CHAPTER III: THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE
6. MIRACLES. ENCOUNTER WITH TROUBLESOME DISPOSITIONS.
HOME | Contents | Chapter IIII: < PART V |PART VI: 97.Calming the tempest | 98.A possessed man cured on the other side of the lake | 99.The daughter of Jairus and the woman with an issue of blood | 100.Jesus is driven out of Nazareth | PART VII.
The calming of the tempest (97).
Luke viii.22-25; Mark iv.35-41; Matthew viii.23-27.
Jesus had revealed nothing of what He purposed when He said to His disciples:
'Let us go over to the other side of the lake.'
According to St. Mark it was
the evening of the very day on which He spoke the parable about the kingdom
of God.
Perhaps He meant to leave the Galilaeans time for reflection,
or desired
to escape their pressing attentions when He came ashore after speaking the
parables.
Or was it that He now wanted to carry the good word to the other
side of the lake?
Foreseen lack of success would not have prevented Him from
making the attempt.
What is certain is that His departure was unexpected.
The
disciples obey, taking Jesus just as He is and without advising Him to protect
Himself against the cold of the night which was now falling.
In providing us
with these details, which would have been neglected by an author of style,
St. Mark admirably shows us how familiar was the life of that little community
of Jesus and the disciples.
Jesus, weary no doubt from having preached earnestly
for a long time,
left the management and work of the boat to His disciples
who were more experienced.
He sat in the stern, the guest's place [Cf. Odyssey, XIII,
74 ff.],
and fell
asleep leaning on the cushion that is always to be found there.
A great wind
sprang up.
On the little lake the storms that rush through the north-western
gap in the hills are sometimes terrible,
and the craft of these fishermen were
frail.
One false movement would have been enough to upset the boat, which was
already filling with water.
The rowers, in their anxiety losing their respect a little, wake the sleeper:
'Master,
doth it not concern Thee that we perish?'
He rebukes the wind and, as if speaking to a troublesome person, says to the sea:
'Silence! Be still!'
And there came a great calm.
Then He said to the disciples:
'Why are you fearful?
Have you not faith yet?'
If their faith had been perfect
they would have known that Jesus was watching over them even while He slept.
Nevertheless they do instinctively turn to Him
for
supernatural aid,
for they did not expect Him to save them by taking an oar.
When Satan urged Him to satisfy His hunger by a miracle He refused;
but
He performs a miracle for His friends,
for it will make their future trust
in Him all the firmer.
They know now that the winds and sea obey Jesus.
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The cure of a possessed man on the other side of the lake (98).
Luke viii.26-39; Mark v.1-20; Matthew viii.28-34.
When the tempest was stilled Jesus and His disciples landed.
What happened
then is related by all three synoptists.
We will follow the most detailed account,
that of Mark,
which Luke surely had before him when he wrote:
Matthew merely gave a brief outline.
[Matthew mentions two possessed persons, but one of them
being probably only the companion of the chief character, he leaves him undescribed.]
Hardly had Jesus landed when He was attacked,
so to speak, by a wild creature coming out of a tomb which he used for a dwelling-place.
People had often tried to bind him with fetters and chains,
a thing still done
in Palestine before the Great War,
when unfortunate lunatics were fastened
with iron chains to the church porches.
This individual, however, was unusually
strong;
he would burst the fetters and break the chains to pieces,
and then
rush into the mountains overlooking the lake,
crying out and wounding himself
with stones.
Jesus, with His knowledge of the unseen,
saw at once that he was possessed by the devil and said:
'Go out of this man, thou unclean spirit.'
But the devil cried:
'Why dost Thou interfere, Jesus, Son of the most high God?
I adjure Thee by God, torment me not.'
Thus, by an amusing irony it is the devil who in a
way exorcizes Jesus in God's name,
and yet beseeches Him and salutes Him as
Son of the Most High.
(This was the name the Gentiles gave the God of the Jews,
since His real name was unknown to them, the Jews not considering it lawful
to utter it.)
