Almost everybody knows that the mother of Jesus of Nazareth was named Mary. In some faith traditions, Mary is thought to be a perpetual virgin. She got pregnant with Jesus despite being a virgin. She remained a virgin during the birth of Jesus. And for the rest of her life, she remained a virgin.
But in other faith traditions, Mary is thought to have borne several children after Jesus. This is based on eleven passages in the New Testament and one in Josephus. Protestant tradition holds that when the New Testament talks about “brothers”, it means actual brothers—sons of Joseph and Mary. This is the simplest interpretation of the data, and it’s the one I think most likely to be right. (Catholic tradition considers these “brothers” to be cousins, and Orthodox tradition considers them to be half-brothers by a previous wife of Joseph.)
However we choose to interpret things, there is quite a lot of biblical evidence that talks about siblings of Jesus, and we’ll look at that evidence here.
The “Brothers of Jesus” in the Gospels
At least 9 texts in the four canonical gospels mention the “brothers” of Jesus, and two of them also mention “sisters.”
Mark 6:3 tells us that Jesus had four brothers, James, Joses, Judas, and Simon. The text also mentions an unspecified number of sisters.
Matthew 13: 55-56 names the same four brothers with slightly different names in a slightly different order, James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas, and it also mentions the sisters, again failing to tell us how many there were.
John 2:12 tells us that after Jesus performed the famous miracle of turning water into wine, he and his mother and brothers and disciples went to Capernaum and stayed there a few days. No sisters are named here, and in fact, the sisters are not mentioned anywhere else in the Bible. I like to think that the water-into-wine story may have happened at the wedding of Jesus’s youngest sister, but this is pure speculation. I can’t prove it, and I can’t disprove it.
Mark 3:31-35 tells a story of a time when Jesus’s mother and brothers came looking for him. The context earlier in the chapter tells us that they were concerned for his mental health. They had heard Jesus had gone crazy, and their mission was to come rescue him. But when they found him, Jesus seemed quite sane.
Matthew 12:46-50 tells essentially the same story, again referring to Jesus’s mother and brothers.
Luke 8:19-21 tells a shorter form of this story, and once again, the family is called his mother and brothers.
John 7:1-10 tells quite an extended account of an incident about six months before Jesus was killed. His brothers urged him to go to Jerusalem for the Feast of Tabernacles and make a name for himself. According to this passage, his brothers had no confidence in him themselves, so it’s not clear what their motives were. But Jesus made no move to go, so his brothers went without him. After that, Jesus also went to the feast.
Matthew 28:10 tells a very brief tale in which Jesus appeared to his disciples on Easter Sunday and asked them to tell his brothers to meet him in Galilee.
John 20:17 has a similar episode in which Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene on Easter Sunday and gives her a message for his brothers.
A Shout-Out to James
By all accounts, the oldest of the brothers of Jesus was James, who became the leader of the Jesus Movement in Jerusalem in the years following his crucifixion. This is quite odd. James was not a follower of Jesus during his lifetime, but he became one after his death. What’s the explanation for this?
1 Corinthians 15:7 gives the reason James became a believer. According to the apostle Paul, Jesus appeared to James at some point after Easter Sunday. Possibly, this appearance happened in Galilee, given the message from Jesus to his brothers, as mentioned in Matthew 28. But how does Paul come by his information that Jesus appeared to Paul? The answer is that Paul met with James on several occasions.
In Galatians 1, Paul tells of visiting Jerusalem about three years after his conversion experience. There he spent 15 days with the apostle Peter, and he also met with “James, the Lord’s brother.” This event probably happened sometime in the mid 30s, about five years after the death of Jesus.
Galations 2:9 tells that Paul returned to Jerusalem about fourteen years later, where he met with Peter and John and James. Paul doesn’t say a lot about this meeting, and it’s hard to assign an exact date. It must be the late 40s or the early 50s.
Acts 15 tells a very long account of a visit Paul made to Jerusalem at some date around the year AD 50. (Was this the same meeting Paul mentions in Galatians 2? Scholars don’t agree on this question.) There Paul met with the leadership of the Jesus Movement and they had a heated discussion on how Gentiles should be treated. Should they be accepted as full believers in Jesus, or were they second-class citizens? In the end of the story, James makes the binding decision that Gentiles must be accepted with almost no restrictions on them as far as Torah-observance. What this tells us is that James was not just “one of the elders”. He was the leader of the Jesus Movement. Quite a change from the hostile attitude he held during the lifetime of Jesus!
