ie, about 150 -200 years after Paul was thought to have died. So we don’t actually know who wrote those copies of Paul either.
But what is the likelihood that Paul knew someone to be the flesh & blood brother of Jesus? If you read Ellegard on this, and he goes into considerable detail on it, despite a great biblical confusion of similar names, it is highly unlikely that Paul ever actually met anyone who claimed to be a personal disciple of Jesus, let alone his actual brother.
Paul’s beliefs about Jesus appear to derive from his dreams. He is interpreting his own religious dreams in the same way that the earlier Essene community of that region did ... and like the DSS community, Paul also believes that his dreams of Jesus are true reality … the dreams are god’s revelation of the most heavenly truth.
In particular, although the writing of Paul makes quite frequent reference to “brothers of the Lord”, in each case it appears the writer is only referring to “brothers in belief”.
And finally, as I said above – what is the likelihood that a wandering street preacher like Paul, could have written his own religious memoirs anyway? Seems rather unlikely to me.
Far more likely, it seems to me, is that all this biblical writing, whether it’s the Pauline Letters or the canonical and non-canonical gospels, was the product of more educated Christian scribes writing some one, two, three or more centuries after the believed events surrounding the figure of Yehoshua/”Jesus”.
By the way – all of this (eg Pauls beliefs) is very similar to the coded description of Jewish religious beliefs as set out in the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS). That’s genuinely dated from about 200 years before the time of Paul and Jesus. And those DSS beliefs in turn are in any case very clearly derived from what the DSS community believed was the religiously correct interpretation of Jewish OT prophecies stretching back to at least 500BC! So, it’s quite clear where the origin of the Jesus stories came from – it was already set out in the ancient Jewish Bible and then more directly in the coded works of the DSS.
Notice however, that I have not ever said that Jesus did not actually exist.
He may have existed. But what is shown in the DSS, and what is shown in Pauls visions of Jesus, is that the story of this apocalyptic messiah goes way back in the OT to at least 500 years and more before the time of Jesus and Paul. And at the time when the DSS were written in that region, ie circa 170BC through to 70AD, which also covers the lifetime of Paul, what that community believed was based largely on their religiously rapturous dreams – they thought that their dreams of Gods and messiahs etc. were God’s way of showing them true reality … the dreams were thought to be even more real than reality itself!
It may seem absurd to you and I now in the 21st century, but to that community of proto-Christians, religious dreams really did represent reality – if they dreamed of a religious situation, then it was interpreted to have really happened. Important dreams were then preached as examples of the reality of events revealed by God.
For more on the DSS, have a look at the book by Hodge, which unusually amongst DSS books, discusses the similarity between the beliefs of the DSS community and the later writing attributed to Paul and the earliest Christians in that same region.
puhleeeeeze...........
