They were Joseph’s sons from an earlier marriage. That’s the Orthodox answer, and it’s been the Church’s teaching since the beginning.
The Gospels mention Jesus’s brothers by name. James, Joses, Simon, and Judas show up in Matthew 13:55 and Mark 6:3. They’re around during Jesus’s ministry, sometimes skeptical of him. After the resurrection, they’re praying with Mary and the apostles in the upper room. James becomes the first bishop of Jerusalem and gets martyred in 62 AD. These weren’t minor figures in the early Church.
But they weren’t Mary’s children. The Orthodox Church has always taught that Mary remained a virgin her entire life, before Christ’s birth, during it, and after. We call her Aeiparthenos, “ever-virgin.” This isn’t some medieval innovation. It’s apostolic tradition, witnessed by the Fathers from the earliest centuries.
So how do we square the Gospel references to Jesus’s “brothers” with Mary’s perpetual virginity? The answer lies in understanding both the Greek word used and the tradition about Joseph.
What “Brothers” Means
The Greek word is adelphoi. Literally it means “from the same womb,” but in actual usage it’s much broader than that. It works like the Hebrew word ach, which covers brothers, half-brothers, cousins, kinsmen, even fellow Israelites. The Septuagint calls Lot Abraham’s adelphos even though Lot was his nephew. Paul uses adelphoi over a hundred times to mean fellow believers, not biological siblings.
Greek has a specific word for cousin, anepsios, but it only appears once in the New Testament (Colossians 4:10). Most of the time, people used adelphoi for extended family. This wasn’t sloppy language. It’s how Semitic cultures talked about kinship, and that carried over into the Greek-speaking world of the early Church.
The word itself doesn’t tell us whether these were biological brothers, step-brothers, or cousins. We need tradition and the rest of Scripture to clarify.
Joseph’s First Family
Here’s what the Church has always taught: Joseph was an older widower with children from his first marriage. When he was chosen to be Mary’s protector, not husband in the usual sense, he already had a family. Those children were Jesus’s step-brothers and step-sisters.
This explains why Joseph fades from the Gospel narrative while Jesus is still young. He was already elderly when he took Mary into his care. It explains why Jesus entrusts Mary to John from the cross rather than to his “brothers.” And it explains why these brothers are present but clearly distinct from Mary’s unique relationship to Jesus.
The Protoevangelium of James, a second-century text, spells this out explicitly. It’s not Scripture, but it preserves the tradition the Church received from the apostles. St. Epiphanius of Salamis taught this in the fourth century. So did the other Fathers. The Synod of Trullo in 692 upheld this understanding. It’s not speculation, it’s what the Church has always believed.
You’ll see this in our icons. Joseph is depicted as an old man, gray-haired and weathered. That’s not artistic license. It’s theology in paint.
Why It Matters
Some folks coming from Protestant backgrounds wonder why we make such a big deal about Mary’s virginity after Jesus’s birth. If she had other children later, wouldn’t that be fine? She’d still be the mother of God.
But the Church has never seen it that way. Mary’s perpetual virginity isn’t about squeamishness regarding marriage or sex, we’re not Gnostics. It’s about the uniqueness of the Incarnation. The womb that bore God himself remained consecrated to that purpose alone. Mary’s whole life was given to Christ. She didn’t go back to ordinary family life after Bethlehem.
There’s also the practical matter that if Jesus had younger siblings through Mary, the early Church would’ve known it. James the brother of the Lord was a major figure. If he’d been Mary’s biological son, that would’ve been mentioned. Instead, the tradition uniformly identifies him as Joseph’s son.
When your Baptist relatives ask about this at Thanksgiving, and if you’re in Southeast Texas, they probably will, you can explain it simply. The word “brothers” in the Bible is broader than we use it in English. Joseph was older and had been married before. Those were his kids, Jesus’s step-brothers. Mary remained a virgin because her whole life belonged to the mystery of God becoming man.
Fr. Thomas Hopko’s podcast series “Speaking the Truth in Love” has a good episode on this if you want to dig deeper. But the short version is what the Church has always taught: those brothers were Joseph’s sons, and Mary remained ever-virgin, just as we proclaim every time we honor her as Theotokos.
