John2 wrote: ↑Thu Mar 22, 2018 11:11 am
Ben wrote:
Would you answer my question about Matthew and Mark in the same way? Is it that they know Paul, too? What about John?
A parallel question for you is whether you think that Mary the mother of James and Joses, in Mark 15.40, 47; 16.1, is Jesus' mother.
I think Mark knew (at least of) Paul because I think he knew Peter, like Papias says. And I think whoever translated the original Hebrew Matthew into Greek and combined it with Mark may have known of Paul since the Hebrew Matthew seems to; perhaps they were an in-betweener like Mark and to some extent like Peter as well, meaning they were in between the Pauline and Jewish Christian camps and this was their motive for combining Matthew with Mark (and for translating it into Greek). I can't really prove any of that, it's just my guess.
That the author of the original Hebrew Matthew may have also at least known
of Paul or was non- or anti-Pauline is argued by several scholars (notably Sim). As Zangenberg writes in his chapter "Matthew and James" in
Matthew and His Christian Contemporaries:
... both writings [Matthew and James] have developed in a distinctly non-Pauline milieu, and even if they came into contact with ... positions that might or might not have been known to them as 'Pauline', they commented on them and rejected them on the basis of their own, independently grown convictions ... a common theological outlook and a common pool of semantic tools to express it clearly bind Matthew and James together. Matthew and James represent a type of Christianity that sees itself as a perfect way to fulfill the Law, in a way as 'perfect Judaism'.
https://books.google.com/books?id=_ALUA ... ne&f=false
I haven't done much research on the Gospel of John so I have no comment about that. And I'm not sure who Mary the mother of James and Joses is in Mark. I haven't given it much thought before but am curious to take a look at it now.
Regarding Luke/Acts and James, I think the smoking gun of their bias against James is that Mark mentions James as being Jesus' brother and Luke apparently chose not to mention it (unlike the Greek Matthew).
I have admitted and still admit that there is no smoking gun aimed against this reconstruction, which is very close to what I consider to be the mainstream option.
But what do you think of this alternative?
- James is the leader of a special group called "the brothers of the Lord." He is not related physically to Jesus, nor does he believe Jesus to be the Messiah. It is known as a conscious datum (and not merely by the lack of evidence to the contrary) that he does not believe in Jesus. He wields tremendous influence among Jewish sectarians (your Josephan Fourth Philosophy).
- The urge to make James a Christian in the tradition would have been intense, I imagine, given Paul's dealings with him and the reach of his influence. So some tradent(s) baptized him posthumously as a believer.
- At roughly the same time, some other tradent(s) thought that "brother of the Lord" meant "physical brother of Jesus," and brought Jesus into James' family accordingly.
- The above two moves were not made across the entire tradition equally and immediately. Some tradents (Luke, the authors of James and Jude, and Thomas) remained either uninformed or unconvinced that James was Jesus' physical brother, while other tradents (Matthew, Mark, John) remained uninformed or unconvinced that James was a believer and had to make out that the James in the triumvirate of Peter, James, and John was not actually the brother of Jesus; he was some other James (the son of Zebedee).
I imagine you will find my interpretation of "brother of the Lord" difficult, and that you will want to interpret Mark as standing, through Peter, closer to the original tradition than this theory would imply. Is that correct? Is there anything else?
This scenario would explain why, in your words, Luke "chose not to mention" that James was Jesus' brother: Luke was either not aware or not convinced that he was. Either his copy of Galatians lacked 1.18 (like some ancient copies apparently did) or Luke interpreted that line in the same way that my tentative reconstruction does; and it would be easy to assume that Jesus' brother James in Mark was a different James, since that was a pretty common name, especially given that Mark 15.40 calls him "James the Less" instead of something uniquely designating James of Jerusalem (James the Just or what have you).
ETA: In short, it seems possible to me that the authors/editors of our extant texts were not always sure which figures were the same and which were different, and they theorized on the matter as best they could given their biases, the same as we do given ours.