Who were the "brothers" of Jesus?

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po18guy said:
Why do you insist, against the bible, that Mary had other children?
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You are the one making the positive case that she had not other children when the scriptures say otherwise. You will have to make your case from the text. Since I have taken the negative position on the issue of perpetual virginity, the burden of proof lies on you.
po18guy said:
Yet you add to the bible
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Again you are going to have to prove this accusation. I have referred directly to the text, you are the one who reads it in the most unliteral way possible to assume something the text does not explicitly say.
po18guy said:
apparently for the sake of demeaning or condemning the Catholic Church,
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Another accusation without cause. Disagreeing on this issue is not demeaning the Catholic Church. I have made absolutely no ad hominem attacks and have based everything I have said with reference to this doctrine based on the evidence at hand.
po18guy said:
Can you see how that appears to be arrogant?
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No, I don’t. You assume I am alone in this opinion. Given that Jerome had to debate it in the 4th Century, it appears I am not alone, and given that millions also have the same opinion as I, it appears as if your assumption that I am a heretic based on a speculation not supported in the text itself would be arrogant.
 
Hodos said:
I certainly think its possible, although unlikely given the rest of the text in Matthew. However, I am not the one insisting on a de fide dogma that must be believed on pain of anathema. My issue is the declaration of a dogma based on speculation that at best cannot be proven by the text, and at worst violates the text.
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Well, as I have said, I do not believe the Church has mandated a particular interpretation of those words.

Personally, I find it very unlikely that Luke (or Matthew, for that matter) would choose a word with the common meaning “brother” if he meant “cousin” or some other word. Especially if 1) Luke believed in perpetual virginity and 2) found that a theologically important fact.

Of course that does not necessarily mean that Mary was not perpetually virgin. It could mean that Luke did not understand or had not heard of that teaching. It could mean that Luke was loose with his language because he didn’t think perpetual virginity was important enough to be careful with his language when discussing Jesus’ family. It could mean that Luke was copying some other source and did not change that word for some reason (although that seems sloppy, suggesting it was not an important point to him). It could mean that Luke believed James (and perhaps others) were Jesus’ older step/half-siblings, and that everyone would understand he used the word brother in that context. But it would be odd for someone who believed James and the others were NOT Jesus biological brothers, and thought that fact was important, to nonetheless choose to use that word to describe them.
 
BartholomewB said:
Does that mean we are all “biased”?
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I think it’s truly difficult - if not impossible - to avoid bias on either side of the discussion about Mary’s perpetual virginity, given the variety of battlelines (theological, historical, etc.) that have been drawn over the topic. From my perspective, there is no objectively neutral position.

Pp. 318-332 of John Meier’s A Marginal Jew is an excellent history of the debate, its background and the various evidences put forth. A bit of background: Fr Meier is a Catholic priest, a historical-critical scholar and the book is premised on that nebulous and problematic concept of the ‘historical Jesus’.

With that in mind, Fr Meier wrote that the ‘most probable opinion is that the brothers and sisters of Jesus were true siblings’. But he adds three significant interpretive conditions:
  1. The supporting arguments, individually and taken together, ‘cannot produce absolute certitude in a manner for which there is so little evidence’.
  2. The arguments are solely philological and historical, without consideration of ‘faith and later Church teaching’. This leaves out theological reflections, both Catholic and Protestant, on the role of Mary (or lack thereof) in the economy of salvation.
  3. Sources are treated strictly as historical sources such as Caesar’s Gallic Wars or today’s The Sydney Morning Herald. This leaves out also the inspiration of Scripture (Fr Meier considers at various points the critical redaction of Mark by Matthew and Luke).
As others here have mentioned, a number of Protestant Reformers actively taught Mary’s perpetual virginity. Luther incorporated it into the Smalkald Articles, and the commentary of the Geneva Bible (involving Coverdale, Knox, Calvin and others) taught it as well (see its note on Matt 1:25).

Diarmaid MacCulloch (another historical-critical scholar) writes that the Magisterial Reformers taught the perpetual virginity primarily because of Arian-like tendencies amongst the Radical Reformers: Mary’s perpetual virginity was a safeguard for Jesus’ divinity. In connection to this, Fr Meier wrote that widespread questioning of the perpetual virginity only occurred at the Enlightenment during the nascency of modern historical-critical scholarship: the attempted demythologisation of Son of God necessarily entailed the refutation of the perpetual virginity.
 
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This question gets asked every few months here on CAF. Like other things in the new testament, it is not crystal clear. There is no way around that (that the Bible is not crystal clear on Jesus’ brothers and sisters). Catholic teaching is however. They were not Mary’s children.

I empathize with you. I could accept the virgin birth and the immaculate conception, but I struggled with this one…i.e. perpetual virginity. Perhaps a different approach is to ask yourself “Why is it so important to you that the exact nature Jesus’ brothers and sisters are pinned down in the bible?” or “Why is it so important to you about whether Mary remained a virgin or not?” Asking myself these questions helped me accept Catholic teaching.
 
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The NT refers to Jesus’ ‘brethren’ by these names: James the Less, Joses, Simon and Jude (Thaddeus). Both James and Jude have epistles in the NT.
 
@Bithynian, I would add to that just one further scrap of information. Belief in the perpetual virginity is said to date back to a very early period, though exactly how early is not clear to me. If Simeon, Jude and the other “brethren” were the children of Mary and Joseph, surely people would have known about that. It isn’t the kind of thing the children’s parents, or the children themselves, can keep secret. So it’s hard to see how the belief in the perpetual virginity could have arisen in the first place, and survived year after year, if people knew all about her four or five children.
 
