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Mark 6.3
We have discussed how Mary in the virgin birth narratives is a figure on the cosmic stage helping to bring in a new relationship between God and Israel, a paradigm, exemplar, and representative of disciples, past and present. However, this does not necessarily establish anything about the historical Mary. We could argue that the New Testament would not present Mary as this kind of representative unless she was a fitting one, in other words, that in reality she was someone who heard the Word of God and responded to it. That is a reasonable conclusion to make, but it is not a strong basis for establishing history. To try and dig further into the Mary of history, we need to tackle the text that seems least promising, as it says the least about Mary. That is the earliest gospel, the Gospel of Mark.1
There is so little on Mary in the Gospel of Mark, one could say that, were it to have been the only gospel to have survived, then a biblically-based Mariology would scarcely exist. Given that Mark is regarded as the earliest gospel by biblical scholars and the source for much that is in Matthew and Luke, probably some of the material in John as well, this might present a major problem. Our other primary sources for earliest Christianity, the letters of Paul, do not mention Mary at all. Does this mean that the picture of Mary that we find in Matthew, Luke, and John was a late construction, in other words, a great ‘myth’ of Mary overlaid on an earlier tradition in which she was not important at all?
Fortunately, the situation is not quite as bad as this. Mark’s Gospel does at least say something about Mary. The writer or compiler of Mark shows little interest in promoting her as the heroine of salvation history in the same way as Luke’s Gospel, nor does he present the mysterious figure of John’s Gospel who is intimately present at the crucial moments of Jesus’ life, the wedding at Cana and the crucifixion. Mark’s apparent disinterest in Mary suggests that the verses which speak of her in this gospel belong to a tradition that the writer of Mark has used. Therefore, it is our best hope for finding biographical information present in the earliest decades of the Church.
Mark 6.1–6 is a story that tells us how Jesus was regarded by the residents of Nazareth:
He left that place and came to his home town, and his disciples followed him. On the sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were astounded. They said, ‘Where did this man get all this? What is this wisdom that has been given to him? What deeds of power are being done by his hands! Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?’ And they took offence at him. Then Jesus said to them, ‘Prophets are not without honour, except in their home town, and among their own kin, and in their own house.’ And he could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them. And he was amazed at their unbelief.
Mark’s Gospel tells us that Jesus was the Son of God, but that it was a struggle for anyone in his lifetime to recognize this. Jesus looks for faith, but he does not find it very often. The family of Jesus and the disciples in Mark are not paragons of belief: they doubt, misunderstand, deny, and even betray Jesus. In Mark, people who believe in Jesus and gain his praise are remarkable because they are so few. These include people who receive healing because they believe: the woman with haemorrhages (5.34), the Syrophoenician woman (7.29), and Bartimaeus, a blind beggar (10.52). There are those who seem to understand what Jesus is trying to tell them: the scribe for his answer (12.34), and the anointing woman (14.6). Finally, he praises the poor widow because of her generosity (12.43). But that is the full extent of the list. Overall, Mark’s Gospel invites the reader to understand the implications of Jesus’ Messianic status while suggesting that many people who met him in his lifetime did not.
The residents of Nazareth are a classic example of this. In Mark’s account, they think that Jesus is an ordinary man without any outstanding qualities because he grew up among them. This is a common experience for anyone who becomes famous. Those who knew them before they were regarded as celebrities will register surprise: ‘She was just a quiet little lass who played along with the other children’; ‘I remember him delivering groceries to earn some extra money.’ Jesus had been a carpenter, a relatively unremarkable worker in Jewish society and the crowd are well aware of this. ‘Carpenter’, tekton, could easily be translated as ‘construction worker’; while a very important function in any society, it does not suggest much in the way of social status. Therefore, Mark is drawing on an experience to which the reader can relate, that people who know someone and their family well, along with their humble origins, might be reluctant to accept them as having anything important to say, particularly if this presents challenges to them. Jesus refers this common occurrence to the mission of the prophets: like him, their honour often derived from people who enjoyed the objectivity of distance.
