HistoricalChristian.Faith

Are “James the little” and Joses (Mark 15:40) the Lord’s brothers James and Joses? (Bauckham’s two impediments)

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: weak — the load-bearing identification beneath every form of the Hieronymian reading — even the most economical (Blinzler’s), which sheds the apostle-making props — is that the Lord’s brothers James and Joses (Mark 6:3) are the “James the little and Joses” whose mother, a second Mary, stands at the cross (Mark 15:40). Richard Bauckham (himself a defender of Mary’s perpetual virginity, on the Epiphanian reading) rejects the identification with two fresh impediments: James the Lord’s brother, the towering leader of the Jerusalem church, could not have been nicknamed “the little”; and the mother of the two equally-known sons of Mark 15:40 cannot be the mother of James and the insignificant Joses. Mark’s epithet marks off this James, and this Mary, from the Lord’s brother and from the Virgin · the base identification assumed by Jerome’s cousin-theory in all its forms

Related arguments: the cousin theory — see also Does “brother” (adelphos) mean “cousin”? · Does the separate word for “kinsman” (suggenēs) tell against the cousin-reading? · Do the completing identifications hold? · Does the shared manner of death (both stoned in Jerusalem) support the identification? · Does John 19:25 make “Mary of Clopas” the Virgin’s sister? · 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

Every version of the Hieronymian (cousin) reading, however much machinery it strips away, rests on one identification at the base. The companion pages weigh the props that make the brethren apostles among the Twelve (Alphaeus = Clopas, “Jude of James,” “James the little” as a comparative) and the John 19:25 punctuation that makes their mother the Virgin’s sister — and the theory’s strongest modern form (Josef Blinzler’s) discards them all. What no form of the reading can shed is the first link: that the “James and Joses” named among the Lord’s brethren (Mark 6:3: “the brother of James, and Joses, and of Juda, and Simon”) are the same two men as the “James the little and Joses” whose mother, a Mary distinct from the Virgin, watches the crucifixion (Mark 15:40: “Mary the mother of James the less and of Joses”).¹ If that Mary’s sons are the Lord’s brothers, then those brothers had a mother other than the Virgin, and the cousin-reading follows; if her sons are two other men, the whole edifice loses its foundation. The narrow question here is not whether the brethren were cousins in general (that turns on adelphos, weighed on the companion page), nor whether their mother was the Virgin’s sister, but the prior one: are these two pairs of “James and Joses” the same pair?

Who advances it

Jerome assumed it without argument — it is embedded in his equation of “the mother of James the less” with “Mary of Clopas” the Virgin’s sister, from which he derives the cousinhood in Against Helvidius. The identification is older and broader than his theory, however, because it seems to fall straight out of the coincidence of names, and it survives as the one indispensable premise in the pared-down modern defences of the cousin-reading — Blinzler’s and John McHugh’s alike. Its clearest modern critic is Richard Bauckham, who — though himself holding Mary’s perpetual virginity on the Epiphanian reading, and so no partisan of the Helvidian view — judges the identification untenable, and with it any theory of the relatives of Jesus that depends on finding them among the women at the cross. “No relatives of Jesus,” he concludes, “appear among the women disciples named by the Synoptic evangelists.”²

The evidence for

The identification is genuinely tempting, and Bauckham grants what makes it so. Two brothers named James and Joses appear in the Lord’s family (Mark 6:3); a Mary at the cross has two sons named James and Joses (Mark 15:40) — the same two names, in the same order, both pairs evidently known in the early church. That this second Mary is identified precisely by her sons (“the mother of James the little and Joses”) shows those sons were figures of some note, as the Lord’s brothers James and Joses were; Mark no more coins her than he coins “Alexander and Rufus,” by whom he identifies Simon of Cyrene (Mark 15:21). At first sight, then, it looks economical to suppose one pair of well-known brothers rather than two. On that supposition the second Mary is the mother of the Lord’s brothers but not of the Lord — so those “brothers” stand in some more distant relation (cousins, step-brothers) — and the cousin-reading has the family it needs without positing later sons of the Virgin. This is the foothold on which Blinzler builds his minimal case.²

Adversarial assessment

Bauckham first clears away the extreme option — that the second Mary is the Virgin herself — as “incredible,” since neither Mark nor Matthew nor the pre-Markan tradition would refer to the mother of Jesus so obliquely, by two of her lesser sons.² That leaves the cousin-form of the identification, against which he raises two impediments.

