----- Original Message -----
From: Jack Kilmon <jkilmon@...>
To: <crosstalk2@egroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, May 09, 2000 3:07 PM
Subject: Re: [XTalk] Bauckham: "All in the Family"


>
>
> Mark Goodacre wrote:
>
> > An interesting article by Richard Bauckham in the most recent Bible
> > Review is on-line at:
> >
> > http://www.bib-arch.org/br400/family1.html
> > "All in the Family: Identifying Jesus' Relatives"
> >
> > Essentially it's a well written, popular introduction to Bauckham's
> > fascinating research on Jesus' family found in particular in his _Jude
> > and the Relatives of Jesus in the Early Church_.
>
> Thanks for this reference, Mark. The family of Jesus has always been
> an area of specific interest and study for me. Having just blown this
> weeks book budget on Crum's Coptic Dictionary, I'll have to wait
> a bit to order Bauckham's book, but I will get it. I would like to
> have seen the treatment on Clopas/Cleophas expanded to include
> the Aramaic equivalent Alphaeus <Aram xlfa> which extends the
> family to Matthew and James, the lesser. Other sources say that
> Mary's sister Salome was married to Zebedee, hence the Zebedee
> boys were also cousins. With Thaddeus also related, it appears
> that this may have been a "family enterprise" even before the
> crucifixion....at the very least, these disciples were not just strangers
> that dropped everything to follow Jesus, but friends and kin he knew
> all his life.
>
> Jack

This gives me the opportunity to advance one of my other speculative
hypotheses: that the unnamed disciple in the Road to Emmaus resurrection
appearance in Luke 24:13-35 was in fact supposed to be James, the "brother
of the Lord." While I don't want to comment about the historicity of the
appearance accounts, I am quite convinced that the earliest version of this
narrative (likely well prior to 70 a.d.) was of a resurrection appearance to
James.

There are several intersecting lines of evidence that point to this
conclusion. (The following is from notes towards an article I'd like to
write some day, so while comment is welcome, if anybody is interested in
this, please do not copy without attribution.)

1) 1 Corinthians 15:3-7

The earliest appearance account is found in 1 Corinthians 15:3-7. In this
passage, written c. 50 a.d., Paul
claims to be handing down a tradition which he has received - a tradition
which is then older than Paul's own conversion to Christianity, and one
which he likely learned during his visit to the Jerusalem church c. 36 a.d.
As many scholars have noted, the passage takes the form of a creed, with a
poetic grammatical structure of statements beginning with "hoti." Verses 3b
to 5 seem especially credal in their form, with verses 6 to 7 likely
reflecting other traditions that Paul had learned over the years, and verse
8 serving as an appendix describing Paul's own Damascus road conversion
experience.

Overall, the 1 Cor. 15:3-7 seems to harmonize quite well with the accounts
of Jesus' death, burial and resurrection we know from the Gospels. The
Gospels contain traditions of Jesus death, burial, being raised on the third
day, an appearance to Peter, and appearances to the twelve. The appearance
to five hundred is not recorded in the Gospels directly, but tradition
associates this appearance with the appearance to the eleven disciples in
Galilee in Matt. 28:16-20 (the phrase "but some doubted" in v. 17 is then
seen as referring to some of the five hundred, not to the eleven.) But of
the appearance to James in verse 7, the Gospels are apparently silent.

This is a significant omission. From Paul's letters (especially Galatians)
and Luke's account in Acts, we know of the importance of James, the brother
of the Lord, as the leader of the Jewish-Christians of Jerusalem. Along
with Peter and John, he is called one of the "pillars" of the early church
by Paul (Gal. 2:9). Books attributed to James and his brother Jude were
accepted in the early Church and form part of the canon. Furthermore, of
all the figures in the early Church, we possess perhaps the most
extra-Biblical tradition about James. Josephus talks of James, as does the
early 2nd century Jewish-Christian historian Hegesippus. Many of the
Jewish-Christian looked to James as their putative founder, and some of
their traditions are recorded in the pseudo-Clementine writings. Clearly,
James was a most significant figure in the early Church, yet none of the
four Gospels record a resurrection appearance to James, despite the fact
that Paul knew of one before 50 a.d. In fact, aside from a few rather
derogatory references to James being among the skeptical and critical
brothers of the Lord, there are no Gospel references to James at all. Given
the fact that 1 Cor. 15 leads us to expect that there was an account of an
appearance to James, one is left to wonder what happened to it in the
Gospels.

