I think also that there are
circumstances connected with one remarkable episode in our Lord’s childhood
which are more easily explicable if we suppose Him not to have been His mother’s
only son. Is it likely that Mary and Joseph would have been so little
solicitous about an only son, and that son the promised Messiah, as to begin
their homeward journey after the feast of the Passover at Jerusalem, and to
travel for a whole day, without taking the pains to ascertain whether He was in
their company or not? If they had several younger children to attend to, we can
understand that their first thoughts would have been given to the latter;
otherwise it is conceivable that Mary, however complete her confidence in her
eldest Son, should first have lost Him from her side, and then have allowed so
long a time to elapse without an effort to find him? (Joseph B. Mayor, The
Epistle of St. James [3d ed.; 1910; repr., Alpha Editions, 2019], xv)
In a footnote, Mayor responds to an attempted critique of the Helvidian
understanding of the brothers and sisters of Jesus:
An anonymous writer in the Church
Quarterly for April 1908, puts forward another consideration which, he
thinks, suggests a different conclusion (p. 79). Referring to Luke ii. 41, he
says: ‘We are told that Mary went up to the Passover each year during their
residence at Nazareth; could a journey of twice eighty miles he made at a
specific date annually by a woman who was fulfilling the functions of
motherhood to a large and increasing family?’ The original merely says that it
was the custom of Joseph and Mary to go up yearly to the Passover (επορευοντο κατ’ ετος). Of course such a custom does
not imply an iron rule which allows of no exception. We have a parallel in the
story of Hannah. We are told thrice over that she and her husband Elkanah and
all his house used to go up yearly to sacrifice at Shiloh (1 Sam. I, 3, 7, 21),
but in verse 22 we read that Hannah refused to go up during the time (probably
three years) which elapsed between the birth and the weaning of Samuel. This
shows that we are not bound to interpret κατ’ ετος rigidly.
On the other hand Mary’s own history shows that there was no impossibility in
taking about young children. She took her Infant with her to the Temple, before
He was two months old, and to Egypt before He was two years old. The return
from Egypt suggests to the same writer an argument in favour of the Epiphanian
hypothesis, ‘because St. Matthew uses the same words in describing it was he
had used in his description of the flight from Bethelem (he took the young
child and his mother), and yet, according to the received chronology, a space
of time had elapsed in which the Helvidian theory would require at least, one
child to have been born’ (p. 78). The simple answer is that the Evangelists
exclude irrelevant matter, and that the presence of another child at this
period is not of the slightest importance. It need not even involve the use of
an additional ass for their journey. If we wished to indulge in fantasing imaginations
of this sort, we might ask, what became of the elder brothers (on the
Epiphanian hypothesis) during the interval between the departure from Nazareth
and the return to it again? The Protoevangelium represents one of them as in
attendance on Mary. (Ibid., xv-xvi n. 2)