The task of a professional or scholarly historian is to determine what is likely. Let me write that again:
The task of a professional or scholarly historian is to determine what is likely.
When someone like Carrier concocts a complicated set of scenarios that might seem to dispose of a quandary, we don't ask "Is this farfetched 'solution' good enough to hold up for our fictional movie?" We ask:
Is this solution LIKELY?
James the Brother was not some minor character. Historians describe him as the leader of the early Christian community in Jerusalem. Simon Peter was the "Bishop of Rome" while James was the "Bishop of Bishops." That he's never mentioned in Sunday School (
![Smile :-) :-)](https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png)
) is due to the Roman Church's insistence that Jesus was an only child -- the Myth of the Perpetual Virgin, a notion for which there is no Biblical evidence. (Yes, there WAS a lot of myth-making in Christianity:
That's why the EARLIEST sources (e.g. Gospels and Epistles) are the BEST sources.
I've never called Richard Carrier a moron. No doubt he has a higher IQ than most of his disciples. He knew he had to concoct some "solution" to the Brother-James quandary, and he did! (Did he need FOUR distinct Jameses? Or were THREE enough?) The question posed to us is NOT to list the gaping holes in Carrier's concoction (although there ARE gaping holes), but rather:
Is this solution LIKELY?
I am reminded of the famous poem by Emily Dickinson:
I'm James the Just! Who are you?
Are you a James the Just too?
Then there's four of us! – don't tell!
They'll conflate us all, you know!
. . .
...zero mentions of James the Brother.
The Gospel Jesus (GJ) figure was derived from an amalgam of Historical personages (AJ) rather than a single HJ.
The sourced historical personages for the Gospel Jesus (GJ) figure likely had 3-5 brothers named James and each with a different father+mother.
Up to FIVE Jameses?? I thought Lord Richard could make do with four.
No problem; make six or seven Jameses if you need them. There's a fool born every minute!
Paul shows James (the Just) as leader of the early Christians. "Luke" shows James (the Just) as leader of the early Christians.
That's two DIFFERENT Jameses? Was one of them the leader of the
Christians and the other leader of the
Chrestians?
Jesus Christ and Jesus Chrest EACH had a brother named James the Just?
(I'm having fun here! I'll let the professional historians "refute" Lord Richard. What's that? They don't bother to refute his malarkey?)
The first historical personage to start the amalgam of Historical personages (AJ) recipe is:
Jesus ben Ananias,
[The Markan] sequence of the Passover narrative appears to be based on the tale of another Jesus: Jesus ben Ananias, the ‘Jesus of Jerusalem’, an insane prophet active in the 60s CE who is then killed in the siege of Jerusalem (roughly in the year 70).
His story is told by Josephus in the Jewish War
Jesus ben Ananias became famous AFTER the death of James the Just (aka James ben Ananias?). This renders Carrier's clever concoction not quite so clever. Capische?
And let's not forget that Josephus' works were written AFTER the Markan narrative was created, after
Acts was written and long after the author of
Galatians was dead. Did Josephus upload preprints to arXiv.org before he wrote his works down on parchment?
, and unless Josephus invented him, his narrative must have been famous, famous enough for Josephus to know of it, and thus famous enough for Mark to know of it, too, and make use of it to model the tale of his own Jesus.
Or if Josephus invented the tale then Mark evidently used Josephus as a source. Because the parallels are too numerous to be at all probable as a coincidence....
Note that all of this alleged myth-making and preprint downloading must have occurred long AFTER the events in
Acts and long AFTER Paul write his
Epistle to the Galatians.
--Carrier, Richard (2014). On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt. Sheffield Phoenix Press. ISBN 978-1-909697-35-5.
Same to you, buddy!
![Cool 8-) 8-)](https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60e.png)