What the residents of Nazareth fail to understand is that Jesus is the Son of God, the Messiah. Mark recounts in 6.3 that they think he is rather ‘the son of Mary, and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon’, as well as having some unnamed sisters. There is a clear contrast between the two. Mark, unlike Luke, does not want to link the two facts that Jesus is both the Son of God and the son of Mary. For Mark, he is the Son of God, and very little else about his background before the ministry is important; the fact that he is the son of Mary is only for the unbelievers. This reflects Paul’s description of Jesus in Galatians 4.4: ‘But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law…’ Paul accepts that, despite his divine origin, Jesus was born of a woman like everyone else, and that he was a Jew. However, he is not really interested in the detail because the important facts are theological, not historical.
Mark helps us more than Paul with respect to Mary because he does provide a small amount of information about Jesus’ family. We find out the names of his mother, Mary, and his brothers. The description ‘son of Mary’ is odd, as Jewish men were usually known by their father’s name. To find out that Jesus is the son of Joseph, we need to read the other gospels, as Joseph is nowhere mentioned in Mark. Unfortunately, the sisters are not named, although there was a tradition that they were called Salome and Mary (Epiphanius, Panarion 78.8–9 from the fourth century; the Gospel of Philip 59.6–11 from possibly the third century). It has been speculated as to whether Salome the sister is the same woman as the one who observed the crucifixion and attended the tomb in Mark 15.40 and 16.1. We do not know this from the gospel, although it would make sense in the social context for a female in the family to be involved in the burial rites. However, the point of Mark 6.1–6 is that the people of Nazareth declare that Jesus was a member of a known family, and this prevents them from seeing Jesus as they really should: as the Son of God, the Christ or Messiah, the one who brings into being the kingdom of God (1.1, 11, 15).
The story is reproduced in other gospels in different forms but none of them refer to Jesus as the ‘son of Mary’. Matthew 13.55–56 is close to Mark 6.3 but with important differences: ‘Is not this the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother called Mary? And are not his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and Judas? And are not all his sisters here with us?’ So, for Matthew, Jesus’ father was the carpenter rather than Jesus as specified in Mark (these are the only instances of the word ‘carpenter’ in the New Testament). Matthew also avoids the awkward ‘son of Mary’. The name of one of the brothers, Joses, is replaced with Joseph; Joses seems to have been a familiar form of Joseph. In all these respects, Matthew seems to be tidying up the language of Mark’s account and clarifying some of the questions that might arise from it. Luke 4.22 tells the story with a straightforward question by the residents of Nazareth: ‘Is not this Joseph’s son?’ In John 6.42, the questioners are Jews from the region of the Sea of Galilee and say: ‘Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know?’
There are two approaches from very different perspectives that one could take to the question as to why Mark describes Jesus as the ‘son of Mary’, but neither are satisfying. The first is held by those who want to preserve the integrity of the gospels and their interconnection. They claim that the writer of this section of Mark’s Gospel knew that Jesus had been born from a virgin and that Joseph was not his father in the usual sense. This then concurs with Luke’s statement in 3.23 that Jesus ‘was the son (as was thought) of Joseph son of Heli’: Jesus born of a virgin is, strictly speaking, the ‘son of Mary’ as in Mark 6.3. The problem with this view is that Mark’s Gospel nowhere shows any knowledge of something as sensational as the virgin birth of Jesus.
There is a second possible answer: that the crowd were voicing doubts about Jesus’ legitimacy. As sons were normally named after their father, ‘son of Mary’ suggests that he is the product of an extramarital relationship, which would have been scandalous and a reason for denouncing him. This has a possible parallel in John 8.41, where Jesus’ protagonists, simply referred to as ‘the Jews’, say: ‘We are not illegitimate children…’; the stress on the we might suggest that they are claiming that Jesus is an illegitimate child. This answer would strengthen the case for those who argue that there was a very early tradition of the illegitimacy of Jesus, something that appears later in anti-Christian polemic as a counter to the belief in the virgin birth.
These two approaches involve two hypotheses that cannot be proved: either that the writer of Mark knew about the virgin birth, or that he was aware of a controversy concerning Jesus’ legitimacy. A third answer is much more straightforward. Mark is simply including information about the family that has been passed down. Mary, along with the brothers and unnamed sisters, was known to the pre-gospel tradition in a way that Joseph was not. That Mary and the brothers were known in the early Church is confirmed by their appearances together elsewhere: in John 2.12, after the wedding in Cana, and Acts 1.14, after the Ascension and before Pentecost (sadly, the sisters are not mentioned in either of these verses). In placing this biographical detail in a story about people who misunderstand Jesus and underestimate his importance, the passage in Mark 6 achieves two objectives at once:
1. It includes information about Jesus’ family; given that Mark was written with no previous gospels as sources, then it is not surprising that it briefly describes the background to the story of Jesus’ life and ministry.
