Journal 4

Why does the fact that Jesus had siblings pose trouble for a theist?

Jesus is considered the son of man, and according to the bible his mother, Mary, was
a Virgin. Those who heard him teach in the Synagogue wondered: “Isn’t this the
carpenter? Isn’t this Mary’s son and the brother of James, Joseph, Judas and
Simon? Aren’t his sisters here with us?” (Mark 6:3) An interesting passage indeed, as it
brings into question Jesus’s family, and explicitly states that Jesus has four brothers and
at least three sisters. From a theological standpoint this creates some tension, as Jesus is
supposedly the Son of God; does it mean that his siblings are also the immediate
children of the Holy Spirit? Well, wouldn’t this make Jesus less special? Why would he
be the only one of his siblings who possessed the power to create miracles and change
the course of history? Did God choose him
because he was the first-born? I’ll tell you
what I believe. I believe that Jesus was the
son of St. Joseph, and that James, Judas,
Joseph, Simon and his sisters were in fact
his immediate family. For a theist who
believes that Jesus was the Son of God,
there are a few different ways to work
around this issue. One way being to say that
these were Jesus’s half siblings (the children
of Joseph and Mary, while Jesus is the son
of God and Mary), even though it does not
explicitly state this in the bible. Another way
to work around the issue is to say that the
term ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ is used as a way
to describe an acquaintance, like ‘brethren’.
But in John it states “he went down to
Capernaum with his mother, his brothers,
and his disciples; and they remained there a few days” (John 2:12). I wonder if Jesus
would consider his disciples as ‘Brethren’, meaning that his ‘brothers’ are his actual
brothers. It is not possible for a believer to interpret the bible in a literal way without
somehow disregarding the issue of Jesus’s siblings, by one or more of the ways I have
described above.