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This morning I recounted to my wife an occasion about twelve years ago when I was preaching from Luke 8:19-21 where the text says,
“Then his mother and his brothers came to him, but they could not reach him because of the crowd.”
After reading this text to the congregation, I looked up with a smirk and said, “and for those of you who might have mistakenly heard that Mary was a perpetual virgin, or that Jesus didn’t have other blood-born siblings from Mary and Joseph – behold – I present to you Jesus’ brothers!”
I was going for a laugh, and I got what I wanted from the congregation. But as I would come to learn, I was wrong about my conclusions because I wasn’t reading the Bible with the whole Church (by which I mean the Church through the ages). I was essentially reading it by myself (or, better yet, with the relatively small number of Christians in the entire history of Christianity with whom I agreed).
My wife’s response after hearing me retell the story? “You needed that to be the meaning of the text because you couldn’t give a point to the Catholics. You needed the Catholic perspective to be wrong.” She was right.
Does adelphos (ἀδελφός – brother) always mean a literal blood-brother in the Bible? The short and easy answer for anyone who will take a few minutes to investigate it is simple; no.
In the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament, there are around 771 occurrences of adelphos in its various forms. It is often the word of choice used to communicate that a person is a close family member, countryman, or relative of some kind (often a cousin, aunt, uncle, niece, or nephew). Here is a sampling of texts just from the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament) where the word in the LXX is used to identify a relative who is not a sibling.
Adelphos in the Pentateuch
Genesis
14:14a Abram, upon hearing that his kinsman Lot was taken prisoner…
Lot is literally Abraham’s nephew, so Abraham is Lot’s uncle. But the word adelphos (brother/kinsman) or adelphous (brothers/kinsmen) is used in the LXX and translated nephew in English. Why? Because that’s a common or colloquial way of identifying a relative.
29:12a And he reported to Rachel that he was a kinsman of her father and that he was the son of Rebekah…
In this text, Jacob is reporting to his cousin, Rachel, that he is her cousin, and the nephew of her father, Laban. Once again, the LXX translators pick adelphos to convey this matrix of familial relationships.
See also Gen. 24:48; 25:18; 29:4, 12, 15; 31:23, 25, 32, 37, 46, 54, etc.
Exodus
2:11 On one occasion, after Moses had grown up, when he had gone out to his kinsmen and witnessed their forced labor, he saw an Egyptian striking a Hebrew, one of his own kinsmen.
Adelphous is the word used in both occurrences here. It generally means his ethnic relatives, the Israelites, and is not limited to his own immediate family (mother, brother, and sister).
4:18 Moses went back to Jethro his father-in-law and said to him, “Please let me go back to my brothers in Egypt…”
Moses only has one brother (Aaron). His use of the word here implies that he is going back to check on his entire family, his kinfolk (to use a southern American word). Therefore, some translations use the word kinsmen, relatives, “my own people” in this verse where adelphous is used in the LXX.
See also Ex. 32:27, 29, etc.
Leviticus
25:25 And if your kinsman becomes poor…buy back his brother’s sold property.
25:35 And if your kinsman becomes poor…your kinsman will live with you.
25:36 …your kinsman will live with you.
25:39 …if your kinsman becomes humbled..
25:46 …any person of your kinsmen of the people of Israel.
I’ll stop with these, though there are a total of twelve occurrences of adelphos/ous in Lev. 25. Most of them are not references to siblings. Often, they are references to family relatives of some kind, and even the entire ethnic people of Israel (see especially Lev. 25:46).
Numbers
16:10 And he has brought you and all your kinsmen, the sons of Levi with you…
18:2 And now, bring your kinsmen, the tribe of Levi…
18:6 I myself have taken your kinsmen, the Levites…
Many of the texts in Numbers referencing the sons of Levi have to do with the entire male offspring of Levi across multiple generations. Thus, adelphous is not limited to a single generation of brothers who were the immediate sons of Levi. In this case, an entire tribe, spanning multiple generations, is referred to as brothers. In simple terms, the word here means family and would include all kinds of relationships between fathers, sons, brothers, uncles, and nephews, all of whom come, originally, from Levi.
