Why Can't You Be Like Your Brother?

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

Which sounds great.

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

And I’m Dan Beecher.

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?

Things are going good. Just getting used to everything and enjoying a slightly different lifestyle. I’m all urban now, so that’s kind of fun.

You were just slightly suburban. Just leaning into suburban.

Yeah, yeah, leaning into it. I was. I was on. I was a. I was a suburb. I was urban, but suburbanizing. I was on. I was a cusp. And now I’ve fallen. I’m. I’m straight Downtown Julie Brown is what I am.

So there you go.

There you go. Today’s show is going to be fun. We got. We got a Who Dis? or Who That? I don’t know which one it is. But, yeah, we’re going to be talking about James, the brother of Jesus, which I think is fascinating and something that I’ve been confused about for a while. So I’m glad 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 Text. The Masoretic Text. I guess there’s only one or.

Well, that. That’s a long story. But we’ll get to it.

We’ll get to it. It’s the. It’s in the not too distant future.

But for now, Who Dat? Okay, so Who Dat? We’re. We’re in the. We’re. We’re in the New Testament, where apparently Jesus has a brother or. Or actually many brothers, as I’ve learned as I sort of went through the thing.

Ancestren and, and brethren, and sistren.

Yeah, he had. He has his big family. He has a prolific family.

They were Catholic, so.

Well, if they were, that poses a problem that we’re going to get to.

No, no.

But. But yeah, the. So let’s talk about James, the brother of Jesus.

All right. So. And. And one of the interesting things. I guess we can just do this disambiguation now, if as good a time as any.

There are. There are other Jameses in the New Testament. And in fact, there are, 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. James son of Alphaeus, one of the 12 disciples of Jesus, but almost, but, you know, there’s, we don’t really know anything about him. He’s just mentioned once. We got James the Less, which is an unfortunate epithet.

It just seems so mean is what it.

Yeah. Could we say something other than.

Can we just say that I’m short and not call me the less? Please.

Ho mikros is the, is the Greek. James the father of Jude the Apostle.

James the brother of Jude mentioned in the Epistle of Jude. Okay. So we got, we got a handful of Jameses there. There are Jimmy, James, Jimbo, Jim Bobs running all over the place.

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, not, not clear.

I, I, you know, as I was looking through this, it’s unclear. Like, like, I think some people purposefully further ambiguate them just to avoid certain theological problems that crop up 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.

So let’s talk about that. Because that’s not, that’s not necessarily the case. Like, it doesn’t, it’s not necessary that she remained a virgin. That was just a postulation, a postulate that was proposed and then a bunch of people ran with it.

Yeah. And I think you, I don’t think it comes directly from the Proto-Gospel of James , but you have this idea that she remained a virgin even after giving birth from the Proto-Gospel where the midwife is like, hang on a minute, I’m just gonna check to see if something is still intact.

Don’t touch that.

Yeah, God went a little MC Hammer on the midwife. And, 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.

Right.

And I think this arises because at the time, you know, there was a premium put on celibacy and on abstinence. Not just abstinence, but like, you know, full-time career abstinence. You are celibate 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 kind of a Platonic idea where, you know, you’re supposed to be a spiritual being. You’re supposed to overcome and transcend this ever-changing, corrupt, fleshly body. And you know, we see this in Matthew where the real ones are the ones who, you know, castrate themselves for the kingdom of heaven, those who make themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of God. We see this in Paul where he’s like, “I wish y’all were like me.” But you know, if you can’t hack it, then go ahead, get married so you can have occasional prophylactic and passionless intercourse.

Which sounds great.

Yeah. 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.

Right.

And so it was like, “Well, we’re not gonna 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 Protevangelium 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 all of these others. So that’s one of the rationalizations for that.

And when you say all of these others, I’m just going to quickly read from Matthew. What is it?

Matthew 13:55 .

Yeah. Where it talks… and this is a story, a very brief story that’s repeated in Mark, but in Matthew it says—I mean, 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 this not his mother called Mary? And are not his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and Judas?” I assume all different Simons and Judases. Like, these aren’t the Simons and Judases that we hear about, but… “And are not 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. And then…

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

So I’m starting to think it’s little wonder that Joseph’s first wife didn’t survive. Like suddenly that makes a lot of sense to me.

