The Three Pillars

How Family Politics Shaped the Earliest Church and the Gospel of Mark

Sivertsen

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781498272681
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The Three Pillars: How Family Politics Shaped the Earliest Church and the Gospel of Mark, examines how family relationships played a key role in the earliest Christian church. By disentangling the two disparate genealogies of Jesus, the author reconstructs the families of Joseph and Mary. Presented here for the first time is the full ancestry of Jesus' mother, Mary, who was descended from the anti-Hasmonean high priest Alcimus. The author suggests that Mary and her daughter Mary played a hitherto unrecognized role in the church's earliest leadership struggle and that a composite of these two women, not Mary Magdalene, was the basis for the Gnostic Mary of later Christian works. The author next explores how this early leadership conflict shaped the Gospel of Mark, which she argues was written by Peter's son. She discusses Mark's footprint in this Gospel and how Mark's resentment of the relatives of Jesus, his ambivalence toward his father, and his anger at the disciples for ceding leadership to these relatives is at the heart of some of the most distinctive features of the Second Gospel, features that have perplexed biblical scholars and laymen for centuries.The last section examines the mysterious Beloved Disciple in the Gospel of John. The author concludes that the many unlikely elements in the account of the arrest and interrogation of Jesus can only be explained by seeing the Beloved Disciple as a close relative of the high priest Caiaphas and that this family relationship was crucial to the protection of the early Christians in Jerusalem. The book's final chapter offers reflections on how kinship played an important role in Jesus' ministry and how the high priestly-leadership responded to him in part because of his family lineage.

1

The Brothers and Sisters of Jesus and the Family of Joseph

The Brothers and Sisters of Jesus

In the Gospel of Mark four individuals are named as the brothers of Jesus: James, Joses, Judas and Simon. In the Gospel of Matthew they are called James, Joseph, Simon and Judas. The texts also mention unnamed sisters. Given the virtually universal custom of naming siblings in birth order, James was the oldest of the brothers followed by Joseph, and either Judas (Jude) and Simon or Simon and Judas. The Apostle Paul also refers to James the brother of the Lord in his letter to the Galatians and to the Lord’s brothers in his first letter to the Corinthians.1

What exactly do the terms “brothers” and “sisters” mean here? In Greek the word for brother is adelphos. In the second century a Palestinian Jewish Christian named Hegesippus wrote about the family of Jesus. His writings, quoted in Eusebius’s History of the Church, indicate that the brothers of Jesus were in fact sons of Joseph in the usual way.2 Other second-century writers, and a legendary mid-second-century account of the births of Mary and Jesus entitled the Protevangelium of James,3 treat these brothers as stepbrothers of Jesus, sons of Joseph by an earlier wife. This point of view has become known as the Epiphanian view, after a fourth-century writer who espoused it.4

According to Epiphanius, Joseph Mary’s husband is supposed to have had his oldest son James when he was aged forty and to have been over eighty when he wed Mary.5 That would mean that James would have been over forty himself at the time of Jesus’ birth. Since both the Gospels of Matthew and Luke put Jesus’ birth in the reign of King Herod, who died before the Passover in 4 BCE,6 James would have been at least 106 years old at his death in 62 CE!

This is wildly unrealistic. Generally, even wealthy Jewish men did not survive beyond their sixties in the first century,7 while the first-century emperors Augustus and Tiberius who lived into their seventies where considered highly unusual survivals.

The Protevangelium of James, which I believe does contain a few earlier and genuine oral traditions about Jesus’ family, is nevertheless a legendary work. As oral historians have long known, stories are recombined and reinterpreted as the needs of the group telling the story change through time.8 The Protevangelium is in fact most concerned with suggesting the perpetual virginity of Mary the mother of Jesus. This is why it makes Joseph an old man. It also includes a story in which the midwife’s assistant, named Salome, puts her finger out to feel for Mary’s virginity only to have the finger burned, then miraculously healed by the newborn Jesus.

The Protevangelium of James is a rough contemporary of another legendary Christian account, The Acts of Paul and Thecla, in which the heroine, Thecla, hears the Apostle Paul preach thus: “Blessed are the bodies of the virgins, for these will be pleasing to God and will not lose the reward for their chastity.”9 Thereafter in the story, Thecla maintains her virginity only through a series of miraculous rescues. This emphasis on virginity and chastity was first stressed by Paul in an apocalyptic context in the mid-first century because Paul believed the return of Jesus was imminent and people should prepare for it by living chastely. By the second century chastity had developed into a lifestyle ideal to prepare Christians for eternal life in heaven.10 This time period was when the idea of the perpetual virginity of Mary became so important to Gentile Christians, who by then made up the majority in the church. The idea of Mary’s perpetual virginity had no connection to first-century Judaism, where the ideal for men was to be fruitful and multiply and for their wives to be the biological conduits of this command. According to Jewish Mishnaic law (compiled about 200 CE but referring to situations earlier in time), if the wife refused to have intercourse with her husband, he was required to divorce her.11 Mary and Joseph, as married first-century Jews, would have thought it a matter of righteousness to have produced children, and a matter of disobedience to God to abstain from procreation.

In the late fourth century, a...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Brothers and Sisters of Jesus and the Family of Joseph
• Chapter 2: The Genealogies of Jesus and the Family of Mary
• Chapter 3: The Brothers and Sisters of Jesus and Their Role in the Early Church
• Chapter 4: Peter and Mark in Rome
• Chapter 5: The Composition of the Gospel of Mark
• Chapter 6: Peter’s Son and the Second Gospel
• Chapter 7: Mark, the Disciples, and the Relatives of Jesus
• Chapter 8: A Crucial Question and Its Answer
• Chapter 9: The Beloved Disciple and the Fourth Gospel
• Chapter 10: Concluding Remarks and Observations
• Bibliography