OK, give me some examples.
~Valerie
Just go to bible.com and do a search on “brother”.
Sorry, John. I’m not going to do your work for you. If you want to convince me of something, you’re going to have to hold up your end of the conversation. If you don’t think it’s that important, no worries.
Have a happy Easter!
~Valerie
Gal. 1:18-19:
Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas and remained with him fifteen days. But I saw none of the other apostles except James the Lord’s brother.
To me, the way this sentence is constructed appears to be identfying James as Jesus’ “bother” in a manner which is distinct from Cephas (AKA Peter) and the other apostles. Either Paul intends the word literally (the most plain reading), or it has some titular meaning which does not necessarily apply to the other apostles. The most parsimonious interpretation of this verse (esepcially in conjunction with the synoptic identifications of James) would be that James was simply Jesus sibling.
If you’d look at it again more closely, I think you’d come to agree that your last, ineluctably ambiguous sentence in particular is so nakedly tautological as to bring a gently amused 
smilie to your own face as well as mine, does it not?
I’d written above about how “the Greek word ‘adelphos’ cannot be disambiguated, so the sibling claims are specious”. Surely you can see that the English word “brother” is very nearly as ambiguous as ‘adelphos’!
The members (at least the male ones) of many thousands of different labor unions have called or still call each other brother. Frat boys still call each other brother. African-American men have called each other brother at least since the Civil Rights era. Last night I watched John Sayles’s delightfully sly 1984 science-fiction film The Brother from Another Planet. Do you actually imagine that this black, three-big-toed extraterrestrial was intended to portray a biological sibling of a male human?
As I pointed out above, well before the time of Paul, various Gnostics as well as various mystery cultists had long already adopted the word “brother” (adelphos) to refer to their leaders, fellow members, and initiates. Paul simply brought that meaning of the word into his writings.
I repeat: In 1 Corinthians 1:1, Sosthenes is called adelphos, and in Colossians 1:1, so is Timothy. And in Corinthians 15:6, 500 adelphos receive a spiritual vision of the risen Christ. Are they biological siblings of Jesus? Of course not!
That alone makes it essentially impossible for James to have been a biological sibling of Jesus, for if he had been, Paul would have used a different description to distinguish James from Sosthenes, Timothy, and 500 other people (no doubt many women among them), none of whom could be Jesus’ siblings!
So when Dio, above, cites the English phrase “James, the brother of the Lord” (not “James, the brother of Jesus”!) in Galatians 1:19 and recognize that Paul once again used the term “adelphos”, it is foolish in the extreme to contend that Paul meant that James was Jesus’ biological sibling.
But I’ll return to Dio later…
Why would he have not said, instead, “Our brother in Jesus”, or “Our Brother”? I think the “Brother OF Jesus” is pretty clear.
Forgive me, but I can’t quite disambiguate your reply. Were you addressing me? And if so, were you agreeing or disagreeing with what I wrote?
I had noted the following in my most recent post:
One of the points I was making with that paragraph was to again underline the under-appreciated but nevertheless very telling fact that there’s not one single example anywhere in any English translation of the New Testament where the phrase you quoted, “Brother OF Jesus” ever appears.
It’s nowhere in the King James Version
It’s nowhere in the New King James Version
It’s nowhere in the New Living Translation
It’s nowhere in the New International Version
It’s nowhere in the English Standard Version.
It’s nowhere in the Reina-Valera 1960 Version
It’s nowhere in the New American Standard Bible
It’s nowhere in the Revised Standard Version
It’s nowhere in the American Standard Version
It’s nowhere in the Darby’s Translation
It’s nowhere in the Webster’s Bible
And, finally, it’s nowhere in Young’s Literal Translation!
The fact that in any English translation of the New Testament one only finds the phrase “the brother of the Lord” instead is practically shouting at us that James, just like Sosthenes, Timothy, Jude, 500 different people (including women), and others, were all spiritual/honorary “brothers”, not biological siblings at all.
(BTW, I’m not defending the primarily Catholic “ever-virgin” view; I’m simply defending against drawing unwarranted and irrational inferences – based entirely on the extremely biased reading of the text while wearing gospel-colored glasses – concerning the English translation of the Greek word “adelphos”, which simply cannot be disambiguated, neither by us today nor by the long-after-the-fact gospel Evangelists!)