And in Matthew it says James and Joseph in Mark 6:3 . The Greek has Iosetos, which is usually transliterated into English as Joses.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Which is an unusual name, but in Matthew it’s Ioseph, so it’s Joseph.

Oh, interesting. So even in the Greek it is a different name.

Yeah. I’m going to look at the critical apparatus here to see if it’s different in other manuscripts. Yeah, it looks like even some manuscripts of Mark have Ioseph there and then several of them have Iose.

Oh, interesting.

And I’m guessing that, I mean, I’ve been looking at the NRSVUE. I’m guessing that some of the translations harmonize those so that they both say the same name.

The King James Version has Joses in Matthew as well. And I don’t know if that’s because of. Well, I guess I could just look that, that might be because the, the Textus Receptus read Joses. But let me pull up the Textus Receptus and see if, see what we have there. Joses. Joses. Yeah. So the Textus Receptus. So that is the later manuscript tradition that formed the, the source text for our, our earliest English translations.

Right.

Including the King James Version that reads Joses just like Mark. So it looks like we must have decided we had better manuscript witnesses to the name Joseph somewhere along the way.

Interesting.

All right, so anyway, that, that’s not the brother that we’re interested in though, right. Because it’s because James has a whole life of his own as a, as a, as a big time Christian.

He does. He and a lot of scholars think that he was basically the leader of the followers of Jesus who remained in Jerusalem up until around the Roman invasion and the siege. He was probably in charge there. You had, Paul was doing stuff out in, in Anatolia and elsewhere. Peter was probably also a leader nearby. But a lot of scholars suggest that James would have 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. Says, I think it starts around verse 18. Yeah. Then after three years, I did go up to Jerusalem to visit Kephas, which is Peter.

And stayed with him 15 days. But I did not see any other apostle except James, the Lord’s brother. So, so Paul knew James and Peter and they were both hanging out in, in Jerusalem and you know, it says James, the Lord’s brother. There are some folks who argue that this epithet, the Lord’s brother is really just and, and kind of an honorific. This is a person who was considered a follower of Jesus. And so you called your, your, the other fellow followers brother and sister. Similar to, you know, 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 there Paul has a habit of only referring. He like never refers to Peter as the Lord’s brother.

Right.

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

Yeah. I mean you say there’s not a case to make, but people still to

this, they will still make the case,

do make the case because again, they’re trying to solve the, the problem of the brotherhood of Jesus ruining, ruining the, the, the virginity of Mary. So yeah, so they’ll find. They, they. I, you know, I found a whole bunch of different ways that people especially in, I think it’s Eastern Christianity and also is. It does. Does Catholicism still want to hold to, to Mary’s perpetual, perpetual virginity?

Yeah, as far as I know. I, I am not going to speak for Catholics. This is something that we can ask Michael Peppard when we have him on the show because we have his book How Catholics Read the Bible or Approach the Bible. Right. Or what Encounter. What is the title again? How Catholics Encounter the Bible. Yes, that’s. And very purposefully he didn’t say read but encounter. So yeah, I, I think that’s very common. And yeah, there’s the data don’t really support it.

But we have. It looks like Herod Agrippa at some point chased Peter off, which would have left James to be the main authority who presides over the Council of Jerusalem, which we hear about in the Book of Acts . And, 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. 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, this person who took the high priesthood. And this is kind of all, you know, like palace intrigue style stuff. In this time period, the high priesthood was not necessarily hereditary. It was something, it was appointed by the Roman overlords.

And so while it could be hereditary, you could also have somebody who just comes in and pays more money. And then Rome says, hey you, you’re out. Hey you, you’re in. So it was considered corrupt by some folks.

go out of my way to not be childish when you say this guy’s name, the name of the guy that took over.

Well, how to pronounce it? How to pronounce it? Ananus ben Ananus. 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, I didn’t manage to get through it without being childish. I apologize.

Yeah, well, hey, that’s. And, and the, the Hebrew would have been Hanan ben Hanan.

Oh, well, that’s a lot better.

