Cerebralbore101 said:
Paul I saw none of the other apostles--only James, the Lord's brother - Galatiians 1:19 If Paul had meant spiritual brother, or friend then the above would have been worded like the following... "I saw none of the other brothers--only James, the Lord's brother" There's no reason for Paul to use two separate words to describe the apostles if they are the same. After all, if Paul had meant spritual brother, or friend, then why use the word apostle at all? After all aren't all the apostles brothers in that sense? Josephus Josephus was one of the first historians. He would have had access to official Roman government documents, and witnesses. Much of what he reports on isn't based on his own first person accounts, but on what he found out through investigation. Should we throw out everything else he reports on? Should we toss out every piece of investigative journalism in the modern world, because the reporters were not there to witness every single event they report on? There was an Islamic copy found without the interpolations added in. http://khazarzar.skeptik.net/books/pines01.pdf Go to page 16 of that pdf to see the comparisons between the interpolated version and the non-interpolated version. We've known about this since the early 70's but Jesus Mythicists continue to ignore the evidence. In addition to this both John the Babtist and James show up in Josephus. Here is the Josephus passage concerning James. https://pages.uncc.edu/james-tabor/ancient-judaism/josephus-james/ (This adds even more weight to the Paul argument above.) And here is the one concerning John. https://pages.uncc.edu/james-tabor/ancient-judaism/josephus-john-the-baptis/ |
As for the usage of the word brother, we are talking about a translation of a translation. As for why that word choice was used, I don't know because I'm not a biblical scholar. What I do know is that many different sects of Christianity (not to even mention mythicists), have described him as either a metaphorical brother, a cousin, stepbrother, etc. When the scholars have not settled the matter, I'm not going to either.
As for Josephus, let's take it that the Islamic version is 100% legit. This is still incredibly poor evidence. It's just Josephus reporting on what he's heard. He has no firsthand accounts, nor do we know how he went about collecting this evidence. We don't need to dismiss every piece of modern research, but we would be justified in dismissing those with such limited evidence.
Naturally I get that we shouldn't expect much more evidence than we have, because of the time and the place. But that's just the problem of dealing with history. Again I'm not a mythicist, mainly because I don't care to research the matter to the point where I can claim an informed opinion, but the evidence I've seen so far isn't enough for me to decide either way.
