Mary, the Mother of God, the Mother of God, possesses many attributes. Let’s look at her as a historical figure living in a specific time. Families were large and multi-generational back then. Women largely cared for their numerous offspring, while men were responsible for ensuring that everyone had food, clothing, and shelter. Women passed on religious values, while men passed on their professions to their sons when they were old enough.
Mary, as a young woman, one might say a teenager, was chosen by God among Jewish women to give birth to the Son of God. She accepted what awaited her with faith and love for God and humanity. She gave birth to Jesus, and it should be noted that she was a virgin until His birth, but not afterward. Today, we know perfectly well that it is impossible to give birth to a child and remain a virgin. It is simply physically impossible and inconsistent with our current knowledge of medicine and human physiology. What conclusion can we draw from this? Mary wasn’t always a virgin, as we are taught, but until the birth of Jesus.
Mary was Joseph’s wife. One of the marital obligations and a condition for a valid marriage is cohabitation after the wedding. No one disputes Mary’s marriage to Joseph. The Bible, however, records that Jesus had brothers and sisters in many places. The Gospel of Matthew states that he had brothers, and even mentions their names: James, Joseph, Simon, and Jude, as well as sisters, but they are not mentioned by name (Matthew 13:55-56), as is usual in Holy Scripture. Women are omitted, contrary to Jesus’ own wishes. Mentioning them by name seems to emphasize the fact that they are his own brothers – Jesus could have had hundreds of cousins or men in his extended family, and it would not be appropriate to mention several of them by name. Other Gospels also confirm that he had brothers and sisters, for example, Mark 3:31-33 and Luke 8:20-21.
I know some will say that Jesus extended the meaning of the terms brother and sister to include other people, especially when it comes to providing an example of how we should show each other love, respect, support, etc. However, he did this extension in a clear and simple way by asking who is his sister or brother—he may simply have wanted to demonstrate how we should treat each other. Ultimately, Jesus’s speech was simple and unequivocal, explaining why we make such broad interpretations that are ultimately inconsistent with neither God’s plan (as demonstrated in the entry on St. Joseph) nor with the realities of life at the time. This suggests that Jesus had half-siblings. Half-siblings because they came from a different father, Joseph, and the same mother, Mary.
This undermines the dogma of Mary as eternally virgin and the teaching of the holy family. It also, in a sense, undermines what is written in Holy Scripture—because we cannot accept that God and what was passed down to us in the Bible by people (because they wrote it down, through oral tradition, many years later, not God himself) are internally contradictory. God desires our good, loves us, gave us the commandment to love as paramount, also gave us the commandment to reproduce, and created us as sexual beings. So why should Mary, like Joseph, be deprived of this aspect? Why should she not have learned what sexual intercourse is? Why should she be deprived of having as many children as she wanted and as many women had in her time?
They teach us that the Holy Family was unremarkable; they lived like other families. I’m leaving aside, of course, the fact that they raised Jesus, the Son of God. If they lived like other families, they would have had other children, and Jesus had numerous half-siblings. If it were otherwise, this family would have been very unusual, conspicuous for having only one child. I know that today, one child isn’t surprising, but back then, it was, and very surprising. Like every father, Joseph passed his profession on to his sons. His mother, like every mother, cared for her children (in the plural) and family.