Sure, but what all three of your examples have in common is that the lie was covering up information having to do with private matters, not with public knowledge. Further information had to come out in order to expose the untruth as what it was. So their fitness as examples would seem to me to depend very much upon exactly how public such knowledge about James the "brother of the Lord" might have been in the early church.jude77 wrote: ↑Tue Jun 26, 2018 6:29 pmThat's a very good point. I think it's always wise to be suspicious when the perfect evidence to prove a point just "happens" to show up at the perfect time.
But, on the other hand, was Marcion just being an idiot and denying the obvious? Well, it certainly has happened before.
To wit:
"I did not have sex with that woman, Miss lewinsky."
"I am not a crook."
"Ninety percent of my emails as Secretary of State were, according to the State Department, “already in the system.”
People sometimes say what fits their theory and just hope nobody ever notices.
James himself seems to have been pretty famous; he pops up everywhere. So perhaps it was only his physical relationship to Jesus that was relatively unknown? But how could that information have been private knowledge? I am not saying it is impossible; but I do think it merits consideration, and I think we ought to come up with different analogies, since the famous relatives of a famous person are hardly as covert, ordinarily, as clandestine affairs, cloak-and-dagger operations in a private hotel room, and the contents of secure email servers are meant to be.