On “The Brother of Jesus and the Lost Teachings of Christainity” by Jefery Butz ****

This biography of Just James, while fairly succinct, seems to cover most of the current research on the subject (at least through 2005). I was initially a bit skeptical of Butz's book, especially as in his preface, he pointed out how much he respects the work of Robert Eisenman, whose biography of James may qualify as one of the longest ever but is also one of the most kooky. But Butz doesn't quite try to tie James in with the Dead Sea Scrolls and make claims that the entire original Christrian movement was actually some kind of Essene movement revolved completely around Jesus's family and that it had only ever aimed at being some kind of worldly Jewish Messiah, though in some ways he comes close.

What I like about what Butz does is that he doesn't quite go so radically far. Rather, he tries to reclaim James and the early Christian movement as part of Judaism, and while he does fall into the common Protestant and often secular point of view that James and Paul were at cross-purposes, which colors many of the insights he manages to provide, he does still manage to show just how important James was to early Christians and how that early movement was signficantly Jewish in form and nature. (Plenty of newer works call into question the antinomial Paul who created some kind of new movement that had little in common with what Jesus actually taught.)

Some of the interesting insights include a correction of the common idea that James and the rest of Jesus's family did not support Jesus during his physical life—that is, that they were not convinced of his ministry until after his resurrection. Some of this interpretation comes from the way we have read certain scriptures out of context, and some has to do with how later generations want to portray Jesus. Butz argues, fairly convincingly, that the family probably had connections to Jesus's ministry well before his resurrection.

Butz also shows how James fit within Judaism, and while claims that James was a Pharisee seem a bit too far out to be believed to me, there is a case to be made that in many ways the early Christian movment had much in common with Pharisaism—and in that way, James, Paul, Jesus, and the whole lot would have been a kind of offshoot.

The book ends with a call to unite the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian faiths through a degree of compromise. It's not a strong ending to me, insofar as I don't think things like divinity of Jesus are really up for debate between the faiths. But the push to remind people of how Christainity started in Judaism is a worthy enterprise.

On “Polycarp and Paul” by Kenneth Berding ***

This is one of two books that I've been reading that are essentially a list or study of a given author's sources. Such does not make for very compelling reading, though no doubt it has some value to those looking to learn more about a particular person, and given that we don't really know that much about Polycarp, the second-century bishop of Smyrna, it's probably about the most one could hope from a book-length work on the guy that isn't just a rehash of well-known facts in large print.

Berding studies Polycarp's one surviving work—his letter of the Philippians. Among facts I learned is the theory that the letter is in fact two letters that were subsequently merged. In this idea, which Berding shares with others, Chapters 13 or chapters 13 and 14 are one letter, while the rest of the letter consists of chapters 1-12. Why the idea? Because the latter part doesn't seem to have much to do with the earlier part. It is in the latter part that Polycarp discusses Ignatius, and it was likely a cover letter for the Ignatian letters. The former part is a discourse on righteousness, which seems an odd thing to attach as part of a cover letter to other letters. This discourse was likely written in response to a request for such a document. As such, Polycarp modeled much of his work on Paul's own statements about the subject.

Typically, Polycarp has been dismissed as a theological lightweight. After all, mostly all he does is heavily sort of quote other sources; he doesn't really bring a lot of his own thoughts to the discussion. But Berding shows that this ability to allude to others and so fully actually would have shown one's astuteness at the time that Polycarp was writing; brains were not coming up with something original but imitating well what had been stated before. At this, Polycarp excelled.

Perhaps one of the most useful aspects of Berding's study is the tracking of Polycarp's citations to Paul's letters to Timothy, to which he alludes heavily and often in the context of other Pauline writings, suggesting that Polycarp considered 1 and 2 Timothy to have been written by Paul, contra the many modern critics who dismiss the work as pseudo-epigraphic. The fact also that he quotes from what would come to be the New Testament letters frequently as authoritative as if he were quoting from the Old Testament or the sayings of Jesus suggests that he saw such works as near canonical. Berding further suggests that Polycarp is not as intense regarding the near-term return of Jesus as Paul usually is, suggesting also the gradual bigger focus on present conditions of the Christian.