Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Jesus' Brothers

Today, somewhat randomly, I had a sudden question come to mind, "Did Jesus have brothers?" And so I started doing some research...

Turns out that answer is harder to find than one may think. The New Testament describes James, Joseph, Joses, Judas, and Simon as "brothers"of Jesus Christ. "brothers". Those quotation marks complicate things. It's not explicitly stated that they were blood relatives, but many scholars claim that the "brothers" were in fact biological children of Mary and Joseph. And for believers in Jesus' immaculate conception, many people would also claim that by nature, Jesus could not have had blood siblings. Despite all these different claims a common middle-ground is that these "brothers" were closely associated with the family and may have been cousins, but were not direct children of Joseph and Mary.

That's basically an overview, but there is a wikipedia page on the brothers of Jesus that includes the sources that these claims originated from, and even some diagrams of a family pedigree. Take a look!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brothers_of_Jesus

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