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

born. And then (later?) came other children to the happy couple. And so Jesus’s brothers were his actual brothers.

Paul knows one of these brothers personally. It is hard to get much closer to the historical Jesus than that. If Jesus never lived, you would think that his brother would know about it.

Mythicist Views of James

Mythicists have long realized that the fact that Paul knew Jesus’s brother creates enormous problems for their view, that in fact the otherwise convincing (to them) case against Jesus’s existence is more or less sunk by the fact that Paul was acquainted with his blood relations. And so they have tried, with some futility in my view, to explain away Paul’s statements so that even though he called James the brother of the Lord, he didn’t really mean it that way. The most recent attempt to resolve the problem is in mythicist Robert Price’s comprehensive study, where he cites three possible explanations for how James may not actually be Jesus’s brother. Price has the honesty to admit that if these explanations “end up sounding like text-twisting harmonizations, we must say so and reject them.”3 In the end he doesn’t say so, and he doesn’t reject them. But he doesn’t embrace any of them either, which at least must leave his readers puzzled.

One explanation has been most forcefully argued by G. A. Wells, who revives a theory floated without much success by J. M. Robertson back in 1927.4 According to Wells, there was a small fraternity of messianic Jews in Jerusalem who called themselves “the brothers of the Lord.” James was a member of this missionary group. And that is why he can be called “the brother of the Lord.” Wells likens it to the situation that Paul refers to in the city of Corinth, where he calls himself the “father” of the community (1 Corinthians 4:15) and where some of the members of the congregation claim that they are “of Christ” (1 Corinthians 1:11–13). As Wells concludes, “Now if there was a Corinthian group called ‘those of the Christ,’ there could also have been a Jerusalem one called ‘the brethren of the Lord,’ who would not necessarily have had any more personal experience of Jesus than Paul himself. And James, as ‘the brother of the Lord’ could have been the leader of the group.”5 Wells cites as well Matthew 28:9–10 and John 20:17, where Jesus speaks of his unrelated followers as his “brothers.”

This view sounds reasonable enough until it is examined in greater detail. The first thing to point out is that the final two Gospel passages that Wells cites are irrelevant. They do not refer to a distinct group of people who are zealous missionaries; they refer to the twelve disciples of Jesus, pure and simple. But Wells does not think that James (or anyone else) was a member of that group because he does not think Jesus lived in the recent past and even had disciples. And so the Gospel references to the disciples as Jesus’s brothers does not support Wells’s claim that there was a select missionary group in Jerusalem that included James.

Neither does it work to claim that there was an analogous situation in the church in Corinth. Paul thinks of himself as the “father” of the entire church of Corinth, not of a specific group within it. Even more important, and contrary to what Wells asserts, we decidedly do not know of a group that called themselves “Those of the Christ.” There were, to be sure, Christians who said their ultimate allegiance was to Christ (not to Paul or Cephas or Apollos). But we have no idea what they called themselves because Paul never tells us. They are not, then, a named group comparable to what Wells imagines as being in Jerusalem, headed by James.

And what evidence does Wells cite for such a group of zealous messianic Jews in Jerusalem that separated themselves off from all the other Jerusalem Christians? None. At all. What evidence could there be? No such group is mentioned in any surviving source of any kind whatsoever. Wells (or his predecessor, Robinson) made it up.

And there is a good reason for thinking that such a group did not in fact exist. Throughout our traditions Cephas and James are portrayed as being completely aligned with each other. They are both Jews, believers in the resurrection of Jesus, residing in Jerusalem, working for the same ends, participating in the same meetings, actively leading the home church together. Cephas, moreover, is a missionary sent out from this church. If there was a group called “the brothers of the Lord,” made up of zealous Jewish missionaries in Jerusalem, Cephas himself would certainly be a member. Why is James, then, the one called “the brother of the Lord,” precisely to differentiate him from Cephas?

Since there is no evidence to support the idea that such a group existed, this explanation seems to be grasping at straws. It is important to review what we know. We have several traditions that Jesus actually had brothers (it is independently affirmed in Mark, John, Paul, and Josephus). In multiple independent sources one of these brothers is named James. So too Paul speaks of James as his Lord’s brother. Surely the most obvious, straightforward, and compelling interpretation is the one held by every scholar of Galatians that, so far as I know, walks the planet. Paul is referring to Jesus’s own brother.

Price 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. For 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