Thus he who was exercising such tyrannical sway over his victim
felt helpless before Jesus, for all his adjuring Him.
We see how unfounded
is the charge sometimes brought against the evangelists of being dualists,
that is, of believing in the existence of a second (evil) principle on an equality
with God.
Following the custom of exorcists, Jesus
commands the devil to disclose his name.
The devil eludes the question by answering:
'Legion! For we are many,'
which must have made the disciples shudder,
for a legion numbered six thousand men,
a veritable army corps for those days.
And yet this devil, or this multitude
of devils- Mark still uses the singular, though later he will use the plural-beseech
Jesus not to send them out of a country in which they fared so well, for it
was mainly inhabited by idolaters.
Must they give up the tributes they received
and be chained in the abyss, where a terrible punishment awaited them?
And
as there was a great herd of swine feeding there, the devils, thinking perhaps
to play a good trick on Jesus by stirring up the inhabitants of the district
against Him, beg Him to allow them, if they must let go of their man, to take
refuge in the swine.
It was poor compensation, but how could one refuse!
Jesus
was certainly not deceived by their manoeuvre, but He disdained to treat
them as rigorously as He might have done and gave them leave.
The devils
do not wait to be told twice.
They rush into the swine and the swine - about
two thousand of them - hurl themselves into the lake.
Not that they took a
perilous leap from the brink of a cliff, for there is everywhere a space,
sometimes a considerable space, between the mountains and the water's edge;
but their onrush carries them on from the high ground without a stop.
The swineherds
are seized with consternation;
they run to tell their story in the city.
People
hasten to the spot.
What has happened?
One glance at the bearing of the demoniac
tells them:
he who hitherto had been more like a wild beast than a human being
was seated clothed and in his right mind.
Soon the newcomers know all:
the
sudden appearance of the possessed man, his cure, and, as a result, the mad
rush of the swine.
They had lost valuable stock, but their land was freed from
a maleficent power that attacked even
human beings and reduced them to the condition of beasts.
How should they
act?
To attack Jesus for the affair would hardly be wise, seeing that He
was endowed with such great power.
To render thanks would be equivalent to
admitting that He was an envoy of the God of Israel.
Until then they had
kept on good terms with the evil spirits cheaply enough by means of offerings
and sacrifices.
They politely ask Jesus to go away.
But there was one, at any rate, who had understood and
was moved,
and seeing that Jesus was going away he wanted to follow Him.
This
was the poor demoniac.
Jesus did not rebuff him, but gave him to understand
that he would be doing better work for God by staying amongst his own people.
He thought well enough of him to judge that, left thus, he would not fail
in that work.
He would remain as a witness, beyond all cavil, of the divine
act that had restored human dignity to a slave of the devil:
'Go back to thy house, to thine own people,
and tell them all that the Lord hath done for thee,
and that He hath had mercy on thee.'
Though not so well known as the Magdalen out of whom Jesus had driven seven devils, and who became 'the apostle of the apostles,' this man, too, was an apostle, and he set to work to publish throughout the Decapolis all that Jesus had done for him.
It was a gift beyond all compare, an outpouring of mercy such as those cannot
appreciate who weigh the loss of a herd of swine in the balance against it.
In their opinion Jesus had treated the rights of property rather too lightly,
supreme Lord though He was.
But had the devils waited for His formal permission
before doing harm, and would they have abstained from doing further harm?
They, at any rate, were reduced to impotence.
Thus the ill-will of the lakeside inhabitants does not allow Him to complete
His work and deliver them from slavery to the devils.
He charges the cured
demoniac to preach the word to them.
It is the first step in the conversion
of the Gentiles;
for the Decapolis, or 'the ten cities,' though conquered
by Alexander Jannaeus, had been freed irom the Jewish yoke by Pompey.
People
have disagreed about which were the ten cities making up the Decapolis:
but Gerasa and Gadara were of the number, as well as Scythopolis.
