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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadGreater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 590. The Brother of the Lord
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The Brother of the Lord
1. Three theories have been held as to the “brethren of the Lord.” (1) According to Helvidius they were the children of Joseph and Mary, born after Jesus Christ. (2) They were, according to Jerome, the sons of Alphæus, the cousins of our Lord, loosely called “brethren.” (3) According to Epiphanius they were the sons of Joseph by a previous marriage. The weight of opinion is now in favour of the first of these theories.
The chief objections to it are that Jesus commended His mother to the care of John, not to one of the brothers; that their conduct in trying to control Him implies that they were older; that tradition favours the theory of Epiphanius as early as the second century; and that it is repugnant to Christian sentiment to suppose that, after the birth of Christ, Mary became the mother of other children. This feeling, so real to us, cannot be attributed with certainty to Jews of the first century. It is uncertain when, or to what extent, Joseph and Mary realized the mystery of the Incarnation.
2. As there was nothing in the announcement made to them which could enable them to realize the astounding truth that He who was to be born of Mary was Very God of Very God, so there is nothing in the subsequent life of Mary which would lead us to believe that she, any more than His Apostles, had realized it before His resurrection. It is hard enough even now to hold together the ideas of the humanity and the divinity of Christ without doing violence to either; but to those who knew Him in the flesh we may safely say it was impossible until the Comforter had come and revealed it unto them. As to what should be the relations between the husband and wife after the birth of the promised Child, there is one thing we may be sure of, viz., that these would be determined, not by personal considerations, but either by immediate inspiration, as the journey to Egypt and other events had been, or, in the absence of this, by the one desire to do what they believed to be best for the bringing up of the Child entrusted to them. We can imagine their feeling it to be a duty to abstain from bringing other children into the world, in order that they might devote themselves more exclusively to the nurture and training of Jesus. On the other hand, the greatest prophets and saints had not been brought up in solitude. Moses, Samuel, and David had had brothers and sisters. It might be God's will that the Messiah should experience in this, as in other things, the common lot of man.
The natural meaning of the language used in the New Testament is that the “brethren” were the children of Joseph and Mary.
Jesus was a son to His mother, an eldest son, too, and maybe, rather likely, of a widowed mother, who leaned upon her first-born in piecing out the small funds, and in the ceaseless care of the younger children. He was a brother to His brothers and sisters, a real brother, the big brother of the little group. He was a neighbour to His fellow-villagers, and a fellow-labourer with the other craftsmen.1 [Note: S. D. Gordon, Quiet Talks on Home Ideals, 113.]
The typical human institution of marriage, round which all social existence turns, is transfigured by Christ's appearance. He finds in it the symbol and law of His own relation to man, and so raises it to a higher power, and endows it with a finer force, and a more valid stability, and a deeper significance. And out of this exaltation of marriage there rises a new fabric, a new wonder-the Christian home, with its exquisite ideal of firm and beautiful order, in which all the several parts are given their full value, and the man is at once master yet servant, and the wife is endowed with grace out of her very weakness, as the curse of pain that lay on child-bearing is transmuted by the sweet honour that belongs to it, since she who was highly favoured became a maiden mother. And the children are made holy, even as the type from which we learn how to enter the Kingdom of Heaven by becoming what they are, whose angels behold the face of their true Father who is in heaven.2 [Note: H. Scott Holland.]