His mother had just before referred to Joseph as his father. He does not indeed reject the economic relationship : he even continued to respect it (ver. 51) ; but he pointedly refers to another Father, Whose business' he had in hand, and to Whom it W3S now time that he should exhibit a public obedience. The piety of the reputed father would no doubt suggest to him a cheerful compliance with the mysterious bent of his wonderful foster-child. Though he understood not the mission, he would in faith submit to the will of God, who was evi dently calling the child to a great destiny ; and thus worthily did he conclude the g-uardianship of Jesus, which he had so well discharged from his very birth. We do not again hear of Joseph, who, it would therefore seem, did not live, with Mary, to witness the public career and dcath of his illus trious ward.
Our lord's Brethren. —As Jesus has not yet quitted the sphere of domestic life, we will, while he is still at home in Nazareth, adorning it with his meek submission to his parents, consider briefly' the other Members of his family circle, who are occa sionally referred to in the Gospel narrative. They are most perspicuously mentioned in Nlatt. xiii. 55, 56 : Is not this the carpenter's son ? Is not his mother called Mary ? and his brethren, yames, and yoses, and Simon, and Yua'as ? and his sisters, are they not all with us ?' (Comp. xii. 46, 48; xxvii. 56 ; Mark iii. ; vi. 3 ; xv. 40 ; xvi. ; Luke viii. 19 ; xxiv. to ; John ii. 12 ; VI 3-10; Acts i. 13, 14 ; Cor. ix. 5 ; Gal. i. 19.) Speculation was very early rife on the nature of this relationship to Jesus, and the question is still unsolved and pro bably insoluble. Passing over the obviously here tical opinions of Cerinthus (tremens [Harvey], vol.
p. 211) and the Ebionites, most of whom at least accompanied their opinions on the human birth of our Lord with the denial of his miraculous concep tion (Origen, contra Cels. v. 61,65; Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. iii. 27), we find, in cent. iv., that the ques tion had assumed a shape from which it has never since quite extricated itself. Helvidius, Jovinian, and Bonosus of Macedonia started opinions which afterwards formed the party whom St. Augustine and Epiphanius call ' Ap-rt&twicapiamrat (Adver saries of Mary). St. Jerome vehemently opposed the first and second (see his treatises, Adv. Helvi dium and Adv. yovinianum). His work against Helvidius enters largely into the discussion of our subject. He asserts the perpetual virginity of our Lord's mother' against his opponent, whom the learned father vigorously rates as a heretic.' This censure, however, is too harsh, for Helvidius believed the conception of Jesus to have been sui generis and immaculate. He only held that after the birth of Christ, his mother Mary, by her hus band Joseph, became also the mother of the four who in the Gospels are called the Lord's breth ren.' Much of the argument on either side up to the present time may be found in germ employed by Helvidius and Jerome.• In controverting his opponent the Latin father maintained that the Lord's brethren were in fact his co2isins. In ac cepting this view of St. Jerome as our own, we wish to keep clear of the theological prepossessions in which its advocacy has been much involved, and simply state its biblical grounds. [I.] We first re mark, that the Hebrew usage undoubtedly. justifies the extension of the word brethren' required by our view : See Gen. xiii. 8; xiv. 14 ; xxix. 12; Lev. xxv. 48, 49 ; Judg. xiv. 3 ; Job xlii. 1. [2.] The men of Nazareth, who predicated the fraternal relation to Jesus of James and the rest (Matt. xiii. 55), seem either to have spoken in a lax and popularly understood sense, or to have been ignorant of the real degree of the family relationship of the persons whom they were some what contumeliously speaking of. This is appa rent from their very first question—` Is not this the carpenter's son ?' [3.] Of the Marys who so nobly endured the agonising scenes of the cruci fixion, one is called the mother af Yames,' etc. (Matt. xxvii. 56 ; Mark xv. 4o), and the other Mary' (Matt. xxvii. 61). These designations, in deed, leave it undetermined whether this mother of James was the Virgin. Mary, as Helvidius as serted, and as Gal. i. 19 (considered hastily and alone) might suggest. We have, however, the additional testimony of another eye-witness of the awful events on Calvary, decisive we think of the question. St. John (xix. 25) tells us of a third Mary who saw the Saviour's agony, even his own Virgin Mother. So that the other Mary,' the mother of James and others, was the Virgin's sister, and bore [no unusual thing in Hebrew fami lies] her name. The domiciliation of either sister, when a widow, in the other's house at Nazareth, on the decease of either husband, Joseph or Clo pas, so that the children of both would thenceforth form but one household, and well be accounted brethren,' is therefore a most conceivable and probable event ; still more if, as the ancient his torian Hegesippus positively testifies, those hus bands of the sisteis were themselves brothers. (The marriage of two brothcrs to two sisters ap pears to have been no uncommon case among the Hebrews ; see Surenhusii Mischna, 9, 12, 44 ; Michaelis, laws of Moses, Eng. Trans., ii. 82-122).
