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Background

I’m currently blogging about the second chapter of Part 2 of The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus by Gary Habermas and Michael Licona.

This chapter is numbered as Chapter 4, is titled “A Quintet of Facts (4+1)”, and is subtitled The Last Three.

As a refresher, “minimal facts” are facts that:

• Are agreed on by nearly all scholars
• Are strongly supported by the evidence
• Collectively build a strong case for the bodily resurrection of Jesus

You are here

We covered the third minimal fact (“The church persecutor Paul was suddenly changed”) last time…see post #19 in hyperlinked series outline above.

Today, we discuss fact #4: The skeptic James, brother of Jesus, was suddenly changed

God’s little brothers

It’s true! Jesus had four half-brothers:

[Mar 6:3 KJV] 3 Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of JAMES, and JOSES, and of JUDA, and SIMON? and are not his sisters here with us? And they were offended at him.

No, my brother is not God

Jesus’s own brothers didn’t believe in Him.

Like many of the intermediate claims we’ve advanced in this series, this one should be pretty easy to accept. If you don’t believe Jesus was God, it should be easy to accept that his own brothers – the ones who would have known Him best – didn’t believe in Him. If you are a Christian, then you are even more on the hook to accept this…the Bible explicitly points out their unbelief:

[Jhn 7:5 KJV] 5 For neither did his brethren believe in him.

Britannica has the same read on this:

“James evidently was not a follower of Jesus during his public ministry.” (1)

Oh, wait…my brother really IS God

But fast forward to a few years after the crucifixion and we find His brother James leading the Christian church in Jerusalem:

[Act 15:13, 19 KJV] 13 And after they had held their peace, JAMES answered, saying, Men [and] brethren, hearken unto me: … 19 Wherefore my sentence is, that we trouble not them, which from among the Gentiles are turned to God: 

TFOTF uses a timeout

For those wondering why I am trying to prove Jesus rose again merely by quoting Scripture; I’m not! The fact is, Christianity is the world’s largest religion (3) and has had an ongoing major impact on global culture. In light of that, we should expect that a subset of historians would go to great lengths to learn as much as they could about early Christianity. We should not expect that the origins of such an influential movement would be totally shrouded in mystery and obscurity. We should expect historians to have some consensus on some basic facts about early Christianity. And they do…which leads me to my next point…

Oh, wait…my brother really IS God (continued)

Wikipedia and Britannica concur with said takeaway from the Acts passage I mentioned earlier:

“Modern historians of the early Christian churches tend to place James in the tradition of Jewish Christianity” (2)

“He was leader of the Jerusalem Christians,…” (1)

And yes, I will die on that confession

This is where things get real; not that any of the previous statements were false, but at this point in the story, James proves he wasn’t fronting.

“[the high priest] assembled the Sanhedrin of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James, and some others, [or, some of his companions]; and when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned:” (4)

That is an excerpt from Jewish historian Josephus’s work known as Antiquities of the Jews. For the scholarly consensus on this excerpt, we have this from wikipedia:

“Modern scholarship has almost universally acknowledged the authenticity of the reference to ‘the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James’ (τὸν ἀδελφὸν Ἰησοῦ τοῦ λεγομένου Χριστοῦ, Ἰάκωβος ὄνομα αὐτῷ) and has rejected its being the result of later Christian interpolation.”

So, yes, Josephus was a real historian, and he really did document this episode in the life of Jesus’s brother James.

I have a theory why James was killed

Since I’m offering that account of James’s death as evidence of his faith, I need to provide evidence that it really was a martyrdom. Rather than appeal to a Christian historian such as Hegesippus, I will make a more indirect case:

• A few years earlier, big brother Jesus was recommended for execution by the same outfit (the Sanhedrin)
• One of the charges against Jesus was that He claimed He was God (see Mark 14:61-64 and John 5:18)
• James was the leader of the subculture of Jerusalem that believed Jesus was God, which makes James  a suitable additional target
• The Josephus excerpt below (again, this is a non-Christian historian) shows that James’s execution was not well-received by the upstanding members of the community:
  • “…but as for those who seemed the most equitable of the citizens, and such as were the most uneasy at the breach of the laws, THEY DISLIKED WHAT WAS DONE; they also sent to the king [Agrippa], desiring him to send to Ananus that he should act so no more, for that what he had already done was not to be justified; nay, some of them went also to meet Albinus, as he was upon his journey from Alexandria, and informed him that it was not lawful for Ananus to assemble a sanhedrim without his consent.”
  • Would the execution of an actual miscreant, like a murderer or a rapist, cause such protests among the people due to a legal technicality? Not likely…

So, I think it’s pretty clear why James was killed….for his faith in Jesus.

What a difference an appearance of the risen Jesus can make!

Again, our overall topic in this series is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. So how does today’s blog post tie in? Because the resurrection of Jesus is the most reasonable way to explain James’s about-face:

[1Co 15:7 KJV] 7 After that, he was seen of James; then of all the apostles.

But there are a lot of guys named James in the New Testament, so what evidence is there that the one just mentioned is the brother of Jesus? I thought you’d never ask!

• The book of Acts documents multiple encounters between Paul the Apostle (who wrote the I Corinthians letter cited above) and a leader of the Jerusalem church named “James”
• In Galatians 1, Paul mentions interactions with an apostle called “James the Lord’s brother”, and in the next chapter, he mentions “James” again as a leader of the Jerusalem church
• Paul never mentions any other James with an included family relation

So, I think it’s reasonable to say that the James mentioned by Paul in I Corinthians 15:7 is the same James that Paul encountered and mentioned in the Acts and Galatians passages cited above.

The critical Cambridge scholar with New York Times and Los Angeles Times references, as well as a Wikipedia page, weighs in

If I have not convinced you that Paul was saying that the risen Jesus appeared to James the brother of Jesus, Habermas and Licona provide this gem from respected Bible scholar Reginald Fuller:

“Further, critical scholar Reginald Fuller explains that this is sufficient. Even without it, ‘we should have to invent’ such an appearance in order to account for two things: James’s conversion from skepticism and his elevation to the pastorate of the church in Jerusalem, the center of ancient Christianity.”

And if Google reveals to you that Fuller was an Anglican priest and you are minded to discard his testimony on this matter; keep in mind that there is a reason Habermas and Licona describe him as “critical”. Here’s one example I found, where William Most documents Fuller tossing out a key part of the dialogue between Peter and Jesus, resulting in an entirely different takeaway:

“What did Fuller and others claim, thinking they had proved something: They read units 1 and 4 alone: ‘Who do you say I am? The Messiah. Get behind me satan.’ He did not believe He was Messiah.” (5)(6)

In the actual reading, it’s clear that Jesus is rebuking Peter for trying to stop Jesus from going to the cross; not for saying Jesus is the Christ. Yikes!

Since he’s clearly willing to toss out passages about the core identity of Jesus, we should pay close attention when Fuller does affirm orthodox claims about resurrection passages. 

So, again: The resurrection of Jesus is the best explanation of James’s conversion.

God bless, and thanks for reading.

TFOTF

P.S.: Next time…The Empty Tomb

Links:

(1) James on Britannica

(2) James on Wikipedia (he gets around)

(3) This is big. This is really, really big.

(4) Josephus on wikisource

(5) Taking a meat cleaver to the Bible

(6) Taking a meat cleaver to the Bible (more detail)

TFOTF