Quoth I:
One point that struck me is that the brother of Joshua would be a native speaker of Aramaic, and the letter is in Greek, so as long as a pseudo-epigrapher takes at least some lines of argument that James had the reputation of delivering (where the reputation is at the time of disseminating the letter) the hypothetical translation from Aramaic to Greek by some companion or scribe provides ample cover for differences in tone of voice.

Stephen said
I am reliably informed that the Greek of James is among the most eloquent and rhetorically informed of the New Testament.  Leaving aside the question of how the child of a Galilean peasant day-laborer would have mastered Koine, scholars can find no trace of an Aramaic underpinning.  The translation of Semitic languages into Indo-European languages usually leaves certain markers.  The best example is the LXX. 
  

Yes, I had been aware of the description of the high quality of the Greek prose in the Jamesian epistle. Indeed, I have seen argued that many of the Semitisms that appear in the text seem more to be references or allusions to the Septuagint than the marker of a translation of the letter itself.

Also, some of the features that are pointed to make it seem like it would be an especially effective text if read aloud for an audience fluent in Koine Greek, with puns, parechesis, alliteration, rhyme and rhythm, composed primarily in short sentences, with heavy reliance on imperative and vocative, providing similes and vivid examples, & &c.

With that much wordplay, it seems like a hypothetical (I stress) Aramaic original would be more of an inspiration than a source of a direct translation, prompting a Greek composition by a fluent Greek speaker (but perhaps aware of at least some scriptures in Hebrew, and so not entirely reliant on the Septuagint, if as I’ve seen one author argue, James5:20 alludes to Prov10:20 in a form not available from the Septuagint) intended to achieve a similar effect.

Porphyry said
>> the Jamesian epistle
 
This made me think. I’d thought the adjective was jacobean. 
  

It is indeed, apologies, still cooling off from giving midterms today.

It was a claim due to a Dan McCartney (as I can read neither the Hebrew nor the Greek), but I transcribed it incorrectly, it was Prov10:12.

Eratosthenes24601 said
In Response to Bruce February 23, 2026 – 4:22PM post Part 1
 
“If the Kernel is a set of memorized speeches, then there is no need to bridge the gap. As with folk songs, the versions of the rolling corpus that are written down are the versions that..”

Highly doubtful that some memorized speech from the 2nd century just so happens to be fairly similar to the logia in Matthew and Luke which came out in the late first century.

Why would the Kernel be from the 2nd Century?

As far as whether canonical Matthew and Luke came out in the 1st century, the contrary view I’ve noted more than once from Vincenz, Bilby & krewe doesn’t have to be raised here, since they date the pre-canonical precursors to Luke and Matthew to the 1st century.

The logia in Mark isn’t even that similar to what’s in Thomas or what’s traditionally attributed to Q, and Peter was Mark’s source.

Peter being “Mark”‘s source is a tradition. What evidence is there that the tradition is historical fact rather than a developed folkview?

The guy that heard the logia first hand hundreds of times over

… hypothetically …

… didn’t even get it as close as Thomas got it to what is traditionally attributed to Q in Matthew and Luke, so what chance does some second century guy who heard it from someone who heard it from someone who heard it from someone who heard it from Jesus have?

What makes you think that the original kernel of the rolling corpus was in the 2nd century?

Also why would anyone need to make a sayings gospel if there are three to four gospels that are already in circulation which contain plenty of logia, and on top of that the settings and context the logia were used in.

That’s an excellent question, but the Kernel of GThom being started when there are three to four gospels that are already in circulation which contain plenty of logia is your assumption.

If anything a sayings gospel is most likely to come first, and than a narrative.

Yes, it is. That is, after all, the speculative hypothesis Dr. DeConnick advances, that the GThomas is a rolling corpus that develops over roughly a century, from on the order of 50 CE to on the order of 150 CE.

Someone making a sayings gospel after three coveted gospels hit circulation would be like watching Rogue One, and than making A New Hope opening scroll by itself: “During the battle, rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the empire’s ultimate weapon…”. Simplicity usually precedes complexity. Not the other way around.

So you are arguing against your premise and in favor of Dr. DeConnick’s premise?

“And April DoConnick presents in following work a reconstruction which she argues would represent that earliest independent layer.”
 
That’s cool that April DoConnick did that in some book,

It’s an article.

which hopefully you did not pirate(unlike Marc Goodacre’s book, cause it’s not like a laborer deserves his wages after all.),

What is your basis for throwing around baseless and vile accusations on this forum?

but Helmut Koester, John Dominic Crossan, Elaine Pagels, Stevan Davies would all disagree.

Yes, she critiques Koester and Crossan, and presents her reasons to disagree.

Also, you are aware that more often than not scholars just publish for the sole purpose of avoiding being perished right? Sometimes someone just goes against the grain so they stay relevant in academia, not because they truly believe in the thesis of their book.

If you disagree with Dr. DeConnick’s arguments, do the work of critiquing them, rather than throwing around lazy accusations of academic hypocrisy.

“Literacy was more widespread among elites, but certainly not everyone among the elites are literate. Some buy their literacy in the form of literate slaves. This is even more common for scribes. “Unlettered peasant” is an anachronism from the early modern period when the roll-out of mass literacy was not evenly distributed between urban and rural settings.”
 
You’re correct, Peter was not literate, Acts and Papias corroborate this,

What relevance would Acts saying it is or is not so be to whether or not he was?

** you do not have permission to see this link **

… but enough Elites like Apollos, and Paul were. The others could have had secretaries, and even if they didn’t, a literate follower or fellow literate church leader could have helped.

We can’t assume that every middle of the 1st Century house church had a literate member to offer that help, and in any case, not being dependent upon text transmission of information opens up the opportunity to take advantage of whichever church member felt the evangelical fervor to be one of the scarce workers to bring in the harvest. 

Acts itself states that the first generation of followers had literate followers amongst their ranks. Obviously not everything in Acts is true, but Acts had to contain true things to pass off as credible, and literate followers amongst the first generation of disciples is more than probable.

It needs to be credible to the time when it is composed and being disseminated, and the early 2nd century date suggested by its knowledge of Josephus allows substantial time for current experience within the church to have evolved substantially.

“We don’t have those receipts, we have putative copies of those receipts from centuries later.
king the Epistle of James as proof of the ability of James the Just to compose in Greek is begging the question, since one must assume th mes is able to compose in Greek in order for it to be credible that James composed it. Now Jerusalem would have been at least a sub-regior trading center, so it is certainly plausible that a student of James who was fluent in Greek composed a counter-argument to whatever the current Pauline gospel was, and disseminated it as an epistle of the first Bishop of Rome in the expectation that people would recognize it as representing his teaching. I would be happy to be presented with evidence that makes James the Just himself composing the work as the most likely among available explanations, but I have yet to encounter it myself.
What strong evidence exists that Acts is more than a work of second century historical fiction about the first century? AFAIU, there is other attestation of Apollos than that in Acts, but Acts would seem to be just as likely to be responding to those other attestations to increase the “oh, yeah, I heard something about that guy reception of the work as having any strong independent sources for the account in Acts.
The companion of Paul attested in the minimal reconstructions of the early letters of Paul as contained in Marcion’s NT is Titus. The rest of the hole krewe may well be a mid-2nd-century CE redaction or series of redactions
And, of course, the same goes for Paul being trained by Gamaliel.
It would not be shocking if every single one of your receipts was forged in the 2nd century.”

 Right, everything was forged in the second century, sure. And none of these pseudepigrapher bothered to make their forgeries line up with the gospels.

You make a sarcastic remark as if it is conveying a substantial argument, but it is not. The canonical Pauline epistles certainly line up with canonical Luke better than the verses attested to be in the Evangelion distributed by Marcion do, so yes, they seemed to do what harmonizing they could do. But if earlier versions of the work are already in circulation, and held by many to be divinely inspired, that harmonization will be more likely to work rather by elaboration and expansion than by elimination.

