JOHN113 - Seemingly Innocuous Nerve-Touching

John 2:12

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Music by Jeff Foote

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:23

Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast. And did you ever say something to somebody just real innocently? You're just making small talk, you're being friendly, whatever. And they get real defensive because it turns out you touched a nerve or something. That has happened to me a lot, but the first time I ever remember that happening was in fourth grade. I was walking down the street. We just moved to this new town. I didn't know nobody. And I see this big tree in this house about four doors down. It's one of those that has horizontal branches that are within jumping distance of the ground. I thought it'd be a fun tree to climb in and play in. I looked a little closer, and sure enough, somebody else had the same idea. There's a kid playing that tree, hanging with both hands from one of those horizontal branches. And I was like, Oh, that's cool. Maybe I got a friend here. And so I said, Hey man, you having fun? And he said, It's my house. And I was like, Oh, well, I uh I didn't understand. Like, why are you angry at me? I thought we had tree liking in common. No, you're yelling, I'm disoriented. So I didn't talk to that kid for a while after that. But later I ran into him again. We kind of compared notes, and I found out that that was a rental house that his parents own, and it was empty at the time. But apparently some other people had given him guff for playing in a tree that they thought wasn't his tree. And he thought maybe I was a guff giver. So we wanted to just nip that in the bud and be like, it's my house. I can play in this tree if I want to, Buster. And I mean, I guess we got past it because that's one of my earliest, that's the origin story of one of my oldest friendships. We're still friends to this day. But you know, you know what it's like, right? To touch an herb on accident. You didn't really know why. And you thought you were just saying something or hearing something completely innocuous, and there you go. Well, if you get that, you're gonna understand what's going on today because here is a seemingly innocuous verse from the Holy Bible in the book of John, chapter two, verse 12, that I'm gonna read. And some of you are gonna think, that was harmless. What on earth could we need to talk about there? Why don't we just move forward, you know? Because maybe it's time in this podcast to move a little faster through John. Maybe it could be that. Others of you are gonna be like, no, I know exactly what we need to talk about there. Slow down more, talk about more history. Well, remember, this is again right after the end of the wedding at Cana, miracle water into wine. It says, after this, he, Jesus, went down to Capernaum with his mother and brothers and his disciples. There they stayed for a few days. Did you catch it? It's the brothers thing. That's why this one touches a nerve, because there's been a disagreement in the history of the church about what happened with Mary's state of virginity over the course of the rest of her life after Jesus was born. You got a bunch of people who argue, starting in the like the third century, especially, that Mary remained a virgin after Jesus was born, and she was never intimate with her husband Joseph, they never knew each other in that way, and they never consummated the marriage in that sense, and she never had any other kids. Jesus was her only child. There are other Christians who look at the Bible and reasons we're going to talk about, and they say, Well, no, obviously Mary was a virgin when Jesus was conceived and all the way through the pregnancy and Jesus' birth, that's very clear in scripture. But then after that, you know, the Bible is silent on you know what happened in private in a marriage between a man and a woman, Mary and Joseph, but I mean they're married. The expectation would be that you have more kids as a young wife, as a couple, and the Bible talks a lot about Jesus having brothers. I mean, a lot, it comes up. So no, why I mean, why wouldn't why wouldn't Mary and Joseph just, you know, be intimate as husband and wife? There's no need for a belief in the perpetual virginity of Mary. So they're the two sides, right? We're gonna unpack how we get here. I know a whole bunch of you already feel very strongly about this question, and you know what you think and why you think it. Others of you are like, oh, this will be interesting. I really don't know why people think different things. I'm gonna try to do my best to fairly represent what people believe. I'm also, as is our practice around here, just gonna disclose what I think, and I think it pretty hard, and that is well, I don't think the perpetual virginity of Mary is a thing. I don't see why it would need to be, and I think the Bible is pretty explicit in saying that Jesus had brothers. There's my biases, take those into account as we talk about what's going on here. So, in preparation for this conversation, I went and uh looked up every single occurrence in the New Testament where there is some kind of reference to Jesus having brothers. And I thought, you know, I haven't really ever gone and looked at the Greek there. I would expect the word for brother to just be Adelphos, like Philadelphia, city of brotherly love. Adelphos would be, you know, I would expect that to appear a lot, but maybe there's some other words that I don't remember from Greek class about that describe this exact relationship and what these quote-unquote brothers were. So I went and looked, I got on my little Greek New Testament, and I wrote down a little chart and I did the thing, and here's what I found. Every single time Jesus' brothers are mentioned in your English translations. The lexical that means just the basic unadjusted dictionary definition, Greek word version. Uh, the Greek word behind it is Adelphos every single time. Now, if you go and