LETTERS BY OTHER WRITERS
One thing that is worth mentioning at this point: the letters of Paul are clearly what might be called internal documents of the Christian community: writings that were intended for people who were already believers. But one of the things they reveal, even at this early stage, was the need for an external document for people who were not yet Christians, because the oral preaching was not by any means uniform, and (if Paul is to be believed) was distorting the facts, often for the sake of financial gain or power on the part of those who were "delivering the proclamation."
I think that this was one of the functions of the Reports of the Good News; but we will get to that shortly. Let us now look at the other letters, to see if what Paul was reporting was an aberration, or whether it is consistent with what the others were also saying.
First, the letter of James. Many say that this was not written by James, but by someone else (an Alexandrian Jew) "as from" James, in the same way as, for example, the book of Wisdom was written "as from" Solomon, though it must have been written years later. There is also a good body of opinion that this letter dates from the next century, and not somewhere around sixty to seventy, when I think it was written. As to the date, it says a great deal about the fact that faith without works is dead. For example, "Consider it this way: Suppose I say, 'You have faith, and I have actions. You show me your faith without any actions, and I will show you my faith from my actions. You believe that there is only one God. Fine. Devils believe that too, and cower."
This is clearly a response to what we find in the letter of Paul to Galatia, the first letter to Corinth and the letter to Rome, where Paul insists that actions don't make a person virtuous any more; only faith in Jesus as the Prince does. Now Paul also says in those letters that the faith spills over into actions, even (though not emphatically) in the letter to Galatia ("In Jesus the Prince circumcision has no force, and neither does having a foreskin; the only thing that matters is faith that acts through love.") It is also clear from the letter to Corinth that the faith doesn't allow you to do what the Law forbids; and so it implies actions; but what is clear is that the Corinthians were misinterpreting Paul's teaching as if it implied that all you had to do was have faith and you could do whatever you pleased.
Now when would a letter with a content like James's be written? When this doctrine of Paul had been around for sixty or seventy years, and when it had been discussed and interpreted by the community, or when it was a "hot topic," and when it was controversial, and when the qualification that "faith without works is dead" would have to be stressed? Further, the reference in it to Abraham and his works is again a reference to the letter to Galatia's (or the one to Rome's) stress on the fact that Abraham was considered to be virtuous "because he believed." It is definitely a response to one or other of those two letters; and the time to respond to a letter is at the beginning, when it is being circulated. I would incline to place it shortly after the letter to Galatia, because the letter to Rome makes it clear that Paul was not trying to say that faith gave one a license to do wrong, and so faith in his sense implied actions.
Not to make a long story of this, as I said in the introduction to the letter in The New Testament: An Idiomatic Translation, the most reasonable hypothesis is that this letter was written after Paul's letter to Galatia, but before his letter to Rome, since the letter to Rome does two things: First, it concedes that faith and works are inseparable (that's the point of the early part of the letter); but secondly, it takes up precisely James's "refutation" of the Abraham example by saying:
"But if this is true, what about Abraham, our natural forefather? If Abraham became virtuous because of what he did [which is James's contention], then he at least has something to be proud of. But he doesn't, as far as God is concerned. Why else does Scripture say, 'Abraham believed God, and this was taken to be his virtue'? But if a man does a job, his wages are not 'taken to be' something, as if they were a gift, they are something he earns. It is when a person has done nothing, and simply believes in the one who makes virtuous people out of godless ones, that his belief is 'taken to be' his virtue."
It would be completely silly for James to have written his letter after this, because it refutes the very reason he used the example in his letter. So the fact that Paul clarifies himself and says that, while "faith," (i.e. actually, God's grace) is what produces "virtue," a sign of whether one has faith or not is the works that one does. See my introduction to the letter to the Romans for a bit of an expansion on this.
Anyhow, this means that the most reasonable date for the letter would be some time after 57 and before Paul's letter to Rome, or before 60 or so.