I realize that it’s relatively long (not that any Dopers – of all people – should consider that a drawback, of course, though some do anyway), but if you were arguing against my view, I’d like to propose that you to carefully re-read my [url=http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=13667930&postcount=11]post of April 9’th above**. Thanks!
Before I begin further replies to your posts in this thread, Dio, I’d like to make a few genuinely friendly comments. You’ve certainly got a very interesting mind and personality, Diogenes (please note that I’m not using the word “interesting” as a left-handed compliment or an insult, veiled or otherwise). You’ve frustrated and confused me several times before over many years on the topic of the historical Jesus as you alternate between defending a relatively traditional historicist view against my own and others’ mythicist arguments (as you’ve done here) while simultaneously defending skeptical and mythicist arguments against historicist arguments (in previous threads, anyway). You get pitted for that kind of defending-all-views thing regarding other topics, but I’ve long had a more positive interpretation of your behavior…
You’ve told me in the past that it’s because you’ve keep vacillating in your own mind between one side of the spectrum and the other. But my own hunch has been more that you’re sort of an “intellectual centrist”; that you just don’t much like moving away from the center of any spectrum (an outlook that has real merit in most cases). I’ve also thought for a long time that another explanation was that you were trying to make sure that other points of view that were not your own were represented in a given thread, as a matter of honorable intellectual fairness.
But if I might make a suggestion? Please consider making it explicit when you’re posting as a kind of devil’s advocate. I know very well just how deeply educated and amazingly well-informed you are, how sharp your thinking is on this enormously broad issue surrounding whether Jesus was a historical figure or not. You’ve agreed with nearly all of the mythicist arguments put forth many times in the past, and you’ve also argued against those very same positions many times as well. Surely you can understand why I find it somewhat frustrating to have to keep re-arguing and re-arguing the very same points we’ve actually agreed upon several times before, yes?
Please don’t misunderstand me, though. I’m not even hinting that I’m asking you to stop changing your positions or – Bob forbid! – to agree with me! Absolutely not! My own views keep evolving, too! There’s something seriously wrong with anyone whose views are not still changing and evolving! I’m simply talking about (for lack of a better word) the tone you seem to adopt – as if a given post decidedly IS your own personal position – when you actually seem at least to be arguing for a position that isn’t or may not be currently your own.
I offer my sincere apologies, my friend, if my words failed to carry the genuine warmth and respect I’d hoped that they would or if you feel I’ve overstepped the bounds of propriety…
Moving on…
“Tendentious”? My friend, there are some extremely important and relevant facts relating to those quotations that, rather than being tendentious, very much need to be strongly emphasized:
(1): Not a single one of those passages were written by anybody who had known Jesus or his family. They were all piously embellished or even outright fabricated decades later, and their books all continued to be revised and edited for centuries!
(2): Consider even the traditional story of a turn-of-the-millennium Jesus (something I consider to be approximately a century too late) and the consensus dating of Paul’s “awakening” circa 50 CE – the earliest known to us today – and ask yourself who might have theoretically lived early enough to have known anything reliable about Jesus’ family, and that the Gospel authors are absolutely not among them. Then carefully consider the fact that neither Paul nor any other genuine pre-Gospel writer ever wrote anything about Jesus’ human mother or father, let alone any other of their children! This strongly indicates that there mustn’t have been even any oral traditions concerning them! And then consider also that all references by these early writers to any adelphos cannot be disambiguated and were also always referred to as adelphos of “the Lord”, NOT adelphos of Jesus!
(3): Consider also that the authors of the Gospels wouldn’t have been able to disambiguate the Greek word adelphos any better than anyone can today! I see no alternative other than that they were clearly employing pious midrashic techniques (as well as other literary techniques, of course) to invent everything concerning Jesus’ alleged birth, early “biographies”, travels, and, most of all, his alleged “family”. In the past, you’ve seemed to know this as well as I, Dio. Paul and other early writers (as well as the promulgators of various oral tradition branches, I’m sure) had already referred to honorary/spiritual adelphos of “the Lord”, so several decades later when the not-very-sophisticated authors of the canonical Gospels such as Mark and Matthew (who either didn’t grasp that the epistles’ Jesus was portrayed as spiritual rather than biological being, or otherwise felt that they needed to reify and historicize him for proselytization purposes), clumsily went ahead and piously invented human parents and biological adelphos for him.