Matthew and Mark aren’t the only sources in the NT. John describes a conversation between Jesus and his (unnamed) brothers, adding the comment that “Not even his brothers believed in him” (7:2-9).

In Gal 1:19 Paul recalls a visit to Jerusalem in which he met with Peter and with “James, the Lord’s brother.” This seems to be the sole verse in the whole NT where James the Just is explicitly stated to be Jesus’ brother.
 
“Is not this the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother called Mary, and his brethren James, and Joseph, and Simon, and Jude: And his sisters, are they not all with us? Whence therefore hath he all these things?” (Mt. 13: 55-56)

“Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James, and Joseph, and Jude, and Simon?
Are not also his sisters here with us?” (Mk. 6:3)

“For neither did his brethren believe in him” (Jn. 7:2-9)

“But other of the apostles I saw none, saving James the brother of the Lord” (Ga. 1:19)

At times, the term “brethren” refers to Jesus’s “cousins”, the sons of Joseph’s brother, Alphaeus:
Simon, Joseph, Judas (Thaddeus), and James (James the Less/Just) – the latter two apostles. At others, His disciples in general. And, Alphaeus, Simon, and Joseph specifically did not believe in Jesus for some time. Additionally, James was referred to as “brother of the Lord” because He resembled Jesus. As for “sisters”, it refers to the women disciples.
 
jack63 said:
but I struggled with this one…i.e. perpetual virginity
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It makes sense when you consider that the Holy Spirit overshadowed her and she conceived. This implies a special relationship. Also, there is the tradition that Mary was a virgin consecrated to the Temple since infancy and had made a perpetual vow which God allowed her to keep.
 
The gospel is not much clear on this matter. If it were, there would not be so many interpretations.
 
Of course, St. Augustine rejected as absurd the notion of occupied antipodes. We should be careful between doctrine and the opinions of theologians.
 
The explanation I presented above isn’t founded solely on texts within the Bible, rather gospel writings and testimonies outside of it as well, though all coincide.
 
BartholomewB said:
Does that mean we are all “biased”?
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The question of bias is an interesting one. Honestly, I would tend to answer “yes”.

Nobody comes to the Bible without a number of presuppositions – on its historicity, on its truth, on its significance, on its impact on our civilization, on its place in spiritual life, on its very message.

These presuppositions inevitably determine the way we read and understand it. As much as we may try to adopt a “neutral” position, or go on from scientific doubt, I do not believe we can really reach it; we can simply do our best to approximate it.

It is not a bad thing per se, as long as one is conscious of what one’s own biases are.

In my own case, two particular postulates play a role here : 1) the Gospels are trustworthy; 2) the perpetual virginity of Mary is important to the way I think about my faith.

This doesn’t prevent anyone from doing their honest best to understand a text in a way that the text itself allows (ie, discarding interpretations which are obviously not compatible with it, or even dishonest).
 
Hodos said:
Then exegete the text. So far, you have avoided doing so.
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I have not. I have simply limited myself to its background (asking myself in what environment the text was written, by whom, in what cultural world, all of which are indispensable steps of any serious historico-critical exegesis).

I am also pointing out that in my opinion, taking the modern concept of a nuclear family and applying it to a semitic family who lived 2000 years ago is an anachronism.

To sum up what I’m saying :
  • Matthew (or other evangelists for that matter) never once says who the “brothers of Jesus” are sons of, which would be the surest way to p(name removed by moderator)oint a relationship. The most he does is saying, in 13:55, “Isn’t his mother called Mary, and his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and Judas?”
  • He writes in a culture where the term “brother” can mean many things, and, to further complicate matters, at a time where it had become usual to use it between Christians believers (Paul attests of this, and Matthew writes later than Paul).
  • In the rest of the gospel, when Matthew speaks about (presumably) biological brothers, he likes to insist a bit on the relationship. For example, when Jesus calls his disciples in 4:18-22, he says twice in the same sentence that Simon and Andrew are brothers, and he gives the name of John and James’ father).
  • The passage of 12:50, which you were referencing, is indeed about redefining family – from blood ties to spiritual intimacy with the Father.
  • In the absence of an indisputable wording (like, say, “the other sons of Mary” or “the sons of Joseph”), what we know about the cultural background of the gospel prevents us from being absolutely positive about what exact blood relation is described by the word “brother” – brother in the modern sense, half-brother, cousin, nephew, other relative, or even someone from the same tribe (that use of “brother” is attested in the OT).
To me, the text gives us a certain leeway in interpretation here, without betraying it. It does not exclude interpreting it in the sense of biological brothers, nor does it exclude interpreting it in a wider sense and a looser relation.

If I were really doing an exegesis of this text, one of the things I’d do next is weigh the evidence from Paul (“James, the brother of the Lord”) and of non-biblical early traditions, which, even of they are not part of the canon, still give us an informative picture of what a given set of people knew or believed at a given time.
 
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Very good video. But I have one last doubt: James the less is, apparently, one of the “brothers” of Jesus, but James the less is son of Alphaeus, not son of Clopas (the father of the “brothers” of Jesus)
 
Two of the twelve disciples are called James. Historically, the James called “the brother of the Lord” may have been one of those two (specifically, James the Less) or he may have been a third James.
 
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