Was the author James, the Master's relative? Why not? The tone of the letter is that of a Jew who doesn't seem to be much in touch with the teaching of Jesus. The assumption is that this lets James out, because after all, he was Jesus' relative, and so had to be a Galilean. Well no, not necessarily. We must remember that this James was not either of the Jameses that were members of the original Twelve, because in the Reports (written later than Paul's letters) those Jameses are identified by who their father was, Zebedee and Alpheus, and neither of them are called relatives of the Master, while Paul and others refer to this James as "the Master's relative." Secondly, this word adelphos, which is usually translated "brother," means, as I said, "a close relative," and can just as easily be a cousin.(1)
It is perfectly possible for Jesus to have had a cousin who became a Christian only after Jesus' death, and who might very well have lived a good part of his life in some place like Alexandria. Or even if he didn't, he could have been a person who had cosmopolitan interests and was perhaps even embarrassed (like the relatives John speaks of) by this crackpot carpenter-preacher--until he found out after Jesus death what the facts of the matter were. In that case, he would not have known about what Jesus' teaching was during his lifetime, and would only have found out about it like everyone else, after Jesus' death.
Finally, if the letter was in fact written reasonably close to Paul's relevant letters, it is very unlikely that it was written "as from" James. Why impersonate someone who was around to deny authorship?
But the important point is what the letter says. Again, it is anything but the sayings of Jesus, and is really full of Jewish natural-law morality, but with an emphasis on brotherly love. And this is just what you would expect believers to be clamoring for at this point. "All right, we believe, and so we've been rescued. But now how are we supposed to live our lives?" It is also interesting that there is a heavy emphasis on caring for the poor, which recalls another part of Paul's letter to Galatia:
"And when they recognized--these respected pillars, by the way, were James, Cephas, and John--the gift that had been given to me, they shook hands with me and Barnabas and made us partners; we were to go to the Gentiles, and they to the circumcised. The only thing we were told was to keep the poor in mind--which was just what we had been careful to do."
James, note, was one of the ones who wanted Paul to be concerned about the poor. But in this internal document, obviously addressed to believers, we find no analysis of the meaning of the more esoteric statements of Jesus--evidently because, whenever this letter was written, the meaning of what Jesus said was not the important issue. Then what was distinctive about Christianity? You find nothing in this letter; as so many commentators have mentioned, it could easily have been a document from Judaism that some Christian copied and just attributed to James. For that matter, it could have been written by a Buddhist.
If we look at the first letter of Peter, it seems to me silly to say that it wasn't written by Peter, even if it weren't so well attested by ancient witnesses. In the first place, if the character of Peter is anything like what all the evangelists report, it would be very unlikely that he wouldn't undertake an official letter. In the second place, the elegant style is easily explained in the letter itself, where Peter acknowledges the help of Sylvanus. Third, the persecution doesn't place the letter late, not even for being "Christians." According to Acts, the Christians got that name early on in Antioch, and even the first letter to Thessalonica indicates that persecutions precisely for being Christian were rampant from the very beginning. True, it was not a formal crime to be a Christian until considerably later, but that would be small comfort to those who were persecuted for what they were without its being against the law. Nor does the fact that chapter 3, for instance, is almost an echo of Paul's letters to Colossae and "Ephesus" in how wives are to treat their husbands and vice versa indicate that it isn't by Peter. Granted, Peter and Paul had a run-in, where Paul "told him to his face that he should be ashamed of himself," but this doesn't mean that Peter hated Paul and wasn't ready to listen to him. Incidentally, this copying from someone else is also something that crops up in the second letter; and why shouldn't the first Pope use information from his leading Theologians when he wants to make a point? Of course, in those days before radical individualism, plagiarism was not considered evil; if anything, those plagiarized probably regarded it as a compliment.
In any case, the letter's intent is not by any means to explore the significance of what Jesus said, but to encourage people shocked by the fact that they are suffering great torment, not because they did anything wrong, but simply because they believed in Jesus. This, in fact, must have been a severe blow to the faith of many "Princists" from the very beginning. "Why on earth are people killing us just because we think Jesus came back to life to save us from our sins? How does this hurt them? And why is God allowing this to happen?"
When you think about it, it is very odd that a belief in someone's coming back out of the grave, so similar to many of the pagan legends, should unleash such a virulent response. It is easy enough to see why the Jews would hate the Christians, but not why the pagans would--except in the sense that Luke talks about in Ephesus, that Jesus was supplanting Artemis as the real God. And that must have been it. The pagans couldn't stomach the idea that Jesus wasn't just an addition to the pantheon, but that those who accepted him as the god held that there really weren't any others. And what was behind this, of course, is that the Christians held that Jesus really was God in the sense of "factually real," not in what you might call a "religious" sense (almost an aesthetic sense) of "real." In any case, the early Christians couldn't fathom what caused the pagans to detest them so; they were good citizens, obeying the emperor; they just wanted to be left alone, as Paul makes clear in the first letter to Timothy.
