Translation of the words "brother" and "cousin"

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BartholomewB said:
He was probably just describing Jesus’ family background as it was generally understood among the Christian community at the time.
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Yes - I’m sure he partly based it on the then current stories, legends and whatnot that had been circulating around that time period. It’s quite possible the idea of a previous marriage for Joseph came about as people wrestled with the idea of perpetual virgin vs. what Matthew’s gospel stated. A sort of simple way to explain an obvious discrepancy.
 
There is nothing inherently unreasonable in the idea of a young(ish) widower left with several young sons and daughters to bring up by himself, looking for a second marriage primarly so that his children will have a new mother to take care of them.
 
Agreed - but the operative word here is ‘younger’.

It’s actually quite common in French Canadian genealogy in my neck of the woods, but again,the operative word is ‘younger’. A man’s wife say, dies in childbirth, he’s already got six or seven kids, he looks for another wife and mother for his kids and they go on to have about seven or eight kids. I see it all the time in different family lines.

With respect to the PJ however, an 80+ year old would not be looking for a 14-16 year old mother for his 40 to 50-something year old children.

I would entertain the idea if Joseph and Mary were about the same age (which I believe they were), but again, I would also suggest that if Joseph were a widower, the author of Matthew’s gospel would have noted it.
 
Where does the idea come from that Joseph is 80 and his children are grown up? Not from the Protoevangelium of James, as far as I can see. I’ve just been looking through it in M. R. James’ edition of the Apocryphal New Testament. The only mention of Joseph’s age is in Chap. 9: the widowers are assembled in the Temple and they draw lots to see which of them the Lord has chosen to marry the twelve-year-old Mary. Joseph wins – “a dove flew upon the head of Joseph” – but he objects, saying, “I have sons, and I am an old man, but she is a girl; lest I become a laughing-stock to the children of Israel.” Nothing is said here about the age of his children. Later, in Chap. 17, one of his sons reappears, leading the donkey carrying Mary to Bethlehem, but again no mention is made either of the (unnamed) son’s age or of Joseph’s age.

That remark, “I am an old man, but she is a girl,” certainly doesn’t convey to me the idea that Joseph is a decrepit octogenarian with one foot in the grave. I think it just means that he sees himself as too old to be betrothed to a girl of twelve. A man of thirty could credibly say that, I think. Possibly even less.
 
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Have a question…are there any bible translations that show belief that brothers is actually cousins , or step brothers? That is do they actually use the latter words? The Vulgate, does Jerome write “brothers” or does he translate according to his belief and teaching that they were “cousins”? There were words to describe such in Latin available to him were there not, (as they were in the Greek) ?

“I saw none of the other apostles–only James, the Lord’s brother.” NIV

" alium autem apostolorum vidi neminem nisi Iacobum fratrem Domini" Gal 1:19 Vulgate

fratrem= brother

cognata=cousin

?
 
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Re: anti-sex Gnostics – They mentioned Mary as little as possible, because they didn’t want to believe that Jesus was the son of any pregnant woman whatsoever. Most of them were some variety of Docetist – Jesus as a baby was just an illusion, as was Jesus suffering on the Cross. Matter was evil, so no god or even higher spirit would ever become really incarnate. Sex was silly; the real problem with sex was that it created babies, thus imprisoning spirits in horrible matter and flesh. That’s why there were some Gnostic sects that were pro-sex, as long as you never let a child grow or live. (Usually by trying to avoid conception or forms of sex that would permit conception.)

Re: St. Jerome – The context of St. Jerome is that he started out as every Roman parent’s dream: an easily classically educated young man with plenty of gifts, who got along well with women and impressed other men. He would have made a great Roman government career, or he could have just administered his estate in leisure.

Then he got a vocation to become a monk. He went with the vocation and went off to the desert, but found it hard to stick with it unless he dropped all his worldly interests, or turned them into something else. So he eventually had to get rid of all his beloved Roman and Greek classics, because they were taking his time away from religious thoughts; and although he was eventually able to have chaste friendships with women (approached in large chaperoned groups), he was really really heterosexual. So every time he started thinking about women, he decided he’d study Hebrew to get his mind off it.

And that’s how he became a world-class scholar of Hebrew.

So yes, St. Jerome runs the Monk Fan Club and the Vowed Virgin Fan Club and the Vowed Widow Fan Club, just like he runs the Study the Bible until You Fall Asleep On Your Scrolls and Codices Fan Club.

But he was also the guy who said that a cranky pagan granddad living in a Christian family was not a scandal, but rather, the next best thing to a catechumen.

St. Jerome had a real heart for little old ladies and family life. He was always trying to recruit people to go out to the desert, if he thought they had a ghost of a vocation, and he was clearsighted about the problems of being a Christian woman married to a pagan man, or a Christian widow separated from her kids by her dead husband’s pagan family. But he had some very moving things to say about marriage. (And you usually have to look that up in commentaries on Psalms, or the Song of Songs, or such.)

Of course, St. Jerome largely wrote for a Mediterranean-spanning group of scholarly Christian female penpals, so I am obviously in his target audience!
 