Where ought the scene of these events to be placed?
The difficulty is a famous
one and deserves our attention, chiefly because of the variants in the text
of the gospels.
Mark speaks of' 'the country of the Gerasens.'
But Gerasa, a
famous city (to-day called Jerash), was situated about thirty miles south-east
of the lake.
To anyone writing, say, at Rome, the difficulty that this distance
presents might not stand out in all its clearness, but even so it is impossible
that he could have made the mistake that would have to be supposed.
The Greek
Matthew surely wrote 'country
of the Gadarenes';
but between Gadara, a city admirably situated on a high
hill to the south of the lake, and the lake itself was the River Hieromax,
and the swine would have been drowned in that.
And so Origen definitely concluded
that neither of these names was likely, and being assured that there was
once upon a time a city named Gergesa on the lakeside, proposed the reading
'country of the Gergesenes or Gergeseneans,' the name of an ancient people
formerly driven out by the Israelites [Genesis xv.21.];
at any rate it was due to his influence
that this reading became prevalent in so many old manuscripts of the gospels.
But it seems too erudite a conjecture to be relied upon.
It will be observed, however, that these different names for the scene of
the incident are not precisely names of a city but rather of a region that
might be fairly extensive and have a chief city more or less close to the lake.
Despite the variants, the evangelists were surely all thinking of one and the
same spot on the eastern shore of the lake, and thanks to persevering research
it seems that we can now fix the spot with real probability.
The starting point
in the situation is the place from which the swine hurled themselves into the
lake.
Nowhere does a steep descent from the mountain go right down to the water,
which is often some considerable distance from the slopes.
But at a place called
Moqâ edlô, where there is situated a sulphurous spring which marks the
frontier between the British and French mandates over Palestine and Syria,
the shore is hardly more than thirty yards wide and the distance must formerly
have been still less.
Above this spot the slope is very steep and, moreover,
is honeycombed by natural caves which may very well have been used as tombs,
though they cannot be stated with certainty to have been used for that purpose.
Granting this, what was the neighbouring city?
We might hesitate between
two ruins.
Qalaât-el-Hosn, to the south, appears to answer exactly to the
description of the city that Josephus calls Gamala.
The ruin stands opposite to Tiberias
and is in the shape of a gigantic camel's hump, whence it gets its name.
Near
by there are numerous tombs hewn out in the rock, and these may well have served
as dwellings, for they are even furnished with doors of basalt.
But the name
does not resemble those found in the gospels,
nor was any tradition ever preserved
there regarding this matter.
On the north side, about a mile and a quarter
from Moqâ edlô, lies the ruined village of Kursi,
the Arabic word for throne.
But Père Abel has clearly shown that the Greek
form of the name, Chorsia, was a transcription from the Aramaic and
existed before the coming of the Arabs,
[See Kursi, in the Journal of the Palestine Oriental
Society, 1927, pp. 112 ff.]
for we find that St. Sabas visited
Chorsia in the sixth century and prayed there, doubtless in commemoration of
some gospel incident;
and later tradition regarded it as the place we are seeking.
One
confirmation of the tradition can be found in the fact that the walls of a
Byzantine city can still be distinguished to the east of the existing village.
The Aramaic name of Chorsia may have given rise to Mark's 'country
of the Gerasens' and Origen's 'Gergesa,'
while Matthew preferred a better
known name, Gadara, a city very renowned as a centre of Greek culture.
In this
case the place of the demoniac's deliverance would be Moqâ edlô,
and the neighbouring city referred to in the gospels would be Kursi, though
it is also possible that the man took up his dwelling in the tombs situated
further to the south.
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The daughter of Jairus and the woman with an issue of blood (99).
Luke viii.40-56; Mark v.21-43; Matt. ix.18-26.
This story of the possessed man was told in detail by St. Mark and St. Luke,
though it seemed to end in disappointment.