Come on Bruce, these are mythicist talking points from the likes of Richard Carrier and Joseph Atwill. Are you mythicist? Also, why wouldn’t James the Just be fluent in Greek or have access to a secretary that was fluent in Greek? You know Greek, the lingua franca? James the Just and his brother were not ordinary men. They were built different. They backed up their faith with works. Being proficient in the lingua franca would have behooved the likes of Jesus and James.  They didn’t just wake up one day and decide to start a new sect of judaism, they probably prepared for years. There’s a reason Jesus is said to have been around 30 when he started his ministry and not 18.

That’s one plausible line, but there are enough contrary different plausible lines that it is simply speculative unless evidence is provided in support.

As for Acts, it shows virtually no awareness of Mark, and parts of it were clearly written by Timothy, Paul’s heir apparent.

Acts short-cuts the need to recognize Mark by centering Peter, Mark’s traditional Apostolic source, in it’s narrative. “Shows no awareness of” is carefully constructed to avoid the illegitimate construction “is unaware of Mark“, which would be an argument from silence. And we cannot argue from silence … both the fact that Mark is silent on the early Church history after the Crucifixion and the second volume of Luke/Acts does not continue the extensive use of some version of Mark that the first volume made use of.

How old would Timothy have been by the early second century CE? Given that the letters to Timothy themselves appear to be 2nd century CE compositions, rather than being 2nd century CE redactions of earlier texts, the argument by Vincenz and krewe that Timothy was written into the canonical letters of Paul as part of the substantial expansion of the supporting cast that arrived with the expansion of the original Pauline and deutero Pauline epistles into the canonical Pauline epistles seems just as plausible as your version.

Most likely what happened was after Peter and Paul were martyred, what was left of their’s and Apollo’s network probably consolidated and a gospel was commissioned.

Why is it most likely? Why is it probable? 

Years later after Mark and the second narrative hit circulation Acts was set aside and Luke was born. Sometime after John hit circulation, The Gospel that was once used in Luke’s network got reworked into Acts, and the temple incident in Luke chapter 2.
 
“This is arguing from armchair supposition, not from evidence. I encounter too much of that in my field, so I’m not really enthusiastic about swallowing it hook, line and sinker when not required to address it as part of academic”
 
Bruce, calling it ‘armchair supposition’ is a convenient way to avoid the reality of organizational survival. 

The ‘Winging It’ Fallacy: You’re suggesting that a group under active surveillance by the Sanhedrin and the Roman state—spreading a message that was technically treasonous (proclaiming a different ‘King’)—didn’t bother with written policy or secure records. That’s not how history works; that’s how people get wiped out in a weekend.

Yes, this is the part that I believe to be counter-historical, writing events as an exciting spy thriller because mundane reality is too boring.

Evidence of Infrastructure: We have the evidence. We have the letters of Paul.

Which there is extant evidence are heavily expanded and elaborated editions of the original.

We have the ‘We-Passages’ in Acts.

Where Acts itself contradicts the letters of Paul that you are using as evidence, on multiple points, and offers internal substantial evidence of being composed in the 2nd Century CE, we are to accept subtle grammatical clues that it was “Luke”, a companion of Paul, who composed it, and composed into the text literary dependencies on texts to be composed in the future.

We have the primitive, administrative list in Thomas.

If you are taking your evidence from a rolling corpus accumulating over roughly a century, you are going to have to be more specific about your passage citations to see whether you are citing a candidate to be from the original Kernel or are citing a passage likely added sometime in the following century.

Your ‘academic’ response is to claim every single piece of that infrastructure is a 2nd-century forgery. That is the real supposition.

To be a supposition, it would have to be based on supposition, rather than being based on argument drawn from extant evidence.

>
The ‘Field’ Problem: You say you encounter too much ‘supposition’ in your field. Maybe that’s because the field is obsessed with the ‘Peasant Folk-Song’ model and refuses to look at the logistical reality of 1st-century Mediterranean life. These men were traveling thousands of miles, managing finances, and coordinating multiple city-centers. You don’t do that by ‘winging it.’