Yeah, yeah. So the, the ooze on the end is, is really just a, a relic of the transliteration into Greek and then Latin. Right? So yeah, so he’s, 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 Feldman or is this the Feldman? Oh, this is the Feldman translation. I thought this was. 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, or Albinus was but upon the road.

So he assembled the Sanhedrin of judges and brought them, or brought before them the brother of Jesus, who is called Christ, whose name was James. And this is. This is one of the two references to Jesus in Josephus.

Right?

And. 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, oh, what if we add Jesus here? Because Josephus is saying the brother of Jesus who is called Christ, and in this way is kind of dismissing the identification of Jesus as the anointed one. He’s saying 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 have happened around 62 CE. In other words, the cat’s away and so the mouse is gonna play and kill the enemies.

Right?

You know, as if. 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 by Hanan around 62 CE. And we can. But if we go look at other early Christian authors, Clement of Alexandria, Eusebius of Caesarea, who was good buddies with Emperor Constantine, Hegesippus or Hegesippus is another early Christian author. These folks insist that James was killed around 69 CE 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. The.

And the other accounts, if I’m, unless I miss my guess, would not have 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?

Contemporaneously? Josephus is writing about 30 years later, right? But is. Yeah, but he. He would have been. He would have been alive when this was going on. So he was. Was around during that time period. I. 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. I mean, why would you question it? I, and I don’t know if the tradition had become firmly implanted by, you know, we’re talking 2nd, 3rd, 4th century CE. So we’re not, 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, 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.

So there’s, 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 after James was gone. So, so that’s why scholars think, well, that’s why Matthew got one, 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’s, he goes by Levi in all the other gospels, but here he’s Matthew. So maybe he was like, I’m going to get my freaking name right in one of these. And, but, 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, right? And so you tag the, 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. 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.

Interesting.

Well, you’ve got a playoff.

Yeah, okay, that’s, I, I, I, I’ve got to check my fantasy league, but I think I’ve got, I think, I think I’ve got all of them. 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 book, the Epistle of James is so. Oy. Oh, I get away from that. Okay, talk to me about that. Oy.

Well, I don’t think there are scholars, many scholars anyway, who take seriously the notion that, that James was actually written by the brother of Jesus. Okay. Probably coming from, from much later, but there’s, I pulled up one of the 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, slash 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, is a great scholar who wrote the, the volume on James. And one, one of the interesting things is there’s a.

There’s been an argument about which James is. Is the Epistle of James actually attributed to. Is it James, the brother of Jesus, or is it somebody.

We’ve got a lot of Jameses. We’ve already established there’s a, there’s plenty of Jameses to choose from and they’re. Who knows that you could throw another James into the mix?

Yeah, well, there could be one we don’t know. And yeah, that’s always, it’s always an option. We always tend to want to side with the, the devil we do know. But like, you know, that’s like, like John the Revelator, the, the author of Revelation. People are like, we got, we got another John over here. We could just, you know, say this.

Make them the same John.

Yeah, they like. One of them is clearly very educated and the other one is clearly not. But let’s just say they’re the same John. I mean, who’s gonna know? Who’s gonna know?

But this. So, so the, so the Epistle of James, chapter one, verse one, starts with James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the twelve tribes in the dispersion. Greetings.

Yeah, so not, not making many claims there.

Right. Does not say names, James, brother of Jesus or anything like that. Yeah, says a servant of God and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Yeah. So the, I think the, the scholarly consensus is that this was, 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, and trying to sound like the brother of Jesus. But, but you can look for, you can look in the, the ICC, the International Critical Commentary, the discussion of authorship is, is long, it’s many pages. But there, and there’s one really interesting thing here. He’s got. Well, he concludes the authorship thing about 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 they tip the scale. So denying authorship by, by James, the brother of Jesus is, is what tips the scale.

Hence, this commentary adopts the thesis that James is a pseudepigraphon, as it were, a false writing. And then the, 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 like 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 150, 80 to 130, 57 to 62. So it’s, it’s like basically during James’s lifetime or way after James’s lifetime getting into like the second quarter of the second century CE.

Okay, so if I put it at, if, if I put the over-under at 100, are you going… Are you taking the over? You taking the under?

I, I personally would take the over.

Okay, interesting.

