Moonwood
Member
Your response keeps repeating a claim I’m not making. I’m not arguing that adelphos “means cousin” in some technical sense, or that the NT should have used anepsios. I’m arguing that the NT’s use of adelphoi for Jesus’s “brothers” does not require them to be Mary’s biological children, and that the men so labeled are identified elsewhere as belonging to another mother and another household. That’s a contextual argument, not a lexical one.
Appealing to anepsios doesn’t help your case. Greek has both narrow and broad kinship terms, and Scripture does not always use the narrow one. The Septuagint repeatedly uses adelphos for extended‑family relationships, and the NT writers inherit that usage. The existence of anepsios does not force adelphos to mean “biological sibling” every time it appears. It simply means Greek has both specific and general kinship terms, and the NT often uses the general one.
You say Matthew 27:56, Mark 15:40, Mark 16:1, and John 19:25 “don’t use adelphos or anepsios.” Exactly. Those passages aren’t about the word; they’re about the identities. They name the women at the cross and the tomb, and they identify “Mary the wife of Clopas/Cleophas” as the mother of James and Joseph—the same men called Jesus’s adelphoi in Matthew 13:55 and Mark 6:3. John calls Mary of Clopas/Cleophas “Mary’s sister.” Two biological sisters would not both be named Mary, so the natural reading is that she is Mary’s sister‑in‑law. That places her and her sons in Joseph’s extended family, not as additional children of Mary.
You say “none of these passages refer to Mary’s children as cousins.” But I haven’t claimed the NT uses the word anepsios. I’ve said the NT never identifies any child of Mary except Jesus, and that the men called Jesus’s adelphoi are identified as the sons of another Mary. That’s what the text actually gives you. The cousin language comes from the family structure implied by those identifications, not from a single Greek word.
As for “NT Greek scholars”: they say exactly what I’ve said—that adelphos has a broad semantic range and does not always mean biological sibling. They don’t claim the word itself “means cousin”; they acknowledge that context determines the relationship. And the NT context identifies another mother, another household, and a kinship term broad enough to cover extended family.
You keep saying I must “prove by the context” that these men are cousins. The context I’ve given is the NT’s own: named individuals, named mothers, named relationships, and a kinship term that is broad enough to include extended family. Taken together, that context shows that the NT’s use of adelphoi for Jesus’s “brothers” fits extended‑family kinship and does not support the claim that Mary had other children. If you want to insist they are Mary’s biological sons, you need a verse that actually identifies them as such. There isn’t one.
