Why Can't You Be Like Your Brother?

Dan McClellan He's like, "I wish you all were like me." But, if you can't hack it, then go ahead, get married so you can have occasional prophylactic and passionless intercourse.

Dan Beecher Which sounds great.

Dan McClellan Oh, yeah. It's definitely what everybody was joining the church for. Hey, everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan And you're listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things in the new digs, Dan?

Dan Beecher Oh, things are going good.

Dan McClellan All right.

Dan Beecher Just getting used to everything and enjoying a slightly different lifestyle. I'm all urban now. So that's kind of fun.

Dan McClellan You were just slightly suburban, just leaning into suburban.

Dan Beecher Yeah. Leaning to it. I was urban, but suburb rising.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher I was a cusp- Yeah ... and now I've fallen. I'm straight downtown. Julie Brown is what I am.

Dan McClellan All right.

Dan Beecher There you go.

Dan McClellan There you go. Today's show is going to be fun. We got a who this or a who that.

Dan Beecher I don't know which one it is. Who that, yeah. But yeah, we're going to be talking about Jesus' brother, which I think- Yes ... is fascinating, and something that I've been confused about for a while, so I'm glad- Mm-hmm ... that we will get to clear up any ambiguities there. And then in the second half of the show, we got a what is that? Because you have mentioned Masoretic texts.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher The Masoretic Text. I guess there's only one.

Dan McClellan Well, that's a long story, but- Okay ...

Dan Beecher continue. We'll get to it.

Dan McClellan We'll get to it, yeah.

Dan Beecher It's in the not too distant future.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher But for now, "Who Dat?" Okay, so who dat? We're in the New Testament, where apparently Jesus has a brother- Yes ... or actually many brothers, as I have learned as I sort of went through the thing.

Dan McClellan And sistren.

Dan Beecher And sisters.

Dan McClellan Brethren and sistren.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Big family.

Dan Beecher He has a prolific family.

Dan McClellan They were Catholic.

Dan Beecher Well, if they were, that poses a problem that we're going to get to.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher No. So, let's talk about James, the brother of Jesus.

Dan McClellan All right. And one of the interesting things, I guess we can just do this disambiguation now, if it's as good a time as any. For sure. There are other Jameses- Yeah ... in the New Testament. And, in fact, there are numerous. We've got James the Great, son of Zebedee, brother of John the Apostle. So John the Beloved Apostle, according to tradition, also had a brother named James.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan James son of Alphaeus, one of the 12 disciples of Jesus, but we don't really know anything about him. He's just mentioned once. We've got James the Less- ... which is an unfortunate epithet.

Dan Beecher It just seems so mean, is what it seems.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Could we say something other than- Can we just say that I'm short and not call me the less, please?

Dan McClellan Mikros is the Greek. James, the father of Jude the Apostle.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan James, the brother of Jude, mentioned in the Epistle of Jude.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Woo. So, we got a handful of Jameses there. There are Jimmy James, Jimbo- ... Jim Bobs running all over the place.

Dan Beecher Yeah. I don't know how they told each other apart, but- And I don't know how you tell them apart necessarily in the Bible, because it's not always disambiguated the way that you have just gone through. As a matter of fact- Yes.

Dan McClellan No, not clear ...

Dan Beecher as I was looking through this, it's unclear. I think some people purposefully further ambiguity them just to avoid certain theological problems that crop up- Mm-hmm ... when you say that Jesus has a brother, because that can be a problem, especially if you are of the belief that Mary remained a virgin through her life.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher So let's talk about that because- Oh, okay ... that's not necessarily the case. It's not necessary that she remained a virgin. That was just- No ... a postulation, a postulate that was proposed, and then a bunch of people ran with it.

Dan McClellan Yeah. I don't think it comes directly from the Proto-gospel of James- Mm ... but you have this idea that she remained a virgin even after giving birth from the Proto-gospel, where- Yeah ... the midwife is like, "Hang on a minute. I'm just going to check to see if something is still intact." And was like, "Whoa, it's still intact." Then her hand catches fire, and she's got to pray to God to put it out because God was like- Oh, really?

Dan Beecher ...

Dan McClellan "How dare you?"

Dan Beecher Don't touch that.

Dan McClellan Yeah. God went a little MC Hammer on- ... the midwife. And so there's this tradition that she remained a virgin, and for whatever reason, the tradition also developed that she remained a virgin throughout the rest of her life.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And I think this arises because at the time, there was a premium put on celibacy and on abstinence. Not just abstinence, but full-time ... career abstinence.

