Paul and Jesus

It is difficult for one to imagine a version of Christianity predating Paul with none of these seemingly essential elements. Yet that is precisely what our evidence indicates. The original apostles and followers of Jesus, led by James and assisted by Peter and John, continued to live as Jews, observing the Torah and worshipping in the Temple at Jerusalem, or in their local synagogues, while remembering and honoring Jesus as their martyred Teacher and Messiah. They neither worshipped nor divinized Jesus as the Son of God, or as a Dying-and-Rising Savior, who died for the sins of humankind. They practiced no ritual of baptism into Christ, nor did they celebrate a sacred meal equated with “eating the body and drinking the blood” of Christ as a guarantee of eternal life. Their message was wholly focused around their expectations that the kingdom of God had drawn near, as proclaimed by John the Baptizer and Jesus, and that very soon God would intervene in human history to bring about his righteous rule of peace and justice among all nations. In the meantime both Jews and non-Jews were urged to repent of their sins, turn to God, and live righteously before him in expectation of his kingdom.

But that takes us far ahead of our story. Let’s begin with James the forgotten brother of Jesus. Since the late 1990s there have been over a dozen major scholarly studies of James published.⁵ Prior to this, to my knowledge, not a single major scholarly study of James had ever been published. But these academic studies by and large did not reach the public.

Remarkably, on October 21, 2002, James made headline news around the world. Hershel Shanks, editor of the Biblical Archaeology Review, announced at a Washington, D.C., press conference that a first-century A.D. limestone burial box, or ossuary (literally “bone box”), inscribed in Aramaic “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus,” had turned up in Jerusalem in the hands of a private collector. The news flashed around the globe. Experts involved in studying the artifact were convinced that it was genuine, that it most likely referred to James the brother of Jesus of Nazareth, and that it had once held his bones. As such, it would be our earliest archaeological reference to Jesus and to James.⁶ Some scholars have since questioned the authenticity of various parts of the inscription and it has become part of a highly controversial ongoing criminal forgery case in Israel, but there is no question that the ossuary story gave James the brother of Jesus his fifteen minutes of fame, almost as if he had been resurrected from the dead after nineteen hundred years.⁷

Most people who read or heard the news story, even those claiming a fair knowledge of the New Testament, found themselves asking—James who? The fisherman James, one of the twelve apostles, might have been familiar, but who was this mysterious second James? And how could he have been a brother of Jesus, if Mary, Jesus’ mother, remained a virgin throughout her life?

At least since the fourth century, Roman Catholics, represented by the church father Jerome, had claimed that the brothers of Jesus, mentioned and named in the New Testament, were cousins of Jesus, not literal brothers, since both Mary and Joseph remained virgins throughout their lives.⁸ Eastern Catholics, represented by Epiphanius, held the view that they were stepbrothers, older than Jesus, and children of Joseph from a previous marriage.⁹ According to Epiphanius, Joseph was a widower, over eighty years old, when he took Mary as his wife. Protestants tend to be divided, but many, particularly in modern times, accept that Joseph and Mary, following the virgin birth of Jesus, had other children together, so these would be half brothers of Jesus from his mother, Mary, since Jesus had no human father.¹⁰

Paul knows James as “the brother of the Lord,” and he mentions the “brothers of the Lord” as a group as well (Galatians 1:19; 1 Corinthians 9:5). He distinguishes these brothers from Peter, from the Twelve, and from those called “apostles” in a more general sense (1 Corinthians 9:5; 15:5–7). When he mentions the name James without a descriptive tag, there is no doubt he refers to Jesus’ brother James, as Paul is our earliest witness to James being the head of the Jerusalem church. According to Paul, James stands first, along with Peter and John, as the “pillars” of the movement (Galatians 2:9, 12).

Terminology can be quite tricky when it comes to James himself, as well as the movement he led for over thirty years. Before I take up the full story let me attempt some important clarifications and express some caveats.