But other of the apostles saw I none, save James the Lord's brother. (Gal 1:19)
Gal 1:19 is an important text in the debate about the historicity of Jesus, as Paul writes of James, a person living at the time of the authorship of Galatians, as being the brother (αδελφος) of Jesus.
Some (e.g., Richard Carrier) argue that the term “brother” here is a synonym for “fellow Christian,” not a biological relationship and that the Greek of the text does not include James as one of the apostles, following the argumentation forwarded by L.P. Trudinger. Commenting on this verse, and responding to Trudinger, F.F. Bruce wrote:
The most natural way to understand Paul’s construction ετερον . . . ουχ ειδον ει μη . . . is ‘The only other apostle I saw [apart from Cephas] was James the Lord’s brother.’ It is less natural to take it to mean ‘I saw none of the other apostles, but I did see James the Lord’s brother’ (cf. J.G. Machen, Galatians, 76-80). It would be difficult to improve on J.B. Lightfoot’s observation that ει μη has (as always) exceptive force, the question here being ‘whether the exception refers to the whole clause or to the verb alone’. In the present construction ‘the sense of ετερον carries των αποστολων with it’ (Galatians, 84f.) L.P. Trudinger, ‘Heteron de tōn apostolōn ouk eidon, ei mē la kōbon . . . : A Note on Galatians i. 19’, NovT 17 (1975), 200-202, argues for the rendering: ‘Apart from the apostles, I saw no one but James, the Lord’s brother’. But, as was pointed out in a reply by G. Howard, ‘Was James an Apostle? A Reflection on a New Proposal for Gal i 19’, NovT 19 (1977), 63f., if Paul had wished to say this, he would have expressed himself differently, saying perhaps ετερον δε η τους αποστολους . . . (or παρα τους αποστολους . . . or εκτος των αποστολων . . . .). Trudinger’s rendering provides a closer harmonization with Acts 9:27, where Barnabas is said to have used his good offices and brought Paul προς τους αποστολους (‘to the apostles’). But it is best to take τους αποστολους in Acts 9:27 as an instance of the generalizing plural.
A good parallel to the present construction, with the pronoun in the negative clause qualified by a genitive, is 1 Cor. 1:14, ουδενα υμων εβαπτισα ει μη Κρισπον και Γαιον, ‘I baptized none of you but Crispus and Gaius’ (where Crispus and Gaius are included in υμων). Where the exception relates to the negatived verb only, this is made plain by the context, as in 2:16, ου δικαιουται ανθρπος εξ εργων νομου ει μη δια πιστεως . . . , ‘one is not justified by legal works but [one is justified] through faith’. There is nothing in the present context to suggest that here the exception relates to ουκ ειδον only.
Probably few would have questioned the rendering here preferred but for the misgivings about the designation of James as an apostle. But there is nothing anomalous in the designation, so far as Paul’s usage of αποστολος is concerned. He clearly did not restrict the designation to the twelve. If, in the summary of resurrection appearances in 1 Cor. 15:5-7 he links the appearance to Cephas with a following appearance to ‘the twelve’ (to whose number Cephas belonged), his linking of the appearance to James with a following appearance to ‘all the apostles’ suggests that he included James among ‘all the apostles’.
According to C. Marius Victorinus Afer, In epistulam Pauli ad Galatas . . . (on 1:19), the Symmachians (Ebionites) regarded this James as the twelfth apostle (ed. A. Locher [Leipzig, 1972], 14).
At any rate, during the first post-conversion visit to Jerusalem, Paul had only a limited opportunity of conferring with ‘flesh and blood’; should any one suppose that he met the whole apostolic college at that time, he would be mistaken, as Paul asserts most solemnly. (F.F. Bruce, The Epistle to the Galatians: A Commentary on the Greek Text [New International Greek Testament Commentary; Exeter: Paternoster Press, 1982], 100-1)