Dan Beecher You are celibate.

Dan McClellan Because there were an awful lot of ascetics in early Christianity that were trying to avoid all of the trappings of the flesh. And this has a platonic idea where you're supposed to be a spiritual being. You're supposed to overcome and transcend this ever-changing, corrupt, fleshly body. And we see this in Matthew, where the real ones are the ones who castrate themselves for the kingdom of heaven.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Those who make themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of God. We see this in Paul, where he's like, "I wish you all were like me. But if you can't hack it, then go ahead, get married so you can have occasional prophylactic and passionless intercourse."

Dan Beecher Which sounds great.

Dan McClellan Oh, yeah. It's definitely what everybody was joining the church for. And so the idea was that there was something sinful about sexual intercourse.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so it was like, well, we're not going to besmirch the good name of Mary, and so for whatever reason, that idea stuck. And so to make up for it, or to account for the brethren of Jesus, and I think you do see this in the Proto-Gospel of James, they had this idea that Joseph had a previous wife who passed away. And so all of the brothers are actually Joseph's children from a previous marriage, and so Mary is in the position of stepmother to- Right ... all of these others. So that's one of the rationalizations for that.

Dan Beecher And when you say all of these others, I'm just going to quickly read from Matthew. What is it? Matthew- 13:55 13.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Yeah. And this is a very brief story that's repeated in Mark, but in Matthew it says, Jesus has come to his hometown of Nazareth, and he's preaching to them, and they're all just sort of rejecting him, and they're like, "Is this not the carpenter's son? Is not his mother called Mary? And are not his brothers James, and Joseph, and Simon, and Judas?" I assume all different Simon and Judas. These aren't- Yeah ... the Simons and Judases that we hear about, but, "And are not all his sisters," so not just both, all his sisters, "with us?" So apparently, in his previous marriage, according to that theory, Joseph was woof, he was going to town, because that is a lot of siblings to produce in a previous marriage.

Dan McClellan And then- Yeah And then- And these presumably are people who survived into adulthood, who are still living- Right ... when this happens, which means, based on the odds, they probably would've had to have close to twice as many total pregnancies- Oh, right ... yeah, because you were lucky if you got north of 50% of your offspring surviving childbirth and then into adulthood.

Dan Beecher So- I'm starting to think it's little wonder that Joseph's first wife didn't survive. Suddenly that makes a lot of sense to me.

Dan McClellan And in Matthew it says James and Joseph. In Mark 6:3, the Greek has Iositos, which is usually transliterated into English as Joses.

Dan Beecher Oh.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Which is an unusual name. But in Matthew it's Ioseph, so it's Joseph.

Dan Beecher Oh, interesting.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher So, even in the Greek, it is a different name.

Dan McClellan Yeah. I'm going to look at the critical apparatus here to see if it's different in other manuscripts.

Dan Beecher Huh.

Dan McClellan Yeah, it looks like even some manuscripts of Mark have Joseph there, and then several of them have Iose.

Dan Beecher Oh, interesting.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And I've been looking at the NRSVUE.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher I'm guessing that some of the translations harmonize those so that they both say the same name.

Dan McClellan The King James version has Joses in Matthew as well.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan And I don't know if that's because of-- Well, I guess I could just look. That might be because the Textus Receptus read Joses. But let me pull up the Textus Receptus and see what we have there.

Dan Beecher Joses.

Dan McClellan Yeah. So the Textus Receptus, so that is the later manuscript tradition that formed the source text for our earliest English translations- Right ... including the King James version. That reads Joses- Huh ... just like Mark. So it looks like we must have decided we had better manuscript witnesses to the name Joseph somewhere along the way.

Dan Beecher Interesting.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher All right. So anyway, that's not the brother that we're interested in, though.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher No. Because James has a whole life of his own as a- Yeah ... big-time Christian.

Dan McClellan He does. And a lot of scholars think that he was basically the leader of the followers of Jesus who remained in Jerusalem- Yeah ... up until around the Roman invasion and the siege. He was probably in charge there. You had Paul was doing stuff out in Anatolia and elsewhere. Peter was probably also a leader nearby, but a lot of scholars suggest that James would've been in charge in Jerusalem. And we even have Paul, when he comes into town, in Galatians 1, we have Paul talking about some of the other apostles that he hung out with. It says, I think it starts around verse 18. "Then after three years I did go up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas," which is Peter.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan "And stayed with him 15 days. But I did not see any other apostle except James, the Lord's brother." So, Paul knew James and Peter, and they were both hanging out in Jerusalem, and it says, "James, the Lord's brother." There are some folks who argue that this epithet, the Lord's brother, is really just an honorific. This is a person who was considered a follower of Jesus, and so you called the other fellow followers brother and sister, similar to, if you watch awful old movies about Mormonism, and they always talk about Brother Joseph. And so, maybe that's what's going on, maybe that's why they're calling James that. But Paul has a habit of never refers to Peter as the Lord's brother.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan It's only James as the Lord's brother. There's not really a case to make that this is anything other than a recognition that he is Jesus's biological brother.