Dean Alford, in an interesting note on Matt. xiii. 55, goes into the question, and, like Helvidius of old, determines these persons to have been strictly the brothers of our Lord, as the younger • children of the Virgin Mary. He sets great st.ore on t Cor. ix. 5, and Jude 17, as if these passages established an antithesis between the apostles and the lord's brethren. On the strength of this he denies that SS. James and Jude were members of the sacrcd body of the twelve apostles. That James is asserted to be an apostle in Gal. 19, does not disconcert him ; for _lames he supposes was one of thc later and extraordinary apostles—such as Paul himself. This, however, is inadmissible in the face of Gal. ii. 9. The James of this Epistle, if we would take an unsophisticated view ot the en tire case, was in fact a colleague of Peter and John, and identical with the James who, in the apostolic lists, is called the .1071 of Alphaus* (Matt. x. 3 ; Mark iii. IS ; Luke vi. 15 ; Acts i. 13). Now, assuming that the four brethren' mentioned in Matt. xiii. 55 were brothers, we infer that (Alphus, and Clopas or Cleophas being one and the same person, both names being, it is said, de rivedt from the Hebrew N6-0, as they were the sons of the Mary, wife of Cleophas, whom St. John, as we have seen, expressly calls the sister of the blessed Virgin (xix. 25), they must needs stand to our Lord in the relation of firSi C011Sill.r. We do not fear that our assumption will be deemed harsh, in understanding the Nazarenes to state the strict fi-aternity of James, Joses, Simon, and Jude. In support of it, it is worth while to compare Jude r, Matt. xxvii. 56, and Mark xv. 4o ; for these passages seem to corroborate the statement of Matt. xiii. 55 with regard to three of the four brethren.' As to the fourth, Simon, we find no similar link elsewhere in the N. T. binding him with the rest. In Eusebius, however (Eccl. Hist. iv. 22), we have an extract from the very ancient and credible writer Hegesippus, which expressly speaks of a Simon, or 'Simeon, son of Clopas,' who succeeded James the Just in the see of Jerusa lem ; and there further occurs in the same extract the extremely valuable and consistent statement, that this Simeon, son of Clopas, was a first cousin of the Lord' (EmArceop, ro0 KXwra Kalararat erloworos, ov irpo&-evro ravaes 11vra civeiMv T01, Kupiou Sairepov, where the last word seems to re late to the before-mentioned James the Just, as if he had been the first of the Lord's cousins who had filled the office to which the second of them bad now succeeded). We cannot linger to point out the importance of this passage in connection with the places which we have adduced out of the N. T. Its remarkable fitness and consistency with these places is also obvious. (Neander, Planting of Christian Church, Bohn, pp. 350-354, reviews this passage, but curiously endeavours to evade its force, as it seems to us, without success.) If these premises be correct, it follows that two of the Lord's brethren stood to him also in the far higher relation of apostles. We do not shrink front this conclusion, though we reject the fancy of those writers (including St. Chrysostom himself) who are fond of discovering family relationship to Christ in more of his apostles, and who attach even St. Matthew as a brother to James the less and the others, from the mere circumstance that his father bore the name Alp/urns (Mark ii. 14). In like manner Simon, one of the brethren,' has been confounded (by St. Jerome and others) with the apostle Simon Zelotes ; and, as if this were not enough, the sons of Zebedee have been brought within the same degree of consinly affinity through their mother Salome, whom these writers assert to have been another sister of the blessed virgin. Thus no less than six of the original apostles have been, by various writers, connected with our Lord by consanguinity! The claims of the last men tioned four we think to be unsustained by scrip tural evidence, but the case is different with respect to James and ,Idas. We have already endea voured to show that there is good ground for supposing them to have been really cousins, and, therefore, within the laxer sense 'brethren ' of Christ. An objection, however, against this view has been raised from the statement of St. John (vii. 5). None of the apost/es, it has been con tended, could have been among the brethren of Christ—for, at a late period of his ministry, it is expressly said, that 'his brethren did not believe in him,' an allegation which could not have been true of any of the apostles. The objection, how ever, thus stated is too rigorously put. [I.] As Grotius suggested, the brethren of Christ ' may fairly be supposed to include many more persons than the four mentioned in Matt. xiii. 55, so that the assertion of the unbelief of his brethren may be quite true, without involving the two apostolic kinsmen, James and Jude, in the censure. [2.] Moreover, it does not seem to us, even if the two apostles be included in the statement of the evangelist, that it would imply too strong a censure.