So are you assuming that the members of the first century Jesus Movement were primarily drawn from among the very small percentage of men traveling thousands of miles, managing finances, and coordinating multiple city centers?

Where in the canonical gospels which you presume to be quite close to the original versions composed in the first century are the traces of this elite movement? Why is it, rather, evangelists being sent out in pairs, each evangelist with a single set of clothes and a single pair of sandals?

That is not being giants of industry. That is being yeast, tiny grains but able to expand and multiply in the right conditions — and note the parables of yeast.

You’re waiting for a ‘receipt’ from 33 CE, but you’re ignoring the building standing right in front of you. You don’t get a 2nd-century ‘Rolling Corpus’ without a 1st-century Foundation.

Yes, and since the article I cited argued that the rolling corpus is from the middle of the 1st to the middle of the 2nd century, it appears to be entirely beside the point what an entirely second century rolling corpus would require.

“Believe if it you wish, but I don’t see the evidence for it. It has the ring of a “Just So” story to me.” And “I mean, since I believe there is, indeed, a way in hell…”
 
You actually think James the Just thought his brother was magic?

It’s certainly a plausible possibility.

Paul wrote that he performed wonders too, do you really think he thought he was magic as well?

It’s certainly a plausible possibility.

The Gospels, Acts, the epistles, Thomas and Celsus tell us Peter was magic too? So either the supernatural exist or these men were’t being entirely honest with what happened during Jesus ministry.

Or they sincerely believed that there were supernatural causes for things we wouldn’t necessarily attribute supernatural causes to.

All three of these men were more than familiar with the messianic criteria 

Be a descendant of David through his father’s line,
Rebuild the Temple,
Gather the exiles of Israel,
Bring world peace,
Lead all nations to worship the God of Abraham,
Defeat Israel’s enemies,
Be born in Bethlehem,
Enter Jerusalem riding a donkey,

That was one set of messianic criteria. The Priestly Messiah wouldn’t need to be a descendant of David through his father’s line, he would need to be of the tribe of Levi, and perhaps Zadokites (it seems the Dead Sea Scrolls community was keen on restoring Zadokite priestly management of the Temple).

9. Be preceded by Elijah.
 
Jesus didn’t do any of these except ride a donkey, and even than he forced the prophecy to come true, so let’s be real, aside from Apollos, none of these men thought the tribulation and the Abomination of Desolation was nigh. I’m sure there followers did, but they sure as hell didn’t. 
 
“You repeat things that sound very much like end-times, point to them”
 
Bruce, you’re calling it a ‘Just So’ story, but the Roman Empire called it Insurrection. They didn’t crucify Jesus for having a ‘frame’ they didn’t like; they crucified him as a ‘King of the Jews’—a direct rival to Caesar.

The Messianic Job Description: You know that ‘Messiah’ wasn’t a spiritual title; it was a military and political office. The Messiah’s job was to overthrow the Kittim (Romans), gather the exiles, and rule the nations. If you were a follower of a Messianic claimant, you weren’t waiting for a miracle; you were joining a resistance.
Thomas as a Manual: When Thomas 98 talks about ‘killing a powerful man’ or Thomas 10 talks about ‘casting fire upon the world,’ you see ‘end-times talk.’ I see Tactical Double-Speak. In a Roman police state, you don’t write a memo saying ‘Attack the 10th Legion on Tuesday.’ You use the militant traditions of your faith to signal a cell-based movement.
The James Connection: ‘Faith without works is dead’ isn’t just a Sunday School lesson. You can’t overthrow the Kittim with ‘end-times’ vibes alone; you have to put in the Works.

You’re trying to turn a 1st-century political revolution into a 2nd-century ‘folk song’ because it fits your academic comfort zone. But the cross Jesus died on is the only ‘receipt’ I need to prove this was an insurrectionist movement from day one.
“In order for the Church to have that agency, it has to have the institutional structure to allow it to exercise that kind of agency, and it seems like your evidence of the Church’s institutional structure in the middle of the 1st century being up to the task is based on 2nd century anachronisms recorded in later texts that pretended to be from the 1st century to increase the strength of their legitimacy claim.”
 
