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III.

James: The “Brother” of Jesus?

The question of whether or not the brothers and sisters of Jesus were the biological children of Mary and Joseph has had more to do with the church’s veneration of the mother of Jesus than it has with his brothers and sisters themselves. Mary’s “perpetual virginity” is a belief that is deeply rooted in the traditions of the oldest churches. Christian piety held virginity and celibacy in high esteem from early on. How could it be, then, given the tendency to elevate perfect chastity, that the one chosen to bear the incarnate God in her womb, the holiest of all women and indeed of all humankind, would engage in sexual relations and bear other children after such a holy nativity? If Mary was the most exalted of saints, the pious assumption was that she must have been perfect in every way, especially in chastity. Her role as “the virgin mother” made her a symbol or type of the church (the church was regarded as the “mother” of the baptized and “virginal” in the purity of its faith), and with the development of Mary’s iconic status there was more even than her personal honor at stake.7

That such a consideration had not been an issue for the writers of the New Testament is evident by their off-handed references to Jesus’ brothers and sisters, without once qualifying those terms. For the first generation of Jewish Christians, virginal chastity and celibacy were not regarded as signs of purity so much as signs of calling and consecration, often related to prophetic zeal (as, for example, in the case of John the Baptist).8 For the New Testament writers, then, whether or not Mary had conceived children other than Jesus was not of great concern. Subsequent generations of Christians, however, influenced by Greco-Roman views of matter and spirit, with the former being regarded as lower than the latter in value, were not so indifferent to the issue of Mary’s virginal status. It became increasingly important to see her as the type of the church’s perpetual virginal motherhood. The doctrine of her perfect physical inviolability was understood as complementing her inner spiritual purity.

Not every thoughtful believer in the early centuries accepted the idea, however. One Christian writer by the name of Helvidius, writing towards the end of the fourth century, produced a treatise maintaining that the most obvious (and, it seemed to him, most ancient) way to understand the terms “brothers and sisters” in the Gospels was to take them literally. These were simply the biological children of Joseph and Mary born subsequent to Jesus’ birth (and therefore, in Helvidius’s view, James would have been the oldest of Jesus’ younger siblings). The ever-combative Jerome didn’t take what he saw as Helvidius’s attack on Mary’s perfect chastity lying down. He took up his pen and wrote against the latter, suggesting that Jesus’ “brothers and sisters” were in reality Jesus’ cousins and therefore not biological children of Mary. Jerome’s dubious “cousin hypothesis” has continued as an accepted view to this day in the Roman Catholic tradition. There is, however, very little evidence to suppose that the words “brother” and “sister” were used in Jesus’ time to mean “cousin.”

Another, more plausible view is the one found in the otherwise fantastical second-century apocryphal book, the Protevangelion of James, in which the siblings of Jesus are said to have been Joseph’s children from a previous marriage. Mary is, in this account, the widower Joseph’s young second wife, and Jesus, born of her virginally, is her only child (and so James was, according to this narrative, the oldest of Jesus’ older half-brothers). This is the view that was supported by such church fathers as Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Ambrose of Milan, Hilary of Poitiers, and others, and it remains the accepted view of the Eastern churches. It is also the reason why, in Christian art both of the East and the West, Joseph has often been depicted as an elderly gray-haired man. The brown-haired, brown-bearded Joseph of popular Roman Catholic art is a later representation.

Thus we have three early views, all of them claiming antiquity and authenticity, regarding the siblings of Jesus—those of Helvidius, Jerome, and the Eastern fathers. Of these, the first and the last possess more credibility than Jerome’s. It is certainly not impossible that the brothers and sisters of Jesus were the children of a previous marriage of Joseph’s. On the other hand, long-standing pious tradition aside (a tradition which has, in all honesty, tended to regard even marital sexual relations with suspicion and—in its most extreme form—with hostility), the idea that they were also children of Mary, and thus Jesus’ younger siblings, is a thoroughly reasonable one.

In this commentary, I will let the matter remain moot and take no definite position on it. But I will, following the usage in the New Testament, continue simply to refer to James as Jesus’ brother without qualification.

7. See my book, The Woman, the Hour, and the Garden: A Study of Imagery in the Gospel of John (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016), particularly 28–39.

8. The finest and fullest study of this subject is Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).