2) Luke's interest in James

One of the evangelists, Luke, does mention James' important role in the
early Church in Acts, where he appears suddenly as a leader in the Jerusalem
Church in Acts 12:17, and is next seen urging the Christians of Jerusalem to
accept Gentile Christians as brothers. Just as Paul attests in Galatians,
James is seen taking a major role in the debate as to whether Gentile
converts to Christianity should have to adapt to Jewish ritual law (although
in Acts James seems to be more open to the Gentile brethren than Paul
relates in Galatians).

Clearly, however, Luke had access to some traditions about James that
dovetail in part with what we know of James from Paul's letters and
extra-Biblical sources. While he wants to leave an impression of harmony
among the leaders of the early Church, he does not write James out of the
story entirely, as the other evangelists seem to do. If any of the
evangelists had known about the Resurrection appearance to James, one
suspects that it would have been Luke.

3) Cleophas

In the appearance on the Road to Emmaus recorded in Luke 24:13-35. This
appearance was to "two disciples," one of whom is identified as Cleophas,
the other of whom is left unnamed. The naming of Cleophas suggests that
James is involved.

Cleophas is mentioned nowhere else in the NT, and is often identified with
Clopas, who is mentioned in John 19:25 where "Mary the wife of Clopas" is
one of the three women at the foot of the cross. John describes her as the
sister of Mary, the mother of Jesus. In a parallel passage in Mark 15:40,
this same Mary is described as "Mary the mother of James the younger and of
Joses." (Also found in Matt. 27:56) A group of women including "Mary the
mother of James" also appear with Mary Magdalene at the tomb in Mark 16:1,
Matt. 28:1, and Luke 24:10. Later traditions, found in Hegesippus and
elsewhere, mention a Cleophas as the brother of Joseph, Jesus' father, and
the father of Simeon, the second Bishop of Jerusalem after the death of
James. If these different references are all to one couple, then Mary and
Clopas / Cleophas were the parents of three
people known to the early Christians: James "the younger," Joses, and Simon
/ Simeon. In Mark 6:3, Jesus' brothers are identified as "James and Joses
and Judas and Simon," so three of the four names of his brothers are
identical with those named as children of Mary and Cleophas.

This is of course the basis of the traditional Catholic exegesis from St.
Jerome onwards that the "brothers" of Jesus are in fact his cousins by his
aunt and uncle, Mary and Cleophas. But regardless of whether or not this is
the case, Cleophas is closely identified with the blood family of Jesus, the
Desposyni, who became influential in the Jerusalem Church of the late first
and early second century.

Could it be that in placing the story of the road to Emmaus, right after a
mention of "Mary the mother of James" in Luke 24:10, and by putting the
unnamed disciple in the company of Cleophas (James' father or uncle), that
Luke is obliquely hinting that the unnamed disciple in question is James
himself?

4) Parallel evidence from Jerome

In addition to the internal hint from the naming of Cleophas, there is also
external evidence which suggests that
the Emmaus road story may have been based on an appearance to James.
According to St. Jerome, the Gospel of the Hebrews (an Aramaic version of
Matthew with additional material unique to the Jewish-Christian tradition)
recorded a separate Resurrection appearance to James which he quotes from in
"Lives of Illustrious Men" I, 2:

The Gospel also which is called the Gospel according to the Hebrews,
and which
I have recently translated into Greek and Latin and which also Origen
often
makes use of, after the account of the resurrection of the Saviour
says, "but the
Lord, after he had given his grave clothes to the servant of the
priest, appeared to
James (for James had sworn that he would not eat bread from that hour
in which
he drank the cup of the Lord until he should see him rising again from
among
those that sleep)" and again, a little later, it says "'Bring a table
and bread,' said
the Lord." And immediately it is added, "He brought bread and blessed
and brake
and gave to James the Just and said to him, 'my brother eat thy bread,
for the son
of man is risen from among those that sleep.'"

The parallels between this story and the Emmaus Road appearance, where the
disciples recognized Christ only in the breaking of the bread at a table,
are obvious. Additionally, notice the reference to the grave clothes, which
is a rough parallel to Luke 24:12 where Peter runs to the tomb and finds
"the linen cloths by themselves." Maverick Biblical scholar Robert Eisenman
notes these parallels in his _James: The Brother of the Lord_ and believes
that the Emmaus Road story in Luke is a version of the resurrection
appearance to James. While many of his more speculative theories about
James, Paul, and the Dead Sea Scrolls are I think without foundation, in
linking Jerome's _Gospel of the Hebrews_ account with Luke's road to Emmaus
story,
Eisenman seems to be on more solid ground.