Bruce, you’re acting like ‘institutional agency’ requires a 2nd-century cathedral and a board of directors. History shows us the exact opposite: militant movements are at their most ‘organized’ and strategic when they are small, hunted, and high-stakes.

The Startup Reality: You don’t need a 2nd-century bureaucracy to have agency. You need a cell-based network with a clear chain of command. Paul’s letters (which even skeptics date to the 50s CE) describe a sophisticated network of funding, travel, and logistics. That’s not a ‘2nd-century anachronism’; that’s the literal record of the operation.

They are quite plausibly 2nd century additions to the 1st century versions of the letters of Paul.

The Military Logic: You admit Jesus was crucified for insurrection. Insurrections are planned.

But he wasn’t building an army, so he wasn’t crucified for in fact attempting armed insurrection against Rome. His acts of insurrection were symbolic, and on the testimony of canonical Luke, your own proof text, were quite directly aimed at challenging the authority of the Sanhedrin.

They require ‘agency.’ You’re suggesting that Jesus and James were just ‘winging it’ until someone 100 years later decided to write a fan-fiction about how organized they were.

No, I am suggesting that James and the early Church grew the ranks of the faithful by evangelizing. 

That doesn’t fit the Roman political reality.

I don’t buy your rendition of how a grass roots movement perforce must be organized in the many nooks and crannies available in an Imperium like Rome. It appears to be made up by piling speculation on speculation and calling it “likely” and “probably” in lieu of evidence. 

The ‘Forgery’ Shield: Again, you’re using ‘forgery’ as a magic wand to make inconvenient 1st-century evidence disappear. If the 2nd-century Church ‘pretended’ to be a 1st-century military operation, why did they eventually rebrand into a peaceful, supernatural religion? If you’re faking legitimacy, you don’t fake being a failed revolutionary movement that Rome wanted to crush.

You are begging the question here, reading military operation into the 2nd century additions to the texts that can be just as easily be viewed as a commercial operation … Paul voyaging hither and yon, engaging in a strategic compact in Jerusalem, setting up fund raising operation through Asia Minor and Greece, and then asking why they wrote in what you elected to project into their text.

You’re looking for a ‘structure’ that looks like a corporation. I’m showing you a ‘structure’ that looks like a militant cell.

But because the adjective “militant” makes it more exciting, it has to be a militant cell and not a growing number of small faith communities growing in a grass roots manner.

But you project much that is not in the text onto the gospel, perhaps I should be flattered that you elect to project much that is not in what I said into my discussion.

One of these leaves the ‘Sayings of Thomas’ behind; the other just sings folk songs until they get executed.

But you are engaged in contradictory reasoning. Yours is the version of the expansion of the faith that acts like it is actively building toward armed insurrection, so is the version that would have to worry about being executed if the Romans get wind of what they are up to.

The other version is the version that is getting ready for the return of the Crucified Christ in power, regarding whom those who are not believers have no reason to worry about what they are up to, and would only occasionally be subject to persecution by authorities who stumble upon them and do not understand what they are up to … the kind of occasional outbreaks of persecutions of the early Jesus Movement which lines up more closely with the non-Christian evidence that sometimes pops up in the first few centuries. 

“However, it would seem to be the least likely among those legitimate ways for how a sayings gospel could come into being, so treating it as the ‘representative case’ rather than ‘the case at one extreme’ is problematic.”
Bruce, you’re calling my deduction ‘the extreme case,’ but your ‘representative case’ relies on a sociological miracle.

My confidence has been growing for a while that your claims regarding what sociologically plausible and implausible do not have to be taken at face value.

The ‘Pub in 75 CE’ Problem: You’re suggesting that decades passed, and then someone just decided to ‘compile’ the logia from thin air.

Depends on which compilation we are talking about. Bilby’s thesis on the accumulations of gospels texts is an early text is composed, the Gospel of the Poor in the 60’s, which “Mark” in the 70’s makes some use of in addition to his own sources, with “Luke” in the 80s making use of both, with “Matthew” in the 90s substantially reorganizing that material and his sources, with the expansion of the early version of Luke, which Marcion collected into his NT, into something quite like the canonical Luke, early in the 2nd century, followed by similar being done to form the canonical Matthew and Mark. So no logia are being compiled from thin air there.

