Brothers of Jesus
The Desposyni (from Greek δεσπόσυνος (desposunos) "of or belonging to the master or lord"[1]) was a sacred name reserved only for Jesus' blood relatives. The closely related word δεσπότης (despotes) meaning lord, master, or ship owner is commonly used of God, human slave-masters, and of Jesus in the reading Luke 13:25 found in Papyrus 75, in Jude 1:4, and possibly in 2nd Peter 2:1 (Strong's G1203). In Ebionite belief, the desposyni included his mother Mary, his father Joseph, and in the modern Protestant Christian perspective, his unnamed sisters and brothers James the Just, Joses, Simon and Jude; in modern Catholic Christian belief, Mary is counted as a blood relative, Joseph only as a foster father and the rest as step-siblings or cousins.
As some asserted their descent from both king David and high priest Aaron, all male desposyni could have laid claim to both the throne (King of the Jews) and the office of high priest of Jerusalem. However, the Roman occupation of Palestine (Iudaea Province), with the collaboration of the Judean establishment (Herodians), made any attempt by a desposynos to rise to or seize political and religious power impossible or limited in scope.
Jesus' relations with his biological family in the New Testament
According to the Synoptic Gospels, and particularly the Gospel of Mark, Jesus was once teaching a large crowd near the home of his own family, and when this came to their attention, his family come to see him and say that Jesus is ...out of his mind. In the narrative of the Synoptic Gospels, and of the Gospel of Thomas, when Jesus' mother and brothers are outside the house that Jesus is teaching in, Jesus tells the crowd that whoever does what God wills would constitute his mother and brothers (Thomas 99). In many strands of Gnosticism, this was interpreted as a reference to doing what the Monad wished rather than to what Yahweh desired.
According to Christian apologists like Kilgallen, Jesus' answer was a way of underlining that his life had changed to the degree that his family were far less important than those that he teaches about the kingdom of God. Gnostics on the other hand, reverse this, and argue that Jesus' answer meant that everyone who gained gnosis counted as a relative of Jesus, in an allegorical sense.
The Gospel of John instead mentions an equally negative view of Jesus held by his family; John states that Jesus' brothers did not believe in him, because he wouldn't perform miracles with them at the Feast of Tabernacles. In modern psychology, dissociation with one's own family is often considered a sign of either strong depression, or of strong dislike or fear of them, and so some commentators have argued that Jesus was either depressed, or had an unpleasant upbringing.
There is much disagreement over whether the brothers referred to by these narratives are actual brothers or merely step-brothers or cousins - argued to be valid translations for the underlying Greek term (adelphos). The official Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox doctrine is that Mary was a perpetual virgin, and so could not have had any other children besides Jesus, thus making these Jesus's step-brothers, sons of Joseph by another, unrecorded marriage (since according to Christian doctrine Joseph was not Jesus' biological father, such children would have no relation to Jesus whatsoever), or cousins. Only Tertullian seems to have questioned this in the early Church. Islam also holds that Mary was a perpetual virgin as did many of the early Protestants, although many Protestants today do not hold to the doctrine of perpetual virginity, and would thus believe that these are Mary's children.
Historical accounts of the Desposyni
Hegesippus (c.110-c.180) wrote five books of Commentaries on the Acts of the Church. They are lost, but a few fragments are quoted by Eusebius in Historia Ecclesiae, 3.20. Among them is the following relation, ascribed to the reign of Domitian (81-96):
- "There still survived of the kindred of the Lord the grandsons of Judas, who according to the flesh was called his brother. These were informed against, as belonging to the family of David, and Evocatus brought them before Domitian Caesar: for that emperor dreaded the advent of Christ, as Herod had done.
- "So he asked them whether they were of the family of David; and they confessed they were. Next he asked them what property they had, or how much money they possessed. They both replied that they had only 9000 denaria between them, each of them owning half that sum; but even this they said they did not possess in cash, but as the estimated value of some land, consisting of thirty-nine plethra only, out of which they had to pay the dues, and that they supported themselves by their own labour. And then they began to hold out their hands, exhibiting, as proof of their manual labour, the roughness of their skin, and the corns raised on their hands by constant work.
- "Being then asked concerning Christ and His kingdom, what was its nature, and when and where it was to appear, they returned answer that it was not of this world, nor of the earth, but belonging to the sphere of heaven and angels, and would make its appearance at the end of time, when He shall come in glory, and judge living and dead, and render to every one according to the course of his life.
- "Thereupon Domitian passed no condemnation upon them, but treated them with contempt, as too mean for notice, and let them go free. At the same time he issued a command, and put a stop to the persecution against the Church.
- "When they were released they became leaders of the churches, as was natural in the case of those who were at once martyrs and of the kindred of the Lord. And, after the establishment of peace to the Church, their lives were prolonged to the reign of Trajan."
In "The Ecclesiastical History", Eusebius records an account by Julianus Africanus recorded the following concerning the family:
- "...For the relatives of our Lord according to the flesh, whether with the desire of boasting or simply wishing to state the fact, in either case truly, have handed down the following account...But as there had been kept in the archives up to that time the genealogies of the Hebrews as well as of those who traced their lineage back to proselytes, such as Achior the Ammonite and Ruth the Moabitess, and to those who were mingled with the Israelites and came out of Egypt with them, Herod, inasmuch as the lineage of the Israelites contributed nothing to his advantage, and since he was goaded with the consciousness of his own ignoble extraction, burned all the genealogical records, thinking that he might appear of noble origin if no one else were able, from the public registers, to trace back his lineage to the patriarchs or proselytes and to those mingled with them, who were called Georae."