(1) The Lord’s brother could not be called “the little.” James the Lord’s brother was the leader of the Jerusalem church, and “could certainly not have been called ‘the little’ in any sense other than a reference to his physical height” — a designation “nowhere else attested” for him. The epithets that did distinguish him from other Jameses were “the Lord’s brother” (Galatians 1:19; Hegesippus in Eusebius, H.E. 2.23.4) and “the Just.” Blinzler’s escape — that “the little” was a very early nickname of James, current before “the Lord’s brother” hardened into his title — “will not do, because ‘the Lord’s brother’ was certainly the term in common use for him by the time Mark wrote.” If Mark keeps “the little,” it is because the epithet could still distinguish for his readers — and what it distinguishes is precisely “this James from the Lord’s brother to whom he refers in 6:3, and this James’ mother from the mother of Jesus.” The nickname is not a label the Lord’s brother bore; it is Mark’s way of saying this is a different James.³

(2) The mother of Mark 15:40 has two equally-known sons; the Lord’s brothers did not. Among the Lord’s brethren James towered and Joses was insignificant — only James left a mark on the early church. Their mother, had she been at the cross, would always have been identified as “the mother of James,” never as “the mother of Joses.” Yet Mark, having named the second Mary in full at 15:40, refers to her as readily as “the mother of Joses” (Mark 15:47) as “the mother of James” (Mark 16:1) — which “suggests that, unlike the brothers of Jesus, these two brothers were equally well known figures.” Her Joses was no lesser man than her James; the Lord’s Joses plainly was. So the two Marys, and the two pairs of sons, come apart.³

Bauckham also blocks the counter-move of John McHugh, who reasoned that since “James” unqualified normally meant the Lord’s brother in the early church (Acts 12:17; 15:13; 1 Corinthians 15:7), the “Mary of James” of Luke 24:10 must be his mother. That does not follow: Luke’s is not an unidentified James but one tied to a Mary, and “if Luke could assume, as surely he could, that no one would refer to the mother of Jesus as ‘Mary of James,’ he may have known only one Mary and one James, so connected” — the second Mary and her James, not the Lord’s brother.³ An early version reads the phrase against McHugh outright: the Curetonian Syriac fills the same ellipsis with “daughter,” not “mother,” rendering “Mary of James” (Luke 24:10) “Mary the daughter of James” — so one of the oldest Syriac translators took the Mary tied to a James for his daughter, not for the mother of the Lord’s brother. The datum is corroborative, not decisive — a translator’s filling of an ellipsis reflects how he construed an ambiguous Greek phrase rather than what the grammar compels — but it shows the reading McHugh’s move needs was not the one the earliest Syriac Christians found natural.⁴

The same identification underwrites McHugh’s own distinctive reconstruction — that the brethren were foster-brothers, cousins reared in Joseph’s household and so called “brothers” by upbringing rather than by blood — and Bauckham’s objection to it turns on the same fault-line. The “brethren” of the Gospels are a set of four: James, Joses, Simon, and Judas (Mark 6:3). A foster-brother theory only coheres if the whole set is one household of children reared together — if, that is, the four are the sons of the same parents. McHugh could make a case for James and Joses as the second Mary’s sons, but he had no account of why Simon and Judas too belonged in Joseph’s household; and, as Bauckham puts it, “any credibility the theory of foster-brothers might have is lost if the four foster-brothers are not the sons of the same parents.” So the very identification the cousin-reading cannot do without fails even to carry McHugh’s own version of it: securing James and Joses at the cross does nothing to explain the other two brethren, and the set of four will not reduce to a single fostered family.⁵

Assessment

Weak. The identification of the Lord’s brothers James and Joses with the “James the little and Joses” of Mark 15:40 is the one premise every form of the cousin-reading must keep, and on Bauckham’s two impediments it is the less-probable reading: the Jerusalem leader is not credibly “the little,” and the mother of two equally-prominent sons is not credibly the mother of James-and-lesser-Joses. On the better account, Mark’s epithet does the opposite of what the theory needs — it distinguishes this James and this Mary from the Lord’s brother and the Virgin, so that the coincidence of names is just that, a coincidence among the commonest Jewish names of the day. This cuts deeper than the props weighed on the sibling pages: those show the apostle-making superstructure and the maternal-sisterhood to be later grafts the reading can survive without; this removes the foundation the reading cannot do without, so that even Blinzler’s minimal form is left without a family. It does not, by itself, establish the perpetual virginity or decide between the Epiphanian and Helvidian readings — both of which keep the brethren clear of the women at the cross — and it is offered here by a defender of the virginity, not a denier of it. What it settles is narrower and firm: the brethren of the Lord are not to be found among the Marys of the Passion, and the cousin-reading gains no support from them.

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