The brothers and sisters of Jesus on film
The brothers and sisters of Jesus on film
The siblings of Jesus are mentioned throughout the New Testament, but only a few films have depicted them. Here's a brief look at those that have.
The following is adapted from ‘Obscure Gospel Elements in Jesus Films’, a chapter I wrote for The T&T Clark Handbook of Jesus and Film (ed. Richard Walsh, 2021, pp 19-30). I am posting it here because the producers of The Chosen have indicated that Season 3 Episode 3, which airs next Sunday (i.e. Christmas Day), may address whether Jesus had siblings.
Family ties: The brothers (and sisters!) of Jesus
Thanks in part to the popularity of the Christmas story, the mother and putative father of Jesus are well represented in film and have sometimes been the focus of entire films.1 Less well represented—indeed, virtually absent from mainstream Jesus films—are the brothers and sisters of Jesus, which is striking, as the brothers in particular are mentioned throughout the New Testament. All four of the canonical gospels mention them, as do the book of Acts and the epistles of Paul, and while each source has its biases and emphases, a coherent picture does emerge: Jesus had four brothers named James, Joseph, Judas and Simon, in addition to some sisters (Mark 6:3; Matthew 13:55-56). He went to social events such as weddings with his brothers (John 2:12) but they did not believe in him at first, and they expressed this disbelief by sarcastically daring him to show himself to the world (John 7:2-10) and/or by trying to stop him from preaching, believing that he was crazy (Mark 3:20-21). Jesus rebuffed his brothers during his ministry, claiming that those who followed God’s will were his real brothers and sisters (Mark 3:31-35; Matthew 12:46-50; Luke 8:19-21), but he appeared to James after the resurrection (I Corinthians 15:3-8) and, by the time Pentecost happened seven weeks later, the brothers were meeting and praying with the apostles on a regular basis (Acts 1:12-14). James in particular went on to be a leader in the early Church, albeit one who sometimes butted heads with Paul over the application of Jewish food laws to the Gentiles (Acts 12:17, 15:12-21, 21:17-26; Galatians 1:18-20, 2:6-13), and both he and Jude are traditionally believed to be the authors of the epistles that bear their names. Paul also reports that the brothers of Jesus took their wives with them on their journeys (I Corinthians 9:5)—so Jesus had not only brothers and sisters, but sisters-in-law as well.
Very little of this has made it to the screen, and there are several reasons why that might be. First, there may be a perceived need for dramatic simplicity; even films that do depict the extended family of Jesus tend to reduce the number of characters that are juggled onscreen. (The Young Messiah [2016], an adaptation of Anne Rice’s novel Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt [2005], reduces the number of adult relatives who travel with Mary and Joseph to two—Mary’s brother Cleopas and his wife—but there are quite a few more in the novel.) Second, the evidently contentious nature of Jesus’s relationship with his brothers is out of step with the positive, even pious, approach that most films have taken towards Jesus’s relationship with his family, particularly his mother.2 (Joseph is generally presumed to have died before Jesus began his ministry, but is sometimes shown interacting with Jesus beforehand.) Third, what information the gospels do have about Jesus’s siblings is somewhat sketchy, and filmmakers may be reluctant to fill in the gaps lest they be accused of straying too far from the text. And fourth, depicting the brothers and sisters of Jesus would require filmmakers to choose (or at least tiptoe) between the traditions of different churches, which disagree as to whether these siblings were Mary’s biological offspring, her stepsons through Joseph, or an even more distant sort of relative, such as cousins, who would have been “brothers” and “sisters” in a looser sense of the word.3
To the extent that the brothers and sisters of Jesus are shown onscreen, it is usually in films that are set before or after the events of his ministry as depicted in the gospels. James, because of his role in the early Church, does show up in a number of films based on the book of Acts, such as Atti degli apostoli (Acts of the Apostles, 1969), Peter and Paul (1981), A.D. Anno Domini (1985), and Sao Paolo (Saint Paul, 2000). Films about the courtship of Joseph and Mary sometimes depict the brothers in ways that honour the traditional belief that Mary was a virgin her entire life and, thus, the siblings of Jesus must have been someone else’s children. In Giuseppe di Nazareth (Joseph of Nazareth, 2000), Joses, Simon, and Judas are the widower Joseph’s nephews rather than his sons (so they are the cousins of Jesus, technically, rather than his brothers); and in La sacra famiglia (The Holy Family, 2006), James, Judas, and their sister Sarah are the widower Joseph’s biological children from his previous marriage4—and because James is roughly the same age as Mary, he develops a romantic interest in her before she and Joseph are formally married. (Later, after Jesus is born, James complains that Joseph would rather go on having children of his own than have grandchildren.) A.D. The Bible Continues (2015) combines aspects of the films that are set before and after Jesus’s ministry: the series is mostly based on Acts, so it shows James getting involved in church politics around the time of Paul’s conversion to Christianity, but it introduces James through a flashback in which it is the young James, rather than Mary or Joseph, who finds Jesus in the Temple (see Luke 2:41-50)—and when James tells this story to the apostles, he refers to Mary as “his [i.e. Jesus’s] mother,” thereby indicating that he, James, is probably not one of Mary’s biological children.
