Who was James the brother of Jesus?

[Minimalist]

When Livy recounts the reasons for the Second Punic War he has characters give "speeches" outlining the issues involved. But when he writes that "Fabius Maximus mounted the rostrum and addressed the Senate as follows...." we can be certain that Fabius said no such thing. Livy, writing two centuries later did not have access to a verbatim account of any discussion in the senate. No such records were kept. Even worse, he will have a member of the Carthaginian war party addressing Carthage's senate on the reasons for starting the war! Certainly there were no Roman spies sitting there taking notes of what was said.

We have no original documents written by any of these "people" including James and Paul. They are characters to be manipulated by later power brokers.

Do we have any original documents of Livy? If not, how old are the earliest?

No, but since you asked a really good question I exerted myself to dig out a copy of Rome and The Mediterranean and in the introduction, Prof. Henry Bettenson notes:

" ...the discovery of Latin manuscripts extended the study of Livy. In 1328 Petrarch at Avignon, using a copy of a Chartres manuscript, introduced Books XXXI-XL. "

I checked for data on a Chartres manuscript of Livy but found only references to the manuscript not to the date of copying. It has been associated with Fulcher of Chartres who was a chronicler of the First Crusade which probably means that the manuscript existed c 1080 although we do not know how long it before that date.


It seems unlikely that parchment copies of anything would last very long in the moist climate of France without frequent re-copying. Egypt was a much better climate for preserving documents.

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35 are extant (Books I-X, XXI-XLV).

But 'extant' in this case does not mean in Livy's own hand. We are lucky to have copies of copies.