The James of Galatians 2 can’t be the brother of John (and therefore must instead be the James named in Galatians 1), because Acts says he was dead by then. This was attempted by Craig Evans on the fly in our Kennesaw debate (for which Evans demonstrably did not prepare; he was given, but apparently never read my book, even though he was paid quite a lot of money to debate the content of that book; the irony of Gullotta also not reading the book he claims to be responding to on this point is not lost on me). I’ve already explained what’s wrong with that argument. Basically, Acts is unreliable. Especially in chronology. When Acts contradicts Paul, sound historical method requires us to side with Paul. Because unlike the author of Acts, Paul is an eyewitness to what he reports.
This raises the strong suspect: was Acts deliberately making die in advance the James son of Zebedee (by hand of Herod), so that the survived James who met a so obedient Paul in Jerusalem could be identified more easily with the brother of Jesus (even if he is not so named)?
If this is the case, then Acts would give more reason to :
1) consider evident the presence of mythicist Christians (or more probably docetic Christians) in polemic with the proto-Catholic author of Acts,
2) consider the same Gal 1:19 as an anti-marcionite interpolation based on Acts (Detering's view).