Yeah, I, I think the, I think overall the what they call the Catholic epistles—Peter, James, John, Jude—I think those are overwhelmingly probably second century.

And, and I think Second Peter is probably considered the last one written, which would be somewhere between 120 and 150 CE. And I wouldn’t be surprised. And, and also for the pastoral epistles, First and Second Timothy and Titus, those are probably also maybe first quarter of the second century. But the Johannine epistles, the Petrine epistles, the Jacobian epistle.

That’s this one. That’s the James.

Don’t stop, stop confusing us with, with names. Well, if you look, that’s, that’s because it’s Iakobos. Am I right?

It’s Iakobos. Yeah. That’s something I was going to point out. When you look at those names, like we look at Joseph versus Yosef.

In, in the Greek of Matthew and Mark, nothing says James in there. It says, it says Jacob in there, which is the origin of the name James, oddly enough.

And if you look at the epistle of James in Greek, it will be… it just says “kata” or it says the letter of Jacob. And, and this comes from Hebrew. And then when it goes into, into Greek it’s Iakobos and then into Latin is Iacobus.

And then you have a bunch of regional variations. You know, you get some rhotacization in some parts of, you know, some places you drop your r’s and you, you get a lot of variations and so Iacobus gets nasalized and becomes Iacombus. And then you, you drop the b and you get Iacomus. And that’s where you get Jacobo, which is a… I’ve known some Jacobos in Uruguay, for instance. That’s not an uncommon name in Spanish-speaking places.

Well, and Italian has the name Giacomo.

Giacomo, yeah. And then you also… that’s where Iago comes from.

Right.

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

Something, something involving a whale. Is that where you…

Yeah, it’s not anatomical in orientation, that, that particular name. But, but San Diego, Santiago, Chile… these are, these are variations on Saint James. And then you go from Iacomus and Iacomus to the c gets, gets dropped I think in French. And so we get like James. And then once we get the j, uh, in like the 17th century in English that becomes James as the name comes into English. So. And you know, you… In Spanish you get the Jaime and stuff.

Yeah, it’s interesting that we have both Jacob and James in our language and, yeah, they have, they have, you know, Diego and Jaime and all of these. Like, it’s interesting that, that various iterations still survive.

They get preserved.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, I, I looked at, when I was living over in England, I was like, I’m gonna do some heraldry and I went and looked at my family history and I’ve had like my mom has done a bunch of family history and, and we go back to at least the, the name McClellan goes back to the… There’s a MacLellan’s Castle in a lovely little town called Kirkcudbright in the Dumfries in Scotland. We’ve been there and… But I, I looked into all the variants on that name which comes from “son of the servant of Saint Fillan” is where McClellan originates. But like we have a, we have neighbors named the Gillilands and that is a variant.

Oh, wow. Oh, interesting.

Like there are, there are over a hundred different variants, forms of last names that derive from McClellan.

I thought you were going to go to like McClelland with a D. But no, you went Gilliland or whatever. Yeah, you went off the rails on that one.

Yeah, it, it’s, it is bananas.

But you know, and that’s what gives us Jacob and James. So yeah, you know, we, we’re living just a few houses down from each other and you wouldn’t even know it that they’re. They’re both descended from the exact same last name. Yeah. So, yeah, it is a peculiar little accident of linguistics and language and stuff like that. Yeah. So.

All right, well, I think. I think that wraps up the brother of Jesus as best we can. I’m fascinated. I. One wonders. There’s. There’s so many questions. Like, the more you dig into this stuff, the more, like, you get more questions than you get answers. And that’s kind of how all of this works. But, yeah, it’s a fun thing to explore it.

It is so interesting that of all the disciples that we know of from the New Testament, we have traditions about, you know, a bunch of them and. And most of those traditions are probably don’t have any truth to them, but there we. We seem to think we know an awful lot about James. And it’s so. It’s so fascinating that Josephus preserves that little reference to him. I don’t know where he’s like, oh, there was a dude named James. Yeah, his brother thought he was the Messiah and. 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. It is really about just point. Kind of an illustration of how much. Of how much this guy Ananus lived up to his namesake.

Right.

At least a mispronunciation of his namesake.

Yeah, exactly. All right, well, that’s it for that. Let’s move on to our. Our next segment. What is that,

by the way? Before you get into this? I got. I got dragged

through the.