- "...A few of the careful, however, having obtained private records of their own, either by remembering the names or by getting them in some other way from the registers, pride themselves on preserving the memory of their noble extraction. Among these are those already mentioned, called Desposyni, on account of their connection with the family of the Saviour. Coming from Nazara and Cochaba, villages of Judea, into other parts of the world, they drew the aforesaid genealogy from memory and from the book of daily records as faithfully as possible. [Eusebius, History Section 1, Chapter 7]
The Desposyni and the Pope
The controversial Irish priest Malachi Martin, without giving a legitimate reference, noted in "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Church" that:
- "...A meeting between Sylvester (Pope Silvester I) and the Jewish Christian leaders took place in 318....The vital interview was not, as far as we know, recorded, but the issues were very well known, and it is probable the Joses, the oldest of the Christian Jews, spoke on behalf of the desposyni and the rest."
- "...That most hallowed name, desposyni, had been respected by all believers in the first century and a half of Christian history. The word literally meant, in Greek, "belonging to the Lord." It was reserved uniquely for Jesus' blood relatives. Every part of the ancient Jewish Christian church had always been governed by a desposynos, and each of them carried one of the names traditional in Jesus' family---Zachary, Joseph, John, James, Joses, Simeon, Matthias, and so on. But no one was ever called Jesus. Neither Sylvester nor any of the thirty-two popes before him, nor those succeeding him, ever emphasized that there were at least three well-known and authentic lines of legitimate blood descent from Jesus' own family..."
- "...The Desposyni demanded that Sylvester, who now had Roman patronage, revoke his confirmation of the authority of the Greek Christian bishops at Jerusalem, in Antioch, in Ephesus, and in Alexandria, and to name desposynos bishops to take their place. They asked that the practice of sending cash to Jerusalem as the mother church be resumed... These blood relatives of Christ demanded the reintroduction of the Law, which included the Sabbath and the Holy Day system of Feasts and New Moons of the Bible. Sylvester dismissed their claims and said that, from now on, the mother church was in Rome and he insisted they accept the Greek bishops to lead them."
- "...This was the last known dialogue with the Sabbath-keeping church in the east led by the disciples who were descended from blood relatives of Jesus the Messiah."
Extended family
Other known relatives of Jesus include Simeon, the second bishop of Jerusalem, who was the son of Joseph's brother Clopas (mentioned by Eusebius, H.E. 3.11,32), and three Nestorian bishops of Seleucia on the Tigris in the 3rd century (according to the 13th-century Syrian historian, Gregory Barhebraeus). John the Baptist was also a relative of Jesus.
Family trees and pedigrees
Aside from the Genealogies of Jesus present in the Gospel of Luke and Gospel of Matthew, there have been several attempts to piece together a detailed family tree of Jesus' immediate nuclear family:
- Version I (after James Tabor)
Matthat bar Levi
|
Eleazar |
| Heli/Eliakim
| |
Matthan ________|_________
| | |
| | |
Pantera? + Mary =(1st) Joseph = (2nd) Clophas
| no issue? |
| _________|________________________
Jesus | | | | | |
5 B.C.- A.D. 28. | | | | | |
James Jose Judas Simon Mary Salome
d.A.D. 62 | d.A.D. 101
____|____
| |
| |
Zechariah James
alive in the reign of Domitian
- Version II (edited; see external link)
__________________________________________
| |
| |
Mary=Joseph Cleopas=Mary
| |
|______________________________________ |
| | | | | | | Simeon
| | | | | | | d. 106
Jesus James Joses Simon Sister Sister Jude
d.62 |
|
|
|
two grandsons
|
?
|
Bishop Judah Kyriakos
fl. c. 148-149.
Patriarchal Rule
According to author Malachi Martin, every early community of Judean followers of Jesus, whether it was Nazarene or Ebionite, was governed by a desposynos as a patriarch, and each of them carried one of the names traditional in Jesus' family but no one was ever named after him. This does not seem absolutely true, as: there is no recorded Ebionite bishop; Hegisippus makes a special mention that the grand sons of Jude, the Lord's brother, were elevated to the Priesthood after suffering as Confessors; and many of the early Church Fathers were the Bishops of the major Sees Malachi Martin mentions - yet it doesn't seem likely that any more than half of them, if even that many, were related to Jesus.
References in Popular Culture
The fictional film account in the film The Da Vinci Code hypothesized that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. If Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, their child or children would have been desposyni.
In the film Dogma, the main character, Bethany, is the many-times great grand-daughter of one of Jesus' younger siblings.
External link
References
- Cooper, L.E. The Jesus Presidents. iUniverse, 2004. ISBN 0-595-33300-1
- Kilgallen, John J. A Brief Commentary on the Gospel of Mark, Paulist Press, 1989.
- Malachi Martin. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Church. New York, Bantam, 1983, pages 30–31.
- James D. Tabor. The Jesus Dynasty. Simon & Schuster, 2006.