The Credibility Of Jesus' Relatives As Witnesses

Their testimony is significant in a lot of contexts, such as the events surrounding Christmas and Easter. Here's a summary of the factors involved, taken from a post I wrote last year:

Their unbelief is significant, but the evidence for it doesn't get discussed much. We have a lot of reason to accept the historicity of their unbelief. It's referred to by multiple early sources who can be shown to be credible in other contexts, such as the ones discussed here and here. Those sources' claims about the relatives' unbelief occur in multiple and widespread contexts in a variety of explicit and implicit forms. The claims were widely accepted and unchallenged early on. The claims are unlikely to have been made up due to their embarrassing nature. The claims are of a highly public and falsifiable nature, such as claiming that Jesus' brothers weren't among his followers during his public ministry, that Jesus publicly referred to their unbelief while in their hometown (Mark 6:4), that they were unsupportive of him in the contexts of his execution and burial, and that Mary was entrusted to and lived with the apostle John rather than the siblings of Jesus. It would have been significantly dangerous to the Christian movement to have made up such claims, or hard to explain how the earliest Christians would have been honestly mistaken about such things, accordingly. Don't just think of how the most critical opponents of Christianity would have reacted to these claims about the unbelief of Jesus' relatives. Put yourself in the place of the wife, son, grandson, or friend of one of Jesus' brothers, such as James. If he had been a faithful follower of Jesus, would you want him remembered as somebody who had been so unfaithful for so long, somebody who had been judged to be so incompetent to take care of his own mother that she was entrusted to John instead? Acts, Paul's letters, and the letters of James and Jude have Jesus' brothers in prominent positions of church leadership. 1 Corinthians 9:5 has at least two of the brothers still alive in the 50s, and Josephus dates James' death to the 60s. If Jesus' brothers had referred to their faithfulness to Jesus prior to his death during those decades when they were in positions of church leadership, how did the view that they were instead unfaithful to Jesus prior to his death become so dominant so early? Then there's the fact that the earliest Christians don't seem to have made much apologetic use of the unbelief of Jesus' relatives, which undermines any suggestion that they fabricated the accounts for apologetic purposes. And so on….

There's widespread agreement among the earliest sources that multiple relatives of Jesus, including his closest relatives, were known to the public, were easily accessible to Christianity's enemies (Mark 3:21-35, 6:1-6, John 19:25-27; Josephus, Antiquities Of The Jews, 20:9:1), were in contact with the Twelve on multiple occasions (including Mary's living with one of them for a while), traveled (1 Corinthians 9:5), lived for more than a quarter of a century past the time of Jesus' death, and so on. It's highly probable that they had a large role in shaping early views of the childhood of Jesus.

That raises the issue of those relatives' credibility. They would have been in a position to have had a large amount of reliable information about Jesus' childhood. I've written a lot in the past about the likelihood of their honesty: their willingness to express skepticism toward Jesus at times, as we see in multiple contexts in the gospels; their susceptibility to suffering and the known suffering and martyrdom in the case of James; the public, falsifiable nature of many of the issues involved (e.g., Jesus' birthplace, his early residence in Nazareth, whether the family had claimed Davidic ancestry prior to when Messianic claims were made about Jesus); some of the claims made about Jesus' childhood are of such a nature as to have been difficult for the early Christians in some way and are unlikely to have been fabricated accordingly (e.g., the examples discussed here); corroboration from non-Christian sources.

That last point should be underscored, and it takes us back to where I began this post. The relatives of Jesus ranged across a spectrum, from the sort of unbelief we see in John 7:1-10 to the sort of belief to the point of martyrdom that we see in the account of James' death in Josephus' Antiquities Of The Jews (20:9:1). They were known to the public and highly accessible during all of those decades. They surely influenced both the early Christian and the early non-Christian sources, and their influence can't be adequately addressed merely by dismissing them as biased believers.