Along with it they relate two miracles
which caused no great sensation at the time,
the first because the goodness
of our Saviour allowed it to be, as it were, stolen secretly from Him;
the
second because He took steps to prevent the news of it being spread abroad
immediately.
It is easy to see from these instances in what light the evangelists
regarded miracles,
and they were imitated in that respect by the early Christians.
When they talk of miracles they do not always appeal to general belief in them
or to the testimony of a whole crowd of people.
To their mind, for a miracle
to be worthy of credence it is
enough that it should have been attested by witnesses chosen by Jesus, the
same witnesses who will vouch for His Resurrection.
They clearly recognized
that this was the Master's plan, and it was one which brought out the principle
of authority and hierarchy. [Acts x.41: 'Not to all the
people, but to witnesses preordained by God.']
It was impossible, however, for Jesus to escape the curiosity of the crowd:
as soon as He landed at Capharnaum or somewhere in the vicinity
He was surrounded
before He had time even to leave the. shore.
A man of some importance named Jairus -
perhaps the president of the synagogue, or at all events one of its chief members -
makes his way through the throng and falls at the Master's feet, beseeching:
'My daughter only a child, is at the point of death:
come, lay Thy hands upon her that she may be safe and live.'
Without a word, Jesus follows him,
moved by his sorrow and faith.
The father in his distress seems to tell Jesus
how He ought to work the miracle;
but that is merely because he has often
seen Him lay His hands on the sick and heal them.
The interested crowd grows
in number and flocks around the Healer.
In the meantime a woman had resolved to approach Him.
She had been afflicted
with a loss of blood for twelve years, and had spent all she possessed in consulting
doctors;
but it was all of no avail;
her illness rather grew worse.
Her only
hope was in a miracle.
But her condition rendered her unclean according to
the Law [Leviticus xv.25.], and at the slightest
suspicion that she suffered from this complaint people would have driven her
away mercilessly, and overwhelmed her with reproaches for having exposed so
many of her fellow-Israelites to defilement.
Consequently,
she could not ask aloud to be cured.
Not daring to imitate the audacity of
the leper whom Jesus had cured, she has no other resource left than to approach
Him who poured forth such divine power around Him and take Him by surprise.
She comes up from behind, fearing to be driven away if she makes herself too
noticeable, and succeeds in touching the hem of His garment:
that is, the
tassel of woollen threads which the Jews fastened one to each of the four corners
of their cloak.
The Law commanded this explicitly [Numbers xv.38.],
and Jesus observed it exactly.
The woman immediately felt that she was healed.
Such a miracle, as St. Mark
and St. Luke observe, could not have been performed without the knowledge of
Him who was responsible for it.
A health-giving power had gone forth from Jesus,
and He had been conscious of it;
He had therefore consented to it.
We need
not attribute this knowledge to the divine light that enlightened His human
intelligence and enabled Him always to see God face to face;
for in His mission
as prophet and worker of miracles also Jesus received special enlightenment
touching things belonging to the supernatural order.
Nevertheless He very earnestly asks the question:
'Who hath touched My garments? '
He had not seen the woman,
and He followed the common rule of human nature
in acquiring knowledge from experience by the use of His senses and intelligence.
This was one of
the conditions of the abasement He took upon Himself in His Incarnation, when
along with our human nature He assumed its natural limitations and its capacity
for development.
Hence St. Mark frankly states that Jesus looked around to
see who had touched Him.
Nor are the disciples, with Peter at their head, surprised at His questioning them,
though they do not disguise the fact that the question seems naive:
'Thou seest the multitude thronging Thee,
and Thou sayest : "Who hath touched Me?"'
Why, everybody.
The woman knew well enough what had happened:
she came forward frightened
and trembling and confessed to Him the whole truth, which He already knew.
Jesus did not wish her to go away with the idea that He could be constrained
or taken by surprise, in the way that was looked for by the pagans who practised
magical arts.
What had won her cure was not that furtive touch,
but her faith.
Healed of her infirmity, she goes away with her soul at peace.
