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In my previous post I pointed out that mythicists have a real problem on their hands when it comes to insisting that Jesus didn’t exist (well, they actually have a *boatload* of problems; but this is one of them): Paul actually knew, personally, Jesus’ own brother, James. It’s hard to say that Jesus never lived if he in fact had a brother….
It doesn’t solve the problem to say that this was in fact Jesus’ cousin, since, well, he would still then be the cousin of (the real) Jesus (!) (plus the word Paul uses is “brother” not “cousin”) and it doesn’t work to say that he is Jesus’ brother meaning he is a member of the Christian church (since Paul differentiates him from himself and Peter by calling James the “brother” – and both Peter and Paul were also members of the church!).
Mythicists have tried other approaches, including the one I discussed yesterday, of trying to claim that there was a group of fervent missionaries in Jerusalem called “the brothers of the Lord,” and James was one of them. No need to repeat yesterday’s post: that claim just don’t work.
The one mythicist with a graduate degree in NT studies is Robert Price, a smart, interesting, and good guy. But he too doesn’t think Jesus existed and he too has to explain then how it is that Paul knows his “brother.” One of the other possibilities that Price sets forth is the one I discuss below, again in an extract from my fuller study, Did Jesus Exist.
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Price himself puts forward a different way to interpret Paul’s words so as not to concede that the James that Paul knew was actually related to Jesus. In this second view (which, I need to add, stands at odds with the first), James is said to be the brother of the Lord because he reflected on earth so well the views of Jesus in heaven that he was his virtual twin. As evidence Price appeals to several apocryphal books from outside the New Testament, including the famous Acts of Thomas.
This is the second-century account of the missionary endeavors of the apostle Thomas after Jesus’ resurrection, most famous for its stories of how Thomas was the first to bring the gospel to India. In this account Thomas is called the “twin” of Jesus. And why is he Jesus’ twin? For Price it is because Thomas, better than any of the other disciples, has a true understanding of who Jesus is, as indicated in yet another apocryphal book, the Gospel of Thomas (saying 13). In addition, Price notes several apocryphal works that deal with James of Jerusalem, which also call him Jesus’ brother. Price argues that this is because of his particularly close ties to Jesus and his clear understanding of Jesus and his teaching.
This last piece of evidence shows where Price’s argument unravels itself. The reason James is called Jesus’ brother in these other apocryphal works is because it was widely believed in early Christianity that James was in fact his brother. These texts say nothing, not a thing, to counteract that view. They simply assume a sibling relationship.
So too with the Acts of Thomas. The whole point of the narrative of this intriguing book is precisely that Thomas really is Jesus’ brother. In fact he is his twin. Not only that: he is his identical twin. This is not because he uniquely agrees with Jesus or understands him particularly well. Quite the contrary, the very first episode of the book shows that Thomas does not agree with Jesus and does not see eye-to-eye with him in the least. After Jesus’ resurrection, Thomas is instructed by the other apostles to go to India to convert the pagans, and he refuses to go. It is only when Jesus appears from heaven that he forces his twin brother to proceed against his wishes. It is only in a different book, the Gospel of Thomas, that Thomas is said to understand Jesus better than any of the others. But strikingly, the Gospel of Thomas decidedly does not say that for that reason Thomas was Jesus’ brother, let alone his twin.
The reality is that there was a tradition in some parts of the early Church that Thomas really was the twin of Jesus. The Aramaic word Thomas, itself, means “twin.” That Jesus and Thomas were identical twins plays a key role in the Acts of Thomas itself, in one of its most amusing episodes. While Thomas is enroute (reluctantly) to India, his ship stops in a major port city, where the king’s daughter is about to celebrate her wedding with a local aristocrat. Thomas as an outside guest is invited to the wedding, and after the ceremony he speaks to the wedded couple, but in a highly unusual way. As a good ascetic Christian, Thomas believes that sex is sinful, and that to be fully right with God, people – even married people – need to abstain. And so he tries to convince the king’s daughter and her new husband not to consummate their marriage that night.
But he is frustratingly unsuccessful in his pleas. He leaves the scene and the couple enter their bridal chamber. But to their great surprise, there is Thomas again, sitting on their bed. Or at least they think that it’s Thomas, since he does, after all, look exactly like the man they were just talking with. But it is not Thomas. It is his identical twin, Jesus, come down from heaven to finish the task that his brother had unsuccessfully begun. Jesus, more powerfully persuasive, of course, than his twin, wins the hearts of the newlyweds, who spend the night in conversation instead of conjugal embrace.
This tale is predicated on the view that Thomas and Jesus really were twins, in a physical, not symbolic or spiritual sense.