5) Parallel evidence from Josephus

The final piece of evidence is the intriguing parallel between the disciple'
s description of Jesus to the stranger on the road in Luke 24:19-21 and
another famous ancient passage, the so called Testimonium Flavianum -
Josephus' famous extra-Biblical account of the life of Jesus in book XX of
the Antiquities. G.J. Goldberg's 1995 article in the _Journal for the Study
of Pseudopegripha_ documents the very close literary connections between
these passages, in some cases down to the same precise grammar and
vocabulary. Using computer search methods, Goldberg demonstrates a high
degree of statistical correlation between these two passages. For example,
he notes that a computer search for the first major Greek words in the
Testimonium:
"Iesous", "aner", and "ergon" through the entire TLG database turns up only
one matching phrase: Luke 24:19. The Testimonium and Luke 24:21 are the
only passages in ancient Christian literature that use the term "third day"
as the object of a verb ("triten hemeran") rather than as the object of the
preposition "on" ("en triti himei"). The close relationship he documents
between these passages leads him "the conclusion... that Josephus and Luke
derived their passages from a common Christian (or Jewish-Christian)
source."

Now, since Josephus is (along with Hegesippus) our major extra-Biblical
source for information about James the Just, it stands to reason that
Josephus may have been privy to some Jewish-Christian traditions emanating
from the community of James, from which he drew the Testimonium Flavianum.
Is it not reasonable to assume that Luke also drew upon a related
Jewish-Christian source in Luke 24, especially as both the parallels to the
Gospel of the Hebrews resurrection account and the parallels to the
Testimonium Flavianum occur in the exact same passage in Luke's Gospel?

6) Explaining the anonymity

Why then, if the Emmaus Road appearance was an appearance to such an
important disciple as James, the Brother of the Lord, one of the appearances
enumerated by Paul in 1 Cor. 15, would Luke leave the recipient of the
appearance anonymous? As Crosaan and many other commentators have noted,
being a witnesses of the resurrection was an important basis for claims to
apostolic authority. Early tradition points to Peter, the leader among the
Twelve, being the first among the Twelve to witness the Resurrection (1 Cor.
15:5; Mark 16:7; Luke 24:34). Therefore, recording an appearance to James
may not have served Luke's purpose if he was writing for a community that
acknowledged the leading authority of Peter. By the time the Gospels were
recorded, the evangelists may have wanted to play down the role of James in
the life of Jesus and the earliest Church, as to have emphasized his
importance may have been to strengthen the claims of the Jewish-Christian
community in Jerusalem led by James, in some respects a rival to the
communities established under the authority of Peter, the communities that
appear to have been responsible for the Synoptic Gospels. Thus, the
tradition of a resurrection appearance to James, known to Paul before 50
a.d., was neglected when the Synoptic evangelists recorded their Gospels
roughly between 65 and 90 a.d, except perhaps in this anonymous account in
Luke.

Furthermore, Luke seems to take pains in Acts, the sequel to his Gospel, to
portray harmonious relationships among the early apostles. In the account
of the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15, James is shown as urging the
Jerusalem Church to accept the Gentile Christians as brethren, only obliging
them to follow the moral laws given to Noah, not the entire Jewish law.
This seems to contradict the portrait of James in Galatians, which portrays
him as the leader of the Judaizing party. The impression is left that Luke
is trying to show Peter, James, and Paul working in perfect harmony in the
early Church, when there is evidence from Paul himself that there were
conflicts. Further evidence of Luke's harmonization is found in the fact
that Luke records the martyrdom of James, the brother of John, in Acts 12:2,
only a few verses before James, the Lord's brother, appears as a leader of
the Church without further description. If James, son of Zebedee were still
alive, Luke would have had to explain which James he was talking about. One
has the impression that the placement of James martyrdom in Acts 12:2 was at
least partly in the interests of keeping the narrative tidy. So, both for
reasons of showing unity among the leaders of the early Church, and for
narrative tidiness, Luke may have opted to keep the Emmaus Road appearance
anonymous.

Given the intersecting lines of evidence of 1) the 1 Cor. 15 account, 2)
Luke's interest in James, 3) the family relationships of James to Cleophas
and Mary, 4) the Gospel to the Hebrews account, and 5) the links between
Luke 24:19-21 and the Testimonium Flavianum, pointing to a common
Jewish-Christian source, and 6) the possible motives that Luke may have had
for keeping James anonymous in his account, the hypothesis that James, "the
brother of the Lord" is our unnamed disciple on the road to Emmaus story
seems very plausible and perhaps even probable.

Comments welcomed!

Mark Cameron
(613) 271-1532 (ph.)
(613) 271-0097 (fax)