What does “brothers of Jesus” mean?

Some years ago I co-edited a book with Scott Hahn entitled Catholic for a Reason II: Scripture and the Mystery of Mary, in which I devoted an entire chapter to Mary’s perpetual virginity. I certainly would recommend that title to you. However, I think your question is more specific than that, so I will provide further information here.

Dr. Scherschligt was correct, in that neither Hebrew or Aramaic (the language spoken by Christ and His disciples) had a special word meaning “cousin,” so that speakers of those languages had to use either the word for “brother” or a circumlocution, such as “the son of my uncle.” But circumlocutions are clumsy, so the Jews often used “brother.” In the example you gave, Jeremiah 32:12 employs such a circumlocution, which translators commonly render as “cousin.”

The writers of the New Testament were brought up using the Aramaic equivalent of “brothers” to mean both cousins and sons of the same father — plus other relatives and even non-relatives. When they wrote in Greek, they did the same thing the translators of the Septuagint did. (The Septuagint was the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible; it was translated by Hellenistic Jews a century or two before Christ’s birth and was the version of the Bible from which most of the Old Testament quotations found in the New Testament are taken.)

In the Septuagint the Hebrew word that includes both brothers and cousins was translated as adelphos, which in Greek usually has the narrow meaning that the English “brother” has. Unlike Hebrew or Aramaic, Greek has a separate word for cousin, anepsios, but the translators of the Septuagint used adelphos, even for true cousins.

This same usage was employed by the writers of the New Testament and passed into English translations of the Bible. To determine what “brethren” or “brother” or “sister” means in any one verse, we have to look at the context. When we do that, we see that insuperable problems arise if we assume that Mary had children other than Jesus—most notably it is clear in some cases that individuals identified as Jesus’ “brothers” actually had a different mother.

Courtesy of Leon Suprenant