The Brothers of the Lord

The Gospels name four “brothers” of Jesus — James, Joses, Judas, and Simon — along with unnamed sisters, and this has generated three historic accounts of who they were: the Epiphanian (children of Joseph by a prior marriage), the Hieronymian (cousins), and the Helvidian (later children of Mary and Joseph). This file presents each view in its strongest form, names its proponents, and sets out the philological debate over adelphos, “till,” and “firstborn.” The Church’s dogma of the perpetual virginity excludes the Helvidian reading; between the two virginity-preserving accounts the Church has not defined, and there this file does not adjudicate — the Epiphanian account is the traditional Eastern reading.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The New Testament repeatedly refers to persons called the “brothers” (Greek adelphoi) of Jesus. The townspeople of Nazareth ask, “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James, and Joses, and of Judas, and Simon? and are not his sisters here with us?” (Mark 6:3; par. Matthew 13:55, which reads “Joseph” for “Joses” and calls Him “the carpenter’s son”). St. John notes that during His ministry “neither did his brethren believe in him” (John 7:5). St. Paul reports meeting “James the Lord’s brother” (Galatians 1:19), and Acts places “his brethren” with Mary and the apostles in the upper room (Acts 1:14). The plain existence of these persons is not in dispute; their exact relationship to Jesus is. Three solutions have been defended in the tradition, each named for a figure associated with it.

The Epiphanian view: children of Joseph by a prior marriage

The Epiphanian view holds that the “brothers” were sons of Joseph by a marriage before his betrothal to Mary — Jesus’s legal step-brothers, older than He, and no children of Mary at all. It is named for St. Epiphanius of Salamis, who set it out at length while refuting the Antidicomarians (Epiphanius, Panarion 78; trans. Frank Williams). Its documentary root is older still: the Protoevangelium of James (2nd c.) presents Joseph as an elderly widower with children of his own, chosen to guard the consecrated Virgin, who protests at the betrothal, “I have sons, and I am an old man” (Protoevangelium of James 9; 17–18).

This is the dominant Eastern and Orthodox account. It is embedded in the liturgical tradition and in Byzantine iconography, where Joseph is depicted as aged and where a youth accompanying the Holy Family to Bethlehem is identified as his son James; it accounts for the person of St. James “the brother of the Lord,” first bishop of Jerusalem, as Joseph’s son (so the Orthodox commemoration; cf. Hegesippus in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 2.23; 3.11; NPNF II/1). Its theological advantage is that it preserves the whole of what the East confesses at once: Mary’s perpetual virginity is untouched, since the brothers are not her children; and Joseph, though a widower, is understood to have had no marital relations with Mary, so that her betrothal is a guardianship of her virginity rather than an ordinary marriage. In its strongest form the view can claim the earliest surviving narrative source, the plain sense of “brother,” and the whole weight of Eastern liturgical memory: the men called Jesus’s brothers really were reared in one household as His brothers, without any need to strain the word.

The Hieronymian view: cousins and kinsmen

The Hieronymian view holds that the “brothers” were cousins — kinsmen of Jesus, sons not of Mary but of another Mary — and that both Joseph and the Theotokos remained lifelong virgins. It was argued by St. Jerome in Against Helvidius (c. 383) and became the dominant Western and Latin account, carried into Roman Catholic tradition (Jerome, Adversus Helvidium; NPNF II/6).

Its case rests first on Semitic usage: Hebrew and Aramaic lacked a dedicated word for “cousin,” and ah / adelphos (“brother”) regularly covered wider kinship. So Lot, Abraham’s nephew, is called his “brother” (Genesis 13:8; 14:14), and Laban calls his nephew Jacob his “brother” (Genesis 29:15); the Septuagint renders these with adelphos. Second, it appeals to the lists of women at the Cross and tomb: “Mary the mother of James and Joses” (Matthew 27:56; Mark 15:40) is a woman distinct from the Theotokos, and John names “Mary the wife of Clopas,” called the Virgin’s “sister” (John 19:25). Jerome identified this Mary of Clopas as the mother of James (called “the Less”) and Joses — so that two of the named “brothers” are demonstrably sons of another woman, and the term adelphoi must therefore mean kinsmen. In its strongest form the Hieronymian view claims to keep both Mary and Joseph in perfect virginity, to make sense of the Gospel lists in which “the brothers’” mother is explicitly someone other than Mary, and to rest on a well-attested breadth of the word “brother.”

The Helvidian view: later children of Mary and Joseph

The Helvidian view takes the “brothers” and “sisters” as full biological children of Mary and Joseph, born after Jesus in an ordinary marriage. It was argued by Helvidius at Rome (c. 380), against whom Jerome wrote; it has been revived by many modern Protestant exegetes and is common in contemporary critical scholarship (e.g., John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew, vol. 1, argues the “brothers” are most naturally read as siblings).

