Charles Ellicott Commentary Matthew 12:46

"While he was yet speaking to the multitudes, behold, his mother and his brethren stood without, seeking to speak to him." — Matthew 12:46 (ASV)

His mother and his brothers—Who were these “brothers of the Lord?” This is a question we cannot answer with any certainty. The facts in the Gospel records are few. What we gather from the Church Fathers are not so much traditions as they are conjectures based on assumptions.

The facts, such as they are, are as follows:

1. The Greek word translated “brother” has the same range of meaning as the term in English. Like the English word, it could be applied to half-brothers, adopted brothers, or used in the wider sense of national or religious brotherhood (as in the case of Joseph and his brothers). There is no adequate evidence that the term was applied to cousins as such.
2. The names of four brothers are given in Mark 6:3: James (that is, Jacob), Joses, Judas, and Simon. Three of these names (James, Judas, Simon) are found in the third group of four in the lists of the twelve apostles. This has suggested to some that they had been chosen by our Lord for that office. The fact that a disciple named Joses was nearly chosen to fill the place of Judas Iscariot (Acts 1:23, in many manuscripts) presents another curious coincidence. This inference, however, is set aside by the fact distinctly stated by John (John 7:3), and implied in this narrative and in our Lord’s reference to a prophet being without honor in his own town (Matthew 13:57; Mark 6:4), that his brothers did not believe in his claims to be the Christ until the time of the Feast of Tabernacles that preceded the Crucifixion, within six months of the end of our Lord’s ministry. The names, it must be remembered, were so common that they could be found in any family.
3. Sisters are mentioned in Mark 6:3, but we know nothing of their number, names, later history, or belief or unbelief. It is clear that these facts do not enable us to decide whether the brothers and sisters were: children of Mary and Joseph; children of Joseph by a former marriage (either a typical marriage or a Levirate marriage, as described in Deuteronomy 25:5, to raise up children for a deceased brother); or the children of Mary’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas (John 19:25).

Regarding the last theory, the fact that two sisters would share the same name, though strange, is not incredible, as nicknames might have been used to distinguish between them. Each of these views has been maintained with elaborate ingenuity. Some writers have even identified these brothers, assumed to be sons of Clopas, with the sons of Alphaeus in the list of the apostles (in spite of the objection mentioned earlier, which is fatal to this theory). As Christian thought led to an ever-increasing reverence for the mother of the Lord, and for virginity as a condition of higher holiness, the belief in her perpetual virginity became a dogma. This led people to fall back on one of the other hypotheses regarding the brothers.

There are several arguments in favor of these alternative views:

1. If the mother of the Lord had other children, it would have been natural for this to be recorded by the Gospel writers, as was common in the family narratives of the Old Testament (for example, Genesis 5:11; 1 Chronicles 1:2). However, there is no record of any such birth in either of the two Gospels that give “the book of the generations” of Jesus.
2. The tone of the brothers—their unbelief and their attempts to restrain him—suggests they were elder brothers in some sense, rather than younger siblings who would have been trained in reverential love for the firstborn of the house.
3. It is unlikely that our Lord would have committed his mother to the care of the disciple whom he loved (John 19:26) if she had children of her own whose duty it was to protect and cherish her.
4. The absence of any later mention of the sisters at or after the Crucifixion suggests the same conclusion, supporting the idea that the sisters and brothers were, in some sense, a distinct family with separate interests.
5. Lastly, though this enters the uncertain realm of feeling, if we accept the birth and infancy narratives given by Matthew and Luke, it is at least conceivable that the mysterious, awesome responsibility of the work committed to Joseph may have led him to be content with the task of loving guardianship, which then became both the duty and the blessing of the rest of his life.

On the whole, then, I am inclined to believe that the so-called “brothers” were cousins who, through some unrecorded circumstances, had been adopted into the household at Nazareth to such an extent that they were known by a term of closer relationship.

The motive that led the mother and brothers to seek to speak with our Lord on this occasion is apparent from the narrative. Never before in his Galilean ministry had he acted in such open opposition to the scribes and Pharisees of Capernaum and Jerusalem. It became known that they had plotted with the followers of the tetrarch to take his life. Was he not going too far in daring them to do their worst? Was it not necessary to interrupt a discourse that was so sharp and stinging in its rebukes?

The tone of protest and, as it were, rejection in which Jesus now speaks of this attempt to control and check his work shows what their purpose was. His brothers, John reports, did not believe in him (John 7:3–5)—that is, they did not accept him as the Christ, and perhaps not even as a prophet of the Lord.