Tanner, you’ve created a straw man here. Most Protestant (including Anglicans & Episcopalians), Evangelicals, Exvangelicals, Anabaptists, etc.do not hold to the perpetual virginity of Mary.

While Catholicism holds to this belief—they are not the totality of Christianity.

James was clearly a leader in the Jerusalem church. Josephus is 2,000-year-old-news. (I read Josephus when I was a teenager—I did that because preachers in my church tradition brought him up on several occasions and I was curious).

None of this is controversial or subversive at all. And frankly, no Christian I know is surprised or bothered that James, the literal brother of Jesus, was prominent in the early church or well respected among the Jewish people in Jerusalem.

You also don’t know much about Paul if you think he said the Law of Moses didn’t matter. He was an observant Jew and a Pharisee until his death. His last known trip to Jerusalem he had Timothy circumcised according to Jewish custom (but not Titus who was a Gentile). He completed a Nazarite vow and even sponsored other Jewish Christians in the same vow.

He also attended synagogue regularly. His “Bible” was the LXX (Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures).

Paul’s concern was that Jewish traditions should not be bound on Gentile Messianic believers—not that Jewish believers should give up Judaism. Please read Romans 14.

Paul did not start a new religion—he saw himself living as a devout Jew who followed Jesus as the Jewish Messiah.

To quote N. T. Wright, New Testament and Jewish studies scholar.

“Part of the problem we’ve had for many generations in the Western world and church is that we’ve thought of the Jews and Judaism as the dark background against which the gospel shines out all the more brightly. So we’ve not studied the Jewish world because we thought it was the bad bit and we wanted the good bit. And of course that’s a totally misleading way of seeing it. And so we’ve invented a kind of anachronistic context for Paul which corresponds to modern Western spirituality and religion rather than seeing him in his own world….”

“[Paul is] rethinking what it means to be a loyal Israelite with Jesus as God’s Messiah all the way through.”

(Interview with N. T. Wright, “Getting to Know the Apostle Paul,” The Bible Project—https://bibleproject.com/podcast/series-gospel-p9-acts-e5-nt-wright-interview-getting-know-apostle-paul/)