Dan Beecher Yeah. You say there's not a case to make, but people still, to this day- They will still make the case.

Dan McClellan Yep ...

Dan Beecher do make the case because, again, they're trying to solve the problem of the brotherhood of Jesus ruining the virginity of Mary.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher I've found a whole bunch of different ways that people, especially in, I think it's Eastern Christianity, and also, does Catholicism still want to hold to Mary's perpetual virginity?

Dan McClellan The perpetual virginity?

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan As far as I know.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm. I am not going to speak for Catholics. This is something that we can ask Michael Peppard, when we have him on the show.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan Because we have his book, "How Catholics Approach the Bible."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Or Encounter? What is the title again? "How Catholics Encounter the Bible."

Dan Beecher Yes.

Dan McClellan And very purposefully, he didn't say read, but encounter.

Dan Beecher Yes.

Dan McClellan So, yeah. I think that's very common, and yeah, the data don't really support it.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan But it looks like Herod Agrippa, at some point, chased Peter off, which would've left James to be the main authority who presides over the Council of Jerusalem, which we hear about in the Book of Acts. And Paul talks about James as well. And then it seems he is executed somewhere along the way, either in 62 CE or in 69 CE, depending on who you're listening to.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan So, we have an interesting reference in Josephus, in the "Antiquities of the Jews" or the "Judean Antiquities" or "Jewish Antiquities," however you want to translate that. In book 20, chapter nine, paragraph one, we have this person who took the high priesthood. And this is all palace intrigue-style stuff. In this time period, the high priesthood was not necessarily hereditary. It was appointed by- Hmm ... the Roman overlords. And so, while it could be hereditary, you could also have somebody who just comes in and pays more money.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And then Rome says, "Hey, you, you're out. Hey, you, you're in." So, it was considered corrupt- Okay ...

Dan Beecher by some folks, but at least if- And I am going to go out of my way to not be childish when you say this guy's name. The name of the guy that took over.

Dan McClellan Well, how to pronounce it. Ananus ben Ananus.

Dan Beecher That's good. That's a lot better pronunciation than an anus- ... which is how my brain will only see it as I read it. So anyway, I didn't manage to get through it without being childish. I apologize.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And the Hebrew would've been Hanan ben Hanan.

Dan Beecher Oh. Um- Well, that's a lot better.

Dan McClellan Yeah. So, the "us" on the end is really just a relic of the transliteration into Greek and then Latin.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan So, yeah. So, he's a high priest, and Josephus says, "Ananus or Hanan, who, as we have told you already, took the high priesthood, was a bold man in his temper and very insolent. He was also of the sect of the Sadducees." And unfortunately, I've got to read from the old... Is this the Feldman? Oh, this is the Feldman translation. There's another translation that was done by a Christian that is not great, but this is the LCL. This is the "Loeb Classical Library" translation. This one is good. "Also of the sect of the Sadducees who are very rigid in judging offenders above all the rest of the Jews, as we have already observed. When therefore Hanan was of this disposition, he thought he had now a proper opportunity to exercise his authority. Festus was now dead, and Albinus was but upon the road, so he assembled the Sanhedrin of judges and brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James." And this is one of the two references to Jesus in Josephus.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And again, we have a bunch of people who try to make the case, but there's not really a case for interpolation here. There's not really a case to make that Christians were like, "Ooh, what if we add Jesus here?" Because- Josephus is saying the brother of Jesus who was called Christ, and in this way is kind of dismissing the identification of Jesus as the anointed one. He's saying- Right ... "Other people called him Christ, those weirdos." Anyway, whose name was James and some others. And when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned. So, this would've happened around 62 CE. In other words, the cat's away, and so the mouse is going to play and kill the enemies.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Well, I won't get political, but imagine the Constitution suddenly was out of town. There would be a lot of bad things happening in our nation right now. So we have, according to Josephus, James is unjustly executed- Yeah ... by Chanan around 62 CE. But if we go look at other early Christian authors, Clement of Alexandria, Eusebius of Caesarea, who was good buddies with Emperor Constantine, Hegesippus is another early Christian author. These folks insist that James was killed around 69 CE- Right ... in the hullabaloo of the Roman siege of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple and all that kind of stuff. So we don't have a real clear account. If we look at all those authors, some of them have more detailed accounts of what happened to James than others, but it's in the air. I think most, it's up in the air. I think most scholars would probably say, of all these folks, Josephus is probably the closest to the events and is probably to be trusted the most.