One might wonder how the Christians who told such stories could have possibly imagined that Jesus had a twin brother. Wasn’t his mother a virgin? Then where did the twin come from?
None of our sources indicates an answer to that question, but I think a solution can come from the mythologies that were popular in the period. We have several myths about divine men who were born of the union of a God and a mortal. In some of those stories, the mortal woman is also impregnated by her husband, leading to the birth of twins (it is hard to know how they could be identical twins, but anatomy was not among most ancient story-tellers’ long suit). This in fact is how the divine man Heracles is born. His mother Alcmene is ravished by the king of the gods Zeus, but only after she has already become pregnant by her husband Amphitryon. And so she bears twins, the immortal Zeus and the mortal Iphicles.
Is it possible that the Christians who told stories of Jesus and his twin brother Thomas had a similar idea? That Jesus himself was conceived while Mary was a virgin, but then her husband also slept with her, so that two sons were born? We will never know if they thought this, but it at least is a viable possibility. What does not seem viable, given what the stories about Thomas and Jesus actually say, is that they were unrelated. On the contrary, for these stories they were actual, twin brothers.
Price claims that his view that a mortal could be a special “brother” of Jesus because he so well reflected his views is supported by a range of the Apocryphal Acts. But he does not cite any of the others, just texts that deal with Thomas and James, the two figures in the early church best known precisely for being Jesus’ actual brothers. But as a clinching argument Price appeals to the nineteenth century revolutionary leader in China named Taiping Messiah Hong Xiuquan, who called himself “the Little Brother of Jesus.” Price finds this figure to provide compelling evidence of his view. In his own words “I find the possible parallel to the case of Hong Xiuquan to be, almost by itself, proof that James’ being the Lord’s brother need not prove a recent historical Jesus.” That is, since Hong Xiuquan was not really Jesus’ brother, the same could be true of James.
Now we are really grasping at straws. A nineteenth-century man from China is evidence of what someone living in the 30s CE in Palestine thought about himself? Hong Xiuquan is living 1800 years later, in a different part of the world, in a different social and cultural context. Among other things, he is the heir of eighteen centuries worth of Christian tradition. He has nothing to do with the historical Jesus or the historical James. To use his case in order to cinch the argument is an enormous stretch, even by Price’s standards.
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I’ll stop here. Jesus had a brother. And it’s because Jesus really lived.
Found a scribal error. You write, “[Heracles’] mother Alcmene is ravished by the king of the gods Zeus, but only after she has already become pregnant by her husband Amphitryon. And so she bears twins, the immortal Zeus and the mortal Iphicles.”
Zeus’ immortal son is, of course, Heracles, not Zeus Jr.
Ha! Right, a corruption of the text.
Excellent post!
I have two questions completely different from the post:
1) do you think Mark made a mistake for not listing Levi as a disciple? Do you think he mistakenly listed James where Levi should have been?
2) do you mind writing a post or two on 4 Erza? I recently finished reading the Jewish Annotated Apocrypha, and fell in love with 4 Erza because of its intellectual honesty of questioning God in the tradition of Abraham and Job. I find the author of 4 Erza more refreshing and honest than the writers of the New Testament which either revel in the destruction of others ( Revelation) or cannot bring themselves to criticize God (Romans).
1. I don’t think we know what the names of teh disciples actually were, apart from Simon) Peter, James, John, and presumably Andrew. 2. Yeah, a fascinating book. Good idea. (Best known among NT scholars because its apocalyptic views parallel those of the NT as you suggest, with key differences)disabledupes{de8316dd256ab65436ecd24eb4a48a6f}disabledupes
Thank you for your thoughtful response.
When I read Robert Price, I notice he talks about a long ago story and then states that a story in the NT is a rewrite of that past story. I believe he also says that the death of Stephen in Acts is a rewrite of the murder of James.
1. Is there anything to these rewrite ideas?
2. Is this a standard mythicist method?
That sometimes happens, of course — stroies are always being rewritten. But as with all thing historical, if someone claims story X is simply a fictional rewriting of story Y, one has to look to see what the proof is. Lots of interesting ideas are nothing but speculation, so historians prefer looking to evidence.
And even if we accept this ridiculous interpretation of his, he then needs to explain why James is called the brother of the Lord but Peter isn’t.
Yup.
Dr. Erhman, I really would love to see a string of posts (or maybe a book) on what the hell is up with the portrayal of sex in early Christianity. I suppose as an originally apocryphal religion, it was all about converting living people before end times came, but it seems to me that after a generation or two, someone would realize that bringing more little Christians into the world was a good idea. But I would think that even Paul (great thinker that he was) wasn’t seeing the whole picture with the “if you can’t control your urges, then it would be better to be married” philosophy. I as a former Roman Catholic experienced the more modern teachings of “sex only to procreate, sinful even then” reasoning. And then there’s the whole exaltation of virginity (and celibacy). I grew up in an era when the clear implication was that a woman was better off dying than submitting to the unwanted advances of a man. Any woman (or any man who has raised daughters) knows how shattering a concept that would be for a rape victim.. Where did all of this come from?
