HistoricalChristian.Faith

Do the identifications that complete Jerome’s cousin-theory hold? (Alphaeus = Clopas; “Jude of James”; “James the little”)

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: weak — the three identifications that turn Jerome’s cousins into named apostles among the Twelve are each a later graft on his theory and each independently the less-probable reading: Clopas and Alphaeus are distinct names (Aramaic QLWPY vs HLPY), “Jude of James” reads more naturally “son” than “brother” of James, and “the little” (ho mikros) marks stature, not a rank that implies only two Jameses. The strongest modern form of the cousin-reading (Blinzler’s) discards all three · advanced by later completers of Jerome’s theory

Related arguments: the cousin theory — see also Does “brother” (adelphos) mean “cousin”? · Does the separate word for “kinsman” (suggenēs) tell against the cousin-reading? · Does John 19:25 make “Mary of Clopas” the Virgin’s sister? · Are “James the little” and Joses the Lord’s brothers? · Does the shared manner of death (both stoned in Jerusalem) support the identification? · Was the cousin theory a novelty Jerome himself let go? · Does the “Papias” fragment give early support? · Does Hegesippus tell against the cousin-theory?

The claim

Jerome himself advanced only that the “brethren of the Lord” (Matthew 13:55; Mark 6:3; John 7:5; Acts 1:14; 1 Corinthians 9:5; Galatians 1:19) were sons of “Mary of Clopas” the Virgin’s sister — His maternal cousins. The fuller Hieronymian reading that came to be taught, in which two or three of the brethren are also apostles numbered among the Twelve, needs three further identifications bolted onto Jerome’s core:

1. Alphaeus = Clopas — the father of the brethren (Clopas, John 19:25) is one man with Alphaeus the father of the apostle “James son of Alphaeus” (Matthew 10:3), on the supposition that both Greek forms render a single Aramaic original, Chalphai. This makes James the Lord’s brother = James the apostle.
2. “Jude of James” = Jude the Lord’s brother — the apostle “Judas of James” (Ioudas Iakobou, Luke 6:16; Acts 1:13) is read as Jude the brother of James (so, Jude 1), not the son of James, placing a second brother among the Twelve.
3. “James the little” implies only two Jameses — “James the little” of Mark 15:40 is read as “James the less” (Jerome’s Latin minor), a comparative that would leave exactly two Jameses, so that the “little” one must be the son of Alphaeus among the Twelve.

These three props stand or fall together as the load-bearing frame of the completed cousin-theory: only if all hold do the brethren become the apostles James and Jude. The narrow question weighed here is not whether the brethren were cousins at all (that turns on the word adelphos, weighed on the companion page), but whether this chain of identifications will carry the weight put on it.

Who advances it

Jerome did not. The first of the three — Alphaeus = Clopas — J. B. Lightfoot, who named the theory after Jerome, found “was unknown to Jerome himself”; Jerome even “confesses plainly that he does not know why Mary is called” of Clopas. Lightfoot traced the equation’s first appearance to John Chrysostom and its clearest early statement to Theodoret of Cyrus, both on Galatians 1:19: “It occurs first, I believe, in Chrysostom… and after him in Theodoret who is more explicit.” The graft was a natural one for “a Syrian Greek, who… must at all events have known that Chalphai was the Aramaean… original of Alphaios.”¹ Chrysostom, expounding Paul’s “James, the Lord’s brother,” lets the new equation slip — Paul “might have shown this by another appellation, and called him the son of Cleophas, as the Evangelist does” — treating James as if an apostle and, on the Aramaic equation, as the son of Alphaeus.² Theodoret states it outright: James “was not, as some suppose, the son of Joseph by a previous marriage but the son of Clopas and cousin of the Lord.”³ The other two identifications complete the frame these two fathers began, and became the standard machinery of the Latin and later Greek harmonizers.

The evidence for

Each identification has a real foothold, and taken together they yield a tidy single family. (1) The Greek transliteration of Aramaic gutturals was loose, and it is at least conceivable that Alphaios and Klopas/Kleopas both go back to one name Chalphai; Greek-speaking fathers close to the Aramaic (Chrysostom, Theodoret) evidently thought so. (2) The phrase “Judas of James” is a genuine ellipsis, and a reader who already knew Jude 1 — “Jude… brother of James” — could fill it with “brother”; the coincidence that the brethren-list (Mark 6:3) and the apostle-lists share the names James, Jude, and Simon makes the identification tempting. (3) Mark plainly uses “the little” to distinguish this James, and the church did know a “James the less”; if only two Jameses were prominent among the Twelve, the epithet could pick out the son of Alphaeus. Cumulatively the chain lets the brethren be believers and leaders after the resurrection (James of Jerusalem; Jude of the epistle) without positing later sons of Mary — the coherence that recommended the reading to the Latin West.

