Did Jesus Exist? - The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth by Bart Ehrman (read book .TXT) 📕

along a believing wife as do the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas?” It should not be thought here that Paul is referring to “brothers of the Lord” in some kind of spiritual sense, in that in Christ all men are brothers. If that were what he meant, then the rest of the statement would make no sense because it would mean that the apostles themselves and even Cephas (Peter) were not the “spiritual brothers” of the Lord since they are differentiated from those who are brothers. And so interpreters are virtually unified in thinking that Paul means Jesus’s actual brothers.

We know the names of some of Jesus’s brothers from our early Gospel traditions. The Gospel of Mark names them as James, Joses, Judas, and Simon (6:3). It also indicates that Jesus had sisters, though these are not named. As it turns out, in one place Paul also names one of the brothers of Jesus, and it is none other than James, also mentioned by Mark. This is in one of the most disputed passages discussed by mythicists, and I will reserve a full treatment for the next chapter. The comment comes in Galatians 1:18–19, one of those rare autobiographical statements of Paul in which he reflects back on his life and indicates what he did after his conversion: “Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to consult with Cephas. And I remained with him for fifteen days. I did not see any of the other apostles except James, the brother of the Lord. What I am writing to you, I tell you before God, I am not lying!”

When Paul swears he is not lying, I generally believe him. During those fifteen days he saw Cephas and James and no one else. Here again James cannot simply be a “brother” of Jesus the way any other Christian was since his being a brother is what differentiates him from Cephas, as I will explain yet more fully in the next chapter. At this point it is enough to know that Paul knew that Jesus had brothers and that one of them was James, a personal acquaintance of his.

Paul also appears to know that Jesus had twelve disciples, or perhaps it is better to say that Paul knows of a close-knit group of disciples of Jesus who were called “the twelve.” I phrase it this way because some scholars think that what mattered was not the actual number of this group but the symbolic number attached to them. That Paul knew of them is shown by his statement concerning the appearances of Jesus after his resurrection, where he indicates that after Jesus was raised on the third day, “he appeared to Cephas and then to the twelve” (1 Corinthians 15:5). It is not necessary to conclude that Cephas was not one of the twelve himself; Paul may simply be saying that first there was an appearance to Peter and then to the entire group. It is interesting that he calls them “the twelve” in this context since according to both Matthew and the book of Acts the disciple Judas Iscariot, one of this inner circle, had already defected and in fact died (by hanging in Matthew, by falling headlong and bursting in Acts). The fact that Paul speaks of “the twelve” as having seen Jesus at the resurrection means either that he does not know the stories about Judas (as was possibly true of Mark and John as well) or, as I have suggested, that the name “the twelve” was attached to this group as a group, even when one of them was no longer with them.

Paul knows that Jesus was a teacher because he quotes several of his sayings. I will deal with these in a moment. For now it is worth noting that two of the sayings of Jesus that Paul quotes were delivered, he tells us, at the Last Supper on the very night that Jesus was handed over to the authorities to face his fate.

For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night in which he was handed over took bread, and after giving thanks he broke it and said, “This is my body that is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” Likewise also the cup after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, whenever you drink, in remembrance of me.” (1 Corinthians 11:22–24)

When Paul says that he “received” this tradition “from the Lord,” he appears to mean that somehow—in a revelation?—the truthfulness of the account was confirmed to him by God, or Jesus, himself. But the terminology of “received” and “delivered,” as often noted by scholars, is the kind of language commonly used in Jewish circles to refer to traditions that are handed on from one teacher to the next. In this case, we have a tradition about Jesus’s Last Supper, which Paul obviously knows about. The scene that he describes is very close to the description of the event in the Gospel of Luke (with some key differences); it is less similar to Matthew and Mark.

One point I will stress in a later chapter is that Paul emphasizes that this event happened “on the night in which he was handed over.” Traditionally this phrase is translated as “on the night in which he was betrayed” and is taken to indicate that he is referring to the betrayal of Judas Iscariot. The problem with this translation is that the word Paul uses here does not mean “betray” but “hand over,” and he uses it in other passages to refer to what God did when he “handed over” his son to his fate, as in Romans 8:31–32: “If God is for us, who is against us? The one who did not spare his own son, but handed him over for all of us, how will he not with him freely give