Dan Beecher And the other accounts, unless I miss my guess, would not have identified James as the brother of Jesus because-- And the reason I know that is because I know that Josephus is kind of the only historian to have mentioned Jesus contemporaneously. Am I right about that?

Dan McClellan Almost contemporaneously.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Josephus is writing about 30 years later.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But he would've been alive when this was going on.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan So he was around during that time period. To be honest, I don't know if the other ones refer to him as the brother of Jesus, but that's in the New Testament. Why would you need- Well, yeah ... to question it? And I don't know if the tradition had become firmly implanted by-- We're talking second, third, fourth century CE.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan So we're not into late antiquity yet. But yeah, so probably somewhere around 62 CE, he's out of the picture. And this is one of the reasons that scholars think when it comes time to figure out who is the author of the gospels, the four most prominent disciples of Jesus were Peter, James, John, and Paul. And so you would expect, you would hope that maybe James would get credit for one of these gospels. But he was dead before these gospels started circulating, so there wouldn't have been a good case to make that James had written one of these gospels. They didn't start getting written down until around 70 CE- Right ... after James was gone. So that's why scholars think, "Well, that's why Matthew got one."

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Because there was one left over, and it was like, "Well, what are we going to do here? Well, there's this guy, Matthew, and he goes by Levi in all the other gospels, but here he is Matthew." So maybe he was like, "I'm going to get my freaking name right in one of these."

Dan Beecher All right.

Dan McClellan But you have ways to get from the other gospel authors to Peter, Paul, and John, because Mark was supposed to be the interpreter of Peter.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so you tag the Petrine base by attributing one gospel to Mark. You've got John, and then Luke was supposed to be the traveling companion of Paul.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan So you tag the Pauline base by attributing a gospel to Luke. So you get three of the four, and then Matthew is your wild card.

Dan Beecher Interesting.

Dan McClellan Well- You've got a playoff.

Dan Beecher Okay. I've got to check my fantasy league, but I think I've got- ...

Dan McClellan all of them.

Dan Beecher The last thing, though, is that even though none of the gospels are attributed to James, there is the Book of James. There is the- There is the Book of James ...

Dan McClellan Epistle of James.

Dan Beecher Oy.

Dan McClellan Oy.

Dan Beecher Oh, I get an oy from that.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher Talk to me about that oy.

Dan McClellan Well, I don't think there are many scholars anyway, who take seriously the notion that James was actually written by the brother of Jesus.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan This is probably coming from much later. I pulled up one of the commentary series I like. There are four commentary series that I have pointed to regularly as I think the most reliable critical commentary series. Hermeneia is my favorite. Anchor Yale Bible commentary series is good. The Old Testament Library/New Testament Library is very good. And then the ICC, which is the International Critical Commentary, is another one that I think is really good. And Dale Allison Jr. is a great scholar who wrote the volume on James. And one of the interesting things is there's been an argument about which James is the Epistle of James actually attributed to. Is it James, the brother of Jesus, or is it somebody else?

Dan Beecher Yeah, we got a lot of Jameses.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher We've already established there's plenty of Jameses to choose from, and who knows? You could throw another James into the mix.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Well, there could be one we don't know. And yeah, it's always an option. We always tend to want to side with the devil we do know. But that's like John the Revelator, the author of Revelation. People are like, "We got another John over here. We could just say they're the same John."

Dan Beecher Make them the same John.

Dan McClellan Yeah. One of them is clearly very educated, and the other one is clearly not.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But let's just say they're the same John.

Dan Beecher Who's going to know? But the Epistle of James 1:1 starts with, "James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the 12 tribes in the Dispersion.

Dan McClellan Greetings."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So not making many claims there.

Dan Beecher Right. Does not say- Apart from that he's named James ... brother of Jesus or anything like that.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Just says, "A servant of God and the Lord Jesus Christ."

