My middle-age years were a time when I had become interested in various topics and personalities having to do with science, history, society and religious spirituality. Once I picked up such an interest, I would usually dig in by buying and (eventually) reading a handful of books, and maybe one or two Great Course audio\/video lectures from the Teaching Company. When the Internet became widely available in the last few years of the 20th Century, I supplemented my research with web-site searches. I even occasionally found someone else who is also interested in the subject and exchange notes on it. <\/p>\n
But after a few years, I usually moved on from a particular subject and took up another topic. One of the topics that I explored for awhile in the late 1990’s regarded James the “brother of Jesus”<\/a>. I had previously become interested in the “Historical Jesus” movement of the early 1990’s, and had soaked up a fair amount of information on what the scholars knew or were speculating about the life of Jesus of Nazareth, along with the social, cultural and historical background of his home turf, i.e. ancient Palestine in the early Roman Empire. One of the major aims of historical Jesus research is to come up with a portrait of Jesus that is not inspired by any particular religious viewpoint, but instead “lets the chips fall where they may” by using standard historical and sociological research techniques. <\/p>\n (Unfortunately, too much of what was presented to the public as “historical” research on Jesus in the 1990s and 2000s was in fact driven by anti-religious motivation; there was an apparent desire to prove that Jesus had not only failed to perform miracles or rise from the dead, but that his teachings and motivations were not primarily religious or spiritual but were more philosophical or political. These views were hardly any more objective than the standard religious interpretations of Jesus. John Dominic Crossan<\/a> was a notable axe-grinder, but certainly was not the only one.)<\/p>\n After a while, any historical Jesus junkie will stumbles across the matter of James, who is called the “brother of Jesus” in various Gospel, Epistle and Apocryphal accounts. And James is also noted by Josephus, our primary non-religious historical reference from First Century Palestine \/ Israel. Hmmm, James . . . that’s my name! I grew up in the Roman Catholic faith, but I heard very little if anything about \u201cJames the brother\u201d during my youthful Catholic teachings, and later on in the Catholic readings that I did during my early adulthood (which were mostly about liberal Catholicism and the socially active Church). James was there in the Bible, but if you heard him discussed by a priest, it was simply to say that he was a cousin, not a real brother to “Our Lord”. According to the Vatican website on the Catechism<\/a> of the Catholic Church<\/p>\n . . . the objection is sometimes raised that the Bible mentions brothers and sisters of Jesus. The Church has always understood these passages as not referring to other children of the Virgin Mary. In fact James and Joseph, “brothers of Jesus”, are the sons of another Mary, a disciple of Christ, whom St. Matthew significantly calls “the other Mary”. They are close relations of Jesus, according to an Old Testament expression.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Nonetheless, in my middle-aged research on James, I became convinced that James is a full brother of Jesus and a child of Mary. This is the view of many if not most Protestant<\/a> Biblical scholars, as opposed to the Catholic scholars who continue to defend the Church\u2019s positions on Mary\u2019s perpetual virginity. <\/p>\n I felt that the Protestants were able to approach the topic with an open mind, whereas the Catholics had to start with an answer and work to defend it. Even though James is not mentioned as having a very active role during Jesus\u2019 ministry, after Jesus\u2019s death he took up a very important role as the leader of Jesus\u2019s followers in Jerusalem. Jerusalem was (and still is) the center of the Jewish world, and James\u2019 role thus envisioned a Jesus movement that was closely tied in with First Century Judaism and the Jerusalem Temple. Under James, the \u201cchurch\u201d was still pretty much a Jewish thing. <\/p>\n Of course, the future of Jesus\u2019s followers was not to be a Jewish thing. Paul would put the early church on a trajectory that eventually split its identity from Judaism. The branch of the Jesus movement that James led had died out not too long after James\u2019 martyrdom in 62 or 69 CE. The great Roman-Jewish Wars and the siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE helped put the early Jewish-Christian movement which James led to an end. Paul\u2019s vision for Jesus\u2019 followers was the future of the Church, and also very much the future of the western world for the next two millennia. <\/p>\n As such, James is pretty much a \u201cwhat might have been\u201d footnote to Christianity. So, after reading a few books on James and what he represented in the early Christian movement, I moved on to other topics. <\/p>\n However, not long ago I decided to take a few hours and have a look back on the whole James question, almost 20 years after I first grew interested in it. And even though I\u2019m a lot older now and my mind ain\u2019t as fast and flexible as it once was, I was pleased in that I was able to ask some new questions about James that hadn\u2019t occurred to me back when I first studied him. Here are some of the new issues that I came up with:<\/p>\n — How did James become a recognized and respected Jewish leader in Jerusalem (the historical sources remember him as such, given the amount of time he spent in the Jerusalem Temple) if he was from Galilee? The Galileans had questionable Jewish linage and were considered outlanders and rural hicks by the Judeans in the south. How did James get credibility with the priestly circles and Sadducees, give that he was a rural nobody before Jesus\u2019s death? And recall that even Jesus wasn\u2019t much more than a blip on the screen of the Jewish Temple establishment when he died . . . <\/p>\n — How did a Jewish-Christian community survive in Jerusalem in the 40\u2019s, 50\u2019s and 60\u2019s, given that Rome \/ Pilate had executed Jesus for fear of insurrection against Rome? How did Jesus\u2019s followers get an accommodation with Rome such that they weren\u2019t heavily persecuted? Or did James, with his focus on piety and holiness, and his lesser emphasis on preaching apocalypse, represent less of a threat to Rome?