Across. Raked across the coals. Because I mentioned the. What is that? I mentioned a Saturday Night Live skit about that.

Oh, yes.

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.

You. You were not raked across coals. You were gently corrected.

I was. I was. I’m just. I’m just gonna be dramatic about it because I think it’s funny that I was like. I think it’s. I’m pretty sure it’s the first season.

You were ways wrong, man.

I was way off. I was off by four whole years because Bill Murray wasn’t even part of the cast yet.

It feels shameful now. I feel like I. I feel like we may. We may need to give this whole thing up. All right, so the. So this week’s. What is that? Is what is it the Masoretic Text? Is that. What. What. What is that in.

All right, so the. So this week’s. What is that? Is what is it the Masoretic Text? Is that. What. What. What is that in.

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

But to begin back, you know, once the, the Hebrew Bible had been completed and you know, 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 kind of centers of strength of Judaism in late antiquity. You have some folks who are around the. Not in Judea, they’ve kind of fled Judea, but they’re further up north around the Galilee, for instance. And there are, 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 in the first few centuries of the Common Era, some kind of stops and starts with attempts to come up with vowel annotations. Way to, ways to add vowels to the, to the consonantal text.

Because it’s confusing. Right. There are, there are going to be words where a different vowel makes it a different word.

And not having that can cause like, you know, there are context clues and whatever, but it’s still, it’s still nice to know what vowel you’re supposed to have where.

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, is quite different from Biblical Hebrew. So it’s also helpful just to, for clarity so we know for sure what we’re looking at. But the, the different vowel systems and, and you know, 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, this, 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 Baale ha-Masora, which is.

Which would be lords or masters of the tradition.

And there is that like a title

that was bestowed upon them. These are, these are the keepers of the book. They are the lords and masters of the tradition. Sort of thing.

Yeah, something like that there. And then their. Their children are the. Became the masters of the universe. And we have. I hear they’re doing a live action version of that. By the way of He-Man. Masters of the universe.

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

But so between around the 5th and the 10th centuries CE we have these, these folks who are working in. 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. So. And. And it was anciently as well, but. And then they’re also working in places in. In Mesopotamia and they compiled. They put together this system and they come up with a couple of additions to the vocalization tradition. So they, they come up with these dots, 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.

Is supposed to help you understand what words go with what other words and how to aid in. In reading it out loud and particularly like chanting or singing from it. And then they also.

This is, this is what the cantor in. In a. In a synagogue does is. Yeah, sing the thing. So it’s, it’s. Was there sort of a musical notation to that or was it just to help you sort of understand like how to string the words together or what.

Usually the, the cantillation marks occur on the stressed syllable of the word. So the accented syllable. And usually they were intended to. To indicate if you should be connecting one word with another word or. And I’m not an expert on the cantillation system. 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.

And, and then I apologized many times for that. Dan. 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 Masorah Magna or the large and small Masorah. And these are the Masora Parva or the, the short Masora goes on the, in the margins of the manuscript. And these are little abbreviations that indicate where, you know, 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 then the margins, they would have a little Qof letter, and then under it, they would tell you how to pronounce it.

And the idea there is basically read this way and, and, you know, you. If you looked through all of them, some of it’s phenomenally tedious, but there’s some fascinating changes where they’ve got, like, universal Qeres where every time this word appears, you’re not going to read it according to the vowels in the text.

It’s like when autocorrect tells me I’m trying to use the word duck.

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

Right.

You dummies don’t know what a pericope is.

So I’m a dummy. And I don’t know what it is either. So there you go.

It’s a fancy way to say a story.

Okay, well, then just say story is what, is what Microsoft Word wants you to say.

You can’t make me. But we have. And, and probably the most, the most famous one of these, these Masoretes is the Ben Asher family. We have several generations of folks, and it’s primarily hereditary. You know, you, you grow up to, to go into the family business, which was reading the Hebrew Bible and annotating it. Oh, and. And then the Masorah Magna, the one. There’s another collection of things at the bottom where they give notes on a completely separate text where they kind of 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 dageshim. You will see the Masora Parva on one side, you will see the Masorah Magna on the bottom. So that’s, 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, that are considered most authoritative the, the critical editions of the Hebrew Bible like the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia. And now they’re, they’re releasing in fascicles the Biblia Hebraica Quinta or Quinta, which is the, the newer edition. And, and it’s not even halfway done yet. But anyway, they’re all based on a single manuscript known as the Leningrad Codex. 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.