Dan McClellan Yeah. So I think the scholarly consensus is that this was not written by the brother of Jesus. If it was written by a dude named James, it's probably a James we don't know about. But more than likely, or at least likely, this is pseudepigraphic. Somebody is writing later and trying to sound like the brother of Jesus. But you can look in the ICC, the International Critical Commentary. The discussion of authorship is long. It's many pages. And there's one really interesting thing here. Well, he concludes the authorship thing by saying, "To sum up the previous pages, although not all of the arguments marshaled to deny authorship by the brother of Jesus have merit, taken together tip the scale." So denying authorship by James, the brother of Jesus, is what tips the scale.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan "Hence, this commentary adopts the thesis that James is a pseudepigraphon."

Dan Beecher Yes.

Dan McClellan It is a false writing. And then the next thing is, let's talk about date. "As for the date of James, opinion is here, as on so much else, remarkably diverse. Here is a sampling." And then he lists three dozen scholars and what they say about the date of James. And we have between 120 and 150. We have before 50. We have 44 to 66. We have 40 to 50, 75 to 125, 120 to 50, 80 to 130, 57 to 62. So it's basically during James's lifetime or way after James's lifetime into the second quarter of the second century CE.

Dan Beecher And- Okay, so if I put the over-under at 100, are you taking the over? Are you taking the under?

Dan McClellan I personally would take the over.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Interesting.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan I think overall, what they call the Catholic Epistles, Peter, James, John, Jude, I think those are overwhelmingly probably second century.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And I think 2 Peter is probably considered the last one written, which would be somewhere between 120 and 150 CE, and I wouldn't be surprised. And also for the Pastoral Epistles, 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, those are probably also maybe first quarter of the second century. But the Johannine epistles, the Petrine epistles, the Jacobian epistle.

Dan Beecher That's this one. That's the James one.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher Stop confusing us with names.

Dan McClellan Well, if you look in the- That's because it's Iakóbos.

Dan Beecher Am I right?

Dan McClellan It's Iakóbos.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Something I was going to point out, when you look at those names, like we look at Iēsous versus Joseph- Yeah ... in the Greek of Matthew and Mark, nothing says James in there. It says Jacob in there, which is the origin of the name James, oddly enough.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And if you look at the Epistle of James in Greek, it says the letter of Jacob, and this comes from Hebrew, and then when it goes into Greek as Iakóbos, and then into Latin as Iacobus.

Dan Beecher Oh, God.

Dan McClellan And then you have a bunch of regional variations. You get some rhotacization in some places. You drop your Rs, and you get a lot of variations. And so Iacobus gets nasalized and becomes Iacombus, and then you drop the B, and you get Iacomus, and that's where you get Iacomo, which I've known some Iacomos in Uruguay, for instance. That's not an uncommon name in Spanish-speaking places.

Dan Beecher And so- Well, and Italian has the name Giacomo.

Dan McClellan Giacomo, yeah. And then that's where Iago comes from.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And you've got some Portuguese names. You have Tiago, which probably comes from the combination of San and Tiago. You got San Diego- Yes ... which, contrary to popular opinion, doesn't mean something else.

Dan Beecher Something involving a whale? Is that where you were going with that?

Dan McClellan Yeah. It's not anatomical in orientation, that particular name. But San Diego, Santiago, Chile, these are variations on St.

Dan Beecher James.

Dan McClellan And then you go from Iacomo and Iacomus to the C gets dropped, I think, in French, and so we get James. And then once we get the J in the 17th century in English, that becomes James as the name comes into English. So- Yeah.

Dan Beecher And in Spanish, you get the Jaime and- Yeah, it's interesting that we have both Jacob and James in our language.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher They have Diego and Jaime and all of these. It's interesting that various iterations still survive.

Dan McClellan They get preserved, yeah.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Well, when I was living over in England, I was like, "I'm going to do some heraldry." And I went and looked at my family history, and my mom has done a bunch of family history, and at least the name McClellan goes back to, there's a McClellan castle in a lovely little town called Kirkcudbright in the Dumfries in Scotland. We've been there. But I looked into all the variants on that name, which comes from Son of the Servant of St. Wulf, is where McClellan originates. But we have neighbors named the Gillilands, and that is a variant- Oh, wow ... of McClellan.

Dan Beecher Yeah. Oh, interesting.

Dan McClellan There are over 100 different variants, forms of last names that derive from McClellan.

Dan Beecher I thought you were going to go to McClelland with a D, but no, you went Gilliland or whatever.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher You went off the rails on that one.

