How do you explain to a Protestant that Jesus didn't have siblings?
First thing is, we do have people in scripture
who were described as Jesus's brothers. But the term brother means more than one thing.
The normal meaning of the term brother is someone who is
the child of the same two parents. So they have the same mother and the same father.
That's the normal meaning of the term brother. In English,
the fancy term for that is a brother German. But normally we just say a full brother.
Well, it's clear because Jesus did not have a human father that whatever brothers Jesus had,
they were not full brothers. So the normal sense of the term is not being used for these brothers.
It has to be a rarer use of the term. So what other kinds of brothers are there?
Well, there are half brothers where you have one parent in common, but not both. And
that's the typical theory you hear advocated in Protestant circles that they were half brothers,
that they had Mary as a mother, but they also had Joseph as a father, which Jesus did not.
But that's not the only other kind of brother. There are also stepbrothers.
And a stepbrother is one where they are children of one parent, but they're
in the way this would work in Jesus's case is that they would it could have been children
of Joseph by a former marriage. So they're Joseph's children and not Mary's children.
And thus they thus Mary's virginity was not affected. This is actually the oldest theory that
we have documented in Christian history of who the brethren were. There was a document written in the
second century called the Infancy Gospel of James. It's also called the Proto Evangelism of James.
But in the Infancy Gospel of James, it indicates that Mary was a consecrated virgin from her youth.
And that's why Joseph was picked as a guardian for her, because he was an
elderly widower that already had a family and so he wasn't looking to start a new family.
And the fact that Joseph is older than Mary, which would go along with him being an elderly widower
is something that is at least suggested by the fact that in the New Testament,
Joseph appears to be dead by the time Jesus begins his ministry.
Joseph last appears when Jesus is 12, and he apparently died sometime between when Jesus was 12
and when Jesus was 30, when he began his ministry. And if you have a miracle-working son,
you probably die at an old age. And that would suggest Joseph was older. So that goes along
actually with what we find in the infancy Gospel of James.
There are also a couple of additional things that are in the New Testament itself. One of
them is when Mary is told by the Angel Gabriel that she's going to give birth and have a son,
she says, How will this happen? Because I know not man or I don't know a man.
And "know," here is the biblical sense of knowing, meaning to have - meaning to have - sex.
So she's saying, I don't have sex with a man, so how is this going to be?
Well, the fact that she asks the question reveals that she knows how babies are made. So she knows
parents need to have sex in order to have a baby. But
at this point in her life, Luke tells us she's already engaged to Joseph.
She's already legally married to him. And so if she were planning on a normal marriage,
then she would know exactly what was going to happen. She would just wait until she and Joseph
begin living together, and then they would have sex and then they would have
a baby. And that's how Gabriel's prophecy would come true. But she doesn't say that.
She says, how is this going to happen? Which suggests she was not planning on a normal
marriage. We then go to the end of John's gospel in John 19. During the crucifixion,
Jesus looks down from the cross and - says to - he sees Mary and the beloved disciple John standing there.
And he says to them, Woman, Behold your son and son, behold your mother.
And then John tells us that from that hour, he took Mary into his own family. And
this would never happen if Mary had other children. If Mary had other children,
she would have been cared for by them. Also, this is another sign that Joseph is dead at this point,
because otherwise, she would have just gone back to living with Joseph.
So when we look at all these pieces of evidence, the fact that Joseph seems to be older than Mary
because he dies earlier, the fact that Mary does not appear to be planning on a normal marriage.
The fact that Jesus entrusts her care to an outsider like John instead of to one of her
own children. Plus, the testimony in the early church, like in the Infancy Gospel of James,
all of this together suggests that Mary did indeed remain a virgin.