Jesus & His Brethren

And they say to him, behold thy mother and thy brethren without seek for thee. And answering them, he said, Who is my mother and my brethren?

--Mark 3:32-33 Christ's famed question has long been a poser to Biblical scholars. Roman Catholic teaching holds that Mary was perpetually a virgin, and there is an additional Roman Catholic tradition that Joseph was perpetually chaste. If so, who were Jesus' "brothers," named (together with unspecified "sisters") as James, Joseph, Jude and Simon?

The Arguments. The Catholic answer is based on the fact that the word brother in general Semitic usage applies equally to stepbrothers, and is often extended to include other relatives. So, said the early Greek fathers. Christ's "brethren" were really Joseph's children by a former marriage; Latin fathers maintained that they were the Lord's cousins. The arguments: 1) Mary appears throughout the New Testament only as the mother of Jesus and no one else; 2) Mary's annual pilgrimage to Jerusalem (Luke 2:41) would have been an unlikely custom for a woman involved in the bearing and rearing of a large family; 3) Jesus on the cross commended Mary to the care of John (John 19:26-27). which He would hardly have done if she had had real sons to look after her; 4) there is strong textual support for the view that the James and Joseph mentioned as Christ's brethren are the same James and Joseph elsewhere mentioned as the sons of Alpheus and Mary (sister of the Virgin Mary).

Most Protestants, uncommitted to Mary's perpetual virginity, see no reason not to accept Jesus' brothers as real brothers. They point to the Douay version's "And he [Joseph] knew her not till she brought forth her first-born son" (Matthew 1:25), and "And she brought forth her first-born son" (Luke 2:7). To that Catholics reply that Scriptural use of the word "firstborn" connotes a woman's first child but does not neces-j sarily indicate later children.

Village Schoolmaster. These fine points I danced through the British press last week in the kind of theological Donny| brook that used to delight Christian polemicists. It began with a BBC Easter telecast of Family Portrait, a play by Lenore Coffee and William Joyce Cowen that ran for 14 weeks on Broadway in 1939 and for four weeks in London in 1948. Theme of the play: the hostility and lack of comprehension by Jesus' brothers to His mission. Britain's Bernard Cardinal Griffin lost no time in protesting that the play's assumption that Jesus had blood brothers "is contrary to sound scholarship and the belief of all Christian bodies." "Blasphemy," stormed the Catholic paper Universe. "Cast aside was the age-old belief of the Christian world in Our Lady's virginity."

BBC Director General Sir Ian Jacob publicly apologized for the "grave error" committed in putting on the play. But the apology produced more of an outcry than the performance itself. Said Editor Clifford O. Rhodes of the Church of England Newspaper and the Record: "Catholic dogma regarding Christ's brothers and sisters is theological subterfuge. It is a wild and foolish assumption that the Catholics represent Christianity in England." Editor Kingsley Martin of the New Statesman and Nation was "shocked" that "Sir Ian Jacob apologized for all the world as if he were a village schoolmaster in Galway." John Kielty, secretary of the General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches, huffed: "The BBC has now acknowledged the right of the Roman Catholic Church to dictate to the corporation what it shall or shall not produce . . ."

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