When you carefully consider all you’ve long known regarding these points, Diogenes, do you find my objections valid? I very much would like to see what you have to say since I’ve learned much and I also want to continue to learn even more from you!
Respectfully,
ambushed
ambushed, you may not be aware of this, but Dio is currently suspended from the SDMB, and is unable to read or respond to your post at this time. I’m not sure when his suspension is due to expire, but even after it does he may not check for posts like yours. Just so you know that he’s not deliberately ignoring you.
The post in ATMB about Dio’s suspension was made on 7/2/11, so he could be back soon, as it was for one month.
Thank you both for the friendly heads up. I was aware of his suspension (I’d seen the notice under his handle), and I also knew his return was imminent. However, it’s often extremely difficult for me to find the kind of very extended time I need to read and absorb a given thread’s history with enough focus and concentration to respond intelligently. So on those fairly rare occasions when I can manage that, I need to reply right away or I’ll just have to read everything all over again an unknown number of weeks or months later!
Still, thank you both for your neighborliness!
Arguing about the virgin birth and the pepetual virginity seems sort of like a moot point. It’s not medically possible for a virgin to give birth, unless they’re artificially inseminated, I suppose. But I highly doubt that Mary was artificially inseminated. Unless you believe in magic, this whole virgin birth thing is a fairy tale.
In this context, “miracle” is another word for magic. Of course, if God is omnipotent, then Joseph could have given birth to Jesus, and Catholics could have had a doctrine about the perpetual virginity of the Father of God.
Thanks for the kind words.
I assure you, my position is not one of intellectual “centrism.” I’m not afraid to take an extreme view on anything, but the HJ/MJ debate is one in which I’m simply, genuinely agnostic and undecided. I can see both sides, but I don’t think either side is dispositive. The real evidence for HJ is decidedly thin (the argument is typically based on Josephus, Tacitus, Paul, and on the next tier down, some inferential arguments based on criteria of dissimilarity/embarrassment, and a tier down from that an independently attested common sayings tradition). All of these things are questionable and vulnerable to attack by mythicists, but I don’t think any of them individually can absolutely be dispositively refuted, only questioned.
It’s true that HJ cannot be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, but I think it’s also true that a real historical figure behind the myth cannot be dispositively disproven. My own feeling is that we don’t have enough data to be certain one way or the other, and that even if there was a real HJ, it’s virtually impossible to recover him from the available data.
Gun to the head, I lean a hair to the side of some kind of historicity, but that’s just an educated guess. I don’t assert it with certainity. I would basically characterize myself as favoring historicity 51%/49% over pure myth. Bart Ehrman has a book coming out soon which he says will specifically address mythicist arguments and provide the case for historicism. I’ll be eager to read it, though I don’t expect to see anything I haven’t seen before. At least Ehrman is willing to take the subject on. Most prominent HJ scholars just hand wave mythicists away as fringe kooks (though, admittedly, the list of credentialed mythicists is decidedly small).
On this particular subject, I’m generally just providing data without necessarily trying to provide a strong case one way or the other. It’s unusual for me that I don’t have a strong position on this. I’m usually just trying to be accurate about what the arguments are and what the data is.
All of this is true, but the context of my quotations of Mark and Luke was not to argue that they were necessarily historically accurate, but merely as examples of the Greek being unambiguous as to intention. In those particular quotes, Mark and Matthew certainly intended the word adelphos to literally mean a blood sibling. Whether or not they are fiction was beside my point. I was addressing another poster about the language of the passages, not their historical accuracy.
Yes, your questions are valid - particularly with regards to Paul. It is not a certainty that Paul’s own use of the phrase τὸν ἀδελφὸν τοῦ κυρίου (“the brother of the Lord”) was intended to be literal, titular or otherwise figurative. The fact that he only uses that term for James, and not the other disciples, seems to indicate some kind of special distinction and absent any other kind of qualifiers within that specific text would leave a plain reading of a literal sibling as the most parsimonious choice.
However, I don’t argue that this choice is a certainty, only that we don’t have enough data to say that it’s certainly wrong.
And welcome back Dio!
Just as an aside - do you have a recommendation for any of these books, particularly ones which are not trying to prove “religion is true, there is a God”, but which attempt to disambiguate history from legend? I’m really interested in learning more about the time and the history, but from a strictly factual point-of-view (well, ok, history isn’t really strictly factual, but hopefully you get my drift).
Thanks!