As the cult of the Virgin Mary developed, and piety demanded that her virginity be perpetual (Pomplun 2008), the Gospels’ references to Jesus’s ‘brothers’ posed a problem. From another perspective, however, it was Jesus’s seeming lack of blood relations which was troubling—especially so, perhaps, in the late Middle Ages when a nexus of extensive family ties seemed socially indispensable.

These two problems—Jesus having relatives he shouldn’t, and seeming to lack ones he should—were effectively solved by the emergence of a legend concerning Anne, whom early Christian tradition identified as Mary’s mother. She sits at the visual centre of this polychrome carved altarpiece (probably originally from the Cistercian convent of Kirchheim in southern Germany), a skilfully choreographed portrait of Jesus’s imagined and extensive family.

The Protoevangelium of James from the second century is the first written source to give Mary’s mother a name. Much later tradition held that Anne had three husbands—here bunched amicably behind her. After the death of Joachim (Anne’s first husband and Mary’s father), these further husbands were said to have provided Mary with two sisters, seated at left and right in the front row, and each—like Mary—with a husband standing squarely behind her. The progeny of the sisters gave Jesus six cousins (who could equally be termed ‘brothers’ argued some exegetes, though some preferred to hold that these brothers were Joseph’s sons from earlier marriages), and legend identified these cousins as some of Jesus’s closest apostles and disciples.

Thus, with the development of Anne as a holy yet fecund, thrice-married matriarch, Mary’s virgin status was preserved, while Jesus’s ministry becomes something of a family business, relying on the sort of bonds crucially important in medieval life. The solidarity of the group is here expressed not only by their harmonious arrangement and interaction, but also by the choice of playthings of two of his young cousins at the feet of their mothers. They toy with a bunch of grapes, alluding to the wine of the Eucharist which would have been celebrated before this altarpiece, and thus to the sacrifice towards which Christ’s life, and that of his imagined ‘brothers’ and wider family, is directed.

References

Pomplun, Trent. 2008. ‘Mary’, in The Blackwell Companion to Catholicism, ed. by James Buckley, Frederick Bauerschmidt, and Trent Pomplun (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons)