An Inconvenient Truth – How the Church erased Jesus’s brothers and sisters from history -by Tobias Churton

Published in The Watkins Review, Issue 26, Spring 2011

Some time ago, I sat down with my family to watch the movie version of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. After a good dose of Tom Hanks’s adventures as symbol sleuth Robert Langdon, I began asking myself the question, ‘Why are people so involved in this story?’ I concluded that the root of the fascination lies in a single straightforward question: Whatever happened to Jesus’s family?

It occurred to me that such a question might serve as the launching-pad for a book-length investigation. Fortunately, Michael Mann at Watkins Publishing shared this opinion and The Missing Family of Jesus was born.

We’ve all seen paintings of ‘The Holy Family’. It’s a pretty nuclear affair. We might see Joseph leading a donkey on which Mary sits, holding the baby Jesus. Otherwise, we might see Mother Mary and baby Jesus – but no daddy at all.

Families just weren’t like that in those days.

Even the canonical gospels give us some hints. Mark 6,v.3 tells us that Jesus (Yeshua or ‘Joshua’) had brothers: James (properly ‘Jacob’), Joses (Joseph), Simon and Juda (called ‘Judas’ in More >