2. It suggests that this biographical information is not particularly important in contradiction to those who think that it is. Jesus is the Son of God and being the son of Mary or the brother of James is not determinative for his identity.
The Mother and Brothers of Jesus
Mark 3.21 tells us that Jesus’ family ‘went out to restrain him [Jesus], for people were saying, “He has gone out of his mind”’. It is difficult to know which members of the family are meant, as people in first-century Jewish society lived in extended families, but the overall intent is clear: Mark wants to create a sense of distance between Jesus’ ministry and his relatives. In 3.31–35, the mother and brothers of Jesus are given less priority than the disciples:
Then his mother and his brothers came; and standing outside, they sent to him and called him. A crowd was sitting around him; and they said to him, ‘Your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside, asking for you.’ And he replied, ‘Who are my mother and my brothers?’ And looking at those who sat around him, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.’
When a text argues against something, it is normally a sign that many people held the opposite view. This passage suggests that, for some people in the early Church, the mother and brothers did have authority, and that this has been included to counter that claim. If Mark had simply wanted to stress that Jesus regarded his disciples as a family, then he could have stated that without the part of the story which distanced the natural family.
A version of this story is included in Matthew 12.46–50 and Luke 8.19–21 although, in those gospels, there seems to be a softening of the negative view of Jesus’ family. Matthew and Luke omit the passage about the family trying to restrain Jesus, and in Matthew 13.54–58, the parallel to Mark 6.1–6, ‘own kin’ is not included in the list of people who reject the prophets and Jesus. Luke 8.19–21 states that ‘my mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it’, which does not necessarily rule out the possibility that Jesus’ natural mother and brothers qualify. Luke does have another passage along these lines:
While he was saying this, a woman in the crowd raised her voice and said to him, ‘Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that nursed you!’ But he said, ‘Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it!’
(Luke 11.27–28)
This could be included as another instance of Jesus distancing himself from his mother but the context of the whole gospel suggests something else. Luke 1.38 has described Mary as someone who did hear the word of God: ‘Let it be to me according to your word.’ Therefore, Luke does not necessarily diminish Mary here but suggests that her honour is due to her actions rather than the bare fact of her being the mother of Jesus.
John 2.12 describes the companionship of Jesus with his mother, brothers, and disciples after the marriage in Cana. However, John 7.5 tells us that ‘not even his brothers believed in him’. What is confusing is that the family in Mark attempt to restrain Jesus from his ministry, whereas the brothers in John 7.3–4 encourage him; they tell Jesus to ‘leave here and go to Judea so that your disciples also may see the works you are doing; for no one who wants to be widely known acts in secret. If you do these things, show yourself to the world.’ So, while Mark and John agree that Jesus’ family misunderstood his mission, they give different interpretations of how that problem presented itself.
We can conclude from these passages that there was a memory of the involvement of the mother and brothers of Jesus in the early Church, even though some of the gospels question the appropriateness of it. There is other biblical evidence: as we have seen, the mother and brothers appear in Acts 1.14 which, chronologically, is the last mention of Mary’s role. But the brothers were travellers to various Christian communities and known to Paul, as we read in 1 Corinthians 9.5. Two of them, James and Jude or Judas, are identified as the writers of the epistles of those names; whether they actually wrote them or not, the claim that they authored these epistles is enough to show their importance in the early Church.
The question as to whether Mary was the natural birth mother of James, Joses, Judas, and Simon is not something with which Mark’s Gospel is concerned. The belief that Mary remained a virgin after the birth of Jesus is something that grew in the centuries after the apostolic and gospel forming age of the first century. To believe this requires an answer as to who these brothers might be, and why they would be called brothers. The Roman Catholic Church, following Jerome (On the Perpetual Virginity of Blessed Mary 13–18), says that they were cousins in an extended family, which was the normal mode of family life in ancient Israel. The Eastern Orthodox Churches draw on Protevangelium 9.2 and Epiphanius (Panarion: Against the Antidicomarianites 78.7–10) and regard them as stepbrothers, children of Joseph by a previous marriage. Both these interpretations are possible.
