Why are Paul's writings in the Bible?

[GrandizerII]

If you want to know what mythicists tell us about TF2 it is that Paul did mention James brother of the Lord, but that seemed to be a title as he ascribes to other characters to be the brother of the Lord as well. Josephus did mention James brother of Jesus, but in the continuation says it is "Jesus, the son of  Damneus." The fragment “who was called Christ” was inserted into the text very clumsily since it is different Jesus, and a jew, Josephus, would not call someone messiah (Christ).

Jesus and James were both very common names and Josephus was typically meticulous about identifying who he was talking about. When he said "Jesus, who was called Christ" this did not pinpoint what his own personal beliefs about the matter might be.   And Richard Carrier put forth the "son of  Damneus" theory but it doesn't comport with Josephus' writing style. Nowhere does he introduce a man simply by his name, as in just Jesus, minus the "called Christ" part, and then later refer to the same man with more specificity, as in Jesus, son of Damneus.  It's always the other way around.

Tim O'Neill responds to Carrier in detail here on this very topic:

https://historyforatheists.com/2018/02/j...-the-lord/

[Fake Messiah]

  And Richard Carrier put forth the "son of  Damneus" theory but it doesn't comport with Josephus' writing style. Nowhere does he introduce a man simply by his name, as in just Jesus, minus the "called Christ" part, and then later refer to the same man with more specificity, as in Jesus, son of Damneus.  It's always the other way around.

So are you saying that "son of Damneus" is an interpolation?

[LinuxGal]

Jesus and James were both very common names and Josephus was typically meticulous about identifying who he was talking about. When he said "Jesus, who was called Christ" this did not pinpoint what his own personal beliefs about the matter might be.   And Richard Carrier put forth the "son of  Damneus" theory but it doesn't comport with Josephus' writing style. Nowhere does he introduce a man simply by his name, as in just Jesus, minus the "called Christ" part, and then later refer to the same man with more specificity, as in Jesus, son of Damneus.  It's always the other way around.

Tim O'Neill responds to Carrier in detail here on this very topic:

https://historyforatheists.com/2018/02/j...-the-lord/

I first encountered Tim O'Neill on the Reason To Doubt podcast, which led me to that blog post, and I've previously read it.  Quite encyclopedic.

[LinuxGal]

  And Richard Carrier put forth the "son of  Damneus" theory but it doesn't comport with Josephus' writing style. Nowhere does he introduce a man simply by his name, as in just Jesus, minus the "called Christ" part, and then later refer to the same man with more specificity, as in Jesus, son of Damneus.  It's always the other way around.

So are you saying that "son of Damneus" is an interpolation?

No, it's a different Jesus.  One who didn't have a brother who was thrown off the temple parapet and then finished off by a fuller's baton in 62 CE.

[Fake Messiah]

No, it's a different Jesus.  One who didn't have a brother who was thrown off the temple parapet and then finished off by a fuller's baton in 62 CE.

Oh, so it's a different Jesus because of Josephus's writing style, but you acknowledge that he referred to Jesus as the Christ although he never used the terms "Christ" or "Messiah." He was known to use the term "charlatan" for all the false messiahs he describes.

[LinuxGal]

You're a godsend!  I was looking for a quote from years back and couldn't find it - but it was in a discussion about exactly this subject.  

Scholars are divided on the existence of many of the great figures of Israel. I myself don’t believe there was a historical Abraham, Moses, or Joshua, for example (or if they *did* exist they were basically nothing like the figures described in the Hebrew Bible).

-raging mythicist bart ehrman

https://ehrmanblog.org/brothers-jesus-my...s-members/

The comments section of that post are illuminating.

[LinuxGal]

...and here's fire breathing historicist richard carrier, this year

I often use the analogy of the “Roswell saucer crash”:

What Really Happened: In 1947 a guy found some sticks and tinfoil in the desert.
What Was Immediately Said to Have Happened: That this was debris from an alien spacecraft.
What Was Said to Have Happened within just Thirty Years: An entire flying saucer was recovered, complete with alien bodies that were autopsied by the government.

A few more items in the comedy of errors helped things along. The sticks and tinfoil were an USAAF project called Mogul that was designed to record Soviet atomic tests.  When it crashed the highest priority of the military was to obscure the nature of the project, so they said it was one of Kenneth Arnold's "flying saucers" from a month earlier (and that itself was a reporter's garbled take on the nature of their flight, not the shape of the objects, which were probably meteors).  They covered the crash up. But the flying saucer story drew more attention than the Mogul narrative so the military backtracked and said no, it was just a crashed weather balloon.  They covered up the coverup.  Later they declassified Mogul and said it was Mogul all along.  This is what they called, in Watergate, a modified limited hangout.  All these changes to the story were only rocket fuel for the conspiracy theorists. The difference in the First Century is no one had anything to cover up.  No one would have been motivated to create a character ex nihilo when similar Messiah figures cropped up every decade or so anyway.

[The Grand Nudger]

You don't see analogs in how early christian literature developed through successive revisions and revelations? Or in the end product of both sets of interactions - explicitly, a story that started because of some real thing but ended up bearing no resemblance to whatever that was?

If anything, the early christian propagandists did a hell of alot more covering up than the government. As the usaf never went through the trouble of exterminating those groups that diverged from the changing official lines or destroying their ct literature. I'm also not sure that we want to pose, from the historicist vp, that those authors had "nothing to hide" or else the criterion of embarrassment takes yet another fatal hit.

I'd love to put a pin in a specific part of your comments above, too. The usaf went with a story -that already existed-. There was a ufo myth for them to plug into (his other examples also highlight this). Similarly, if we are to believe there was a large enough community of messianic jews that would produce this literature in the first century to birth and then maintain a movement that would quickly spread to and capture the roman state...the myth must've predated the man. Or is that part bullshit too. He was never prophesied in advance and thus they didn't -actually- do any work to make any man fit that non existent pre existing narrative? Yet another persistent issue with the historicist position ( though not limited to it). Advocating for one seemingly critical component often amounts to a competent argument against other seemingly critical components. How are we to determine which components have priority over the others? The ones we -won't- argue against by invoking some other avenue of historicity? 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.

[Fake Messiah]

Here are some of my further thoughts on why “brother of Christ” in TF2 is a forgery, and tell me what you think.
“Brother of Christ” seems a very vague description that wouldn’t mean anything to anyone. As more than one scholar has noted, Monty Python's Life of Brian was quite historically accurate in that it pointed out there was a messiah on every street corner. As was name Jesus (Josephus alone mentions over 20 different Jesuses).
So how would “brother of Jesus messiah” mean anything valuable to any reader in a book that was written at least 50 years after the events? Not even Josephus could have met Jesus since he was born afterward. Readers would be like “Who?”

True, the “brother of Christ” could have meant something even to people living 50 years after the events if that Jesus was very famous, but there are no indications that he was. Already in the late 19th century, John Remsburg lists 42 ancient writers who did not mention Jesus from that time and place but who collectively documented every significant event from that century that's known.

And even if Josephus wrote “brother of Jesus messiah” where is the evidence that it’s that Jesus from the Gospels? Especially since the gospels claim that Jesus’ brothers did not believe him, John 7:5 For even his brothers did not believe in him. And Mark 3:31-35.

[LinuxGal]

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.