Thursday, January 27, 2022

Luke 2 and the loss of Jesus by his Parents in the Temple as Evidence for the Helvidian Understanding of the Brothers and Sisters of Jesus

  

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 κατετος). 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 κατετος 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)

 

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