And thus the
woman vanishes from the Gospel.
Legend has tried to fill in the silence.
The apocryphal Acts of Pilate [Acta Pilati, VII.] call
her Veronica.
Eusebius, the Bishop of Csesarea during the fourth century, a
man of critical mind, echoes a tradition which made her a native of Paneas,
to-day Banias, in northern Palestine.
According to that tradition, she had
even erected on a stone near the door of her house a bronze image of herself
kneeling before a man who was stretching out his hand towards her. [Hist.
Eccl., VII, xviii.]
This incident had scarcely hindered the group, of which Jesus was the centre, in its advance towards the house of Jairus.
While He was still speaking,
someone came to tell the ruler of the synagogue:
'It is useless to trouble the Master any further:
thy daughter is dead.'
Before the man had even time to decide what to do,
Jesus, who had heard everything, said to him:
'Fear not: only believe.'
A miracle had been promised in response
to his faith,
and the fulfilment of the promise was dependent on the stability
of that faith:
whether the child was dead or not would make no difference
to what Jesus had decided.
None of the crowd, however, are allowed to enter
the house except Peter, James, and his brother John,
whom Jesus chooses as
the witnesses of the greatest of His mysteries.
When they arrive, they find
a group at the door mourning and crying.
Jesus says to them:
'Stop all this noise and weeping:
the child is not dead but asleep.'
It is true that death
is often likened to sleep, particularly when it comes as a release.
But in
this case they had seen the child die, and they derided Him.
If He did not
even know that she was dead, what was the good of His coming at all?
Would
He have been able to cure her even if He had come in time?
After such a confession
of ignorance, it was impossible to imagine that He had the power to bring
the dead back to life.
Thus, in spite of all the miracles He had performed, we see that the popular
applause was by no means of a permanent character.
The smallest thing that
could be made a matter for scepticism diminished their enthusiasm for Him.
Without deigning to give them any answer, Jesus sends away all these needless
mourners,
some of whom were there merely for their own profit.
He goes in with
the father and mother, followed by his three disciples,
touches the young girl's
hand and restores her to life.
Both Elias [3 Kings (1Kgs) xvii.19 ff.] and Eliseus [4 Kings )2 Kgs) iv.33 ff.] had
raised the dead.
But what a struggle there
had been, against God as it were, in the earnest prayer they had offered, in
the stretching of the prophet's body over the corpse,
'mouth upon mouth,
eyes upon eyes,
hands upon hands,'
as if by restoring its warmth they could force
the soul to return.
For Jesus, a simple gesture and an imperious command had
been enough.
St. Mark determined to preserve the two words of that
command just as Jesus had uttered them in Aramaic:
Talitha kum. 'Young girl,
arise!'
And there is another difference also between Jesus and the prophets
which shows His goodness rather than His power.
The prophets had restored a
son to his mother, as Jesus too had done at Nairn.
But on this occasion, seeing
the stupefaction of the girl's parents.
He bids them give her something to
eat.
She had been restored to normal life at the age of twelve.
Having performed the miracle
Jesus enjoined secrecy upon the witnesses,
and
it seems to have been fairly well kept.
No doubt the sneerers refused to give
way even in the face of evidence,
and preferred to admit that they were wrong
in the first instance.
At all events the evangelists record no enthusiasm and
no expressions of gratitude.
St. Matthew merely says that the rumour of the
incident spread throughout the whole country-side.
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Jesus is driven out at Nazareth by violence (100).
Luke iv.22-30; Mark vi.1-6; Matt. xiii.54-58.
Capharnaum, where Jesus now lived, had been the centre of His preaching for
a long time.
Yet He did not forget His own home,
the humble city of Nazareth
where He had been brought up from youth to manhood,
where He had devoted so
many hours to work and prayer,
and especially to that work which was His masterpiece,
the perfecting of Mary's soul.
Joseph, whom He had loved as a father, was dead.