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Correct me if i’m wrong, but Matthew’s Gospel was written in Aramaic and Luke’s in Greek. There wasn’t an equivalent for “cousin” in Aramaic but there was in Greek.
 
The Septuagint was also written in Greek, and it also used “brother” and “sister” instead of the Greek word for “cousin” or “nephew” or “niece.”

For example, Sarah was described as being Abraham’s sister, even when he confessed his deception to the kings. Similarly, Lot was described as Abraham’s brother, even though he was his nephew. I seem to recall that Isaac and Rebecca’s relationship was also described that way, but I could be misremembering.

The NT Scriptures in Greek tend to follow Septuagint translation precedents.
 
mcq72 said:
“I saw none of the other apostles–only James, the Lord’s brother.” NIV

" alium autem apostolorum vidi neminem nisi Iacobum fratrem Domini" Gal 1:19 Vulgate

fratrem= brother

cognata=cousin

?
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Cognata is the word used in Luke 1:36 to describe Elizabeth’s relationship to Mary. It doesn’t mean “cousin”. It is the Latin equivalent of Luke’s word συγγενις, as you can see here:

http://newadvent.com/bible/luk001.htm

This Greek word, like its Latin equivalent, means a relative, a kinsman or kinswoman, a blood relation, without specifying any particular degree of kinship.

However, Paul would never have described James as the cognata of the Lord, because that is the feminine form. If he had chosen to use this word rather than frater, he would have written cognatus, which is the masculine form, or more precisely in this verse cognatum, in the accusative case, required here because it is the object of the verb vidi, “I saw.”

http://newadvent.com/bible/gal001.htm
 
Re: Gnostic stuff about Mary –

Marcion decided that none of the OT books, and none of the Gospels but Luke were true, because they all mentioned too much Jewish stuff, and his idea was that the Jewish God was the creator of everything evil, like matter and flesh. So he kept parts of Luke that only mentioned Gentile things, but he cut out everything about Jesus’ conception and birth. (In fact, he started his edited “Gospel of the Lord” in Chapter 3 of Luke.)

Marcion’s idea was that Jesus was never born; He descended from the heaven of the real God (ie, not that Jewish God) directly into Capernaum (because the Gospel says Jesus “came down into Capernaum”) and started preaching directly upon descent. No, I am not kidding.

There’s no wedding at Cana, either. The amusing bit is that Marcion then leaves in the part of Luke where he talks about Jesus’ mother and his brothers, even though Marcion’s whole spiel was that Jesus literally had no mother, brothers, or human relatives of any kind. Similarly, he leaves in “the womb that bore you,” for no logical reason. Marcion did leave in the Passion (a much shorter, de-Jewished version) and Resurrection, though. (Not sure how that fit into his heretical theology.)

Re: Manichaeans, their beliefs were mostly a mix of Zoroastrianism and Gnosticism. But there seem to have been some Manichaeans who mixed their stuff with Zurvanite Zoroastrianism. In one Parthian text, Mary is described as being perhaps an immortal goddess – namely, “the soul of the god Zurvan,” who was supposed to be the god of Time who was the father of both Ahura Mazda (the Zoroastrian god of goodness) and Angra Mainyu (the Zoroastrian god of evil). This Mary was “the Maiden of Light,” and “the head of all wisdom, who has enlightened all the gods.” She is also identified as one of the many gods and goddesses up in the Moon.

To the Manichaeans, “Jesus the Splendor” is important, but just one of the many Persian gods who come to earth in waves, to help with the salvation of man and the defeat of evil. (And basically, the closer to Persia, the more Manichaeanism was all about Persian gods. The further away you got, the more they turned into Greek-style abstractions like “The Great Mind.”) The Child Jesus, and the suffering Jesus, are not actually Jesus the Splendor, because gods can’t age or suffer like that. Instead, they are emanations of his mind.
 
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mary was not of a virgin birth, she was a virgin that gave birth to jesus, therefore, the emphasis in scripture was not in speaking about her mother, i.e. queen ann, meaning mary did not come into this world via a perfect vessel, she herself was overshadowed by the holy spirit and was the perfect vessel for christ to be born, so she did have extended family.
linda
 
cognata can not mean cousin??? so are translations wrong that translate it “cousin” ? Is not frater better to describe brother than cousin ?

Like Spanish translations say cousin outright (primo) leaving no doubt. Are they wrong , to apply Jerome’s teaching ?

Is not "consobrina (o) " = cousin (male/female) quite explicit?

Again, could not have Jerome used explicit Latin words to make clear his teaching ?
 
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mcq72 said:
cognata can not mean cousin??? so are translations wrong that translate it “cousin” ? Is not frater better to describe brother than cousin ?

