Discussing
Mary’s virginity in the New Testament, historian Donald Akenson wrote the
following against (1) the claim that
Jesus alone being called “son of Mary” means he was Mary’s only child and (2) how the Hieronymian view of the
brothers/sisters of Jesus (being relatives [e.g. cousins]) is an exegetical
stretch, wrote:
In Mark 6:3, there is a fascinating
identification of Jesus. “Is this not 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?” This identification of Jesus is not ambiguous either in the
original or in any major translation: two sets of figures are present. Jesus (“the
carpenter”) and his siblings. Jesus is identified solely by his maternal
ancestry (“Mary’s boy” is how the Living Bible puts it), with no reference to
his father. In a society that was highly patriarchal (in the modern sense of the
word), not identifying Joseph as Jesus’ father was tantamount to saying that
he was not indeed the father . . . [the phrase] implies physical illegitimacy
on the part of Jesus . . . The second diagnostic marker is found in Mark 3:21
and occurs when Jesus’ half-brothers and half-sisters try to have him taken
away for being out of his head: “beside himself,” in the King James Bible.
(Incidentally, the KJB, in employing the old term for what is today called “family”
or “relatives,” leaves a slightly misleading impression, that it was Jesus’ “friends”
who wanted to drag him home because of his apparent lunacy. It was his family,
and since neither his father or mother are mentioned—as would have been the normal
notation in an historical narrative such as Mark—one infers that it was his
half-brothers and half-sisters who were involved.) At minimum, one observes here a significant
intra-family split, with Jesus on one side, his half-siblings on the other.
Notice here that I have been referring to
Jesus’ half-brothers and half-sisters. This usage is vexed, but I think defensible.
During the Middle Ages, the western church developed a para-biblical belief
that Mary remained a virgin for her entire life, and, obviously, this produced
problems in dealing with the several biblical references to Jesus’ brothers and
sisters. One solution, the one which the Roman Catholic church held until
recently, has been that all those brothers and sisters were really cousins of
Jesus. This idea strains the text beyond the breaking point and Catholic
scholars are at present largely abandoning it. However, a second approach (also
motivated by Mary’s medievally-declared perpetual virginity) is that what the
Gospels report as Jesus’ brothers and sisters were half-siblings, stemming,
presumably, from an earlier family that Joseph had formed. This leads to the
postulate that Joseph was a widower before he became betrothed to Mary. And to
this must be added a third option, which sits more comfortably with the
Gospels, namely that Mary did not remain a perpetual virgin, but that Jesus was
her first-born son and that she and Joseph had several subsequent children,
each of whom in the technical sense was Jesus’ half-brother or half-sister,
sharing as they did the same biological mother. (Donald Harman Akenson, Surpassing Wonder: The Invention of the
Bible and the Talmuds [New York: Harcourt Bruce and Company, 1999], 460-61
n. 19, emphasis added)