And, and this is kind of the, the pinnacle of, of the Masoretic project,

which is about which, which is the end point. You, you said that the Masoretes were sort of in operation from the 5th through the 10th century. So, yeah, this is, this is in, in the sort of towards the end of that.

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

Oh, wow.

And so it, yeah, was, was probably the tail end. Maybe somebody else was picking up the, the scribal 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 920ish. And this was probably written in Tiberias. So this was probably a part of it was, was done by perhaps the, the Ben Asher family. And we have most of that. But a lot of the Pentateuch is missing or was destroyed. Like there are burn marks on, on a lot of parts of it. And, and just recently, like within the last 10 or 20 years, somebody found some fragments from Genesis or Deuteronomy or something like that in their basement that was identified as, as a part of the Aleppo Codex. But we’re missing, I think the majority of, of the Pentateuch, the first five books of Moses.

And then just, just a few years ago, like maybe within the last five years, there was a Codex called Codex Sassoon, which was I believe, auctioned off. And the, 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, the dating that maybe the, the folks who dated it were just trying to make it a little sexier for, for the, for the auction

did not open it up to other scholars to, to verify that.

I think there are others who have looked at it, which is why I think you have competing ideas about dating. Let’s see, it was sold at Sotheby’s in May of 2023 for $38.1 million.

So, yeah, check your basements, everybody.

Yeah. Get your hands on a codex if you can.

You have a piece of the Aleppo Codex or.

Yeah, some good.

Yeah. So this, it makes it the fourth most expensive book and manuscript ever sold. So. Wow, that’s pretty cool. So the, the Masoretic Text is considered the authoritative version of the Hebrew Bible. This is what, like the Jewish Publication Society, which is, they produce a lot of Hebrew Bibles in Hebrew for use by, by Jewish folks. They also have a translation into English that is used in like the, 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, by most Jewish communities. And, 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. And 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.

But yeah, it is, it is a fascinating story. There has been so much research on that. We have some, we’re. We have some other manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible. They’re not complete, but they are earlier than the, like the Aleppo and the Sassoon and the Leningrad Codex that were discovered in what they call genizas. Have you ever heard of the. That word before? Geniza. So the Cairo Geniza is probably one of the most famous genizas. And the geniza is a. Is basically the place where you discard holy texts within Judaism because you’re not, you don’t just throw them out.

Right.

Because these are holy. And anciently there were a variety of different ways they were discarded, but usually you just had to. There was a special room where you just had to put them. And so, you know, if you discover a geniza, like jackpot, right? You just, you just found the place where they discarded centuries and centuries of sacred text.

Right? And so although they were discarded for a reason, so they were probably already degraded or somehow in disrepair.

Well, usually the. It was, you know, because their holy texts were expected to function at a very high level. It didn’t take a whole lot for them to be like this holy text no longer up to par.

There’s a dog ear on this codex

we’re gonna get rid of, stick it in the geniza. And so the Cairo Geniza was discovered with, you know, just tons of, of texts, including fragmentary manuscripts from the early medieval period with, you know, Isaiah and all that kind of stuff in it. And, and so there, there’s a long. Reconstructing the history of, of the Masoretic Text is, is a phenomenal, phenomenally complex thing to do. Yeah, but is fascinating. But the, the short story is that we have these families and, and I, I’m trying to remember the name of the, the main Ben Asher guy. I think his name was Aaron Ben Moses. Ben Asher was like the leader of, of the group and he’s the one who kind of established the pattern and the, the system that was followed. And he, I think he was 9th century. So the Aleppo, the Sassoon, the Leningrad Codex are coming in the generations immediately after him.

And they’re the ones that kind of set the standard for now.

Now I know that Maimonides did was a Ben Asher guy. I’m a Ben Naftali guy. That’s just me. It’s just my own personal feeling. But. But yeah, I’m guessing that that, there was a, that, that, that, that endorsement for Maimonides probably sealed the deal for Ben Asher.