Peter's answer, interestingly enough, is to link what they are going through with the crucifixion of Jesus himself--exactly what one would expect if the thesis of this investigation is true. Beyond that, the letter is, as I said, a reiteration of Pauline moral teaching.
So once again we have internal documents that deal precisely with the implications in believing in Jesus the resurrected wonder-worker, in the face of an environment which not only regards this as silly, but as somehow subversive because, apparently, it is alleged to be factual, and therefore needing to be crushed.
The letter of Jude is generally regarded as having been written in the next century, but I think it was also written around this time--that is to say, before 70--by the Judas who also was a relative of Jesus (Mark mentions both James and Judas as Jesus' relatives). Note that James, above, does not call himself the relative of Jesus, but his slave, and this author doesn't either, though he does call himself "the slave of Prince Jesus and relative of James." It is interesting that, if either of these were written "as from" those people who were related to Jesus, the authors chose to be modest about the attribution, to such an extent that it almost defeats the purpose of putting the name there, given that there were so many Jameses and Judases that were among Jesus' original followers and relatives. If you were writing pseudonymously, a century later, why pick someone so obscure for the one the letter purported to be from? The "apocryphal Gospels" chose "authors" like Andrew, Thomas, Peter, Barnabas, Paul (the "Revelation of Paul") and so on. True, there is a "Gospel of Thaddeus," who, of course, is the Judas who was the Emissary of Jesus--and who doesn't seem to be this one. It is far more likely that these cousins of Jesus would be aware that everyone at this early date would know who they were, and were not anxious to stress their blood relationship with someone they regarded as God Almighty. Put yourself in the place of one of them, about to identify yourself as a letter-writer. Would you call attention to the fact that you were the Master's cousin?
Again, the "foreign" air about this letter and its use of the Book of Enoch (which, of course, is not canonical) can easily be due to the fact that these cousins weren't just peasants from Nazareth, but perhaps Jesus' well-to-do relations who had extensive dealings in a place like Alexandria.
What this letter deals with is "an infiltration by some individuals--predicted in Scripture long ago for this crucial moment--who are irreverent people intent on turning the blessings of God inside out into a license for sex, and denying that Prince Jesus is our only Lord and Master." Some say that this clearly makes the letter late, but we have an indication that similar things were going on from the second letter of Paul to Corinth and the letter to Philippi. The fact that this developed into a full-blown heresy in the second century doesn't prove that it wasn't there from the very beginning, and that members of the earliest communities had to be carefully warned against it. Nor does the reference to the "Emissaries of our Master Prince Jesus" make the letter late, because if the author was the Judas who was the relative of Jesus, he wasn't one of the original twelve who had been picked by Jesus as his emissaries and who heard what Jesus said before he died.
Whoever the author, however, and whenever it was written, it is still the case that what we find in yet another of the documents addressed to those who already believe is that they should beware of people who are trying to "interpret" Christianity into a kind of "meaningful" system that will allow them "to take their irreverent feelings as their guides." So it is precisely the people who are trying to figure out the "meaningfulness" of what Jesus said that are the ones you have to watch out for--exactly the opposite of what you would expect if the events surrounding Jesus' life were legendary and the profound statements were the important thing.
The second letter of Peter is so universally recognized as late that I put down my view here with some diffidence. No early witness mentions it. Stylistically, it is more awkward than the first letter, the author stresses being an eye-witness at the transfiguration, it contains a re-write into worse prose of almost the whole of Jude's letter (which clearly makes it later than that letter), and there is the warning at the end to be careful not to misinterpret Paul's letters (because "in them there are some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and insecure people twist to their ruin, just as they do with the rest of what has been written.")
But I think it was written by Peter. First of all, I detect the same somewhat pompous personality beneath both of them--a personality consistent with what we know of Peter's character from the Reports. Secondly, both indulge in incorporation of other writings, somewhat revised and unattributed, into the letter. The difference in style is easily explainable by the help of Sylvanus in the first. It is easy to picture the shock of the author of the first letter after getting back Sylvanus's copy-editing of what he doubtless regarded as deathless prose, and his vow never to let that happen again. Thirdly, if Paul's letters had not been collected until after Peter's death (in 67), they certainly were circulating before then; Peter himself had to have a copy of the letter to Colossae in order to write his first letter.
But what tips the scale for me is precisely what makes most people think that the letter was not written by Peter: the reference to the transfiguration. Here is the passage:
"You see, we were not retelling 'meaningful' legends when we informed you about the power and presence of our Master Prince Jesus; we saw his magnificence with our own eyes. When, for instance, he had taken on himself from God the Father honor and glory, and the voice reverberated down to him from the glory of the Grandiloquent, 'This is my Son, the one I love, in whom I am pleased,' we heard this voice resound out of the sky while we were with him on the holy mountain.
"So we possess more solidly the prophetic utterances, which you would do well to make your own to be a lamp shining in a dark place until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts. Above all, be aware of the fact that no prophetic writing is a matter of personal interpretation; no prophesy ever comes from the choice of a human being; it always comes from a person's being led by the Holy Spirit to speak from God.
T"here used to be, however, false prophets in the people, just as there will be false teachers among you, who will insinuate disastrous 'selections among the facts,' [that, by the way, is what the Greek "heresy" means] even to repudiating the Owner who purchased them, and will bring on themselves swift ruin."
And so on, following the letter of Jude.
Now I have heard people defend this as the kind of thing a second-century writer would say if he were writing "as if" from Peter. But in the context of Christianity, where the "religious" sense of "real" is precisely what the Christians are denying, and shedding their blood because they are denying, then to have someone come along and say, "This is not legend; I, who am writing to you, saw this with my own eyes," is simply a lie, if he didn't actually see it, and is writing "as if" from someone who did see it.
This is the whole issue. Did Jesus do these fantastic things or not? If not, as Paul said, belief in him is a waste of time, "and we turn out to be perjurers because we swear to you it did happen." Now Paul himself couldn't say he saw these things; he wasn't there. But Peter could. So if this letter was late, it undercuts the whole point of Christianity, because it says that you should believe things "as if from" an eyewitness when it isn't an eyewitness who is writing this.
That is, you simply can't judge these writings as similar to other ancient writings if they were trying (as I have been attempting to prove) to show the actual factuality of the events related. The similarity to the other writings is only superficial; the whole point of the Christian writings is vitiated if they are "meaningful legends"; and they are at pains to say, over and over again, that this is precisely what they are not. And yet that very protest makes moderns who "project themselves back to the times" think even more firmly that that is what they are. But really. This is making them rather devious and disngenuous, it seems to me. And what else could the authors do to dispel this notion than what they have in fact done? Such a line of thinking poisons the wells.
Another thing which makes people think the letter is late is toward its end, in this passage: "I have tried to waken memories in your vulnerable minds, and call again to your attention the holy prophets' predictions and the commandment of the Master and Savior that came through his Emissaries: first of all, to have you realize that during the final age, cynics will come along with their ridicule and say, motivated by their own desires, 'Where is the promise of his being with you?'"
But look at what Jude says: "My friends, remember the predictions of the Emissaries of our Master Prince Jesus, when they said, 'In the final age, there will be insolent people who take their irreverent feelings as their guides.' These are the people who are splitting you apart; they are animals, and have no Spirit."
Why would Peter, the chief Emissary, refer to the Emissaries? Because Jude, from whom he was copying, did. So if Peter is the author, there is a simple explanation. It isn't so easy, however, to explain why a pseudonymous author would resort to such obvious plagiarism. Think: you are a writer in the second century, obviously wanting people to think that you are Peter writing a century earlier, because you stick in that reference to the transfiguration. Why, in the first place, would you then simply lift what was in an already extant, circulating letter and embellish it a little? And in the second place, if you put in the transfiguration episode to establish who you were, would you then slip up and refer to the Emissaries as if you weren't one? Are authors really that careless?
As to the fact that people of the time didn't mention this letter, I think this can be explained by a kind of embarrassment in the community. Greeks were very style-conscious (as Paul shows in the second letter to Corinth), and this letter is so obviously trying to be "literary" and so obviously falling flat on its face. There is also the fact that it doesn't really say all that much that Jude didn't already say; and a community that had Jude in hand would wonder what to do with this other letter--though, if it was by Peter, they couldn't very well just throw it away.
For these reasons, then, I think the letter was written by Peter, shortly before he died (as he intimates in the letter itself). Given that, there are a couple of things that are instructive for us.
First of all, there is the transfiguration passage that I quoted above. If this was in fact written by Peter, then what he is doing is the same thing that Paul was doing in the first letter to Corinth: stressing the fact that this is not something "religiously true," which would be compatible with the bones of Jesus still being in his grave, but something which I myself saw with my own eyes. This is the kind of thing we would expect if Christianity dealt with the factuality of fantastic events in the face of an age which was simultaneously skeptical and willing to accept such stories as myths.
Secondly, there is precisely the warning to the believers not to be taken in by people who are turning Christianity into a mythology, a tendency that gets stronger the farther away one is from the actual events themselves.
Thirdly, there is the little variation Peter makes on Jude's statement of the "predictions of the Emissaries." Instead of talking about their irreverent feelings and that they are animals and so on, Peter goes on this way:
". . .savior that came through his Emissaries: first of all to have you realize that during the final age, cynics will come along with their ridicule and say, motivated by their own desires, "Where is the promise of his being with you? From the time 'the fathers fell asleep' everything has stayed just as it was from the beginning of creation." They choose not to notice that a sky existed from time immemorial and an earth too, which was formed out of water and by water from God's pronouncement--by which the world that then existed was destroyed by being deluged by water; and the present heavens and earth are by the same pronouncement stored up for fire, and kept for the day of judgment and the doom of irreligious people.
"And do not let this escape your notice, friends: that for the Master, one day is like a thousand years and a thousand years are the same as one day. The Master is not wasting time keeping his promise, the way some accuse him of wasting his time; he is showing patience toward you, since his will is not for some to be destroyed; it is for everyone to move toward a change of thinking."
Some say that this is another indication that the letter is late. But let us say that it was written in the mid sixties, some forty years (a whole generation) after Jesus died. Since we saw from the first letter to Thessalonica, sixteen years before this, that the people were obviously expecting Jesus to return any minute, is it too soon to have the scoffers come forward and taunt the "Princists" with, "Well, where is this Prince of yours that you keep waiting for? When is he coming out of hiding? Let's face it; everything's going on in just the same way as it always has. You're obviously fools."
That is, after hearing people predicting that Jesus was going to come and claim the throne of the world, and having years go by without anything happening, people would be bound to react the same way we react when one of our preachers predicts the end of the world and the world goes on. That would certainly shake the faith of the believers--and you wouldn't have to wait until the second century for it to happen. In fact, it would be much less likely to be a problem in the second century than at the time when the original Emissaries of the Master were dying off. After all, if he's a Prince and he appointed these people as his emissaries to get the world ready for his return, where is he? Pretty soon none of them will be left. Peter is reassuring them that you can't count on his return during the lifetime of the original Twelve; and that if he doesn't return by then, that says nothing about the truth of what was reported to them as fact.
So this document too says, "Hang on to the factuality of what was reported, and don't pay any attention to the cynics and the scoffers, or to the 'interpreters.' We know what actually happened."
The other clearly internal documents are the letters of John, which it seems to me form a triad. I think the second and third letters were tacked onto the first, the way I think the "harsh letter" of Paul was tacked onto the second letter to Corinth. The second and third letters, then, as I see it, were written first, dealing with what we would today call a lecture engagement in some community; and the first "letter" is actually the lecture.
Again, what the second letter does is warn against people who "go beyond what was taught" and don't stay with the teaching of the Prince (of the Prince? What he taught or the teaching about him?). In the third letter, we find that "Diotrephes, who is impressed with his own importance, does not recognize our authority; and for this reason, if I come, I will mention what he is doing, rattling on with slander against us; and not satisfied with that, he not only won't give a welcome to the brothers, he keeps those who want to from doing it and expels them from the community."
So there were people who stood up against John himself and tried to have his lecture canceled. Interesting.
What the first letter--the actual lecture--says is the refrain of John's Report:
"What existed from the beginning, what we saw with our own eyes, what we looked on and handled with our hands, dealing with the meaning of life--and the life disclosed itself; we have seen it and swear to it, and we inform you of the eternal life which existed face to face with the Father and which disclosed itself to us--what we saw and heard is what we are informing you of so that you will have companionship with us. Our companionship is with the Father and with his Son Prince Jesus; and we are writing this for your joy to be complete."
There you are. The eternal life which existed face to face with the Father is what we saw and handled with our hands. Jesus is God Almighty, and is no vision of God, but the kind of thing you can handle with your hands. Anyone who says that the author of the Fourth Report didn't write this can't read.