DeConnick’s rolling corpus that resulted in Thomas could well have been James’ church training some of their evangelists to deliver a set of speeches providing lessons, and one of the faith communities which were established survived the turmoil of the 70’s through to 130’s, and since it survived, the extant version of it’s teachings of around the middle of the 2nd Century. Since an active, evolving faith community is not “thin air”, that would not be taking logia down from thin air either.

In 75 CE, the Levant was a smoking ruin and the ‘talk of the town’ was the likes of Simon Bar Giora, The Egyptian, Simon the Magi or Theudas. Without a 1st-century record, Jesus is just one more name in a crowded list of failed revolutionaries.

Without a Jesus Movement, Jesus is just one more name in a crowded list of failed religious reformers. That is true whether or not there is a 1st century record.

Compulsion vs. Committee: Why is it ‘least likely’ that a follower—seeing a man they believe is the Messiah—would take notes? We see this behavior in every other philosophical school of the era (the Chreia tradition). Students of Epictetus and Socrates did it. Why is Jesus the only ‘unlettered’ exception in your model?

Your rhetorical question is begging the question.

The ‘Just So’ Organization: You keep invoking this ‘organization’ that allegedly compiled the sayings later.

Where? Which compilation? The canonical gospels? The Gospel of Thomas?

There is no need to have an organization to compile the Gospel of Thomas. That can be done by the organized behavior of individuals or of individual faith communities.

As far as the organization to copy and disseminate the later heavily redacted versions of the gospels which later became canonical, we have the traces of evidence about how faith communities became established organized churches with deacons and bishops in the 2nd century, and a growing amount as time progresses. So that doesn’t seem problematic. 

Where did they get them?

If you mean the Gospel of Thomas, it could be from people saying the sayings. I know it is hard for some people to imagine, but “unlettered” doesn’t mean “untrained” or “unsophisticated” in a society where the large majority of people are illiterate. People don’t need written texts.

But people who are literate may use a text as a memory aid, so they might be simply copying down the working copy of the current version of the corpus as it is presently being taught.

Both seem plausible, and I don’t see any reason to privilege one over the other.

If they weren’t getting them from 1st-century ‘receipts’ (transcriptions/notes), they were making them up.

That’s simply a false dichotomy, and you’ve hidden it in the notes — one of the sneakier kinds of false dichotomy logical fallacies. 1st century receipts don’t have to be written. They can be learned and repeated.

If they were making them up, they did a weirdly consistent job of capturing 1st-century Jewish legalisms that no 2nd-century ‘Gnostic’ or ‘Roman-Christian’ cared about.

But making them up is a false dichotomy for “having them written down”, so the argument against one leg of the false dichotomy does not, in fact, establish the other leg.

My deduction follows the Law of Immediate Documentation.

I’m going to ask you to display your deep 1st century sociological knowledge, and cite the sociological or anthropological work from which you draw your Law of Immediate Documentation.

Yours follows the Law of Historical Drift.

As already explained, if you are attempting to use technical terminology for social evolution, the rolling corpus is not drift.

It’s much harder to believe in a 75 CE ‘memory committee’ than a 33 CE scribe.  

What you have difficulty or ease believing is not evidence. But the Jesus Movement certainly had the resources to orally transmit the good news of the early Church. The resources to take the words down on papyrus, preserve the papyrus, and continue to copy them over the decades from that time so that they would be preserved, may be presumed to exist, but there is no certainty that they are available, and the incentive to produce them is uncertain, since they would only be of use to a small minority of the Church’s evangelists.

And under the hypothesis of your exciting spy thriller version of the early Jesus Movement, there is an additional disincentive to preserve the papyrus, since the papyrus can be seized and used as evidence from a raid of one of your imagined “militant cells”, tipped off by an informant, where an evangelizing movement will be open to having informants introduced among their ranks.