See also Num. 32:6, for example.
Deuteronomy
There are simply too many examples of adelphos that are not to be understood as male/female siblings in Deuteronomy to list here. For your own edification, see for example Deut. 1:16; 2:4, 8; 3:18, 20; 10:9; 15:7; 17:15; 18:2, etc.
On and on it goes in Deuteronomy and the rest of the Old Testament, for that matter.
What’s the point?
The point is, adelphos (brother) and adelphous (brethren) are words that may carry a variety of meanings depending on how they are being used. They can mean siblings, family members (uncle, nephew, cousin, etc.), national/ethnic relatives (such as the whole people of Israel from all the tribes), and even those who share a common faith.
Some thoughts from St. Jerome (342-420 AD)
St. Jerome was commissioned by Pope Damasus in the late 4th century to translate the entire Bible out of its original languages (Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic) into Latin. He is an early witness to the linguistic, traditional, and theological understandings that the Church had always had about the “brothers of the Lord.” In around 383 AD, Jerome produced a tract containing 24 sections in response to a man named Helvidius who denied, among other things, that Mary was perpetually a virgin. Part of Helvidius’ argument was the mention of the words “brothers of the Lord” (and language like this) in the New Testament.
Jerome, one of the Church’s most celebrated and earliest Bible translators, who was familiar with the nearly 800 uses of the word adelphos in the Septuagint surveyed multiple uses of adelphos in Genesis as a rejoinder to Helvidius’ insistence that it must mean sibling. Noting the use of the word in the LXX in Gen. 12:4, 14:14, 29:11, 15, 31:36-37, Jerome pithily asks…
Tell me who are those brothers of Jacob and Laban who were present there? Esau, Jacob’s brother, was certainly not there, and Laban, the son of Bethuel, had no brothers although he had a sister Rebecca. [1]
What’s St. Jerome’s point? It is simply that one cannot say that “brothers of the Lord” must mean (or that it ever meant) that Joseph and Mary had other children. St. Jerome points out multiple uses of adelphos/ous in the book of Genesis and asks Helvidius to explain where the blood-born siblings are in these texts that say “brothers.” St. Jerome is well aware that The Church has always said (as it says to this day) that Joseph and Mary had no other children, and that the texts using the word adelphos in its various forms always point to the kinfolk (likely cousins) of Jesus, and not to siblings.
My confession
If I can be a little transparent here and offer a critique of my past behavior and beliefs a bit, I would say that the fact that I didn’t take the time to sort this out back when I was preaching can be explained by two things; (1) prejudice against the Catholic position that I learned from my mentors, and (2) simple laziness.
It’s quite easy, and obvious to anyone who will pause to see it that the word used in the New Testament for the “brothers and sisters” of Jesus is the same word used for kinsmen, countrymen, family, relatives, people, etc. in LXX translation of the Old Testament. Since the word can be translated in a variety of ways with a variety of meanings, one should give heed to (and not easily dismiss) how the earliest followers of Jesus spoke about the family of Jesus. This should, if one is curious, lead to a further investigation of the theological reasons why the Church has always taught that Jesus had no blood-born siblings from Joseph and Mary. Linguistically, we are on solid footing to conclude that no other siblings existed. But that is not the only thing the Church says about the topic.
When the earliest Christians read the verses that said: “brothers of the Lord” (etc.), they knew (because they were the disciples of the apostles or the successors of the disciples of the apostles) that Jesus did not have siblings. He had adelphous (brothers and sisters) by virtue of having kinfolk, aunts, uncles, and cousins. But he was, as the earliest witnesses attest, and which is a perfectly reasonable option when using the word adelphos to signify this, and as the Catholic Church has always taught, the only son of Joseph and Mary.
Though Jesus did have, in the wider familial sense of kinfolk, brothers and sisters (and cousins, etc.), he had no siblings because Joseph and Mary had no other children.
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Notes and references
[1] See the entire tract at https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3007.htm