But when Jesus revisited Nazareth,
it was not for the purpose of seeing His
kinsfolk:
He went to preach the kingdom of God.
If we have been right in dividing
St. Luke's narrative here into two different episodes,
then it was during Our
Lord's second visit to Nazareth that He was driven out with violence.
On the
first occasion the people of Nazareth, proud of the rising reputation of their
fellow-citizen, had merely shown astonishment, but an appreciative astonishment,
at His way of preaching.
In the narrative of the three synoptists His expulsion
followed immediately upon His warm welcome.
But so complete a change of front
is hardly explicable
unless some new circumstance had arisen to embitter the
feelings of the people of Nazareth.
They might have shown themselves
indifferent in His regard, as others were,
or even contemptuous on account
of His lowly origin;
but that was no reason for trying to throw Him down
a precipice, as St. Luke narrates.
This sudden fury implies a hatred that
had been long growing, and the cause of it is not difficult to find :
Jesus had forsaken His own city and Capharnaum was getting the benefit of His
miracles.
This jealousy of theirs becomes apparent
from the way in which He voices what was in their minds:
'Do here also in thine own country all that we have been told has happened in Capharnaum.'
[Luke iv.23.]
We assume, therefore, that
some time must have elapsed between the two scenes;
the first visit must have
taken place at the time given by Luke;
the second at the time indicated by
Mark and Matthew.
In that case the whole story goes with a very natural action,
advancing from astonishment to distrust,
and then to rage,
granting the interval
of time that the people's change of disposition implies.
Ill-humour appears at the very beginning.
By what right does He come teaching?
We know Him too well, they say, to give
any credit to what He says.
Did He not work as a carpenter here?
'Is not this the son of Mary,
the brother of James and Joses and Jude and Simon?'
He
has not thought fit to stop at Nazareth,
but are not his sisters here amongst
us?
Jesus has not asked them to recognize Him as Messiah, so they do not give
a thought to such an absurd imagination as that a workman should think himself
called to the throne.
But He does set up as a teacher, and they know well enough
that a carpenter has not much time for study.
People say that He works miracles.
If so, why does He work for His living?
Physician, they thought, heal Thyself!
In times past, when a prophet arose he appeared in unaccustomed garb and none
knew where he came from, just as Elias the Thesbite had appeared before Achab
and Amos of Thecua before the priest at the sanctuary of Bethel.
On the other
hand Jeremias, whom his neighbours watched grow up in the humble village of
Anathoth, had suffered scorn and ill-treatment.
No man is great in the eyes
of those who have seen him babbling as a child;
at all events he is not the
one to lecture those who once cuffed his ears.
Jesus knew this very well;
He knew that a prophet has but a poor reception in his own country, amongst
his kinsfolk, and in his own home.
But since His
fellow Nazarenes knew it so well also, they must admit the consequence of such
a truth,
namely, that this is precisely the reason why many are deprived
of the graces that a prophet brings to those who believe in him.
It is strangers
who benefit by these graces, like the widow of Sarephta in the time of Elias
and Naaman the Syrian in the time of Eliseus. [3 Kings(1Kgs)
xvii.9-10; 3 Kings(1Kgs)
xvii.9-10;]
So they must not be surprised
if He does not work the same miracles at Nazareth as He has worked at Capharnaum:
faith is normally required as the condition for begging and obtaining a miracle.
Ill-will has the unhappy power of hindering the exercise of goodness.
This allusion to Capharnaum and to Gentiles who had been preferred to Israelites
threw them into a fury, though they were in the synagogue.
What exasperated
them was that Jesus had laid bare the evil root of their jealousy.
They dragged
Him to the top of the hill on which their city was built to throw Him down.
But He, without making Himself invisible, merely by the use of His own personal
power, passed through their midst and none dared to pursue Him.
We have already
spoken of the site of this precipice from which they tried to throw Him.
Some
look for it south of Nazareth where there are several precipices, but they
are all too far from the city.