Its case is built on three texts read in their natural sense. First, Luke calls Jesus Mary’s “firstborn” (prōtotokos) son (Luke 2:7), which — the argument runs — implies later-born children. Second, Matthew says Joseph “knew her not till (heōs hou) she had brought forth her firstborn son” (Matthew 1:25), which is taken to imply that he knew her afterward. Third, the plain, repeated use of “brothers” and “sisters,” their appearing together with Mary as a family group (Mark 3:31–32; John 2:12), is said to favor the ordinary meaning of the words. In its strongest form the view claims to read the Gospels without importing a later doctrine, and it can note that no New Testament text explicitly asserts the perpetual virginity. This account is rejected by the Orthodox tradition as incompatible with the confession of Mary as Ever-Virgin (Constantinople II, 553; see below) — and it is worth recording that it was rejected also by historic Roman Catholicism and by the magisterial Reformers: Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli all continued to hold Mary’s perpetual virginity (see Luther, Sermons on John and his That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew; Calvin, Commentary on Matthew 1:25 and 13:55, who calls the inference of later children from these texts unwarranted).

The philological debate

The three views turn on the same handful of words, and each side reads them differently. [Disputed: the force of adelphos is contested. Proponents of the Helvidian view stress that Greek possessed a precise word for cousin, anepsios — used at Colossians 4:10 of Mark, “the cousin of Barnabas” — so that the Evangelists, writing in Greek, would have used it had they meant cousins; defenders of the Hieronymian view answer that the Evangelists wrote Greek but thought in Semitic idiom, in which adelphos rendered a broad kinship term, as the Septuagint’s usage at Genesis 13:8 and 29:15 shows.]

[Disputed: the meaning of heōs hou (“till,” Matthew 1:25) is contested. The Helvidian reading takes “he knew her not till she had brought forth” to imply relations afterward; the traditional reading answers that Greek and Hebrew heōs often marks only what held up to a point without any claim about after — as when Michal “had no child till (heōs) the day of her death” (2 Samuel 6:23), which plainly does not mean she bore children afterward, or when Christ promises to be with the disciples “till (heōs) the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20), which does not mean He then departs. The clause, on this reading, simply affirms that Joseph had no part in the conception.]

[Disputed: the sense of prōtotokos (“firstborn,” Luke 2:7) is contested. The Helvidian reading infers later siblings from the word; the traditional reading answers that “firstborn” is a legal and cultic category — the son who “opens the womb” and is consecrated to God (Exodus 13:2; Luke 2:23) — and carries no implication of a second-born, as ancient funerary inscriptions calling an only child who died in bearing him a mother’s “firstborn” confirm.]

The Church’s dogma and the traditional reading

On the philology and on the precise identity of the brothers, the Church has not issued a definition, and the two virginity-preserving accounts — Epiphanian and Hieronymian — have both been held within it. What is dogmatized is the perpetual virginity itself: the Fifth Ecumenical Council (Constantinople II, 553) confesses Mary as Aeiparthenos, Ever-Virgin (Anathemas 2, 6, 14; NPNF II/14), which excludes only the Helvidian conclusion, not either of the other two solutions. Within that bound, the Epiphanian account is the traditional Eastern reading of who the brothers were — reflected in the liturgical texts, in the iconography of the aged Joseph, and in the Church’s memory of St. James as Joseph’s son — while the West has generally followed Jerome. The identity of the brothers is thus a matter on which Orthodox tradition has a settled preference but not a conciliar definition; the perpetual virginity that all three interpretive questions circle is the dogma. On how the Church holds truths that Scripture states but does not fully specify, see the companion collection’s treatment of method and of the Protoevangelium.

References

Epiphanius of Salamis. Panarion 78 (Against the Antidicomarians). Trans. Frank Williams, The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis, Books II and III. 2nd ed. Leiden: Brill, 2013.
Eusebius of Caesarea. Ecclesiastical History 2.23; 3.11 (Hegesippus on James the Just). NPNF II/1.
Jerome. The Perpetual Virginity of Blessed Mary against Helvidius (Adversus Helvidium). NPNF II/6.
John Calvin. Commentary on a Harmony of the Evangelists (Matthew 1:25; 13:55). Trans. William Pringle. Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845.
Martin Luther. That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew (1523); Sermons on the Gospel of St. John. In Luther’s Works (American Edition).
Meier, John P. A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, vol. 1. New York: Doubleday, 1991 (for the modern siblings reading).
The Protoevangelium of James 9; 17–18. In J. K. Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993; also ANF 8.
The Seven Ecumenical Councils of the Undivided Church (anathemas of Constantinople II, 553). NPNF II/14.
Bauckham, Richard. Jude and the Relatives of Jesus in the Early Church. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1990 (survey of the three views and their sources).