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Family of Jesus, Reader Comments
The publication of Herodian Messiah has spawned a substantial number of user comments on various disparate issues discussed in the book. The relationship of Jesus with his family members is one particular area that is worthy of it's own discussion threat. I wrote a somewhat related post on this website recently about the women at the cross and tomb of Jesus.
We'll use a reader comment to start the discussion. Joanna writes, "At any rate, the question concerns John 2:4. I don't know where my notes have gotten to on this topic so I'm basically winging it from memory. I am, to say the least, not a Greek scholar, but the Greek here as I recall is "Ti emoi kai soi, gunai?" People trained in classical Greek have problems with it because it is idiomatic. Literally it says, "What to me and to you, woman?" Therefore, it seems a good translation might be something like "What is that to us, woman?" However the same phrasing occurs once more in the Gospels and several times in the Septuagint, and I think the best translation of it (which was in the 'Coke Classic' edition of the NASB and in the KJV) is "What am I to you, woman?" It has the connotation, so far as I can tell, of "What (or who) am I (who am so lowly) to you (who are so high)?" Originally it was a form of address to kings and intended literally, but seems to have passed into more general usage and taken on an air of irony, which I think it has here. Combine that with the strange, though not necessarily disrespectful, use of 'gunai' (woman), and in light of your thesis a rather interesting question arises as to whether Mary was in fact Jesus's biological mother. You might also consider something like Mark 3:31-35 in this light.
There are two suggestive aspects to this, one weaker, namely the (inverted) parallel of the adoption of Moses, and the other considerably stronger, namely the story of the Massacre of the Innocents, which might have less to do with a large-scale slaughter of infants than a metaphor of the slaying of the Hasmoneans by Herod, where the Flight to Egypt then ties into the first aspect. I think it indicated something like Jesus hiding in plain sight, even with respect to his Galilean disciples, since I get the distinct impression that the Jerusalem/Bethany contingent was privy to more inside information (see, for instance, the story of Martha and Mary or the saying about the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing). I was first alerted to this by the respective positioning of the Cleansing of the Temple in the Synoptics and John. It seems to me that John's chronology, locating the story at the beginning of Jesus's ministry, is correct and that the Synoptic writers, faced with unassimilated fragments of the Jerusalem tradition, simply placed the episode where it seemed to them to fit logically (a logic that has since been adopted by many commentators) because they were not aware of any hidden, Hasmonean, context."
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