"Above all, remember to shun any Apostle, teacher, or prophet who does not accurately compare his teaching with that of James...the Brother of my Lord...and this even if he comes to you with recommendations."
Peter preaching at Tripoli (Pseudoclementine Homilies 11.35)
0:00 Intro
0:35 Pseudo-Clementine Writings
4:55 Early Church Sources
6:35 Jamesian Christianity vs Pauline Christianity
8:42 Decoding the Family of Jesus
12:46 The Acts of the Apostles and James
15:20 Quest for the Gospel Truth
17:36 The Historical James
19:20 Kepha the Rock
22:05 The party of the circumcision
24:28 Greco Roman Christianity vs Jewish Christianity
25:35 Apostles and Pillars
29:13 The scandal of Flesh and Blood
31:22 Temple Inner Sanctuary
"born of woman, born under the law"
Jesus was ‘born under the law’, that is, a Jew.
James the Brother of Jesus: The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls
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"I did not confer with flesh and blood, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me, but I went away into Arabia; and again I returned to Damascus.
Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas, and remained with him fifteen days. But I saw none of the other apostles except James the Lord’s brother."
The Apostle Paul
“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle."
As George Orwell stated some of the most impactful truths are right in front of us. This constant struggle to admit the obvious about Jesus of Nazareth (being a devout Jew and a threat to the ruling elite by the very evidence of the Crucifixion by the Roman Empire) did not start in our age but from the very beginning of the religious and political turmoil of the first century in a world torn asunder by war and revolution. In first century Palestine under Roman rule it was dangerous to engage in political Judaism and calling for the empire of God over the empire of Rome.
"We must understand that some of the early Christians [in the decades after Jesus' death] saw the message of Jesus largely within the context of Judaism. Indeed, Christianity might have remained as a sect within Judaism ... In this initial stage there was little or no thought of any dividing line between Christianity and Judaism."—The Catholic Study Bible
Some of the development of Christian theology in the following centuries had to either ignore or accommodate what surrounded the controversial historical Jesus to the Roman Empire. Especially as the Roman Jewish wars intensified.
The pen of Paul and the sword of Rome were too much for the original Messianic movement of John, Jesus, and James to be left unscathed in its original form.
As one scholar noted. "Paul used Jesus. James knew Jesus. Worship or Follow?"
"Ideal types are used to simplify a complex reality" Patricia Crone
The disciples said to Jesus, “We know you will leave us. Who is going to be our leader then?” Jesus said to them, “No matter where you go you are to go to James the Just, for whose sake heaven and earth came into being.” (Thomas)
First, there is James himself, as well as Jesus’ mother and brothers. Jesus was gone but James, as we will see, became a towering figure of faith and strength for Jesus’ followers, as I discussed in the post yesterday. To have Jesus’ own brother with them, his own flesh and blood, and one who also shared Jesus’ royal Davidic lineage, had to have been a powerful reinforcement. And this would be the case with Jesus’ family as a whole. They became the anchor of his movement... Unfortunately, we don’t have many details about how James was able to accomplish what he did as leader of the movement. As we will see, his role has been almost totally marginalized in our New Testament records, but the results are evident.
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The Roman Catholic Church monopolized the New Testament for over fourteen hundred years, forbidding laypeople from reading or interpreting it. Although this monopoly was shattered by the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation, knowledge about Jesus' first-century world was too sparse for anyone to understand the New Testament in its proper context. Today, we know more about Jesus' times than ever before. Yet Christian religious leaders have been reluctant to disseminate these new insights—largely because they reveal that Jesus was a Jewish prophet who insisted on adherence to traditional Judaism. In Jesus the Misunderstood Jew: What the New Testament Really Says About the Man from Nazareth, Dr. Robert Kupor illuminates the New Testament in a way that allows both Christians and Jews to understand this seminal document in a startling new light. Jesus the Misunderstood Jew will surprise and enlighten you.
The original diversity of late second Temple Judaism and Early Christianity meets the bottleneck of the great clashes between the Jewish rebellions and the Roman Empire.
