The brothers and sisters of Jesus

Many Catholics feel very anxious about certain passages in the Gospels which seem to suggest that, far from preserving her perpetual virginity after the birth of Jesus, Our Lady went on to have quite a significant brood – certainly of boys, but perhaps girls too. In Mark 3, and with parallels in Matthew and Luke, we read: “[Jesus’s] mother and his brothers came, and standing outside they sent to Him and called Him. And a crowd was sitting around Him, and they said to Him, ‘Your mother and your brothers are outside, seeking you’” (Mark 3:31).

Famously, Jesus goes on to reply: “‘Who are my mother and my brothers?’ And looking about at those who sat around him, He said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother’” (Mark 3:33-5). We shall return to this response, but it certainly seems to presuppose the existence of people who were literally Jesus’s brothers, just as He had a literal human mother. And it is interesting, surely, that no mention is made of a father.

In Matthew’s version of the rejection of Jesus in His hometown synagogue, we read that “they were astonished, and said, ‘Where did this man get this wisdom and these mighty works? Is this not the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother called Mary? And are not his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and Judas? And are not all his sisters with us?’” (Mat thew 13:54).

The traditional Catholic way of dealing with this supposed difficulty – and I think it is the right way, too – is to point out that very often the scriptures use the word “brother” (adelphos in the Greek of the New Testament and the Greek translation of the Old Testament) to refer to people who are not literally brothers. In Genesis 13:8, Abram tells Lot that they should not quarrel because they are brothers, when in fact they are uncle and nephew. In 1 Chronicles 23:21f, the word “sisters” (adelphai) is used for cousins.

Hebrew, and the related Aramaic language spoken in the Holy Land in the time of Christ, has no words for half-brothers or step-sisters or cousins – many of these relationships are covered by the words “brother” and “sister”. So Jesus’s “brothers and sisters” might perfectly easily have been His cousins. One of these is James, the “brother of the Lord”, who became the leader of the Church in Jerusalem some time after Pentecost, though he seems not to have been a disciple before the Resurrection. It must be admitted that there is a perfectly good Greek word for cousin (anepsios), which is not used in the New Testament, but the Gospel writers may well have been deliberately imitating the vaguer style of the Greek version of the Old Testament.

There is a t tradition, long-standing among Eastern Christians and originating in the apocryphal Protoevangelium of James, that St Joseph was already an older man, a widower with children of his own, when he was betrothed to Mary – in which case these brothers and sisters would be Jesus’s step-siblings. Whether they were step-siblings or cousins, first or second, if they lived in Nazareth then it is entirely plausible that Jesus was brought up among them, that Our Lady was one of perhaps a number of women who cared for them all fairly indiscriminately, and that it was entirely natural to refer to them all as adelphoi.

Catholic scholars often point to the time when Jesus entrusted Our Lady to the care of St John (and perhaps vice versa) as they stood at the foot of the Cross (John 19:26f ). If she had other children, what was the need for this? While it might be pointed out that at this stage those hypothetical children seemed not to be followers of Jesus, still it would be odd for them not to take their own mother into their homes.

Now the point of the story – apart from simply telling us what happened – is to assure us that we have been adopted into Jesus’s family. As His beloved disciples, like St John, we are children of Mary and brothers and sisters of Christ – as He himself promised in the passage with which I began. Hence, of course, the use of the term “brethren” for all Christians from the beginnings of the Church. His unique natural sonship of Mary is shared with us by adoption, just as His unique divine Sonship is shared with us through our membership of His body. And it is as members of His body that we accept the ancient tradition of the Church that Jesus Christ is the natural son of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and Him alone.

This article appeared in the February edition of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent, high-calibre, counter-cultural and orthodox Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click HERE.

Photo: the Apostle St. James, on the high altar inside the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela 

(Photo by MIGUEL RIOPA/AFP via Getty Images)

The post The brothers and sisters of Jesus first appeared on Catholic Herald.

The post The brothers and sisters of Jesus appeared first on Catholic Herald.