In the "Does Jesus have siblings?" column...

(Catholic Doper FWIW) “brother” is plainly referring to his apostles! I’ve NEVER heard it posited that Jesus was related to his apostles. In this case, “brother” is meant in the global, human family, sense.

*ETA: Link to column: Did Jesus have siblings? - The Straight Dope *

So you’re Catholic, and official Catholic doctrine is that Jesus had no siblings, and you’ve never heard that Jesus had siblings?

If only there were a real Sherlock Holmes to solve this mystery.

Might want to look at Matthew 12:46-9, too. The whole point of his remark there is that his “mother and brethren” in the literal sense are less important than in that there metaphorical sense you’re talking about. Which rather implies that he had brethren.

All mankind are brothers of Jesus in the " human family, sense" so it makes little sense to claim that a handful of boys were referred to this way in order to differentiate them from anyone else. There are Catholic scholars who try and wriggle out of the biological brother definition by claiming that the ‘original’ Greek of the bible is a mistranslation from the Aramaic, but if we go down that road anything in the bible you don’t like can be a typo.

Further, the only evidence we have of the historical Jesus are records of his brother James. This does not preclude him being a stepbrother, but given that Jesus was an observant Jew who advocated others follow likewise (contrary to Paul’s neo-platonic spin when selling the religion to the Romans- you try and convert someone to a religion that insisists on circumcision) it would be the duty of a Jewish wife to have relations with her husband.

I’m too lazy to look it up at the moment, but from memory I believe both Luther and Thomas Aquinas (the latter being about as revered a Catholic church father as you can get) lamented the inconvenience of the fact Mary did not stay a virgin, but they did not contest the fact.

Sure, the Vatican in the 19th c. decided Mary remained ever virginal, but they came up with a lot of silly ideas back then. Other than that, there is no reason to reject the biological brother reading, even for Catholics.

yes and his name is bob

Sorry couldn’t resist. :slight_smile:

I hate to contradict Cecil, but given that the term used for brothers, “adelphoi”, was used in the Greek Old Testament for Abraham and Lot (Uncle/Nephew) and in a variety of family configurations, it is not tortuous to render it differently than “blood brother.” Fact was, there was no extensive vocabulary for familial relations, which requires additional scrutiny before jumping to any conclusion about who’s on first.

Also, given that the brothers of Jesus were described as advising and reproving him in John’s Gospel (with parallel accounts in the other three), it would seem that they would have to be older than him in order to get away with rebuking him. “Don’t correct your elders” was a practical maxim for social behaviour back then.

Lastly, why during the Crucifixion would Christ commit his mother to John (who isn’t a relative at all) if he had blood brothers who were still alive? Maybe that had a falling out, but that seems like quite the snub.

Not quite. The not-literal-brothers take does not support the doctrine of the virgin birth, per se, but the doctrine of the *perpetual *virginity of Mary. The doctrine of the virgin birth, which all orthodox (with a lower-case o) Christians believe (see the Apostles’ Creed) states that Mary was a virgin when she conceived Jesus. The doctrine of perpetual virginity, which is particular to Roman Catholicism and capital-O Orthodoxy, states that Mary remained a virgin for the rest of her life. Protestants are happy to take “brothers” literally: The Holy Spirit was involved in Jesus’ conception in a miraculous way; Joseph was involved in the brothers’ and sisters’ conception in the natural way.

~Valerie

In Galatians 1:19 Paul says that after three years, he went to Jerusalem and stayed with Peter fifteen days, “I saw none of the other apostles - only James, the Lord’s brother.” I see no point in this use of “brother” except to distinguish between another apostle named James not the brother of Christ.

Jesus was Virgin -born, AND He had siblings. Mary was a vrigin until after she gave birth to Jesus. The verse in Matthew 1:25 reads, “…and kept her a virgin until she gave birth to a Son and he called His name Jesus.” So there is no reason to suppose those other siblings didn’t come from Mary. The Catholic Church came up with the story that Joseph had a previous wife and children to fit their idea that Mary could NEVER have sex, and had to remain a virgin for life. The Bible does not say that.
To the person who mentioned the passage where Jesus commends his mother to the disciple John from the cross, his brothers didn’t believe in Him until after the resurrection, so it’s possible that’s why she went home with John instead of them. The Bible doesn’t tell us that, either.

