The Missing Family of Jesus: An Inconvenient Truth - How the Church Erased Jesus's Brothers and Sisters from History
So what did happen to those brothers and sisters of Jesus mentioned in the Bible? After being ignored or written around for centuries—deemed cousins or stepsiblings—the family of Jesus has received more scrutiny in recent years, especially after the frenzy following Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. Alas, Churton’s book is not quite so readable as Brown’s thriller. Although he proposes in his introduction to write a “fairly straightforward guide,” it’s not too long before he’s whacking away through the weeds of begats, lineage anomalies, and historians’ suppositions. He relies overmuch on the work of Robert Eisenman, author of James, the Brother of Jesus (2002), whose writings are considered on the fringe of biblical research. Still, a jaunty tone escapes now and again from the morass of detail, and for those with an interest in the subject, there is much here to ponder, especially Churton’s theories about the relationship of Paul to the Jerusalem church. --Ilene Cooper