Adversarial assessment

Alphaeus is not Clopas. Beyond its absence from Jerome, the equation is philologically strained. Clopas (QLWPY in the Aramaic of a Murabbaʿat document, Mur 33) is a distinct name from that behind Alphaeus (HLPY); the two are not variants of one word, and “the identity of the names has always been doubtful on philological grounds.”⁴ Luke, who calls this man Cleopas (Luke 24:18), does not also call him Alphaeus (Luke 6:15; Acts 1:13) — he treats them as two persons. Chrysostom’s own statement of the equation, Lightfoot noted, sits in a passage “somewhat confused, and it is difficult to resist the suspicion that it has been interpolated.”¹ Tellingly, the most economical modern form of the cousin-theory (Josef Blinzler’s) drops this identification altogether — conceding it is not load-bearing.

“Jude of James” means son, not brother. The obvious rendering of the ellipsis is “son”: “the son” “is the more obvious word,” and it is “supported by two of the earliest versions, the Peshito Syriac and the Thebaic,” while the Old Latin and Memphitic leave the ellipsis unfilled and thus preserve the ambiguity.⁵ To make Jude the Lord’s brother the tradition must adopt the less natural reading and then place him among the Twelve — against the whole grain of the Gospels, where the brethren are set apart from, and at points opposed to, the Twelve (a separate objection that would hold even if these identifications did, weighed on its own page): “only a short time before the crucifixion they are disbelievers” (John 7:5); after the Ascension they are still “distinguished from the Twelve” (Acts 1:14); Jude in his epistle “seems to disclaim the title of an Apostle” (Jude 17); and James “the resident bishop… of the mother Church, held a position hardly compatible with the world-wide duties” of the itinerant Twelve. And the apostle in question is designated Lebbaeus (Matthew 10:3), Thaddaeus (Mark 3:18), “Jude of James” (Luke 6:16), and “Judas not Iscariot” (John 14:22) — never once “the Lord’s brother,” the one designation that “would have fixed the person meant at once.”⁶ An ancient reader did fill the ellipsis this way: Ephraem the Syrian (c. 363), in his Commentary on Acts, reads “Judas of James” as Jude the brother of James and places him, with Simon the Zealot, among the Twelve — so the “brother” sense is older than Jerome’s Latin completers and not their invention. But antiquity is not accuracy: Ephraem still takes the less-natural sense against the earliest versions, and he read the brethren as Joseph’s sons, not the Virgin’s sister’s — so his witness, even granted, tells for a stepbrother reckoned among the apostles, not for the cousin the identification is marshalled to produce.⁷ And the reading’s later history tells the same way. To take “Judas of James” as the apostle — folding the Lord’s brother into the Twelve — was the standard identification of the letter’s author before the nineteenth century, adopted by the Council of Trent and so carried in Roman Catholic scholarship into the twentieth; yet it was, as Bauckham notes, “not really an alternative” to identifying Jude as the brother of Jesus — only a way of making that brother an apostle. Jessein (1821) was the first to argue in detail that the author of the epistle must be distinguished from the apostle Judas, and the identification “has now been generally abandoned, even in Roman Catholic scholarship,” the elliptical “Judas of James” now standardly read “son of James.” That even the tradition most invested in the “brother” rendering let it go, once the grammar was pressed, is a fair measure of how little weight the rendering could bear.⁸

“The little” marks stature, not rank. “The Greek gives not ‘James the Less’ but ‘James the little.’ Is it not most natural then to explain this epithet of his height?” Jerome’s Latin minor imports a comparative force the Greek positive ho mikros does not carry; only on the comparative reading does the epithet imply just two Jameses to be ranked against each other. As a stature-nickname it implies nothing of the kind — “‘there were many of the name of James,’ says Hegesippus, and the short stature of one of these might well serve as a distinguishing mark.”⁶ Its function is precisely to distinguish this James (and this Mary) from the Lord’s brother and from the Virgin, not to identify him with the son of Alphaeus.⁴

Assessment

Weak. The three identifications are jointly required to turn Jerome’s cousins into named apostles, yet each is a later graft on his theory and each is the less-probable reading on its own evidence: Clopas and Alphaeus are distinct names, “Jude of James” is more naturally “son,” and “the little” is a mark of stature, not a rank implying two Jameses. As positive support for the Hieronymian reading the chain therefore fails; it lends the cousin-identification no weight. This does not, by itself, refute the cousin-reading — its strongest modern form (Blinzler’s) requires only that the brethren James and Joses be identified with the “James the little and Joses” of Mark 15:40 and that Simon the brother be Symeon son of Clopas, dispensing with all three props here — but that the reading survives only by shedding them is itself the verdict on them. The identifications were the machinery by which the completed theory made the brethren apostles; that machinery does not hold. Jerome’s successors who deployed it as though it settled the matter overstated what it could bear, and Jerome’s own theory is better assessed without it (see his page).

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