Did Jesus Exist? - The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth by Bart Ehrman (read book .TXT) 📕

The Brothers of Jesus

I need to say something further about the brothers of Jesus. I pointed out in an earlier chapter that Paul knows that “the brothers of the Lord” were engaged in Christian missionary activities (1 Corinthians 9:5), and we saw there that Paul could not be using the term brothers in some kind of loose, spiritual sense (we’re all brothers and sisters, or all believers are “brothers” in Christ). Paul does frequently use the term brothers in this metaphorical way when addressing the members of his congregations. But when he speaks of “the brothers of the Lord” in 1 Corinthians 9:5, he is differentiating them both from himself and from Cephas. That would make no sense if he meant the term loosely to mean “believers in Jesus” since he and Cephas too would be in that broader category. And so he means something specific, not something general, about these missionaries. They are Jesus’s actual brothers, who along with Cephas and Paul were engaged in missionary activities.

The same logic applies to what Paul has to say in Galatians 1:18–19. When he says that along with Cephas, the only apostle he saw was “James, the brother of the Lord,” he could not mean the term brother in a loose generic sense to mean “believer.” Cephas was also a believer, and so were the other apostles. And so he must mean it in the specific sense. This is Jesus’s actual brother.

As a side note I should point out that the Roman Catholic Church has insisted for many centuries that Jesus did not actually have brothers. That does not mean that the church denied that James and the other brothers of Jesus existed or that they were unusually closely related to Jesus. But in the Roman Catholic view, Jesus’s brothers were not related to Jesus by blood because they were not the children of his mother, Mary. The reasons the Catholic Church claimed this, however, were not historical or based on a close examination of the New Testament texts. Instead, the reasoning involved a peculiar doctrine that had developed in the Catholic Church dating all the way back to the fourth Christian century. In traditional Catholic dogma Mary, the mother of Jesus, was a virgin not simply when Jesus was born but throughout the rest of her life as well. This is the doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Mary.

In no small measure this doctrine is rooted in the view that sexual relations necessarily involve sinful activities. Mary, however, according to Catholic doctrine, did not have a sinful nature. She could not have had; otherwise she would have passed it along to Jesus when he was born. She herself was conceived without the stain of original sin: the doctrine of the immaculate conception. And since she did not have a sinful nature, she was not involved in any sinful activities, including sex. That is why, at the end of her life, rather than dying, Mary was taken up into heaven. This is the doctrine of the assumption of the virgin.

Protestants have long claimed that none of these doctrines about Mary is actually rooted in scripture, and from a historian’s point of view, I have to say that I think they are right. These are theological views driven by theological concerns that have nothing to do with the earliest traditions about Jesus and his family. But if, for Roman Catholics, Mary was a perpetual virgin and never had sex, who exactly were the so-called brothers of Jesus?

Catholic thinkers developed two views of the matter, one of which became standard. In the older of the two views, the “brothers” of Jesus were the sons of Joseph from a previous marriage. This made them, in effect, Jesus’s stepbrothers. This view can be found in later apocryphal stories about Jesus’s birth, where we are told that Joseph was a very old man when he became betrothed to Mary. Presumably that is one of the reasons they never had sex; Joseph was too old. This perspective continued to exert its influence on Catholic thinkers for centuries. You may have noticed that in all those medieval paintings of Jesus’s nativity, Joseph is portrayed as quite elderly, as opposed to Mary, who is in the blossom of youth. This is why. I should stress that even if this view were historically right—there is not single piece of reliable evidence for it—James still would have been unusually closely related to Jesus.

Eventually this view came to be displaced, however, and in no small measure because of the powerful influence of the fourth-century church father Jerome. Jerome was an ascetic, among other things, denying himself the pleasures of sex. He thought that the superior form of Christian life for everyone involved asceticism. But surely he was no more ascetic than the close relatives of Jesus. For Jerome, this means that not only Jesus’s mother but also his father (who was not really his father, except by adoption) were ascetics as well. Even Joseph never had sex. But that obviously means he could not have children from a previous marriage, and so the brothers of Jesus were not related to Joseph. They were Jesus’s cousins.

The main problem with this view is that when the New Testament talks about Jesus’s brothers, it uses the Greek word that literally refers to a male sibling. There is a different Greek word for cousin. This other word is not used of James and the others. A plain and straightforward reading of the texts in the Gospels and in Paul leads to an unambiguous result: these “brothers” of Jesus were his actual siblings. Since neither Mark (which first mentions Jesus having four brothers and several sisters; 6:3) nor Paul gives any indication at all of knowing anything about Jesus being born of a virgin, the most natural assumption is that they both thought that Jesus’s parents were his real parents. They had sexual relations, and Jesus was