An ancient tradition, which owes its preservation to the piety of past ages
and to honour which a little chapel has been built, shows the place where Mary
stood anxiously watching this scene.
The disciples assisted at it too.
For
them the whole episode was symbolic of the fate that was to befall their Master.
Nazareth typified the nation of Israel in revolt against the prophet sent to
them by God.
Naaman the Syrian bathing in the Jordan prefigured the call of
the Gentiles to baptism.
And even if the disciples did not see the parallel
at the time,
they perceived it after the Resurrection and it encouraged them
to turn to the Gentiles with the Gospel.
The unmannerly language of the Nazarenes regarding Jesus has often been made
to serve as an argument against Mary's virginity.
They may not be sufficiently
well-disposed to their fellow-citizen to espouse His cause, but at any rate,
it is argued, they know well enough who He is.
And if they are low-minded people,
so much the better, for on that account they will not be the sort of people
to devise metaphysical explanations of how Jesus was conceived in a supernatural
fashion, or to invent that rare example of asceticism, a married woman who
is at the same time a virgin.
And precisely because this objection drawn from
the words of the Nazarenes deals with a question of fact and not with any philosophical
notions, it creates an obstacle to the Christian faith for many persons of
great intelligence who feel an attraction for that faith on account of its
lofty character.
For after all there is no getting away from a fact, and
if Jesus had brothers and sisters whose names were known at Nazareth, on
what grounds does the Church pay homage to Mary as a virgin?
But what are the facts? [See author's Commentary on
St. Mark, III, 31-35.]
They can be deduced only from the gospel texts,
and it is no exaggeration to say that the words spoken at Nazareth, far from
disproving the virginity of Mary, throw decisive light on the fact that Jesus
had no brothers or sisters born of her.
The evangelists have recorded these
words with complete simplicity:
therefore they did not in any way consider
them to be in real contradiction to what they already believed.
Luke makes the people of Nazareth say:
'Is not this the son of Joseph?'
[Luke iv.22.]
As these
people knew nothing of the mystery on which Luke has written at length, they
could not have spoken in any other fashion.
Thus they merely bear witness to
what was outwardly apparent and about which there was no difference of opinion,
for Mary was really married to Joseph.
But what about the brothers and sisters?
According to the significance of the Greek terms used they are indeed brothers
and sisters;
but the Semitic terms represented by the Greek can without any
question be used of cousins or even more distant relations.
Then there is the question of the proper names, and these indeed are of great
help for arriving at a true solution of the problem.
It will readily be admitted
that if anybody in the primitive Church had any chance of passing as the brother
of Jesus it was James, called expressly by St. Paul 'the brother of the Lord.'
[Galatians i.19.]
Now a James heads the list at Nazareth;
it is therefore the same James.
He is the brother of Joses, and the evangelists know very well who is their
mother -
a Mary who is certainly not Mary the Mother of Jesus. [Mark
xv.40; Matthew xxvii.56.]
She was known
as 'the mother of James and
Joses.'
[Joses (Jose) or Joseph, according as it was pronounced.]
It is thus that the Arabs even to this day name a woman when they
wish to call her by a name of honour.
If these two are not the children of
Mary the Mother of Jesus, then by what right can we ascribe to her Jude and
Simon who follow in the list of the brethren of Jesus?
Moreover, a very
ancient tradition with which we may here supplement the gospels regards Simon,
under the form Simeon, as a cousin of Our Lord.
[Given by
Hegesippus, a historian of the second century, quoted by Eusebius, Hist.
Eccl., IV, xxii, 4.]
The sisters, of whom no
memory remains, cannot claim any closer relationship with Jesus;
besides, brothers and sisters all together make too large a number.
The whole
group simply designates relations [i Corinthians ix.5.],
and it is ridiculous to imagine that there were brothers or sisters who remain
unknown, if those whom the people of Nazareth mention as the best known were
merely cousins.
[As Renan imagines in his paradoxical solution of the difficulty. Vie
de Jesus, p. 25.]
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