Exactly!

Paul is well known to be the earliest Christian author. In the earliest copies we have of Paul’s writings, he frequently uses the Greek word “adelphos”, just as he’s done in this case. The question is whether Paul’s use of the word “adelphos” here is a reference to a biological sibling.

Paul used the term “adelphos” every time he referred to any member of any Christian group! So, while Paul in Galatians refers to James as the Lord’s “adelphos”, only in English translation can Paul’s personal usage of this 1’st century Greek term be conflated with a biological sibling, and only then if one is also lazy and fails to employ critical thinking.

One of Paul’s many goals (certainly at least in the ahistoricist view) was to synthesize the various Jesus stories that arose from Q, conflations of fables and parables and sayings of Cynic and Stoic philosophers and sages and other itinerant preachers and teachers, Jewish Wisdom literature, the accretion of myth and stories retrospectively force-fit onto the name Yeshua/Jesus, and the so-called “Mystery Cults” (the Gnostics and so on) of the day, who had long already adopted the term “adelphos” to refer to initiates of those gnostic and other mystery cults. Paul, who was a scholar possessed of enormous philosophical and theological knowledge, brought that meaning of the word into his writings as well as the mere courteous title “adelphos”.

In 1 Corinthians 1:1, Sosthenes is called adelphos, and in Colossians 1:1, so is Timothy. And in Corinthians 15:6, 500 adelphos receive a spiritual vision of the risen Christ. Are they biological siblings of Jesus? Of course not!

That alone makes it essentially impossible for James to have been a biological sibling of Jesus, for if he had been, Paul would have used a different description to distinguish James from Sosthenes, Timothy, and 500 other people (no doubt many women among them), none of whom could be Jesus’ siblings!

So when we encounter the English phrase “James, the brother of the Lord” (not “James, the brother of Jesus”!) in Galatians 1:19 and recognize that Paul once again used the term “adelphos”, it is foolish to contend that Paul meant that James was Jesus’ biological sibling.

Some will object: “Paul does put special emphasis on James and his relationship to the Lord. How do you explain that?

Like this: The evidence strongly suggests that James was the head of one particular Christian group in Jerusalem which focused exclusively on the spiritual Christ, as opposed to Jesus the alleged human teacher or minister (that also makes it tremendously unlikely that James would be Jesus’ sibling). This group called themselves the “Adelphos of (or “in”) the Lord”. The leader of this group, whomever he or she was at any specific time (early Christians saw no problem with women leaders, to their great credit), was apparently given the official title that was translated into English as “The brother of the Lord”. It was an honorary title, not a description of a biological sibling relationship to Jesus the man.

Again, that last is also made clear by the references to “brother of the Lord” rather than to “the brother of Jesus”.

But what of the writings of others beside Paul? What are we to make of their references to James?

Let’s look at the epistle named for him. While no knowledgeable biblical scholar still believes that this is a genuine Pauline epistle (or even written by this James), it is instructive to look at the opening line, which reads in English: “James, a Servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ…” If James was thought by the author to be in fact the biological brother of Jesus the man, why is he referred to there as the Lord Jesus Christ’s “servant” and never even his brother or adelphos at all?

And then let’s look at the epistle of Jude. That opens by describing Jude as “a servant of Jesus Christ, and a brother of James”. While the Gospel of Mark 6:3 identifies Jude (and others) as the adelphos of James (implying that both Jude and James are the biological siblings of Jesus), had they been thought to be so in Paul’s day 20 years or so before Mark was written, they would have been described as such, but they were not so described until the (fictional, in my view) Gospels!.

