Having grown up as one of 11

children, this time of year always held great interest for me.

Television shows and newspaper

articles would include special interest stories about mothers of large

families. It was always humorous to see how various people responded to

the numbers of children and the life-style choices and decisions necessary

to make it work. It made me appreciate my mom so much more, and realize

how soft and weak we have become in so many ways in our culture.

Many can't fathom dealing with

more than one or two, and others selfishly don't see the reason for any

more than that.

But the thing that caught my

attention most this Mother's Day was a story of a mother of multiple children

that even I couldn't believe! I was standing in line at the pharmacy,

waiting for a prescription, when I thumbed through a book of bible trivia

and the following question caught my eye: How many natural siblings did

Jesus have? The multiple-choice answers included 0, 2, 4 and 6 or more.

As I turned to look up the answer, it reported that choice "d"

(6 or more) was correct.

Now I am not ignorant of the

fact that many Christians today believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that

Mary had other children (I have often had to respond to questions on that

account), but 6 or more ? The very well-meaning but misguided will

often quote Matthew 13:55, Mark 3:21, and Mark 6:3: "Is not this

the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas

and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?"

The problem here is that the

original Hebrew was the language of a tribal people who had no need to

make distinctions between brothers and cousins; all were sons of the patriarch,

therefore considered brothers of one another. Though the Greek, which

the Bible was later translated into, does have a distinct word to identify

cousins from siblings, the translators of the Septuagint from the Hebrew

to the Greek must have realized the difficulty for they proceeded to translate

the words, at every opportunity, with the word "adelphos" (brother),

and never used the word cousin. This leaves the true meaning of the word

up to the context alone.

Using the context we can see

that not all uses of brother refer to blood brothers. Deuteronomy 23:8,

Nehemiah 5:7, Jeremiah 34:9, 2 Samuel 1:26, and many more Old Testament

verses show this as a regular occurrence that continues in the New Testament

as well: Matthew 5:22-24, Matthew 18:15,21,35. All of these verses involve

the word "adelphos" but clearly are not limiting the teachings

of Christ to blood siblings alone.

Clearly, then, the opportunity

for confusion in English is rife; and this is the same word used in those

verses in Matthew and Mark that many want to say point to the siblings

of Christ.

Another perspective reveals

more, using the genealogies given in Mark 15:40, Luke 6:15-16, Matthew

10:2-3 and 27:56, and John 19:25-27. A cross reference between the above

helps us to see that Mary Magdalen seems not to have had any children,

while Mary the wife of Clopas was mother to James the younger and Joseph.

The question remains, however,

whether the sister of Mary, the mother of Jesus, is the same as Mary the

wife of Clopas, or is it a fourth woman at the cross who is the mother

of James and John, the sons of Zebedee? It remains possible that they

could be one in the same if Clopas or Zebedee had died and the wife had

remarried the other. But all told, Mary the mother of Jesus continues

to come up childless outside of him.

A third way this thought is

sustained is in understanding the Jewish culture and tradition of the

day. Clearly, no matter what your position might be on the family of Jesus,

you would have to agree that Jesus was the firstborn. This is significant,

for when Jesus' family (as the RSV translates it) in Mark 3:21 comes looking

to seize him and correct him, it was not as younger siblings that they

came, for it was a violation of honor, respect and conduct to do so. In

addition, as Jesus is dying on the cross, for him to give his mother into

the hands of John, clearly not a brother, would be just as big an offense

against his alleged brothers, whose legal responsibility it would have

been to care for her in place of the eldest son.

Lastly, we have the voices

of tradition and history that speak to us of what the church has always

believed and taught. Jerome, who lived in the 400s, spoke Latin, Greek

and Hebrew as his native tongues, and was therefore arguably the greatest

scripture scholar of all time. He held that Mary was a perpetual virgin,

comparing her womb to his tomb: no one had been placed there before him,

and no one would be placed there after him.

Many Church fathers of the

first few hundred years point to the arguments above to explain their

teachings on her perpetual virginity.

Even Martin Luther and John

Calvin believed and continued to teach the perpetual virginity of Mary

right up to the day of their deaths. "Christ ... was the only Son

of Mary, and the Virgin Mother bore no more children besides him ... 'brothers'

really means 'cousins' here, and Holy Writ and the Jews have always called

cousins brothers." (Martin Luther: Sermons on John, Chaps. 1-4)

Does this diminish her role

as a mother, since she only had the one? No, not when the one is The One!

Eve, named as the mother of all the living, was in fact misnamed, for

after the fall she became mother of the dead, as all her descendents were

born dead in sin. This was the punishment of the fall, that all would

be tainted as "the seed of the serpent," awaiting "the

seed of the woman" which would deliver us as prophesied in Genesis

3. This seed was Jesus Christ, born of the woman and mother, Mary.

In the motherhood hall of fame,

she thus stands head-and-shoulders above the rest in honor and dignity

because of the perfect response she made to the will of God, therefore

assuring that "all generations would call her blessed." (Luke

1:48)

Mary it was who, through her

"yes" to God, truly became the mother of all the living. Though

she was physically mother to Jesus alone, she has become, in her motherhood

of our Savior, a mother to all "who keep the commandments of God

and bear testimony to Jesus." (Rev.12:17) If we do these things we

are her offspring children of the living God.

Yes, Happy Mother's Day to

the mother of all mothers! Thanks for delivering our salvation, Jesus

Christ!

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