Who were Jesuss parents?
If James was indeed Jesus’s brother (or even a cousin), he could have been an extremely reliable source about Jesus’s family background. But Mark 6:3 refers to Jesus as ‘son of Mary’ instead of ‘son of Joseph’ which would normally imply his father was unknown. (Mary was said to come from Sepphoris.) An illegitimate child would have been ostracised as a ‘mamzer’ at this time. The Talmud claims Jesus’s actual father was a Roman soldier called ‘Panthera’, but this tradition is unattested before 150AD (and it’s debatable whether a different Jesus– Jesus the Egyptian– was intended). (It’s easy to imagine that Mary might have been raped by a soldier when Sepphoris was razed in 4BC.) Another tradition claims Joseph had a first wife before Mary. And Joseph is believed to have died before Jesus was 12.
