Who are the brothers of Jesus in the Bible? The three explanations and the sources

The «brothers of Jesus» in the Bible are four men named in Matthew 13:55 – James, Joseph, Simon and Jude – together with unnamed sisters. No text of the New Testament calls them sons of Mary. Since the fourth century three explanations have disputed 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 Mary’s perpetual virginity, and for that reason it runs through sixteen centuries of exegesis, with its own technical vocabulary and a scholarly bibliography that is still active. This article sets out what the sources say, and where they diverge from one another.

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

The philological knot is well known. The Greek of the New Testament uses adelphos (ἀδελφός) to designate a brother, but that Greek translates a Semitic substratum in which the term has a far wider range. Áurea Silva dos Santos, in The role of the Virgin Mary in the economy of salvation (2024), records the formulation of the mariologist Aleixo Maria Autran (1992, p. 37): «The term adelphos (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) indeed covers the brother by blood, the cousin, the nephew, the uncle and the member of the clan. Santos concludes that in the biblical context the word brother also designates a cousin, a nephew, an uncle or any relative. It is worth stressing the second limb of Autran’s argument, which is the stronger and the less quoted: the absence. Nowhere in the New Testament does one read that those men were sons of Mary, even though she appears mentioned beside them.

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

The decisive argument is not philological but prosopographical, and it comes from a comparison of lists. Geraldo Morujão, in a study published by the Pontifical International Marian Academy in the volume Mary, the Mother of the Lord, in the mystery of salvation, holds that the reference to the brothers of Jesus does not even require recourse 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 Matthew 13:55, are presented in Mark 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. Whoever heads the list of the «brothers» has, 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 crossing of two pericopes. The two converge, but they are not the same argument, and the second is immune to the usual objection that the semantic breadth of adelphos would be an apologetic convenience. On the relation between these texts and Mary’s presence in the Gospels, see whether Mary is almost absent from the Bible.

The three explanations compared

From the fourth century onwards three solutions compete, and it is important not to harmonize them silently, 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 wrote to refute the Manichaean theses, which asserted an iniquity intrinsic to marriage, and used the Gospel texts on the brothers of Jesus to propose the Virgin Mary as a model for the mothers of large families. Against him, the same author writes, Saint Ambrose (397), Saint Jerome (420) and Saint Augustine (430) took their stand in defence of perpetual virginity.

Second, that of the Protoevangelium of James: they were sons of Joseph. João Marcos de Oliveira Silva, in Blessed among women? The uncomfortable relationship between Assemblies of God members and Mary of Nazareth (2019), describes this position and its survival: the Orthodox belief about the brothers of Jesus is an inheritance from the Protoevangelium, according to which Joseph was a widower who already had children before his betrothal 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 cousins, and the two answers exclude one another as regards Joseph’s state. Silva adds a relevant historical datum: Jerome’s condemnation of the Protoevangelium, and later the explicit condemnation of the book in the Decretum Gelasianum, composed in the sixth century, checked the work’s popularity in the West without preventing part of its content from remaining among traditional beliefs. On the value of these ancient writings, see the historical sources on Mary, Bible and apocrypha.

What the theologians of the sixteenth century answered

It is worth listening to a theologian who is not devotional and who writes already in full debate with the Reformation. Melchior Cano, professor at Salamanca and imperial theologian at the Council of Trent, author of De locis theologicis, states the question with a remarkable methodological honesty: «No approved author states that he has seen or known from reliable 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 the suspicion that they were sons of Mary, the commentators on Scripture had to conjecture in order to explain how the truth of the Gospel might agree 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 revealed data. It is a distinction of degrees of certainty rarely found in popular treatments of the subject.

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

The pericope that brings the brothers on stage is Mark 3:31-35, quoted by Áurea Silva dos Santos: «Then his Mother and his brothers came and, standing outside, sent to call him. There was a crowd sitting 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 round at those who were sitting about him, he said: Here are my mother and my brothers. Whoever does the will of God 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, from the Protestant side, reads the same scene from v. 21, where the relatives are mentioned generically, 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 wider family context appears also in Mary, Joseph and Jesus in the temple and in the designation of Jesus as the carpenter’s son, which is precisely the verse where the four names occur.

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 specialist bibliography that shows the contrary, with titles such as 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 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, following René Laurentin (1965), that virginity in giving birth was set out 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 the recovery of the faculties of our first parents before the fall, that is, the capacity to beget or conceive in a spiritual and supra-sexual manner. These are very different frameworks for the same truth of faith.

The answer to the opening question can therefore be given firmly in essentials and prudently in detail. The brothers of Jesus are close relatives, and Mark 15:40 identifies by name the mother of the first two on the list. Exactly what degree of kinship each one had is, as Melchior Cano acknowledged, a conjecture of commentators.

Frequently asked questions

Who are the brothers of Jesus in the Bible?

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

Did Jesus have blood brothers?

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

What does the word adelphos mean in the New Testament?

According to the mariologist Aleixo Maria Autran, quoted by Áurea Silva dos Santos, adelphos 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 a 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 who already had children. Saint Jerome rejected that solution, because he held the virginity of Joseph as well, and proposed instead 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 late fourth century, used the texts on the brothers of Jesus to propose Mary as a model for the mothers of large families, in the context of a polemic against Manichaeism. Saint Ambrose, Saint Jerome and Saint Augustine replied in defence of perpetual virginity, and Jerome’s treatise against him remains the reference text.