Who Is My Mother and Who Are My Brothers?

Jesus and a house divided

The Gospels contain an episode where Jesus refuses to see his mother and brothers. It happens near the beginning of his ministry in Mark and occurs in all three of the synoptic Gospels.

I am focusing on this particular episode thanks to a small selection from the Gospel of Philip, a Valentinian text discovered as part of the Nag Hammadi library.

My previous article focused on identifying this mysterious sister of Jesus named Mary.

However, I couldn’t help but notice a second issue with the text. One could not claim that Mary, the mother of Jesus, had always walked with Him if it can be demonstrated in the Gospels that she and Jesus were physically in different locations at some specific time.

In the parallels above, with Jesus refusing to see his mother and brothers, we have a clear contradiction of the claim from the Gospel of Philip.

Let’s jump back to earlier in Mark chapter three, before the arrival of his mother and brothers:

According to this evidence, Mary was not only not physically walking with Jesus, but she was also among the group that thought He had lost His mind. That seems a little strange though, doesn't it? After everything that Mary has gone through, is she really in a position to doubt His sanity?

I should explain that the Gospel of Philip was designed to unlock layers of meaning symbolically encoded into the narrative of the synoptic Gospels as well as other Biblical and extra-Biblical texts. That, at least, is how I view it.

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