Dan McClellan Yeah. It is bananas.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan How many variants. And that's what gives us Jacob and James. So- Yeah ... we're living just a few houses down from each other, and you wouldn't even know it, that they're both descended from the exact same last name.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So, yeah, it is a peculiar little accident of linguistics and language and stuff like that.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan All right.

Dan Beecher Well, I think that wraps up the brother of Jesus as best we can. I'm fascinated. There's so many questions. The more you dig into this stuff, you get more questions than you get answers, and that's how all of this works.

Dan McClellan But- Yeah ...

Dan Beecher it's a fun thing to explore.

Dan McClellan It is so interesting that of all the disciples that we know of from the New Testament, we have traditions about a bunch of them, and most of those traditions probably don't have any truth to them. But we seem to think we know an awful lot about James.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan And it's so fascinating that Josephus preserves that little reference to him.

Dan Beecher Yeah. I don't know why.

Dan McClellan He's just like, "Oh, there was this dude named James. Yeah, his brother thought he was the Messiah."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Or other people thought his brother was the Messiah, but Josephus is like, "I'm concerned with what happened to this James guy." Although it is really about just an illustration of how much this guy Ananus lived up to his namesake.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan At least, a mispronunciation of his namesake.

Dan Beecher Yeah, exactly.

Dan McClellan All right.

Dan Beecher Well, that's it for that. Let's move on to our next segment.

Dan McClellan What Is That? By the way, before you get into this- Mm ... I got dragged raked across the coals- Mm ... because I mentioned the What Is That, I mentioned a Saturday Night Live skit about that.

Dan Beecher Oh, yes.

Dan McClellan And I said the very first season, and- ... I had a bunch of people point out it was actually the first episode of the fifth season.

Dan Beecher You were not raked across coals.

Dan McClellan You were- ...

Dan Beecher gently corrected, sir.

Dan McClellan I was. I'm just going to be dramatic about it- Yes ... because I think it's funny.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan That I was like, "I'm pretty sure it's the first season."

Dan Beecher You were way off, man.

Dan McClellan I was wrong. I was wrong.

Dan Beecher Way off.

Dan McClellan I was off by four whole years because Bill Murray wasn't even part of the cast yet.

Dan Beecher It feels shameful now.

Dan McClellan I feel like- ...

Dan Beecher we may need to give this whole thing up.

Dan McClellan All right.

Dan Beecher So this week's What Is That, is what? Is it the Masoretic Text?

Dan McClellan Is that what are we what is that-ing?

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Let's call it the Masoretic Text, although I think we want to talk a little bit about that namesake as well, where that- Yeah ... comes from. The Masoretes, which is a fascinating story, and I think as good a place as any to start.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan But to begin, once the Hebrew Bible had been completed and you got translation into Greek and the early Christians are using the Greek translation, and then they get the Latin. But you have the Hebrew Bible being preserved and transmitted among Jewish folks as well, and there are two different main centers of strength of Judaism in late antiquity. You have some folks who are not in Judea. They've fled Judea, but they're further up north around the Galilee, for instance, and there are folks over in Babylon as well. A lot of Jewish folks stayed in Babylon or returned to Babylon. And you have the text being transmitted, but the Hebrew doesn't have any vowels. And so you start to see- Right ... in the first few centuries of the common era, some kind of stops and starts with attempts to come up with vowel annotations, ways to add vowels to the consonantal text.

Dan Beecher Because it's confusing, right? There are going to be words where a different vowel makes it a different word.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And not having that, there are context clues and whatever, but it's still nice to know what vowel you're supposed to have where.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And Hebrew is also changing quite a bit. It's heavily influenced by Aramaic in this time period as well, and so Mishnaic and Middle Hebrew is quite different from Biblical Hebrew. So it's also helpful just for clarity so we know for sure what we're looking at. But the difference vowel systems. And they're like little dashes and curls that usually are written above the consonants. They don't want to add letters to the text, so it's basically writing stuff above, below, or within the characters. And we have these scribes who are known as the Masoretes, who come up with the system that would end up being used all the way down till the modern day for the overwhelming majority of Jewish folks. And the name comes from, I think it's Ba'alei HaMasorah, which would be Lords or Masters of the Tradition.

Dan Beecher Ah. And they- Is that like a title that was bestowed upon them?

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher These are the keepers of the book. They are the- Yeah ... Lords and Masters of the Tradition sort of thing?

Dan McClellan Yeah, something like that.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And then their children became the Masters of the Universe. And we have... I hear they're doing a live-action version of that, by the way.

Dan Beecher Of He-Man?

Dan McClellan Masters of the Universe.

