Catholics Raise Contrary Views on Jesus’ Siblings : Dogma: Some experts join Protestants in belief that Mary had other children. Conservatives fiercely object.

A clear message shines through the familiar Christmas creche, with its depiction of a demure Mary and bearded Joseph flanking a halo-lit baby Jesus in a rustic manger:

Jesus was an only child.

No brothers and sisters were tugging at Mary’s robe.

It’s a portrait rooted in Christian teachings going back to the late 3rd century and backed since then by the Roman Catholic Church, which has held fast to the ancient doctrine declaring Jesus’ mother, Mary, a lifelong virgin despite more than half a dozen references in the New Testament to Jesus’ brothers and sisters.

But now, some Catholic scholars are gingerly voicing the view--long held by Protestants--that Mary had other children besides Jesus. So far, they have avoided a fight with the Vatican by not directly challenging doctrine, but their expansion of the “Holy Family” of Christmas lore is bound to dismay many Catholics.

The New Testament includes several references to Jesus’ brothers and sisters, including the identification of James, head of the early church of Jerusalem, as the brother of Jesus.

But Catholicism has long declared that when the Gospels described Jesus’ siblings, or the apostle Paul mentioned the “brothers of the Lord,” the words--translated from the Greek--really meant “cousins” or “relatives.”

Then, four years ago, in his presidential address to the Catholic Biblical Assn., Father John P. Meier told a meeting at Loyola Marymount University that on historical grounds “the most probable opinion is that the brothers and sisters of Jesus were true siblings.”

His statements drew an immediate objection from some conservative Catholics.

“If Meier does in reality dissent from the doctrine of Mary’s perpetual virginity, how can he be allowed to continue his teaching at the Catholic University of America?” asked a priest-editor of the Catholic Answer.

However, the widely respected Meier still teaches at the Vatican-chartered university in Washington and is working on a multivolume study of the historical Jesus. And in books published this year, three more U.S. Catholic biblical specialists have voiced agreement that Jesus had brothers and sisters.

“No linguistic evidence warrants our interpreting Gospel passages about Jesus’ brothers and sisters as his cousins,” wrote Notre Dame scholar Jerome Neyrey in the new HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism. Neyrey said the word used in the original Greek could not be interpreted as “cousins.”

And Catholic scholar Pheme Perkins of Boston College contends that calling Jesus’ brothers cousins “is plain ridiculous.”

Among the references in the New Testament to Jesus’ siblings is one in the Gospel of Mark--the oldest Gospel, generally considered to have been written about 40 years after Jesus’ death--which names four brothers and an unstated number of sisters.

In the Gospel account, villagers in Nazareth, startled by Jesus’ display of wisdom, ask incredulously: “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joseph and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters with us?”

(The Judas referred to is not Judas Iscariot, the disciple the Gospels say betrayed Jesus to the Romans to be crucified, but the biblical figure also called Jude, known to Catholics as the patron saint of hopeless causes.)

In their Gospels, Mark, Matthew and Luke also tell a story about Jesus’ “mother and brothers” standing outside a crowd gathered around Jesus.

In her commentary on the New Testament, Perkins repeatedly uses the biblical identification of James as a brother of the Lord. But she said the new research does not rule out the possibility--still considered by some Catholic and Protestant scholars--that Mary could have remained a virgin, and the references to Jesus’ brothers and sisters could have meant “step-siblings”--Joseph’s children from a previous marriage.

But Perkins concedes that there is a gap in the attitudes of Catholic Bible scholars and the faithful in the pews, who are often devoted to the image of Mary as a virgin, the holy mother of God.

“If you found a birth certificate saying that James was the child of Mary, it wouldn’t distress the academic community, but it would distress the faith community,” she said.

As bold as the shift in thinking about Jesus’ family is, Luke Timothy Johnson, another Catholic scholar who discards the “cousins” explanation, finds compensating value in the image of Jesus as one of many children.

“Certainly, if Jesus had brothers and sisters, then the humanity of Jesus and the motherhood of Mary takes on a richer resonance--their experiences were more like other people’s than we might have imagined,” said Johnson, a former priest who teaches at the ecumenical Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta.

For the most part, Jesus’ siblings are given no good reputation in New Testament writings. They are portrayed as skeptical nonbelievers during Jesus’ lifetime (“For not even his brothers believed in him,” comments the Gospel of John) who then enjoyed unexplained status as leaders after his death.

Given the sensitivity of the issue of Mary’s virginity, the Catholic biblical specialists should be praised for their integrity, said Presbyterian scholar James Brashler of Richmond, Va., who previously taught at Catholic-run St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore.

“It is really quite a courageous step taken by John Meier and other scholars, who until relatively recently let theological doctrine shape their scholarly opinion,” he said.

But Johnson suggests that he and the other Catholic “true sibling” scholars are not risking censure by church authorities.

“To state that this is what the language says does not mean one is undertaking a challenge to church doctrine,” Johnson said. “Nothing critical or essential to Christian faith rests on this point.”

Nonetheless, Neyrey of Notre Dame said he has “gotten hate mail” since the Encyclopedia of Catholicism came out this year with his short but frank entry on “the brothers of Jesus.”

Wary of the response his commentary might draw, Neyrey said he softened the ending to his entry at the last minute.

“I do not want to spend two to three months of my time speaking to my bishop or Rome,” he said.