look it up for yourself, it might be a little confusing because you'll be like, it's not, it doesn't say Adelphos, it only says that you know, one time. But Adelphos is that's just a singular, just the most basic way of talking about something. Like you point and you're like, brother, that occurs once. Most of the time, what you get is Adelphoi. That just means, I mean, that's a plural, uh brothers. And then a couple of times you get a construction that's a little bit different, where you know, the brothers are like the direct object of Jesus. And so it's a little bit confusing, but I mean it's it's just fact. This is easy translation stuff, very, very basic. So there was no ambiguity at all. And I kind of thought, given all the kerfuffle and fuss about this question, that there would be ambiguity in the Greek text, and uh there's none. Here we go. Uh from top to bottom. I wrote them down Adelphoi, Adelphoi, Adelphoi, Adelphos, Adelphoi, Adelphoi, Adelphoi, Adelfoy, Adelphoi, Adelphoi. And then the couple that are a little bit more complicated, but the brothers of the Lord, the brother of the Lord. So one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen mentions, depending on how we count it here. And they're all saying the exact same thing. So some of you are gonna be like, well, that just settles it right there. We're done. The biblical text, it's not like this hinges on one verse, it's all over the place. Jesus clearly had brothers, and it's not even just a passing mention. We get the names of the brothers in Matthew, uh, it's Matthew 13. Hang on. Ooh, that was a pretty good turn, one page away. Matthew 13, 55. Uh, the people are kind of questioning Jesus, and they're like, Isn't this the carpenter's son? Isn't his mother's name Mary? And aren't his brothers James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas? Well, okay, that's even more specific. They have names, and some of those names come up later because they turn out to be really important characters in the New Testament. James and Jude are associated with Jesus. So, I mean, it sure looks like this is just uh a gimme. Now, in the early going of church history, the church fathers don't talk about the perpetual virginity of Mary at all. So in the first century, from you know, through the life of Jesus and the writing of the whole New Testament all the way up to 100 AD, there's just nothing. Nobody touches it. It doesn't seem like it was a question anybody had. If it was something people were musing about, no record of that survives coming down to us. There's a very important document called the D decay. It kind of echoes a lot of the Sermon on the Mount stuff from Matthew. Talks a lot about how to do church and uh religious rituals and stuff, Christian rituals, stuff like that. It makes no mention of this question, perpetual virginity of Mary, uh, the question of who these brothers were, where did they come from, were they not brothers? It's just not on anybody's radar. The church fathers of the early second century almost entirely don't talk about it. The only possible character who sort of touches on it is a guy named Papias or Papius, and he doesn't really nudge things in one direction either way. He mentions there are traditions about the nature of Jesus' family and extended family, but he doesn't address the question of Mary's perpetual virginity in any way. So huge names come and go like Clement of Rome, Ignatius, Polycarp, Quadratus, Justin Martyr. It's okay if you don't know who these people are. Athenagoras, people say that one differently, and I say it the way I say it. Theophilus of Antioch, Melito of Sardis, Irenaeus of Lyon, all through the first, all through the second century, rather, it just doesn't come up. I mean, they talk about the virgin birth and they talk about Mary, but they don't deal with any of this. It's a lot of people who take that pitch. You know, they don't speak to it, right? Clement of Alexandria, who's a very important church father, he speaks to it in the late second century, getting on toward 200. Maybe he speaks to it in the early 200s, and he is the first to really advance the idea that Mary was a virgin forever. And he says that all the accounts of brothers in the New Testament are all older brothers of Jesus who were Joseph's from a previous marriage. Now, there's no biblical evidence for that, but that's what Clement does with it. And who knows, maybe he knew somebody. Tertullian is a very significant church leader. He's a contemporary of Clement of Alexandria, also a North African, and he absolutely acts as though Jesus' brothers are ordinary full siblings and does not accept any of this stuff about the perpetual virginity of Mary. So, I mean, it's a pretty big name that doesn't seem to be speaking in favor of this evolving position. Well, other guys come and go. And as I look at my chart here that I've written out in front of me and I kind of treat it as a heat map, what I see is that there's still a lot of silence on the issue through the 200s, but you start to see just a little more support. You see it building through the 200s, a couple more guys weigh in. There's a guy named Origin, Gregory. And then as you get into the 300s around the time of the Council of Nicaea, you start to see more support really developing for this idea. There is no good place for me to hit pause here. We are really into the teeth of this right now, but I want to be fair to it, and we just cannot do this in a single episode. So I'm just going to abruptly shut it down. I'm just going to keep going. We'll finish this whole thing out and I'll give you the second half of it tomorrow, picking right up where we left off. I appreciate you so much. Do not finalize or formalize any opinions or anything on this. We still have data to explore here. And of course, remember to take into account my biases as you stew on this overnight, waiting to finish our conversation tomorrow. All right, that's good for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again.