section_path: Historical views/Historicity of events/Family
section_name: Family
paragraph_text: Family
  
  Many scholars agree that Joseph, Jesus's father, died before Jesus began his ministry. Joseph is not mentioned in the Gospels during Jesus's ministry. Joseph's death would explain why in Mark 6:3, Jesus's neighbours refer to Jesus as the "son of Mary" (sons were usually identified by their fathers).
  
  According to Theissen and Merz, it is common for extraordinary charismatic leaders, such as Jesus, to come into conflict with their ordinary families. In Mark, Jesus's family comes to get him, fearing that he is mad (Mark 3:20–34), and this account is thought to be historical because early Christians would likely not have invented it. After Jesus's death, many members of his family joined the Christian movement. Jesus's brother James became a leader of the Jerusalem Church.
  
  Géza Vermes says that the doctrine of the virgin birth of Jesus arose from theological development rather than from historical events. Despite the widely held view that the authors of the Synoptic Gospels drew upon each other (the so-called synoptic problem), other scholars take it as significant that the virgin birth is attested by two separate gospels, Matthew and Luke.
  
  According to E. P. Sanders, the birth narratives in the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke are the clearest case of invention in the Gospel narratives of Jesus's life. Both accounts have Jesus born in Bethlehem, in accordance with Jewish salvation history, and both have him growing up in Nazareth. But Sanders points out that the two Gospels report completely different and irreconcilable explanations for how that happened. Luke's account of a census in which everyone returned to their ancestral cities is not plausible. Matthew's account is more plausible, but the story reads as though it was invented to identify Jesus as like a new Moses, and the historian Josephus reports Herod the Great's brutality without ever mentioning that he massacred little boys. The contradictions between the two Gospels were probably apparent to the early Christians already, since attempts to harmonize the two narratives are already present in the earlier apocryphal infancy gospels (the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of James), which are dated to the 2nd century AD.
  
  Sanders says that the genealogies of Jesus are based not on historical information but on the authors' desire to show that Jesus was the universal Jewish saviour. In any event, once the doctrine of the virgin birth of Jesus became established, that tradition superseded the earlier tradition that he was descended from David through Joseph. The Gospel of Luke reports that Jesus was a blood relative of John the Baptist, but scholars generally consider this connection to be invented.