Posted: May 09, 2012 9:38 am
archibald wrote:IgnorantiaNescia wrote:
Several people here have made a lot out of it, so I introduced the claim ironically and corrected it by quoting Hoffmann's own reply.
No, you didn't correct it. You quoted what Hoffman is now saying. Unfortunately for him, he can't erase what he said before, and even if it's not a spectacular u-turn, the sort of stuff he's currently coming out with is a clear shift in emphasis, away from the mythicism option, which is all I would ever have described it as.
Could you please provide a full-context quote of his words, so that we can discuss it here? I'm open to changing my mind on this, even though I'm inclined to give Hoffmann the benefit of doubt.
archibald wrote:Btw, Cito (who isn't a mythicist, so you might have trouble 'taking his mythicism seriously' as you put it) may not have been interested in your point about lexicography, but I was willing to engage, and asked some questions in your direction, regarding how much weight such analyses can really bring to bear, especially with such a small sample (from Paul I mean), and what value there is in comparing Paul's own' somewhat personal language to not Paul sources, and if Brothers of the Lord' is siblings, how come they are missing, even from Paul's list of witnesses?
As you know, I admitted that it is possible for it to have such meaning, but my position is that such judgments should be based on the evidence. There are limits to the weight of such analyses - especially in the case of a small corpus - but I think there is good reason to suppose that Paul conformed to common usage, especially since that formula is also used in the LXX. Whereas Paul indeed had his own usage, how likely is it he would mean something rather different from the standard meaning (biological kinship) if there isn't evidence of specialised Christian jargon here? I hope we can agree that the default reading of "James, the brother of the Lord" is much more parsimonious.
As for the brothers as witnesses, he does for James, it's in 1 Corintihians 15: 7: "Then he appeared to James, then to all apostles." But I am not sure I understand this argument, for should Paul have believed that all brother witnessed a "resurrected" Jesus?
archibald wrote:Specifically, does 'iakobon ton adelphon tou' (Gal 1:19) not sound quite similar to 'titon ton adelphon mou' (2 Cor 2:13)?
Sound? Yes. Mean? No. First, the part from Galatians is incomplete, the full title reads "Iakobon ton adelphon tou kuriou" which means "James (Iakobon, noun in accusative case) the brother (ton adelphon, article and noun in accusative case) of the Lord (tou kuriou, article and noun in genitive case)", (which makes it sound a little more dissimilar, but that isn't the crucial point). The issue is that the structure is different, "Titon (Titus, noun in accusative case) ton adelphon ([the] brother, article and noun in accusative case) mou (my, first person possessive personal pronoun)", so it doesn't conform to the formula "X, the brother of Y" that's under debate - rather it's simply a way of saying "X, my brother" because mou is just the Greek way of saying "my". It is not debated that the latter formula can refer to fictive kinship.