Acts 21 tells a very long story about Paul’s final visit to Jerusalem, about the year AD 57, when he brought gifts for the believers from their Gentile brothers. There, Paul met with “James and all the elders”. (My novel Transgression is built around this visit by Paul to Jerusalem.) Paul was arrested on this visit, and ultimately he went to Rome to appear before Nero. We don’t know his fate, but tradition says he was beheaded there.
We know from Josephus (Antiquities of the Jews 20.200) that about five years later, around the year AD 62, James “the brother of Jesus, who was also called Christ” was executed on a charge of “law-breaking”. He had run afoul of the high priest Annas, son of the Annas who presided at the trial of Jesus. Whatever disagreements James had with Jesus early on, he ultimately gave his full loyalty to his brother. If you’ve read my novel Premonition, you got a good look at this part of the story of James.
The Other Brothers
The other brothers were less prominent than James, but it seems they were also active in the Jesus Movement. Paul mentions in 1 Corinthians 9:5 that the “brothers of the Lord” took along their wives when they traveled to meet believers in foreign cities.
Some traditions hold that James, the brother of Jesus, wrote the book of James in the New Testament and that his brother Judas wrote the book of Jude. Whether these traditions are true or not, the fact that the books were attributed to brothers of Jesus tells us that those brothers were prominent in the Jesus Movement.
But What About the Sisters of Jesus?
The sisters of Jesus are hardly mentioned in the New Testament. They would have been married off around the age of thirteen. In the patriarchal world Jesus lived in, a girl’s marriage meant that she left her family of origin and became part of a different family. So the sisters don’t play much role in the Jesus Story, except for the two brief mentions in Mark and Matthew, where they were apparently villagers living in Nazareth.
Of course there are old traditions about these sisters. Two of them have been assigned names—Mary and Salome, and these are plausible. A quarter of all Jewish girls at the time of Jesus were named Maria or Maryam or Miryam (all of these become “Mary” in English). Another quarter were named Shlomzion or Shlomi or some other variant (all of these become “Salome” in English). So it would be surprising if the sisters of Jesus didn’t have these names. Some of the women at the cross of Jesus bore these names, and many historians have speculated on whether one or more might have been his sisters.
We don’t know how many sisters Jesus had. I would not be surprised if he had at least three. It would be odd to have five brothers and only two sisters. Possible, but odd.
How Many Children Did Mary Have?
Assuming Mary had at least seven children who lived to adulthood, it’s very likely she had another three or four who died in infancy or childhood. Infant mortality is high in any primitive culture, and a high fraction of all children die before becoming adults.
So it’s plausible that Mary gave birth to ten or twelve children, and possibly as many as fifteen. When I began working on my Crown of Thorns series, I had to make a guess. Here is my line of reasoning, which is pure speculation, but it’s plausible speculation, based on a couple of facts.
Fact 1: It appears that Joseph was dead by the time Jesus began exercising his prophetic gifts. Joseph is never mentioned after the Nativity stories. He must have lived long enough to father at least seven children, and given infant mortality rates, it seems more likely he fathered at least ten.
Fact 2: Jesus didn’t leave the family home until he was “about thirty”. We have reason to think he was maybe even two or three years older than that.
I would guess that Jesus stayed home supporting the family until his youngest sibling became an adult. If that youngest sibling was a girl, then her marriage would have marked her entry to adulthood. And we know Jesus went to a wedding feast right around the beginning of his prophetic career. Was the bride his youngest sister? Does that explain why his mother was so concerned when the wine ran out? It’s plausible, but I don’t claim it’s anywhere close to certain.
If this guess is correct, then Joseph must have lived until roughly the year AD 16 or so. (Assuming Jesus began his work in the fall of AD 29, which is a plausible guess that matches the historical facts pretty well.) If Jesus was born about the year 4 or 5 BC, that gives Joseph and Mary about twenty years of child-production, and a baby every couple of years would produce around ten children. Possibly a couple more. Probably not more than fifteen.
This is all very tenuous, but there seems no way to work the numbers any better than this, so I rest my case. However you slice the numbers, if you accept the premise that the “brothers and sisters” of Jesus were his actual siblings, then Mary seems to have borne a lot of children.
One of them became King of the World.