The Young Messiah, which follows Jesus’s family as it returns to Galilee following the death of Herod the Great, is the one major film that imagines what it might have been like for Jesus to grow up with male and female relatives close to his own age. In this film, James, who is only slightly older than Jesus, is an orphaned cousin of Joseph’s that Joseph has adopted5—so he is a cousin of sorts and a legal step-sibling to Jesus—and Jesus, who is about seven years old, is first seen playing in the streets of Alexandria with his female cousin Salome. Interestingly, because this James was present for the nativity, he knows that Jesus is the messiah before Jesus does—but this knowledge fuels his jealousy, which prefigures the later friction between Jesus and his adult siblings.
Depictions of the siblings of Jesus during his adult lifetime are few and fleeting, but they do exist. In Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth (1977), the transition between the earlier, nativity-themed section of the miniseries and the section depicting Jesus’s baptism includes a scene in which Joseph, on his deathbed, tells Mary not to worry about his carpentry shop because “they”—here he looks at four men standing against the wall—will look after it once he is gone. The men against the wall have no dialogue, are not identified by name, and are never seen in the film again, but they presumably represent the brothers of Jesus, however their relationship to him is understood. There is a very different depiction of Jesus’s family in Color of the Cross (2006): the entire family is black, Joseph is still alive during Jesus’s ministry, and Jesus’s brothers and sisters are clearly identified as Joseph and Mary’s children. Finally, Killing Jesus (2015), which also implies that James is Mary’s son, places James with Mary at the crucifixion and the empty tomb,6 and it shows two women who may be Jesus’s sisters hugging him when he visits his family in Nazareth.7
More families, more ties: The apostles and their kin
Films about Jesus have generally ignored the fact that his followers had families, too. In the gospels, Jesus promises an eternal reward for those who have left their parents, siblings, wives, and children in order to follow him, and Peter says that he and the other apostles have left everything they had in order to follow Jesus (Matthew 19:27-29, Luke 18:28-30). The clear implication is that most, if not all, of the apostles had families—though only a few of these family ties are spelled out in the New Testament. Some of the apostles were, themselves, siblings: Andrew introduced his brother Peter to Jesus (John 1:40-42),8 while James and John left their father Zebedee behind when Jesus called them (Mark 1:19-20, Matthew 4:21). Meanwhile, the mother of James and John was involved with the Jesus movement herself: she asked Jesus to promote her sons above the other apostles (Matthew 20:20-28)9 and she witnessed the crucifixion along with some of the other female disciples (Matthew 27:56). Peter is the only apostle who is explicitly identified as married in the New Testament: Paul writes that Peter took his wife with him on his journeys, just as the brothers of Jesus and “the other apostles” took theirs (I Corinthians 9:5),10 and the gospels report that Jesus healed Peter’s mother-in-law (Mark 1:29-31, Matthew 8:14-15, Luke 4:38-39). There is also a tradition that Peter may have had a daughter named Petronilla who died in Rome.
One might think that filmmakers would take advantage of the fact that Peter and the other apostles had wives, children, and parents to flesh these characters out and explore the Jesus movement’s broader social effects. But, strikingly, filmmakers have generally avoided even alluding to these relatives, much less depicting them.
Exceptions do exist, though. Peter is a widower in The Big Fisherman (1959) and A.D. The Bible Continues—so his wife is acknowledged, even if she is relegated to his back-story—and he has a mother-in-law who is healed by Jesus in the former film, and an adult daughter (named Maya) in the latter series. Peter is briefly seen talking to his wife in Peter and Paul, but she does not travel with him; instead, she gives Peter someone to speak to as he rests at home in Galilee, pondering the significance of Paul’s ministry. More recently, the streaming series The Chosen (2019)—the early episodes of which invent back-stories for the future followers of Jesus—has devoted numerous scenes not only to Peter’s marriage but to his competitive relationship with his wife’s brothers.
