From as early as the second century, Christians took Mary to be, like the Pagan goddesses, a perpetual virgin, and so, rejecting any other of Mary’s possible confinements as supernatural ones, she must have remained as chaste as a pious nun, once Jesus had been born. S Jerome insisted on this article of dogma. Curious, then, that the leader of the Jerusalem Church was James the Just, described by Josephus as “the brother of Christ”. Matthew 1:24-25 implies that Joseph had sexual relations with Mary once she had given birth to Jesus. In Luke 2:7, Jesus is described as Mary’s “first-born”, implying she had others. All four gospels speak of brothers pf Jesus, and two mention sisters. The direct and simple interpretation is that Jesus had a large family of brothers and sisters, children of his own mother, Mary, and the Christians in the first century accepted it as so.

Catholics, who still believe the perpetual virginity tale, say the “brothers and sisters” of Jesus were really cousins, indicating more incompetance by the Holy Guardian of the Word, and that the Jews were indifferent to proper family relations. Christians delight in finding excuses for the lapses of the Holy Ghost, but the frequency of the need for it illustrates the immense credulity of the believer. Why is God, or His spiritual agent, so incompetent at putting over the message of salvation? The most cunning excuse invented by professional Christians is that God made it hard to believe to test the believer’s faith! Thus faith becomes synonymous with foolishness.

Joseph could have been an elderly man who had married before and had several children by earlier wives. Thus, the brothers and sisters of Jesus were his half brothers and half sisters. The word used for brother is “adelphos ” usually meaning a blood brother, but the Septuagint uses “adelphos ” for other relationships like that of Lot and Abraham (Gen 14:14,16), Jacob and Laban (Gen 29:12.15) and 1 Chronicles 23:22 where it means cousin. Moreover, the assignment of Mary to the care of John (Jn 19:25-27) suggests that Mary had no other family.

The brothers of Christ in Mark are James, Joses, Jude and Simon, but none of his sisters are named, perhaps because they were all called Mary! The Jude who supposedly wrote the epistle called himself the brother of James but “a slave of Jesus Christ”. He does not sound like a brother of Jesus Christ, even though he is a brother of James. The Essenes were a brotherhood but they had ranks, and the lower ranks were servants, or slaves, of the higher ones, explaining this usage. Jesus was of the highest rank among the Essenes, but had, in the view of his followers gone on to an even higher status in opening the gates of God’s kingdom. Everyone therefore was a slave to him. Followers of deities were their slaves from the earliest times in Sumer. Jude ranked himself below Jesus but level with James. In fact, Jude’s letter is a later pseudepigraph, but shows that the Essene terminology was still in use over a hundred years after the crucifixion, and continued in use into modern Christianity. It is again something that Christians have to deny since it shows that Jesus did not bring an original revelation. He was a part of the Essene brotherhood.