There were a great many frustrating and polarizing differences in the beliefs and teachings of the church among the early Christian communities (as Paul’s genuine epistles abundantly documents), and there would be no better way to bring more order to all the massive disorder than for a true biological sibling of Jesus the man to be clearly identified as a primary authority. The Jews thought bloodlines and family trees were extremely important. For just one example, who qualified for the priesthood was considered to have enormous importance, and since the priesthood was purely inherited from family members, had a member of Jesus’ biological family been known or had come forward, he or she would have had enormous power to unite the highly fractious and angry bunch of wildly different beliefs and tenets and theologies all over the place. Those communities would have rejoiced to have had a member of Jesus’ family leading them. The Jewish early Christians, of that age at least, were highly authoritarian and would have loved nothing more than an authority figure based on the most fundamental basis: birth and bloodline. But they could find no one like that at all.

No relative of Jesus is ever identified by anyone in the early, pre-Gospel Christian world. Even if such a person were to have been reluctant to exert any authority or even to receive some minor recognition, he or she would have been identified anyway, since someone else would claim authority by proxy by dint of his friendship with Jesus or with one or more of Jesus’ biological siblings.

But no relative of Jesus was ever identified or claimed prior to the Gospels!

The Evangelists merely assumed James and Jesus were siblings, based mainly I suspect on the fact that there simply was no way to distinguish between the several different meanings of the Greek word “adelphos”.

Which bring us to references to Peter/Cephas. Again, we must turn to Paul, for Paul is the single earliest New Testament writer, predating by two decades even the first Gospel to be written, which the largest scholarly consensus identifies as Mark and dates to ~ 72 AD.

Paul refers to Cephas as an “apostle” (though only once), as do the canonical Gospels. But the Gospel’s “apostles” are a group of twelve men, and that Cephas/Peter was one of them. How does Paul refer to the “apostle” Cephas?

He refers in 1 Corinthians 15:5-7 to a group who had a msytical vision of the risen Christ (not Jesus the man), and writes that “… he was seen by Cephas, and afterward by the Twelve … then he was seen by James and afterward by all the apostles”.

This tells us that although the vision was reportedly seen by Cephas, he was not one of “the Twelve”, and further that there were more “apostles” than just “the Twelve”. Bottom line, Cephas was not one of a group of twelve apostles but was instead just one of a large group of many apostles. There’s no credible reason at all to think that Cephas ever knew Jesus the alleged man. So the fact that Cephas is, at least 30 years later, referred to in the Gospel of Matthew as the “rock” upon which Christ will build “His Church”, it’s abundantly clear that either this Cephas is fictional (as I contend Jesus is) or Matthew’s Peter and Paul’s Cehphas are just not the same guy.

This is further revealed by all the bitter disputes between Paul and Cephus and many of the rest of the “apostles”, including “the Twelve”, the title apparently given to a more “select” group of the many “apostles” (note that Paul insists that he was an apostle, too). Both the title “apostle” and the title “the Twelve” appear, again, to be honorary titles rather than descriptive ones (think of them in light of the special group of twelve Mormon “apostles”, for example). Because if “the Twelve” were actually the direct followers of a biological Jesus (as a literal reading of the Gospels would have it), who would dare argue with such holy personages and criticize them as forcefully as Paul so often did?

Look at how important bloodlines are in terms of the leaders of religious sects when the original leader dies or is otherwise removed from the scene, such as we see in Islam and in Mormonism. The blood relative doesn’t necessarily end up the sole or primary leader, but the blood relative is an extremely important and noted personage in the remaining movement or splinter movement.

No, had James been a blood sibling of Jesus, he would have been celebrated as such and would have been seized upon as an authority by dint of his bloodline, or someone else would have capitalized on being the friend or special associated of the blood relative. Sociobiology is powerful indeed in such situations, as religious history has shown over and over again.

Recall that Paul was an avid persecutor of the “Son of God” faith, and like all zealous anti-zealots, the blood relations of any alleged “founder” of such a faith would be subject to special attention and control. But Paul never indicated any such special attention. Instead, he refers to both James -and- Cephas as “adelphos”, showing no special interest in James as he would have done if James were a biological sibling of Jesus. Over and over again, a biological sibling would absolutely have been repeatedly called upon to interpret his biological brother’s words and ideas, just as we see pretty much whenever there is a biological relationship to call upon.

