About 380 a certain Helvidius wrote a tract in which he rejected the proposition that celibacy is a superior and holier calling than that of marriage and family, and referenced the Holy Family as an example. He even cited Tertullian and Victorinus. This caused quite a stir, with the result that in 383 Jerome wrote a reply entitled, On the Perpetual Virginity of the Blessed Virgin, and Against Helvidius, in which he sought to defend the perpetual virginity, not only of Mary, but also of Joseph, and because of Jerome's authority his view eventually became the accepted norm throughout the Latin church. Nevertheless, it is essentially artificial. His view could be summarised as follows:
- The brothers and sisters of Christ were not the offspring of Mary and Joseph, but of the Virgin Mary's sister, coincidentally also called Mary, and her husband, Clopas.
- It therefore follows that Jesus' "brothers" were really His cousins.
- Although James was obviously a very common name at the time, James the brother of the Lord, James "the Less" and the apostle James the son of Alphaeus were all the same person.
But before we consider these propositions, some issues of translation are in order. The gospels were not written solely from oral tradition. Initially, collections of teachings and narratives were written down for catechistic purposes. ("Many have undertaken to compile a narrative..." Luke 1:1) Now, Hebrew and Aramaic possess sounds not present in Greek or, indeed, in most other European languages. However, Greek nouns possess endings indicative of gender, number, and case. Thus, there is always some difficulty rendering Hebrew names into Greek, and as often as not a Greek ending has to be attached. Most readers will be surprised to learn, for example, that Judas is simply the Old Testament name, Judah with a Greek ending, and that Lazarus is found in the Old Testament as Eleazar.
You should not be surprised, therefore, that the same Hebrew name occasionally gets spelled in two different ways in the New Testament. Thus, Symeon is the same as Simon, and there are two different spellings of Jerusalem. Now Mary represents the Hebrew name, Maryām with the result that the mother of Jesus and the sister of Martha and Lazarus are normally written in Greek as Mariám. However, the Maries present at the cross and the tomb are called María. This is not a different name, but a different spelling, indicating that the lists were compiled at an early stage before the "standard" rendition had developed.
Likewise, Joseph acquires a Greek ending as Joses in Mark 6:3 and Mark 15:40, 47. The interesting thing is that the parallel passages of Matt.13:55 and 27:56 have Joseph in the earliest manuscripts. However, it reverts to Joses in the later manuscripts on which the King James Version is based. The same is true for Acts 4:36.
What we do have is a serious mistranslation. Jerome translates Mark 15:40 as “James the Less”, and almost all later translators have followed him, although some render it as “James the Younger”. Nevertheless, it is wrong, and it says a lot that a scholar of such magnitude should be so blind. The word is not the comparative, mikróteros, “less” or “smaller”, but mikrós, “little”. So the person involved should really be translated as “James the Little” or, as we would say, “Little James”, which probably referred to his stature. Does it matter? Yes, because Jerome made an issue of it, insisting that the comparative indicated that two, and no more than two, people of the same name were involved, and that James the Less was so designated in order to distinguish him from James the brother of John, although there is no evidence that the latter was ever called “James the Great(er)”.
Now, getting back to Jerome's thesis -
1. This is ridiculous. Whoever heard of parents calling two living daughters by the same name? It would negate the whole purpose of naming, which is to tell individuals apart. Jerome based this on the strange construction in John 19:25: “And there stood by the cross of Jesus, his mother and his mother’s sister, Mary of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene”. What he apparently intended was “his mother and his mother’s sister” were to be considered a single unit, Mary of Clopas a third, and Mary Magdalene a fourth. A construct such as this is not unknown in Greek, for in Matt. 10:2-4 also arranges the apostles in pairs. It is also an early interpretation. The Peshitta, the standard translation of the Bible into Aramaic in the second century, inserts “and” between “his mother’s sister” and “Mary of Clopas”. This being said, unless we expand the number of Maries at the cross, Mary of Clopas would also be the mother of James and Joseph.
But even if the Virgin Mary's parents adopted this peculiar system of naming their daughters, it does not follow that Mary of Clopas was the mother of Jesus' brothers. Merely saying so doesn't make it so. This has been asserted so often, we forget how bizarre it is. Hitherto, everyone assumed that Jesus' siblings were at least the offspring of Joseph. Now a completely different father has been introduced with no good reason except to satisfy a pre-determined doctrine.