Like Spanish translations say cousin outright (primo) leaving no doubt. Are they wrong , to apply Jerome’s teaching ?
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I don’t know about Spanish Bibles, but in Portuguese the usual translation of Luke’s Greek word συγγενις (Jerome’s Latin cognata) in Luke 1:36 is “parenta”, literally “relative” or “kinswoman”, as you can see in these two links. The Bíblia Almeida Revista e Atualizada is the standard Portuguese Protestant Bible in Brazil, while the Bíblia Ave Maria is one of the most popular Catholic Bibles.
  • E Isabel, tua parenta, igualmente concebeu um filho na sua velhice, sendo este já o sexto mês para aquela que diziam ser estéril. (Almeida Revista e Atualizada)
  • Também Isabel, tua parenta, até ela concebeu um filho na sua velhice; e já está no sexto mês aquela que é tida por estéril, (Bíblia Ave Maria)
http://biblia.com.br/joaoferreiraalmeidarevistaatualizada/lucas/

http://www.claret.org.br/biblia
 
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Mintaka said:
The Septuagint was also written in Greek, and it also used “brother” and “sister” instead of the Greek word for “cousin” or “nephew” or “niece.”

For example, Sarah was described as being Abraham’s sister, even when he confessed his deception to the kings. Similarly, Lot was described as Abraham’s brother, even though he was his nephew. I seem to recall that Isaac and Rebecca’s relationship was also described that way, but I could be misremembering.

The NT Scriptures in Greek tend to follow Septuagint translation precedents.
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Again, that doesn’t do justice to the text considering Barnabas and Mark are called cousins in the Greek and the fact that the Septuagint has the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew word “ben-dod.”

A simple explanation works best. James was Jesus’s stepbrother, not his cousin.
 
Mary was practically a kid. Elizabeth was advanced in age… I have cousins that are 23 years apart.
 
Belated replay to you post –

You’re correct; the PJ only mentions that he was an “old man” and that at the time of the supposed census, he questions whether or not to register Mary as a wife or daughter.

The sources for his ‘advanced age’ come from not only the PJ, but also the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, the “Pseudo-Matthew (I think that’s what it’s called), and the Life of Joseph the Carpenter.

I don’t have the source (I can’t seem to locate it), but there is/was a tradition that when Joseph was 40 he married a Melcha (some sources state Escha (?), or Salome as the name), had six children, remained married to Melcha for 40+ years when she died and after a year, Joseph marries Mary. In short, this particular tradition gives a relative ago of Joseph of between 80 and 90 when he married Mary (in this tradition, he supposedly lived to 111, something like that).

The obvious purpose of these traditions, i.e. all proposing an advanced age for Joseph, were written to support the perpetual virginity idea/myth/legend that started being associated with Mary. Obviously at such and advanced age, Joseph was more a ‘guardian’ than ‘husband’ and could not have possibly sired children.

I don’t buy the Joseph Previously Married theory – these were written to account for the additional children referenced as well as promote the theory of Mary’s perpetual virginity.

If we take a more realistic view of a supposed previous marriage, and apply genealogical standards, Joseph marries at about 20 (the standard genealogical age of a 1st marriage, though in Jewish tradition it was probably more like 15-18), assume he has six children relatively quickly, let’s give him 10 years for the six kids), let’s then say his wife dies in childbirth on the last child (or she meets some other untimely death), Joseph waits a year and marries Mary – that puts him realistically (and conservatively) in his early 30’s. Certainly not too old to marry again (as most men would have done in this situation). If he marries a 14 year old, his oldest child would be about 10-11. Not very realistic. It was more common to marry a woman who was about the same age and quite often a widow herself. One would have to think that if this were the situation, those young kids would have been mentioned somewhere in the narrative before Jesus reaches adulthood.

A difference of twenty years is not really all that much; I have to concur with other posters. The first husband of my wife’s aunt was a little over 20 years her senior – they had five children; my wife’s cousins.

Even a supposed advanced age would not preclude children – my own great-great grandfather, (I do genealogy in case you’re wondering where I’m getting this) sired children well into his 70’s with a second wife (unfortunately, not yet identified) who was obviously considerably younger than he was.

The point being that, no matter Joseph’s age in relation to Mary, there is no reason to think that the children referenced in Matthew’s gospel were not the actual siblings of Jesus.
 
So if other translations use cousins for Jesus’s “brothers”, why didn’t Jerome for his translation?
 
Medawlinno said:
If we take a more realistic view of a supposed previous marriage, and apply genealogical standards, Joseph marries at about 20 (the standard genealogical age of a 1st marriage, though in Jewish tradition it was probably more like 15-18), assume he has six children relatively quickly, let’s give him 10 years for the six kids), let’s then say his wife dies in childbirth on the last child (or she meets some other untimely death), Joseph waits a year and marries Mary – that puts him realistically (and conservatively) in his early 30’s. Certainly not too old to marry again (as most men would have done in this situation). If he marries a 14 year old, his oldest child would be about 10-11. Not very realistic. It was more common to marry a woman who was about the same age and quite often a widow herself. One would have to think that if this were the situation, those young kids would have been mentioned somewhere in the narrative before Jesus reaches adulthood.

A difference of twenty years is not really all that much; I have to concur with other posters. The first husband of my wife’s aunt was a little over 20 years her senior – they had five children; my wife’s cousins
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You have to remember that these same brothers actually “advised” Him. It’s weird having brothers—who are at the very least 12 years younger than you—advising you, or trying to restrain you even.
 
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