It was nasty of Paul not to indicate more clearly to us that by his crucified Jesus he intended Jesus Ben Pandira; and, in view of the circumstance that we have left to us no "biography or teachings whatever" of this Jesus, Paul might surely have communicated to us some details of his career. It would have saved Mr. Robertson the trouble of inventing them.
[James, brother of Jesus, only in a Pickwickian sense] At first sight, too, it was extremely inconsiderate of Paul to "thicken the plot" by bringing on his stage a brother of Jesus Ben Pandira or of the solar myth Joshua. I am not sure which. But Mr. Robertson, like Alice, is out for strange adventures, and prepared to face any emergency. "Brother," therefore, is here to be taken in a Pickwickian sense only. And here we will let Dr. W. B. Smith take up the parable, for it is he who has, with the help of St. Jerome, found his friends a way out of their difficulty. Moreover, he is more in need of a way out than even Mr. Robertson; for he declines to admit behind Jesus of Nazareth even--what Mr. Robertson styles, p. 364--"a Talmudic trace of a Jesus (Ben Pandira), who was put to death on the eve of the Passover about a century before the time of Pontius Pilate." Professor Smith cannot hesitate, therefore, to be of opinion that, when Paul calls James a brother of the Lord, he does not "imply any family kinship," but one of a "class of earnest Messianists, zealots of obedience" to the Mosaic Law. He appeals in confirmation of his conjecture to the apostrophe of Jesus when his mother and brethren came to arrest him as an ecstatic (Mark iii, 31-35):--
Who is my mother and my brethren? ... whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother and sister and mother.
He also appeals to 1 Cor. ix, 5, where Paul alludes to "the brethren of the Lord" as claiming a right to lead about a wife that is a sister. And he argues that those who in Corinth, to the imperilling of Christian unity, said, some, "I am of Cephas"; others, "I am of Christ"; others, "I am of Apollos," were known as brethren of Christ, of Cephas, etc. Now it is true that Paul and other early Christian writers regarded the members of the Church as brethren or as sisters, just as the members of monastic society have ever styled themselves brothers and sisters of one another. But there is no example of a believer being called a brother of the Lord or of Jesus. [34] The passage in Mark and its parallels are, according to Professor Smith, purely legendary and allegorical, since he denies that Jesus ever lived; and he has no right, therefore, to appeal to them in order to decide what Paul intended by the phrase when he used it, as before, not of a mythical, but of a concrete, case. However, if Professor Smith is intent on appealing to the Gospels, then he must allow equal weight to such a text as Matthew xiii, 55: "Is not this the carpenter's son? Is not his mother called Mary? and his brethren, James and Joseph and Simon and Judas? And his sisters, are they not all with us?"