The Brother of Jesus and the Lost Teachings of Christianity by Jeffrey J. Bütz

Author:Jeffrey J. Bütz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion/Christian Studies
Publisher: Inner Traditions
Published: 2010-11-01T16:00:00+00:00

3

THE NATURE OF JEWISH CHRISTIANITY

6

KEEPING THE CANDLE BURNING: JAMES IN HISTORY AND TRADITION

James, whom the people of old called the Just because of his outstanding virtue, was the first, as the records tell us, to be elected to the Episcopal throne of the Jerusalem church.

EUSEBIUS, ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY

When one moves beyond the New Testament, literature about James becomes both surprisingly plentiful and surprisingly reverential. There are at least thirteen extra-biblical sources that treat of him. We have already examined the report of James’s death from Josephus, almost unanimously considered historically trustworthy. While the other sources generally possess less historical reliability, at the very least they contain valuable information that shows how later generations of Jewish Christians, Gnostic Christians, Coptic Christians, and others managed, under some extremely difficult conditions, to keep the memory of James alive. Because all of these later reports about James are relatively brief, it is possible to offer the reader a comprehensive survey, which we shall now undertake as the last phase of our investigation.

Scholarly opinion about the historical reliability of the sources we will be examining falls all over the spectrum. So, unlike the prior phases of our investigation, here we shall for the most part lay aside the scholarly debate on the material. Instead, we shall simply let the accounts speak for themselves and see what historical nuggets we can mine from this material based on the insights gleaned in parts 1 and 2. We turn first to our most plenteous source of information on James outside of the New Testament—the church father and historian Eusebius.

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