The burden of the lecture is, of course, that we should love each other, and in so doing be united to Jesus; that this is no new commandment, but yet it is new, because it means something ineffable in Jesus: "See how much love the Father has given us: that we would be called God's children! And that is what we are!" But even if we sin, we have a patron who can plead for us; so there's nothing to worry about, because we have a share in his Spirit.
And he ends with, "Children, keep yourselves away from idols."
Now I think, as I will say, that a good deal of John's Report of the Good News was also an "internal" document, directed to believers who had begun to "interpret" Christianity as if Jesus were a kind of hologram that God projected onto the world--meaning that Jesus wasn't really a flesh-and-blood human being--or that Jesus was a man "filled with" God somehow, and wasn't really YHWH himself. Interestingly, John also gives the most convincing evidence against the notion that Jesus didn't really die on the cross. I have a Hindu friend who believes that Jesus was a yogi, who put himself into a kind of hibernation during the crucifixion and then revived, but didn't really die. John mentions the piercing of his side after the soldiers recognized that he was dead, "and blood and water came out of the wound." He stresses immediately that "it is an eye-witness who is reporting this, one who is telling the truth and who knows of his own knowledge the facts that he is relating." That is, I saw it. I saw that the blood had already separated into two liquids, the way it does when a person has already died. So he not only bled; the kind of bleeding was that of a corpse which still has liquid blood in it.
Now John's Report also makes out a case for Christianity to unbelievers; but, true to the genius of this great writer, it makes a lot more sense for those who are already aware of the Synoptic Reports, where the Bread of Life speech would be understood in terms of "This is my body" at the Last Supper (which John does not mention); and so on. So the work is both esoteric and exoteric, if I may use such terms.
The only remaining documents other than the Reports are Acts, Revelation, and Hebrews. The first is a fairly straightforward history of the early Christians, with emphasis on showing how the Holy Spirit guided the spread of Christianity, and a kind of historical defense of the orthodoxy of Paul. It does not have anything special to offer us, except perhaps to give an example of what Luke thought the early preaching was like. Clearly, like ancient historians, he "novelizes" his narrative--by, for instance, putting as a direct quotation the words of a speech he couldn't have heard, and which certainly had no stenographer (though there were stenographers who used shorthand in those days) to take down. To me, this presents no problem as to the factuality of what he is writing, insofar as the speakers he "quotes" actually said words to the effect that he indicates. We must keep this in mind when we discuss the words of Jesus that are quoted in the Reports, however.
I will defer Revelation to the end of this study which is getting so long, because it is a Theology of the whole of history, and needs to be seen in the light of the rest of what we discover. As to the "letter"--actually, the discourse--"to the Hebrews," as they say, it was not, obviously, written by Paul; and I personally think it was by Apollos, but of course it could be by anyone who knew Scripture thoroughly and was an excellent writer of Greek. Its language is worthy of Demosthenes. But this discourse has significance for us, because again, though it involves very intricate textual analysis, the analysis is not that of what Jesus said, but of the documents of the Old Treaty; and the burden is to prove to Jews that "the Way" (Christianity) can be a fulfillment of the Old Treaty. The Jews doubtless said, "It can't be. This 'Way' of yours can't be a religion as ours is, because there's no sacrifice in it, and no priesthood. And don't claim that Jesus is a priest, because you can't have it both ways; if he's the Prince, then he's a descendant of David and not of the tribe of Levi; and priests have to come from the tribe of Levi."
The author answers, "Yes there is a sacrifice, the perfect one of Jesus himself, which happens once for all; and there is a priesthood, even older than the Levitical priesthood, one which Abraham himself deferred to: the priesthood in the line of Melchisedek. And even the psalm speaks of the Prince precisely as a priest in this line. So you have no argument; in fact, your own Scriptures argue against you." It is brilliantly reasoned.
But once again, the point of the whole thing is that Jesus, who is God's own Son, died for our sins, fulfilling the Old Treaty demand for sacrifice, not that his wisdom surpasses that of Moses. Again, it is the events of Jesus' life and who he is that makes the difference, not the values connected with his example or the wisdom of his sayings.
Notes
1. Incidentally, if there is such clear textual evidence that Jesus had adelphoi, then it is difficult to see how the tradition of Mary's being a "perpetual virgin" could be so ancient. Obviously those who began the tradition, especially if it were centuries after Jesus' death, would be flying in the face of clear evidence to the contrary unless adelphos had a meaning other than a blood brother in our sense of the term.
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