(with respect to Josephus and whose brother James is):
Only two or three words are in dispute (that is, the striking coincidence that Josephus' Greek-language consultants chose the same phrase as Matthew did for his genealogy and for his Pilate, "called Christ"). Evidence either way is almost necessarily meager. The issue is thus normatively resolved almost entirely by prior plausibility.it's not tenuous and there is no evidence it has been doctored or interpolated.
Sure enough, those who believe confidently that James the Just was killed kind-of when and kind-of as James of Josephus was sentenced tend to find the two are the same (and further that two words asserting that are genuine). Those who are less confident about the conclusion tend also to be less confident about this evidence's genuineness.
There's nothing very problematic about two words being changed to the channel owners' advantage over about a thousand years of manual retransmission. Interpolation does unfortunately connote an intentional act. That unnecessarily restricts the hypothesis set that is consistent with transmission error.Theories about interpolation are very problematic.
Even Carrier's recent and charitable hypothesis (that the error was an innocent mistake) involves an intentional and now missing "reader's comment," that was later mistaken for a scribe's proofreading note. That sad song-and-dance also unnecessarily restricts the hypothesis set which comports with transmission error.
On a thorny point arising,
Says who? The experiment has been done. Although it is still a minority view within living and developing Chrisitanity, plenty of living Christians, many of them Protestant, profess the Apostles' or Nicene Creeds and also profess that Jesus had full sibs.Furthermore, if Mary conceived the brothers with Joseph, the Christians would think Jesus was conceived the same way.
If somebody can believe that a woman can have a human baby without a human father (whatever that word salad would mean), then by what logic would this person demand that she must also have been barren for the rest of her life?
Yes, the two doctrines (Mary let go and let God, and Mary retired from the cycle of life thereafter) express a coherent worldview, but alternatives are also as coherent as the oxymoron premise (virgin motherhood) allows.