Who Are the Brothers of Jesus in the Bible? The Three Explanations and the Sources

The “brothers of Jesus” of the Bible are four men named in Mt 13:55 – James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas – besides unnamed sisters. No text of the New Testament calls them sons of Mary. Since the fourth century, three explanations have contended over the passage: they were cousins or close relatives, they were sons of an earlier marriage of Joseph, or they were sons of Mary – this last one rejected by the Church.

The question is not one of genealogical curiosity. On it depends the reading of the perpetual virginity of Mary, and for that reason it runs through sixteen centuries of exegesis, with a technical vocabulary of its own and a scholarly bibliography that is still active. This article presents what the sources say, and where they diverge among themselves.

The problem begins with a word: adelphós and the Hebrew ah

The philological knot is well known. The Greek of the New Testament uses adelphós (ἀδελφός) to designate a brother, but that Greek translates a Semitic substratum in which the term has a much broader range. Áurea Silva dos Santos, in O papel da Virgem Maria na economia da salvação (2024), gathers the formulation of the mariologist Aleixo Maria Autran (1992, p. 37): “The term adelphós (brother) in biblical Greek corresponds to the Hebrew word Ah, which means both a brother in the flesh and a blood relative. […] Although these ‘brothers’ appear together with Mary, nowhere is it said that they were ‘sons of Mary’.”

The Hebrew אָח (ah) covers, in fact, the brother by blood, the cousin, the nephew, the uncle, and the member of the clan. Santos concludes from this that, in the biblical context, the word brother designates also a cousin, a nephew, an uncle, or any relative. It is worth underlining the second member of Autran’s argument, which is the strongest and the least cited: the absence. Nowhere in the New Testament does one read that these men were sons of Mary, although she appears mentioned alongside them.

The textual proof: Mk 15:40 and the other Mary

The decisive argument is not philological, it is prosopographical, and it comes from a comparison of lists. Geraldo Morujão, in a study published by the Pontifical International Marian Academy in the volume Maria, a Mãe do Senhor, no mistério da salvação, maintains that the reference to the brothers of Jesus does not even require resorting to what he calls a subterfuge, because they were cousins, and the Gospel itself supplies the proof.

The proof is this: James and Joseph, the first two names in the list of Mt 13:55, are presented in Mk 15:40 as sons of another Mary, distinct from the Mother of Jesus. And, Morujão observes, those two names always appear at the head of the lists of the brothers of Jesus. Those who head the list of “brothers” have, in the same Gospel, another mother identified by name.

Note the difference of method between the two approaches. Autran argues from the semantics of the term, Morujão from the cross-referencing of two pericopes. The two converge, but they are not the same argument, and the second is immune to the usual objection that the broad semantics of adelphós would be an apologetic convenience. On the relation between these texts and the presence of Mary in the Gospels, see whether Mary is almost absent from the Bible.

The three explanations in conflict

From the fourth century onward, three solutions compete, and it is important not to harmonize them in silence, because their defenders considered them incompatible.

First, that of Helvidius: they were sons of Mary. Áurea Silva dos Santos places Helvidius (390) in a precise polemical context. He was writing to refute the Manichaean theses, which maintained the iniquity intrinsic to marriage, and he used the Gospel texts about the brothers of Jesus in order to propose the Virgin Mary as a model of the mothers of large families. Against him, writes the same author, Saint Ambrose (397), Saint Jerome (420), and Saint Augustine (430) took their stand in defense of perpetual virginity.

Second, that of the Protoevangelium of James: they were sons of Joseph. João Marcos de Oliveira Silva, in Bendita entre as mulheres? A desconfortável relação entre assembleianos e Maria de Nazaré (2019), describes this position and its survival: the belief of the Orthodox about the brothers of Jesus is an inheritance from the Protoevangelium, according to which Joseph was a widower who already had children before betrothing himself to Mary, so that the brothers of Jesus would be sons of Joseph, not of Mary.

Third, that of Jerome: they were cousins. The same author records that Jerome rejected the explanation of the Protoevangelium, and for a fundamental reason: for him, not only had Mary remained a virgin all her life, but Joseph as well. Jerome argued, in the work The Perpetual Virginity of Mary, Against Helvidius, that in “Sacred Scripture there are four kinds of brothers: by nature, by race, by kinship, and by love” (n. 16). The brothers of Jesus would thus be not brothers in fact, but cousins or relatives.

The divergence is real and deserves to be named. The Eastern tradition and the Protoevangelium answer with the sons of Joseph, Jerome answers with the cousins, and the two answers exclude each other as to the state of Joseph. Silva adds a relevant historical datum: the condemnation of the Protoevangelium by Jerome, and afterward the explicit condemnation of the book in the Decretum Gelasianum, composed in the sixth century, checked the popularity of the work in the West, without preventing part of its content from remaining in traditional beliefs. On the value of these ancient writings, see the historical sources on Mary, the Bible and the apocrypha.

