(October 8, 2023 at 12:46 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: I'm just spitballing these questions, I don't expect you (or anyone) to be able to definitively answer them because, like before, so much of the body of literature appears to be either ad hoc or deeply motivated and so this confusing morass may not indicate that it didn't happen this way, rather, that it's an effect of how it did happen exactly this way.
The Catholic Church was deeply motivated by the doctrine of Mary's perpetual virginity to frame James as anything other than the sibling of Jesus. They settled on him being either a cousin, the son of Jesus' uncle Clophas/Alphaus, or a half-brother, the son of Jesus' father Joseph by a prior marriage. For mythicists this just sets the problem back one step. Paul Bunyan doesn't have an uncle or a cousin for the same reason he doesn't have a brother. One thing the Church never did (though it would have been ideal for their purposes) was invent a parallel group of disciples called the Brothers of the Lord.
