Half siblings.
It's only when you want to put a doctrine before what the bible says (IE Mary's perpetual virginity) that you get something like "oh they're not blood related" or "oh they're 2nd cousins" John the Baptist was Jesus' cousin and he is not referred to by the onlookers as Jesus' "brother" but James is.
a plain reading, after having read the first couple chapters of Matthew, would indicate that they'd be half siblings, having Mary as their mother and Joseph as their Father while Jesus had Mary as His mother and the Holy Spirit as His Father.
If you don't take extrabiblical teachings/doctrines into play, that is the conclusion you come to. Forcing a doctrine into the bible is probably not the best way to go.
Except that
you are the one forcing your beliefs onto the Bible. I'm not forcing anything, did you not pay attention to the fact that I said
I don't know?
My position is
I don't know. Because
the Bible doesn't say.
The only person here imposing their beliefs onto the Bible here is you.
Scripture doesn't say they were half-siblings. That's
you saying that.
A plain reading says that while Mary was pregnant, she and Joseph weren't intimate.
It says nothing about what happened after. You have to add your own assumptions to get anything more than that.
A plain reading says that Jesus had siblings, but does not tell us the precise relationship between Jesus and His siblings. Were they half siblings? Maybe. Were they step-siblings? Maybe. Were they cousins? Maybe.
The Greek word is
ambiguous. And we know it is, because it even calls Christians "brothers" even though we are not (necessarily) biologically related, even though this includes both men
and women. We are brothers, in Christ, because of our
adoption by the Father. When we are called "brothers" it does not mean we are blood-related, it means our union together into the Household of God the Father through His only-begotten Son.
An adelphos, a brother, can be a full sibling, it can be a half-sibling, it can be a step-sibling, it can be figurative (close friends can be called "brothers"), it has a range of meanings. This is obvious from how the word itself is used; and this isn't weird because we do the same thing with the English word "brother". So this isn't even a foreign concept, it's one we are all familiar with.
The question, fundamentally, is who precisely were Jesus' brothers and sisters, were they the children of Mary and Joseph? Maybe. But the text doesn't tell us this.
And we can't just ignore ancient opinions of the Church as though they don't matter at all. Those same ancient opinions are, for example, why we call the Gospel of Matthew the Gospel of
Matthew. It's why we have a New Testament at all. So rejecting, as a matter of principle, all extra-biblical information is not piety, it's foolishness. Instead such things should be measured, considered, tested; not assumed but given adequate weight based on merit.
If you want to do away with all extra-biblical information and context then you have to throw your whole Bible away. And that's clearly not something anyone wants to do, so take a more full measured and consistent approach and study, and be humble, and weigh things.
You are free to reach your opinion that that they were half-siblings. You are not free to claim, dogmatically, that they are; because you do not have the authority to add to God's word.
-CryptoLutheran
