The Brothers of the Lord

The Gospels name several “brothers” and “sisters” of Jesus, and one of them — James — became the first bishop of Jerusalem and is called by Paul “the Lord’s brother” (Gal 1:19). What that kinship means has been answered in three classic ways, named since antiquity for Helvidius, for Jerome (Hieronymus), and for Epiphanius. This file presents all three with their sources and without polemic, and affirms the Epiphanian reading the Orthodox Church has always held — that the “brothers” are sons of Joseph by a marriage before he was betrothed to the Virgin — because the question is inseparable from the dogma of the Ever-Virginity of the Theotokos.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle)

The Scriptural Data

The New Testament speaks plainly of persons called the “brothers” (Greek adelphoi) and “sisters” of Jesus. The clearest catalogue comes when the townspeople of Nazareth take offense at Him: “Is not this the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother called Mary? And his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and Judas? And are not all his sisters with us?” (Matt 13:55–56). Mark gives the same list with one name varied: “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? And are not his sisters here with us?” (Mark 6:3). Four brothers are named — James, Joseph (Joses), Simon, and Judas — and unnamed sisters are mentioned as a group.

These figures appear at several points, and their relation to Jesus develops. During the public ministry they do not believe in Him: “For not even his brothers believed in him” (John 7:5); the Synoptic notice that “his own people” went out to seize Him, thinking Him beside Himself, has often been read in the same light (Mark 3:21). After the Resurrection, however, they are found in the upper room among the believers, praying “together with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers” (Acts 1:14). One of them, James, rises to such prominence that Paul calls him simply “James the Lord’s brother” (Gal 1:19) and takes for granted that “the brothers of the Lord” are a known and married body of missionaries: “Do we not have the right to take along a believing wife, as do the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas?” (1 Cor 9:5). The data are fixed; what is disputed is the kinship the word adelphos expresses.

The Three Classic Views

The classic threefold division was given its enduring form by J. B. Lightfoot in his dissertation “The Brethren of the Lord,” appended to his commentary on Galatians (Lightfoot 1865), who named the positions after their most famous early advocates. They are not three equal guesses but three coherent readings, each with patristic support.

The Helvidian View

On this reading the “brothers” and “sisters” are full siblings of Jesus in the ordinary sense — later children born to Joseph and Mary after the virginal conception of Christ. It takes adelphos in its most natural lexical sense and reads Matt 1:25 (“[Joseph] knew her not until she had given birth to a son”) as implying marital relations afterward. The view is named for Helvidius, a Latin writer of about AD 383, who argued it in a tract now lost but reconstructable from its refutation, in part to deny that virginity was a higher state than marriage (Jerome, Against Helvidius 1; trans. NPNF II/6). It is the reading held by most modern Protestant exegetes. Jerome answered it point by point, observing that “until” in Hebrew and Greek idiom need not imply a change of state afterward, and that Scripture nowhere calls these brothers “sons of Mary” (Jerome, Against Helvidius 5–7; trans. NPNF II/6).

The Hieronymian View

On this reading the “brothers” are cousins — kinsmen of Jesus, the sons of a sister or close relative of the Virgin, not children of either Joseph or Mary. It rests on the breadth of the Semitic term for “brother” (Hebrew ’ach), which covers nephews and cousins, a usage the Septuagint carries into Greek adelphos (so Abraham calls his nephew Lot “brother,” Gen 13:8; 14:14). This is the view argued by Jerome himself in his treatise Against Helvidius (Adversus Helvidium) of about AD 383, and it became the common Western and Roman position. Jerome further identified James the Lord’s brother with James the son of Alphaeus (one of the Twelve), through an equation of the “Mary of Clopas” of John 19:25 with a sister of the Theotokos (Jerome, Against Helvidius 13–16; trans. NPNF II/6). The cousin reading guards the perpetual virginity of Mary, but at the cost of an identification of James with the apostle Alphaeus that the East did not adopt.