A few films have acknowledged how Jesus disrupted the relationships between his followers and their parents. In The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Zebedee is the main antagonist when Jesus defends the woman caught in adultery, and his sons leave him to follow Jesus soon after. In Mary Magdalene (2018), the title character joins the Jesus movement partly to escape an arranged marriage, and when her father asks if it is really “God’s way” to separate a daughter from her father, Jesus replies, “Daughters from fathers, sons from mothers,” thus echoing the biblical Jesus’s declaration that he came to divide families rather than bring peace (Matthew 10:34-37, Luke 12:51-53).
But Mary Magdalene also shows how family ties may have motivated the followers of Jesus. Peter and Judas—the most prominently developed of Jesus’s male disciples—are depicted as fathers, and this experience plays a key role in prompting them to join the Jesus movement. Notably, although scripture and tradition associate Peter with female relatives, the film gives him a male child, to underscore the association it makes between Peter and masculinity (including masculine claims to authority). Judas, on the other hand, is made more sympathetic than usual because he is mourning the loss of his female relatives—his wife and daughter—and it is his desire to see them again in the resurrection that motivates his actions.
In addition to the apostles, there is one other significant figure in the gospels who is identified by his relatives. Simon of Cyrene, who helped Jesus carry his cross according to all three Synoptic gospels, is described as “the father of Alexander and Rufus” in Mark 15:21. It is not clear why this detail appears in Mark’s gospel and not the others, though Mark’s gospel is traditionally associated with the church in Rome, and Paul’s letter to the Romans includes a greeting for a man named Rufus, whose mother was like a mother to Paul (Romans 16:13). Is this the same Rufus? Was Simon’s family well-known to Mark’s original audience? Regardless, despite Simon’s brief part in the gospels, at least two films—The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) and The Passion of the Christ (2004)—have given a nod to this verse by depicting him in the company of one or both of his sons. In the former film, Simon even seems to leave the boys with their mother as he volunteers to help Jesus carry the cross.
When I interviewed The Chosen creator Dallas Jenkins in December 2019, after the second half of Season 1 came out, he told me he did not know if the series would portray Jesus as having siblings. At that point, the series had already omitted the siblings from its depiction of the wedding in Cana, which apparently was attended by the brothers of Jesus (John 2:12). But it sounds like next week’s episode might finally “go there”. As ever, we shall see.
Examples include The Nativity (1978), Mary and Joseph: A Story of Faith (1979), Mary, Mother of Jesus (1999), The Nativity Story (2006), Full of Grace (2015), Joseph and Mary (2016), and The Star (2017). There is even a Muslim, Iranian film, Mariam-e Moghaddas (Saint Mary, 1997).
The Last Temptation of Christ is a rare major film in which Jesus actively rebuffs his mother, who does not know what to make of his ministry. But whereas the equivalent scene in the gospels has Jesus responding to his mother and brothers, the film—like so many other films—omits the brothers and depicts his mother only.
Churches that believe in the perpetual virginity of Mary have different explanations for who the brothers and sisters of Jesus would have been. The Eastern churches tend to follow the tradition, first attested in the second-century apocryphal Infancy Gospel of James, that Joseph was a widower with children from a previous marriage, so the brothers and sisters would have been step-siblings. Catholics, following St Jerome’s fourth-century treatise Against Helvidius, see the brothers and sisters as cousins. Protestants tend to believe the brothers and sisters were the children of Joseph and Mary—the half-siblings of Jesus—because the New Testament does not specify that Mary remained a virgin for her entire life.
Luke 2:44 says Mary and Joseph looked for twelve-year-old Jesus among their “relatives” when he stayed behind in Jerusalem—a detail that is often omitted in films that include some version of this story. In The Holy Family, Mary and Joseph assume at first that Jesus is with his adult step-siblings and their families.
In Rice’s novel, James is Joseph’s son, while the other “brothers”—who are not depicted in the film—are cousins of Jesus.
The film shows Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary the mother of Jesus finding the empty tomb with James, which might reflect the filmmakers’ idiosyncratic take on Luke 24:10, which says the tomb was found by “Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James and the others with them”.
When I visited the Killing Jesus set in October 2014, I noticed that one of the costumes had a tag that said “Girl (Jesus’ Sister)”.
Peter’s father—and presumably Andrew’s as well—was named either John (John 1:42) or Jonah (Matthew 16:17), but he is not an active character within the New Testament.
In Mark 10:35-45, it is James and John themselves who ask for this, and not their mother.
It is not clear whether “the other apostles” refers to members of the Twelve. Elsewhere in his epistle, Paul uses the word “apostles” to mean any of the hundreds of people who reportedly saw the resurrected Jesus (I Corinthians 15:5-7).