Two men, James and Joses, appear in Mark 15:40 with a Mary:

And also women were watching from a distance, among whom also was Mary Magdalene, also Mary the mother of James the less, and of Joses, and Salome.

Mark 15:40

Are these part of Jesus’s family, or is she the “other Mary”?

And there was Mary Magdalene, and the other Mary, sitting over against the sepulchre.

Matthew 27:61

In the end of the sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, came Mary Magdalene and the other Mary to see the sepulchre.

Matthew 28:1

And is she the Mary described as “mother of Joses” or “the mother of James” or “of James”?

And Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joses beheld where he was laid.

Mark 15:47

And when the sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary of James, and Salome, had bought sweet spices, that they might come and anoint him.

Mark 16:1

Among which was Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James and Joses, and the mother of Zebedee’s children.

Matthew 27:56

It was Mary Magdalene, and Joanna, and Mary of James, and other women that were with them, which told these things unto the apostles.

Luke 24:10

And who is who in this passage in John?

Now there stood by the cross of Jesus his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalene.

John 19:25

Is this four women or three? Is Mary of Cleophas (or Clopas) the sister of Mary his mother? Here “the wife” is inserted by pious translators before “of Cleophas”, whereas in the previous cases above, “the mother” is inserted before “of James”. So, the natural reading of it becomes that Mary the mother of Christ had a sister, also called Mary, who was the wife of Cleophas. If this sister of the Virgin Mary were the mother of James and so on, then they were Jesus’s cousins, as the Catholics always maintained.

But could Mary the Virgin have had a blood sister also called Mary? It has to be accepted as possible, but God’s agent is again doing a terrible job of arranging the story to be understandable because it seems so unlikely. If the Inept Ghost arranges for brothers-in-law to be called brothers, then sisters-in-law can be called sisters, and then this Mary would be the sister-in-law of the Virgin, and Cleophas is possibly her brother—who married another Mary (the other Mary)—and Heli was their father. If Joseph joined this family as an apprentice, he would have been taken as an adopted son of Heli, so he too could have been listed as a son of Heli. Geoffrey Ashe surmises that Joseph eventually married a Mary, one of Heli’s daughters. When Heli died, his son, Cleophas, became the head of the family, continuing to employ Joseph. The brood of children of Cleophas grew up with the solitary son of Joseph and Mary, so that they all seemed to be brothers and sisters to their friends and neighbours. So it is that Ashe ingeniously explains away the extended family of Jesus in the gospel accounts, but Joseph remains a cipher, less significant than Cleophas in this scheme.

Since we are speculating as hard as we can, the “other Mary” could have been Joseph’s sister and still been the sister-in-law of Mary. Cleophas was therefore married to Joseph’s sister, or perhaps Cleophas was Joseph’s blood brother, taking in the young widow when Joseph died young. These reconstructions might be plausible, the main criterion of Christian “history”, and it seems more plausible in Judaism that a brother would take into his family his brother’s widow and child than that a brother-in-law would, but the figure of Joseph never gets any clearer. He has to die young leaving the young girl a widow, or unmentionable is that he was feckless and had only one son by Mary because he left her destitute, perhaps before they were even married, being only betrothed, the girl being a minor. Mary the Virgin then depended on her sister’s husband or Joseph’s brother to support her. Christians do not want to hear that.

Another excuse could be that Joseph was an elderly man with several children including a daughter, Mary, the “other Mary”. Perhaps this old man took in the poor naïve girl who had been ravaged by a Roman soldier called Pantherus—a Moor from north Africa. Joseph legitimised the “adoption” by betrothing the girl, and she and her son were brought up in this old man’s large family. When he died many years later, his own son, Jacob (James), grandson of Joseph’s father, Jacob, according to one of the genealogies, it being a social custom to name eldest sons after their grandfather, became head of the family. Jesus hated Romans for the treatment meted out to himself and his mother, becoming a leader of a rebel band and dying on the cross. Fine for Christians except for the end of it.

Ashe boasts that even if the virgin birth doctrine is nonsense his reconstruction of Mary’s family relations is an “unsuspected answer”, “implicit in the record”. Yet to get the unsuspected answer the “Mary of Cleophas” has to have “wife” supplied by the reader for it to mean anything. Why then do we not have a “Mary wife of James”, supplying “wife” in these cases instead of “mother”? The words are missing but reconstructions depend on them. Arbitrary insertions become gospel truth, and then “history” is rewritten by pious liars on their basis. Whether Ashe’s reconstruction is valid or not, the great historian convinces himself that it is, and so is blind to its omissions. There is something about the myth of Christ that taints otherwise honest people, turning them into liars and confidence tricksters.