The Epiphanian View

On this reading the “brothers” are sons of Joseph by a prior marriage — stepbrothers of Jesus, born to Joseph and an earlier wife before he was betrothed to the Virgin, Joseph being already an aged widower when he received Mary. It takes adelphos in a real familial sense (so that the brothers are genuinely raised in one household) while preserving the virginity of Mary entirely, since the children are Joseph’s and not hers. The view is named for Epiphanius of Salamis, who set it out at length in his Panarion (Adversus Haereses) 78, against the “Antidicomarianites” who denied Mary’s perpetual virginity (Epiphanius, Panarion 78.7–10; trans. Williams). It is, however, far older than Epiphanius: it is the picture of the Protevangelium of James, a second-century narrative which presents Joseph as an elderly widower with sons already grown when he is given charge of the Virgin (Protevangelium of James 9; 17–18; trans. ANF Vol. 8).

The Orthodox Affirmation

The Orthodox Church reads the brothers of the Lord in the Epiphanian sense: they are the sons of the righteous Joseph by his first marriage, and James, the eldest of them, is the “brother of the Lord” who became bishop of Jerusalem. This is not private speculation but the settled mind of the Eastern tradition, embedded in its hymnography, its iconography of the Nativity (which shows the aged Joseph), and its liturgical commemorations: James is everywhere titled Adelphotheos, “Brother of God,” not “son of Mary.”

The doctrinal stake is the perpetual virginity — the Ever-Virginity — of the Theotokos, who is confessed aeiparthenos, “ever-virgin,” and whom the Fifth Ecumenical Council (Constantinople II, 553) names with that title. To make the brothers later children of Mary, as the Helvidian view does, is to deny that she remained a virgin after the Nativity; the Epiphanian reading secures the dogma while taking the Gospels’ “brother” language at full familial weight (on the dogma itself, see The Theotokos). The Eastern tradition preferred Epiphanius over Jerome not from any quarrel with the perpetual virginity, which both defend, but because the cousin theory required identifying James of Jerusalem with James the son of Alphaeus — an identification the East rejected (the disentangling of the several men named James is taken up in The Three Jameses and The Identity Question).

It should be said plainly that two of the three views aim to honor the Mother of God: the Helvidian reading sets the brothers’ siblinghood against her virginity, while the Hieronymian and Epiphanian readings differ over how, not whether, that virginity is preserved. The scriptural language is genuinely capable of more than one construal — which is why the dispute is old and is here presented from its sources rather than resolved by assertion — but the Church’s reading, in continuity with the Protevangelium and Epiphanius, is the Epiphanian one, and it is on that basis that this collection speaks of James as the Lord’s stepbrother and kinsman (see James the Just).

References

Lightfoot, J. B. “The Brethren of the Lord.” Dissertation in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians: A Revised Text with Introduction, Notes, and Dissertations. London: Macmillan, 1865. (The classic statement and naming of the Helvidian, Hieronymian, and Epiphanian positions; Lightfoot himself favored the Epiphanian.)
Jerome. The Perpetual Virginity of Blessed Mary, Against Helvidius (Adversus Helvidium). Trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 6. Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1893. (The refutation of Helvidius and the statement of the cousin theory; the “until” of Matt 1:25 at §5–7; the identification of James with the son of Alphaeus at §13–16.)
Epiphanius of Salamis. Panarion (Adversus Haereses) 78 (“Against the Antidicomarianites”). Trans. Frank Williams, The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis, Books II and III (Sects 47–80). Leiden: Brill, 1994. (The prior-marriage view and the defense of the perpetual virginity, esp. §78.7–10.)
The Protevangelium of James (The Book of James). Trans. in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 8. Ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson. (Joseph the aged widower with sons, chs. 9, 17–18; second-century source of the Epiphanian picture.)
The Holy Bible. Cited by book chapter:verse: Matt 1:25; 13:55–56; Mark 3:21; 6:3; John 7:5; 19:25; Acts 1:14; 1 Cor 9:5; Gal 1:19; Gen 13:8; 14:14.