It’s funny how a single sentence can send you down a research rabbit hole for a whole afternoon. I was looking into something completely different the other day when I came across a reference to Jesus’s brothers and sisters. I had to do a double-take. For some reason, I’d always pictured him as an only child.
It turns out, this is a huge, long-running question in Christianity. The New Testament mentions siblings, but it gets complicated fast. A lot of the debate comes down to how you interpret the original Greek words—was it a literal “brother” or something more like “cousin” or “kinsman”?
It’s a fascinating puzzle that pulls together linguistics, theology, and even Roman census records from Egypt to try and understand what a family unit looked like back then. I got pretty absorbed in it all and wrote up what I found, which you can check out at the link in my bio.
Image courtesy of Peter Horree, Alamy