It was, it was definitely incredibly influential. But I think he would have been okay without, without the, the Maimonides deal. But yeah, there, there is. You do have. You know, it wasn’t just. Wasn’t just one guy who, who, you know, exercised unilateral authority. There were, there were other folks who were in the same game, and so there were other traditions. They weren’t the only game in town, but they were the best. But yeah, Maimonides was, was definitely a stan.

Now the, the, the Masoretic Text, it’s, it’s the Tanakh, right? It’s the, the Hebrew Bible.

It’s the full Hebrew Bible Tanakh, which is a, an acronym that has Torah, Neviim, Ketuvim. So the law, the prophets and the writings.

Right. It. Does it differ from what we see in like, you know, a modern Christian Bible in terms of. I, I know we’ve talked some about how some. Sometimes the Jewish text puts the, the books in a different order.

So yeah, there, there will be a different order in Christian versions because the, the Christian order of the, the canon, like, puts Malachi last because that’s the, the most convenient segue into the New Testament because you’ve got this, you know, you’ve got Elijah and then you’ve got the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord, and then you’ve got Matthew, which goes into the birth of the Messiah. So it’s this convenient transition. And then the. I’m pretty sure the Leningrad Codex follows the traditional Jewish order, which ends with Second Chronicles, which is a passage about how King Cyrus sends everybody back and there’s hope for restoration. And so the Jewish canonical order kind of ends with this hope for restoration and the return of the Jewish people in the Jewish nation.

And so, yeah, there’s, there are differences in that regard. And usually translations that you see of the Hebrew Bible, if you’ve got a Christian translation, it’s going to more regularly fill in gaps in our understanding or replace things using like the Septuagint, the Ancient Greek translation. Whereas if you look in a JPS translation of the Tanakh, they’re a lot more strictly going to stick to the Masoretic Text.

What’s JPS? I don’t know.

Oh, sorry. The Jewish Publication Society. Okay. That I talked about earlier, that publishes the, the Tanakh. They’re, they’re going to programmatically stick with the, with the Masoretic Text. And so they’re not going to d. They’re not going to diverge from it unless they absolutely have to. Right. So. So they’re a little more faithful to it in, in that regard. And, you know, they won’t, they’ll say like, you know, we got some Dead Sea Scrolls that say something else here, but a Christian translation is usually going to fiddle with the text with a lot more liberty and so make changes, make a lot more changes here and there, although that, it’s more of a spectrum. It depends on what kind of publication you’re looking at, what kind of translation you’re looking at.

So there you go.

Yeah. And. Yeah, and you can get the, you can get a PDF of the entire Leningrad Codex online pretty easily.

You know, it’s public domain.

So I got a guy, I got come to come to the back room. I got a guy, he’ll get you the whole, the whole Leningrad thing.

And, and the interesting thing about. Well, one of the many interesting things about the Leningrad Codex is the, what’s called the carpet page, which is like an illuminated page in, in a manuscript toward the front has the Star of David on it, which is frequently something that like it. It’s found within Judaism going back to like the 1st century CE and maybe into like the 5th century BCE depending on how you reconstruct some, some iconography. But a lot of people don’t think it was used as a religious symbol until the modern era. But you do have a, a Star of David front and center on the, the carpet page of the Leningrad Codex.

Interesting. Okay, well, there you go.

Some text written inside it. And then I, I think even the, the edges of the, the star are written text.

Oh, cool.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m looking at it right now and, and yeah, if you zoom in, you can see that. Yeah, it’s all that. Yeah, that’s really interesting.

Neat. All right. Yeah, we should talk about the Star of David at some point. That’s a fast. That’s a fascinating idea in and of itself.

All right, well, that’s it for the show today. Thanks everybody for joining us. If you would like to become a part of making this show go. Keeping us alive, keeping us around. If you want to support us, you can go to patreon.com/dataoverdogma and there you can get an access to an early and ad free version of every episode as well as potentially the, the after party, which is Dan and I just shooting the breeze, answering patron questions and having a good time. So definitely check that out.

Bye, everybody.

Why Can't You Be Like Your Brother?

Segments

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology