. . . the Hieronymian approach has had advocates in
recent years, but it is generally considered he least probable option. Ancient writers
use only the term αδελφος to
describe the brothers’ relationship to Jesus. If they were, in fact, cousins of
Jesus, one would expect words such as ανεψιος to surface occasionally in the literature. As this is
not the case, proponents of this theory must demonstrate that αδελφοι is not being employed in its usual
sense. To this end, they identify James and Joses in Mark 6:3, with James “the
little,” and Joses in Mark 15:40, whose mother is called Mary. This Mary is
equated with Jesus’s mother’s sister, Mary of Clopas (John 19:25), James “the
little” with James the son of Alphaeus who was one of the Twelve, Alphaeus with
Clopas, and brother Simon (Mark 6:3) with Symeon, the son of Clopas (Eusebius, Hist.
Eccl. 4.22.4; cf. 3.11). This series of identifications would mean that
Jesus’s maternal aunt Mary and her husband Clopas were the parents of James “the
little,” Joses, Simon, and Judas. The likelihood of this reconstruction has
been ably refuted. (Richard Bauckham, Jude ad the Relatives of Jesus in the
Early Church [Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1990], 9-19’ J. B. Lightfoot, Saint
Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians: A Revised Text with Introduction, Notes, and
Dissertations [London: Macmillan, 1902], 255-63) (Joan Cecelia Campbell, Kinship
Relations in the Gospel of John [The Catholic Biblical Quarterly Monograph
Series 42; Washington, D.C.: The Catholic Biblical Association of America,
2007], 46-47)
It is not easy to choose from among the varying
approaches to the identity of Jesus’s brothers. That the Fourth Evangelist consistently
designates the brothers of Jesus by the term αδελφοι renders the Hieronymian view unlikely,
but not impossible. (Ibid., 49)