Dan Beecher I would be interested also in a live-action version of the Masoretes, but I get that you were talking about He-Man.

Dan McClellan So between around the fifth and the 10th centuries CE, we have these folks who are working mainly in Jerusalem and Tiberias. Tiberias is a city right around the middle of the west coast of the Sea of Galilee. It's like a resort town these days.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And it was anciently as well. And then they're also working in places in Mesopotamia. And they put together this system, and they come up with a couple of additions to the vocalization tradition. So they come up with these series of dots and lines and things like that that are going to go mostly below, but there are a couple that go above to indicate the vowels. But then they also create these annotations that help you identify when consonants should be doubled. So, that's the dagesh that they come up with. They come up with a cantillation system, which is supposed to help you understand what words go with what other words, and how to aid in reading it out loud, and particularly chanting or singing from it.

Dan Beecher And then they also- This is what the cantor in a- Yeah ... synagogue does, is- Yeah ... sing the thing. So was there sort of a musical notation to that, or was it just to help you sort of understand how to string the words together or what?

Dan McClellan Usually the cantillation marks occur on the stressed syllable of the word.

Dan Beecher Oh, okay.

Dan McClellan So the accented syllable. And usually they were intended to indicate if you should be connecting one word with another word. And I'm not an expert on the cantillation system.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan I did not become a cantor for reasons that are obvious to anyone who has ever booed me off of a karaoke night stage. You know who you are.

Dan Beecher And then there was- I apologized many times for that, Dan.

Dan McClellan Geez. And then they also came up with two additional things that they added to the text, what they call the Masora Parva and the Masora Magna, or the large and small Masorah. And these are the Masora Parva, or the short Masorah, goes in the margins of the manuscript. And these are little abbreviations that indicate where there is a form of a word that only occurs once or maybe twice, or where there is what's called a ketiv or qere. And this is where ketiv/qere readings are very interesting, and that's where the Masoretes have gone through and have decided that even though this is the vocalization tradition that we have received, that we have inherited, we've written the vowels down according to that tradition. We're pretty sure that's wrong. And so in the margins, they have... So that's the ketiv, what is written, and in the margins, they would have a little qoph letter, and then under it, they would tell you how to pronounce it. And the idea there is basically read this way.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And if you looked through all of them, some of it's phenomenally tedious, but there's some fascinating changes where they've got universal qeres, where every time this word appears, you're not going to read it according to the vowels in the text. You're going to read it according to these other vowels.

Dan Beecher Huh.

Dan McClellan And some of them are euphemistic, like you're replacing the word in the text with another word so that you're not saying something that they didn't.

Dan Beecher It's like when autocorrect tells me I'm trying to use the word done.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Or for anybody who's gone to any kind of literary or historical graduate program, you've probably had Word fill your papers with the word periscope when you're like, "I meant pericope."

Dan Beecher Right. You dummies don't know what a pericope is. So- I'm a dummy, and I don't know what a pericope is either, so there you go.

Dan McClellan It's a fancy way to say a story.

Dan Beecher Okay. Well, then just say story is what- No ... is what Microsoft Word wants you to say.

Dan McClellan You can't make me. But we have, and probably the most famous one of these Masoretes is the Ben Asher family. We have several generations of folks, and it's primarily hereditary. You grow up to go into the family business, which was Reading the Hebrew Bible and annotating it. Oh, and then the Masorah Magna. There's another collection of things at the bottom where they give notes on a completely separate text, where they go through and just have notes about where things are occurring, how many times things are occurring, what's weird, and that kind of stuff. So if you get a critical edition of the Hebrew Bible, like the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia or something like that, you will see all the cantillation marks, all the vowels, all the dagesim. You will see the Masorah Parva on one side. You will see the Masorah Magna on the bottom. So that's all being represented in critical editions of the Hebrew Bible. But the Ben Asher family is largely responsible for the Masoretic Text as we know it today, and there are a handful of manuscripts that are considered most authoritative. The critical editions of the Hebrew Bible, like the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, and now they're releasing in fascicles the Biblia Hebraica Quinta, which is the newer edition, and it's not even halfway done yet. But anyway, they're all based on a single manuscript known as the Leningrad Codex.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And this codex contains every single word of the Hebrew Bible. It is a complete manuscript, and it dates to about 1008 or, 1008. It dates to about 1008 or 1009 CE.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And this is kind of the pinnacle of the Masoretic project.