While the Jerusalem Church headed by James as “the” adelphos of “the Lord” (never adelphos of Jesus!) was important, it was by no means the central authority of the new church, which instead was Paul. That’s simply not credible if James has been a biological sibling of Jesus.

James’ group in Jerusalem had the following name: Adelphon en Kurio, “Brothers In the Lord”. Never are they called “Brothers in Jesus”. This is strong evidence that no historical or other Jesus was known of or referenced, else they would have either named themselves The Brothers of Jesus or they would have written or asked James or Paul about this Jesus, but there’s no evidence that never happened. It seems clear that his was a church that worshiped a spiritual Lord rather than any historical figure. If “Adelphon en Kurio” referred to biological siblings, they would all have to be biological siblings of some unnamed “Lord”! One cant’ arbitrarily claim adelphos means “biological sibling of Jesus” in certain instances but “members of a like-minded community who believed in a spiritual Lord” in others.

Arguing that a tiny difference in one passage can only mean a reference to a biological sibling is quite absurd and fallacious given that this is never followed up upon. Had James been a biological sibling, much more would have followed, including the kind of special treatment I’ve already described. It’s far too little a thing to base a historical argument upon given all the changes made by copyists that Ehrman brings out in his book Misquoting Jesus.

And thus are the words “torturous” and “logic” combined anew.

Oh please, there’s nothing the least bit tortuous (the word you presumably meant) about, “The word ἀδελφοί provably had multiple meanings; therefore you can’t arbitrarily insist on one to the exclusion of all others.”

By the way, the doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Mary has been taken quite seriously at times. To judge from the 13[sup]th[/sup]-century L’Histoire du Saint Graal, some seem to have seen it as the single great key to the entire Christian religion. Seems strange to me, but there it is…

Paul and the other New Testament writers called all Christians “brothers” because we are all adopted sons of the same Father. We have a common parent, not some ill-defined distant relationship with one another. So if Paul’s usage is an argument for anything, it’s for “brother” meaning “brother.”

~Valerie

So are you saying that “brother” means “anybody” or that it means “Christian”? (Warning: either one leads you into a trap.)

I’m saying that “brother” means son of a common parent. Christians are brothers because they are adopted sons of a common parent, God the Father. It seems most believable to me that Jesus, James, et al. were brothers because they were natural sons of a common parent, Mary of Nazareth.

~Valerie

P.S. Re your signature, I’m not much of a poetry reader, but I’ve enjoyed Williams’s novels.

That’s true, but just as it is in English, it’s primary meaning was a literal sibling, and without qualifiers or other indication from context, that’s how it would be taken,

Look at Mark 6:3:

“Is this not the carpenter, the Son of Mary, and brother of James, Joses, Judas, and Simon? And are not His sisters here with us?” So they were offended at Him.

Now Matthew 13:55:

is not this the carpenter’s son? is not his mother called Mary, and his brethren James, and Joses, and Simon, and Judas?
In both of these passages, the people remarking are from Jesus’ hometown expressing skepticism at him because they know him and his family. There is nothing in the context of these verses that qualifies the use of the words adelphoi and adelphai (“brothers” and “sisters” respectively) as anything other than literal, and the conjunction with his mother makes any reading other than the literal tendentious and strained.

In English, if you hear somebody say, “I know that guy. That’s Bob, and that’s his mother, Badge and those are his brothers, Ned and Fred,” the prima facie meaning of that statement, absent any other qualifiers or context, is that he is referring tro literal siblings.

The texts of the above quoted pasages does not give the reader any reason to deviate from the plain reading and opt for a figurative one instead.

Which only leaves us with the question, how did Bob’s mother get a crazy name like “Badge”? :wink:

~Valerie

Just to throw another log on the fire, Josephus mentions the killing of a person called james who was “the brother of Jesus, the so-called Christ.’”

Her parents were big Cream fans. :cool:

In truth, I meant to write “Madge.” Edit window is closed now, though.