However, Paul, our earliest testimony to the post-resurrection period, calls James ‘the Lord’s brother’ (Gal. 1.19), and his distrust of James (see Gal. 2.12) meant that he would have had plenty of reason not to do this if he knew any different. Throughout the New Testament, the words ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ can refer to fellow Christians, but James, Joses, Judas, and Simon are brothers in a special sense, as is obvious from 1 Cor. 9.5 (‘the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas’). There was a Greek word for cousin, anepsios, and for relative, suggeneus (which is used in Mark 6.4 and Luke 1.36). Jerome’s solution identified James and the rest as relatives of Jesus in an extended family, with the Mary mentioned at the cross as ‘mother of James the younger and of Joses’ (Mark 15.40) being their mother. This would create a strange scenario in which this other Mary was notable enough to be remembered as involved in the ministry and following Jesus to the cross, yet her children were identified as belonging to a family unit with Mary the mother of Jesus at Mark 6.3, a passage where this other Mary is not mentioned.
Suggestions that the brothers were not born from Mary were based on a determination to preserve the Catholic and Orthodox doctrine of her perpetual virginity. Of course, it is possible that Mary was a mother figure in a large extended family to people not born to her and related or adopted in some way. However, it is easier to accept the text at face value.
It is reasonable to suggest that Mark 6.3 is based on the memory of the mother, brothers, and sisters of Jesus as a family unit, influential in the early Church, especially when we relate this passage to other gospels which refer to them in this way. Mark does not mention Jesus’ father Joseph. In the other gospels, Joseph does not feature in any story about Jesus after his visit to Jerusalem at the age of twelve, in Luke 2.41–51. For this reason, it has often been assumed that he died before Jesus reached adulthood, leaving Mary a widow. If that is the case, there is no evidence that she married again, and the probability that she remained in the households of adult sons is completely consonant with both Jewish and Greco-Roman social norms. But she need not have been subservient to her sons; she would have been entitled to property left by the husband, and widows, as we have seen, could be women of means and authority in a household.
Summing up, given that Mark’s Gospel does not promote the memory of the mother of Jesus in the same way as Luke and John for whom Mary is a key figure in the gospel story, then the information we find there is the most likely to have some historical validity. Mark’s Gospel draws on an early Christian tradition, one that found its way into other gospels. Therefore, we know that:
1. The mother and brothers of Jesus were known in the early Church and were described as a family unit. This unit also features in the other gospels and Acts.
2. The description ‘son of Mary’ in Mark 6.3 need not derive from either belief in the virgin birth or the memory of a charge of illegitimacy, but from the simple fact that Mark’s information includes only the surviving family unit of Jesus which was influential in the early Church, that is, his mother and brothers (and unnamed sisters).
3. Jesus’ four brothers had names common to the period in Jewish culture: James (which is Jacob in Hebrew), Joses or Joseph, Judas, and Simon. As we have already dismissed any historical basis for the belief that Mary was always a virgin, in the absence of any information to the contrary we can accept the most obvious reading of the text that Mary was the natural mother of these men.
The traditions behind Mark therefore knew that Jesus’ mother and brothers comprised a known and influential family unit, before and after the crucifixion of Jesus. Presumably, the sense of purpose that came with the belief that Jesus was the Messiah would have strengthened the bonds between them. Given the prominence of the eldest brother, James, in the early Church (which is evident in Galatians 1–2 and Acts 15), scholars agree that Jesus’ brothers had considerable authority in the Church: they were Jesus’ heirs and, if the New Testament is historically accurate in stating that Jesus claimed to be a descendant of David, then they would have shared this with him. As Mark was writing in a patriarchal world, the sisters’ names are not given; presumably, the writer did not inherit any record of their importance in the Church community or, if he did, he failed to acknowledge it.
Yet this leads us to ask: why are James and the other brothers of Jesus treated with suspicion in both Mark and John? Why did they not have a more prominent place in the gospel memory generally? The answer to this question lies in the developing rift between the Christian churches and Jewish culture, the soil in which they had grown originally. It is that which we need to investigate to get to the bottom of what happened to the family of Jesus in the New Testament tradition.
Notes
1 The hypothesis of Matthew Larsen, published in Gospels Before the Book and based upon research into ancient literature, is that Mark was never a book in the modern sense at all, more a series of notes and traditions that other gospels built upon by filling in the gaps and expanding on the narrative.