What the theologians of the sixteenth century answered

It is worth listening to a theologian who is not devotional and who is already writing in the midst of the debate with the Reformation. Melchior Cano, professor at Salamanca and imperial theologian at the Council of Trent, author of De locis theologicis, sets out the state of the question with remarkable methodological honesty: “No approved author affirms that he has seen and has known from trustworthy testimonies that there existed another wife of Joseph besides Mary. But since one reads in the Gospels that the brothers of the Lord existed and faith forbids suspecting that they were sons of Mary, the commentators on Scripture had to conjecture in order to explain the situation, how the truth of the Gospel might accord with the perpetual Virginity of Mary.”

Cano therefore says three things at once. That there is no documentary testimony of an earlier wife of Joseph. That faith excludes the hypothesis of sons of Mary. And that the explanation of the identity of these brothers is a conjecture of commentators, not a revealed datum. It is a distinction of degrees of certainty that is rarely found in popular treatments of the subject.

Mk 3:31-35: the most quoted scene and the most misread

The pericope that brings the brothers onto the scene is Mk 3:31-35, quoted by Áurea Silva dos Santos in her translation: “Then His Mother and His brothers came and, standing outside, they sent to call Him. There was a crowd seated around Him. They said to Him: Behold, your Mother, your brothers, and your sisters are outside and are looking for you. He asked: Who is my Mother and my brothers? And, looking around at those who were seated about Him, He said: Behold my mother and my brothers. Whoever does the will of God, he is my brother, sister, and mother.”

The author comments that Saint Mark presents an image of Mary maternally solicitous for her Son and that Jesus there defines His eschatological family “without excluding His physical family”, referring to Mk 10:29-30. Silva, on the Protestant side, reads the same scene from v. 21, where the relatives are mentioned in a generic way, and points out a divergence of translation that changes the tone of the episode: where some versions say that Jesus “is beside Himself”, the Jerusalem Bible has “He has gone mad”.

Two confessional readings, the same Greek text, and one point on which both agree: the scene does not say that those men were sons of Mary. The broader family context appears also in Mary, Joseph and Jesus in the temple and in the designation of Jesus as the son of the carpenter, which is precisely the verse where the four names appear.

State of the question: a scholarly controversy still open

It would be false to present the matter as closed since Jerome. Carlos Ignacio González, in María, evangelizada y evangelizadora (1988), gathers a specialized bibliography that shows the contrary, with titles such as that of G. Rocca, “La perpetua verginità di Maria nella discussione teologica cattolica degli ultimi anni. Questioni di metodo”, in Ephemerides Mariologicae 27 (1977), pp. 177-214, and that of F. de P. Sola, “La virginidad perpetua de María y sus modernas interpretaciones”, in Estudios Marianos 42 (1978), pp. 93-112. The very existence of articles on questions of method indicates a living debate.

The same work of Áurea Silva dos Santos recalls, relying on René Laurentin (1965), that virginity in giving birth was elucidated amid controversies to the point of leaving Jerome himself hesitant, and that virginity after giving birth was initially deduced amid contradictions, being ignored by Tertullian and by authors who followed his thought. On the Eastern side, Sergei Bulgakov explains perpetual virginity as a recovery of the faculties of the first parents before the fall, that is, the capacity to beget or to conceive in a spiritual and supra-sexual manner. These are very different frameworks for the same truth of faith.

The answer to the initial question, therefore, can be given with firmness in what is essential and with prudence in the detail. The brothers of Jesus are close relatives, and Mk 15:40 identifies by name the mother of the first two on the list. The exact degree of kinship of each one is, as Melchior Cano acknowledged, a conjecture of commentators.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who are the brothers of Jesus in the Bible?

Mt 13:55 names four: James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas, and mentions sisters without naming them. The New Testament never calls them sons of Mary. Mk 15:40 presents James and Joseph as sons of another Mary, distinct from the Mother of Jesus.

Did Jesus have brothers by blood?

The Catholic faith excludes that hypothesis, and the text itself does not affirm it. As Melchior Cano observes, faith forbids suspecting that they were sons of Mary. The Greek term adelphós translates the Hebrew ah, which designates also a cousin, a nephew, an uncle, and a relative in general.

What does the word adelphós mean in the New Testament?

According to the mariologist Aleixo Maria Autran, quoted by Áurea Silva dos Santos, adelphós in biblical Greek corresponds to the Hebrew ah, which means both a brother in the flesh and a blood relative. The semantic breadth is not a later reading, it is characteristic of the Semitic substratum of the text.

Were the brothers of Jesus sons of Saint Joseph by a first marriage?

That is the explanation of the Protoevangelium of James, followed by the Eastern tradition, according to which Joseph was a widower and already had children. Saint Jerome rejected that solution, because he maintained the virginity of Joseph as well, and proposed in its place that they were cousins. The two explanations are incompatible with each other.

Who was Helvidius and why did the Church reject him?

Helvidius, a writer of the end of the fourth century, used the texts about the brothers of Jesus in order to propose Mary as a model of the mothers of large families, in the context of a polemic against Manichaeism. Saint Ambrose, Saint Jerome, and Saint Augustine answered in defense of perpetual virginity, and the treatise of Jerome against him remains the reference text.