12.
III.
James: The “Brother” of Jesus?
The question of whether or not the brothers and sisters of Jesus were the biological children of Mary and Joseph has had more to do with the church’s veneration of the mother of Jesus than it has with his brothers and sisters themselves. Mary’s “perpetual virginity” is a belief that is deeply rooted in the traditions of the oldest churches. Christian piety held virginity and celibacy in high esteem from early on. How could it be, then, given the tendency to elevate perfect chastity, that the one chosen to bear the incarnate God in her womb, the holiest of all women and indeed of all humankind, would engage in sexual relations and bear other children after such a holy nativity? If Mary was the most exalted of saints, the pious assumption was that she must have been perfect in every way, especially in chastity. Her role as “the virgin mother” made her a symbol or type of the church (the church was regarded as the “mother” of the baptized and “virginal” in the purity of its faith), and with the development of Mary’s iconic status there was more even than her personal honor at stake.7
That such a consideration had not been an issue for the writers of the New Testament is evident by their off-handed references to Jesus’ brothers and sisters, without once qualifying those terms. For the first generation of Jewish Christians, virginal chastity and celibacy were not regarded as signs of purity so much as signs of calling and consecration, often related to prophetic zeal (as, for example, in the case of John the Baptist).8 For the New Testament writers, then, whether or not Mary had conceived children other than Jesus was not of great concern. Subsequent generations of Christians, however, influenced by Greco-Roman views of matter and spirit, with the former being regarded as lower than the latter in value, were not so indifferent to the issue of Mary’s virginal status. It became increasingly important to see her as the type of the church’s perpetual virginal motherhood. The doctrine of her perfect physical inviolability was understood as complementing her inner spiritual purity.
Not every thoughtful believer in the early centuries accepted the idea, however. One Christian writer by the name of Helvidius, writing towards the end of the fourth century, produced a treatise maintaining that the most obvious (and, it seemed to him, most ancient) way to understand the terms “brothers and sisters” in the Gospels was to take them literally. These were simply the biological children of Joseph and Mary born subsequent to Jesus’ birth (and therefore, in Helvidius’s view, James would have been the oldest of Jesus’ younger siblings). The ever-combative Jerome didn’t take what he saw as Helvidius’s attack on Mary’s perfect chastity lying down. He took up his pen and wrote against the latter, suggesting that Jesus’ “brothers and sisters” were in reality Jesus’ cousins and therefore not biological children of Mary. Jerome’s dubious “cousin hypothesis” has continued as an accepted view to this day in the Roman Catholic tradition. There is, however, very little evidence to suppose that the words “brother” and “sister” were used in Jesus’ time to mean “cousin.”
Another, more plausible view is the one found in the otherwise fantastical second-century apocryphal book, the Protevangelion of James, in which the siblings of Jesus are said to have been Joseph’s children from a previous marriage. Mary is, in this account, the widower Joseph’s young second wife, and Jesus, born of her virginally, is her only child (and so James was, according to this narrative, the oldest of Jesus’ older half-brothers). This is the view that was supported by such church fathers as Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Ambrose of Milan, Hilary of Poitiers, and others, and it remains the accepted view of the Eastern churches. It is also the reason why, in Christian art both of the East and the West, Joseph has often been depicted as an elderly gray-haired man. The brown-haired, brown-bearded Joseph of popular Roman Catholic art is a later representation.
Thus we have three early views, all of them claiming antiquity and authenticity, regarding the siblings of Jesus—those of Helvidius, Jerome, and the Eastern fathers. Of these, the first and the last possess more credibility than Jerome’s. It is certainly not impossible that the brothers and sisters of Jesus were the children of a previous marriage of Joseph’s. On the other hand, long-standing pious tradition aside (a tradition which has, in all honesty, tended to regard even marital sexual relations with suspicion and—in its most extreme form—with hostility), the idea that they were also children of Mary, and thus Jesus’ younger siblings, is a thoroughly reasonable one.
In this commentary, I will let the matter remain moot and take no definite position on it. But I will, following the usage in the New Testament, continue simply to refer to James as Jesus’ brother without qualification.
7. See my book, The Woman, the Hour, and the Garden: A Study of Imagery in the Gospel of John (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016), particularly 28–39.
8. The finest and fullest study of this subject is Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).
IV.
Was the Letter of James written by James or by someone else?
In this commentary I will assume that James was, in fact, the letter’s author. Some scholars argue that it is a late writing, written under the name of James by some unknown author of a later generation. One can meet with this view in numerous commentaries and study Bibles, too many to list. But, since the arguments for that opinion are well represented elsewhere and can readily be found, I will not repeat them here, but only briefly present my reasons for accepting James as the genuine author.
First, despite tolerable arguments to the contrary, there is no compelling evidence, either internal or external, that the letter must be regarded as a late writing (i.e., between 70 and 100 AD). It can, without any serious difficulty, be dated to the 50s or early 60s.
Second, because the Greek of the Letter of James is quite good by New Testament standards, it has been doubted by some scholars that a “rustic” Galilean, whose first language was Aramaic, could have composed it. But, in actual fact, we do not know at all just how “rustic” James might have been during his adult life, or, for that matter, just how polished or poor (or entirely lacking) his Greek may have been. His hometown of Nazareth, after all, was less than four miles from the cosmopolitan Greco-Roman city of Sepphoris—in other words, within easy walking distance. It is conceivable that James could have acquired a working knowledge of Greek there at some point during his life. If he had shared the trade of Joseph, his father, he may even have been personally involved in the building project that was taking place there while he was a young man. In later life, of course, he lived in Jerusalem, and among those who were members of the church in that city were Hellenistic Jews, whose first language was Greek. If he hadn’t already learned it elsewhere, he could have learned Greek through them. Alternatively, if he, in fact, really didn’t know a lick of Greek (which seems doubtful), he might have employed a bilingual amanuensis and translator to help him compose his letter. In short, the argument that his Greek is overly polished fails to convince.
Third, the Letter of James appears to be an encyclical epistle—that is to say, it is a letter addressed to all Christians, who are designated in it as “the twelve tribes in the Diaspora [i.e., Dispersion],” in other words, the “true Israel” scattered among the gentiles (compare the words of James, as recorded in Acts 15:15–21). Given what we have already cursorily seen as regards James’s influential position among the churches and how he was not hesitant to exercise that influence, it seems wholly in keeping that he could have issued such a general letter. As Martin Hengel noted in an