<\/p>\n — Why didn’t the Jesus movement go back to Galilee \/ Capernaum and have its base there, as opposed to Jerusalem? Think about how the Essenes considered Qumran as a “New Jerusalem” — why didn\u2019t the Christians have taken a similar \u201cTemple in exile\u201d strategy based in their home turf of Galilee, instead of having Jerusalem as the early headquarters of the evolving Church, as per Acts? <\/p>\n — Why did James become so pious and ascetic in contrast to Jesus’ “eating and drinking” and going to wedding feasts and generally being very social and accessible? Why is he not remembered so much for apocalyptic preaching and preparation?<\/p>\n — How did James pick up so much priestly “Zadokite<\/a>” influence, including a piety that was akin to the Essenes<\/a>? Jesus himself had pitted himself against the Temple Establishment and had rejected Essene purity and asceticism – why did brother James embrace it in the name of his fallen brother? <\/p>\n — It seems as if James had developed himself as a Jewish holy-man, but along a different pathway than Jesus took. Can we speculate that during Jesus’ ministry, James was himself on a spiritual path, but a different one, perhaps with some early Essene \/ priestly influence, or at least more sympathy for the piety rituals of the Pharisees?<\/p>\n — Perhaps the biggest question about James and his Jerusalem sect would be: WWJD<\/a>? I.e., what would Jesus want done with his followers, given the circumstances? Well, I don\u2019t think that Jesus thought much about that. Jesus had stayed \u201con the mission\u201d up to the end; he was sure of the impending coming of the Kingdom, and he no doubt anticipated that his followers would play an important and honored roll once the End of Days was past.<\/p>\n But, just as a hypothetical though \u2013 suppose that Jesus were told in his final minutes that he would die without the arrival of the Kingdom, and that the \u201cDays\u201d that were supposed to be ending would not be ending anytime soon? Would he want Paul to take his legacy to the gentiles and establish a new religion throughout the western world? Or would he want what he had said and done over the past three years to remain \u201cin the family\u201d, with the Jews (as James envisioned)? <\/p>\n Obviously we can never answer this question. Perhaps the best indication we might have was in Peter. Peter was something of a \u201cman in the middle\u201d, a fellow Jew who knew that Jesus\u2019s dreams and visions were tied to the soil of the Holy Land, and not to a more cosmopolitan perspective encompassing the Roman Empire, as Paul of Tarsus had. And yet, over time Peter seemed to have come around to the Mediterranean point of view that Paul so forcefully preached. Perhaps he rationalized that the Jews of the diaspora needed to become aware of Jesus and the coming of the Kingdom (perhaps this was a rationale for why God and the angels had not come down from the heavens on that Passover afternoon when Jesus hung on the cross \u2013 perhaps God wanted Jesus\u2019 followers to get the other Jews around the Empire ready to join the Kingdom, once it finally did arrive). <\/p>\n But then again, Christian legend has it that Peter died in Rome with Paul<\/a>, and that like Paul, he may have envisioned Rome as the eventual \u201cNew Jerusalem\u201d<\/a> in keeping with the spirit of the Book of Revelations. Perhaps what Peter and Paul did then was the more logical evolution and use of what Jesus had left behind. And yet, as to leaving the Jewish tradition and the sacred land of Mount Zion and Galilee behind — would Jesus\u2019s heart have let him?<\/p>\n Well, I don\u2019t have immediate answers to these questions. Maybe I\u2019ll do some more pondering of them in the near future, especially since there were one or two books on James that came out after 2000 that seem interesting. But the whole topic is also interesting to me in regard to why these new questions (and arguably deeper questions) did not occur to me the first time around. So, perhaps despite my age, my mind is not yet over the hill. Maybe my older, slower, more forgetful, and yet more experienced brain is still good for something after all !!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My middle-age years were a time when I had become interested in various topics and personalities having to do with science, history, society and religious spirituality. Once I picked up such an interest, I would usually dig in by buying and (eventually) reading a handful of books, and maybe one or two Great Course audio\/video […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,12],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6692"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6692"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6692\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6700,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6692\/revisions\/6700"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}