2. I've already explained in Part 1 that, although "brother" can be used in a symbolic sense, it is not used non-symbolically for more distant relatives. Now, before we go any further, we need to address a contention you will discover on many websites: that Aramaic does not have a separate word for “cousin”. This is false. Aramaic, like most other languages, has to distinguish between such relationships. While “brother” is āḥâ, there are several words for “cousin”, notably āḥān. In any case, the New Testament is not written in Aramaic, but Greek, and this language definitely does possess the appropriate word: anepsiós, which can be found in Col. 4:10. Moreover, there is a perfectly suitable Greek word, used frequently in the New Testament: syngenēs, or “kinsman”. Why wasn’t it used? One might argue - not very convincingly - that the references in the first three gospels are all based on Aramaic originals, but that hardly applies to St. John and St. Paul. Didn’t they know the correct relationships within the Holy Family?
Hegesippus also made the distinction, and so did the early fourth century historian, Eusebius, who quoted him. James, the head of the church in Jerusalem, was called the brother (adelphós) of Jesus, as was a certain Judas, whose grandchildren were interrogated by the Emperor Domitian. After James’ martyrdom, his place was taken by Simeon, the son of Cleophas. In the words of Eusebius: “They say he was the cousin (anepsiós of our Saviour, for Hegesippus asserts that Cleophas was the brother of Joseph.”
3. Nothing in the text identifies Little James ("James the Less") with James the brother of the Lord. It is even more difficult to identify him with James the son of Alphaeus, who was one of the twelve. Nevertheless, such was the authority of Jerome you will constantly see James the sone of Alphaeus referred to as "James the Less".
Jerome admitted that he didn’t know whether Clopas was Mary’s father or her husband. He ought to have. In a patriarchal, patrilinear society a married woman with children is identified by her husband, not the father who gave her away to her husband years before. And Alphaeus and Clopas are two different names. The former is the Greek attempt to write the Hebrew and Aramaic Ḥalphai. The structure and pronunciation of Semitic words make it impossible to convert it to Clopas. The latter is a pure Greek name, a version of Cleopas, itself an abbreviation of Cleopatros. I suppose it is possible that the father of the apostle possessed both a Hebrew and a Greek name, but it is not supported by any evidence, and you just can’t equate two different names in order to advance a particular viewpoint. Apart from that, it is consistently reported that the brothers of Jesus did not believe in him before his resurrection. But James the son of Alphaeus was one of the twelve. And why would he, in particular, be designated “the brother of the Lord”?
And the irony is: if it could be shown that Little James was somehow the same as James the brother of the Lord, it wouldn't be necessary to bring James the son of Alphaeus into the picture. However, it would have left him a rather minor character, and Jerome apparently felt he needed someone fairly important, like an apostle, and because he was convinced there were two James of this stature, one of whom was "the less". So who, then, were Little James and his brother, Joseph (Joses)? My guess is that they were people well known to the Christian community in Jerusalem at the time, but forgotten today - just as Mark 15:21 assumes that the readers know who Alexander and Rufus were, even if we don’t.
Conclusions: This is a good case of putting two and two together to get 22. Full of improbabilities, it is a wholly artificial scheme based on the unproved assumption that both Mary and Joseph were virgins throughout life.
Conclusions: This is a good case of putting two and two together to get 22. Full of improbabilities, it is a wholly artificial scheme based on the unproved assumption that both Mary and Joseph were virgins throughout life.
Next time you hear someone expounding the doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Mary, you should ask: "Why is this important to you?" I've already given the reasons at the start of Part 1, but they ought to be required to face the issue.
In response, we might ask: why is it necessary to debunk it? There are two reasons. The first is that we should not require anyone to believe something which is not taught in the Bible. The second is that it belongs to a world view which devalues sex and marriage as gifts from God. It converts marriage into some sort of necessary evil required for the continuation of the species, and as a channel for urges which are somehow not quite right.
Helvidius was correct: the calling of a virtuous wife and mother is just as holy as that of a lifelong celibate - even more so - and the Holy Family serves as an exemplar.