Ah, great idea. I’ll think about doing that. I’ve broached parts of it (involving the rise of asceticism in early Christianity) but a full etreatment would be worth getting into.
This is off-topic, but I can’t think of another way to present it.
Why was there a need for Jesus to be divine?
I’m not sure it was driven by a need. The followers of Jesus right after his death couldn’t understand why their messiah would be brutally killed; they came to think he had been raised from the dead, and concluded that he really was the one whom God especially favored. But even though he wsa raised, he was no longer with them. They realized that he must have been taken up to heaven. In the ancient world, any human taken up to the heavenly realms had been made a divine being. And so that’s what they concluded.
Wow, great read! This is the first I have heard on this subject. I don’t believe I’ve ever read these Gnostic gospels, but now I am intrigued. Thanks for the read.
Christianity seems to be a mix of Jewish and pagan elements. No doubt Jesus was an observant Jew (perhaps heavily influenced by John the Baptist’s ideas), but Christianity “grew up” in a strongly Hellenic world, with odd mixes of Greek and Roman and Egyptian myth. So, to be blunt, it’s a mash up. The Jesus story was marketed to the non-Jewish pagan world, the gospel writers seem to have been influenced by prevailing mythologies, and so on. As the Jesus story lost Jewish elements and even became hostile to its origin, it gained non-Jewish mystical elements that made it more compatible with the Roman/Hellenic world. And it continues to morph. An armed and dangerous Jesus seems to be getting fashionable in the USA– Pistol Pete Jesus.
And Paul really had ongoing conversations with the resurrected Jesus…. right?
One fitful vision that nobody else heard….. or saw…… okay. Maybe Paul testifies truthfully to that. But, continued instruction that rivals/supercedes the experience of the actual followers of Jesus.
Really?
Just like the Chinese guy who thought he was the brother of Jesus. St Paul was the smartest [& probably the most productive] follower of the Christian movement post Ascension.
I lived in China from hinterland preY2k to a developed & modern 2012 Shanghai, Beijing & Shenzhen. & as I learned it in CA high schools- God blessed the USA, but NOT China. St Paul didn’t walk the walk that Jesus or his chosen disciples lived. An assumption why he had to labor more than the Apostles- b/c he wasn’t one.
Senior management/Executive leadership determine the direction of an organization. Middle Management and supervisorial try best to implement those objectives.
2) the NT was determined by Roman church leaders, not illiterate faithful- so what is the true NT
So Jesus had a brother according to Paul. Does that make what Paul wrote true? What if Paul, the writer, was just making stuff up that included commonly told tales around at the time.
None of this stuff is that well attested outside the New Testament and a bunch of other Christian writings of the first century or two.
So we get to choose to believe that it’s all based on poorly supported historic evidence or on a lot of poorly remembered and made up tales of people with a vested interest.
My view is that we need to treat the writings of the NT like every other source from the ancient world. The NT authors didn’t know they were weriting scripture — they were just writing what they wrote. If they make historical claims, they need to be examined, but they can’t simply be tossed out because they were eventually made into the NT. If Paul says something, we analyze it, just as we do with the writings of Herodutus, or Julius Caesar, or Seneca.
If you do a book on sexual attitudes in early Christianity, it would be a terrific opportunity to deal, with “natural” and “unnatural” types of sex. I greatly appreciated what you recently said on the topic on your YouTube channel with Megan Lewis. It really steals a lot of the thunder from the arguments of the anti-gay crowd.
I think that there must have been a preacher called Jesus who achieved some fame – little meaning in reproaching the Jews for ‘rejecting’ someone imaginary or near-unknown. The references to Brother James indeed seem pointlessly misleading unless the writers intend their words to be understood normally, so this does make Jesus look ‘real’. But the amount known from ‘real’ records about Jesus may have been very little by the time when Jesus’ story came to be written. There had been enormous disruption in both Jerusalem and Rome and many people must have died and ‘vanished’, clearly leaving James with no real successor. Indeed contact between the Christians emerging from all this with whatever survived of Jesus’ family must have been lost, or we would not have Mark’s silence on Jesus’ origins – plus dismissive reference to the family – or the seriously inconsistent nativity stories. Jesus’ family would have known whether he lived to his twenties or his thirties and whether Quirinius was active in the year of birth. A point for the mythicists, perhaps