Dan Beecher Which is the end point. You said that the Masoretes were sort of in operation from the 5th through the 10th century.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher This is sort of towards the end of that.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And in fact, I think scholars think it was probably transcribed in Egypt.

Dan Beecher Oh, wow.

Dan McClellan And so, it was probably the tail end. Maybe somebody else was picking up the scrabble football and running with it. But there are a couple manuscripts that are older. One of them is the Aleppo Codex, which comes from about 100 years earlier, maybe 920-ish. And this was probably written in Tiberius, so this was probably was done by perhaps the Ben Asher family. And we have most of that, but a lot of the Pentateuch is missing or was destroyed. There are burn marks on a lot of parts of it. And just recently, within the last 10 or 20 years, somebody found some fragments from Genesis or Deuteronomy or something like that in their basement.

Dan Beecher Wow.

Dan McClellan That was identified as a part of the Aleppo Codex.

Dan Beecher Wow.

Dan McClellan But we're missing, I think, the majority of the Pentateuch, the first five books of Moses. And then just a few years ago, maybe within the last five years, there was a codex called Codex Sassoon, which was, I believe, auctioned off, and the auction house described it as the oldest witness to the Masoretic Text. It's supposed to be roughly contemporaneous with the Aleppo Codex. But there are a lot of scholars who are a little skeptical about the dating, that maybe the folks who dated it were just trying to make it a little sexier for the auction.

Dan Beecher I don't know. Did they not open it up to other scholars to verify that?

Dan McClellan I think there are others who have looked at it, which is why I think you have competing ideas about dating.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Let's see. It was sold at Sotheby's in May of 2023 for $38.1 million.

Dan Beecher Wow.

Dan McClellan So yeah. Check your basements, everybody.

Dan Beecher Yeah. If you have- Get your hands on a codex if you can.

Dan McClellan That's- If you have a piece of the Aleppo Codex or yeah ...

Dan Beecher some good tips.

Dan McClellan Yeah. So, this makes it the fourth most expensive book and manuscript ever sold.

Dan Beecher Wow.

Dan McClellan That's pretty cool.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So, the Masoretic Text is considered the authoritative version of the Hebrew Bible. This is what the Jewish Publication Society, which is, they produce a lot of Hebrew Bibles in Hebrew for use by Jewish folks. They also have a translation into English that is used in the Jewish Study Bible and the JPS commentary series. They all follow very closely the Leningrad Codex and the Masoretic Text. That's considered most authoritative by most Jewish communities. And so, this is the tradition that was returned to when Martin Luther goes to translate the Bible into German. He's like, "I'm not doing the Vulgate thing. We're not doing your Latin. We're going to go back to the Hebrew and the Greek." Because Erasmus had just put together the first couple editions of the Textus Receptus. He used that for the New Testament, but then he went and found an edition of the Masoretic Text from the 1400s or something like that, which was probably, if not directly descended from the Leningrad Codex, at least closely related to it.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan But yeah, it is a fascinating story. There has been so much research on that. We have some other manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible. They're not complete, but they are earlier than the Aleppo and the Sassoon and the Leningrad Codex that were discovered in what they call genizas. Have you ever heard of that word before?

Dan Beecher No.

Dan McClellan Geniza. So, the Cairo Geniza is probably one of the most famous genizas. And a geniza is a- It's basically the place where you discard holy texts within Judaism, because you don't just throw them out.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Because these are holy, and anciently, there were a variety of different ways they were discarded. But usually, there was a special room where you just had to put them. And so, if you discover a genizah, like jackpot.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan You just found the place where they discarded centuries and centuries of sacred texts.

Dan Beecher Right. And so- Although they were discarded for a reason, so they were probably already degraded or somehow in disrepair even.

Dan McClellan Well, usually, because their holy texts were expected to function at a very high level, it didn't take a whole lot for them- Okay ... to be like, "This holy text, no longer up to par."

Dan Beecher There's a dog ear on this codex. We're going to get rid of it.

Dan McClellan Stick it in the genizah. And so, the Cairo Genizah was discovered with just tons of texts, including fragmentary manuscripts from the early medieval period, with Isaiah and all that kind of stuff in it. And so, reconstructing the history of the Masoretic Text is a phenomenally complex thing to do.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan But is fascinating. But the short story is that we have these families, and I'm trying to remember the name of the main Ben Asher guy. I think his name was Aaron Ben Moses Ben Asher, was the leader of the group, and he's the one who kind of established the pattern and the system that was followed. And I think he was ninth century. So, the Aleppo, the Sassoon, the Leningrad codex are coming in the generations immediately after him.