sus' childhood. That is all.

The writers of the Apocryphal Gospels did their best to fill the gap
by inventing or developing stories, pretty, silly, or repellent,
which only show how little they understood the original Gospels or
the character of Jesus.

But when we turn to the parables of Jesus, and ask ourselves how
they came to be what they are, by what process of mind he framed
them, and where he found the experience from which one and another
of them spring, it is at once clear that a number of them are
stories of domestic life, and the question suggests itself, Why
should he have gone afield for what he found at home? If we know
that he grew up in the ordinary circle of a home, and then find him
drawing familiar illustrations from the common scenes of home, the
inference is easy that he is going back to the remembered daily
round of his own boyhood.

In stray hints the Gospels give us a little of the framework of that
boyhood in Nazareth. The elder Joseph early disappears from the
story, and we find a reference to four brothers and several sisters.
"Is not this the carpenter?" people at Nazareth asked, "the son of
Mary, the brother of James and Joseph, and of Judah and Simon? and
are not his sisters here with us?" (Mark 6:3); Matthew adds a word
that may or may not be significant "his sisters are they not all
with us?" (Matt. 13:56). In ancient times a particular view of the
Incarnation, linked with other contemporary views of celibacy and
the baseness of matter, led men to discover or invent the
possibility that these brothers and sisters were either the children
of Joseph by a former wife, or the cousins of Jesus on his mother's
side.[7] That cousins in some parts of the world actually are
confused in common speech with brothers may be admitted; but to the
ordinary Greek reader "brothers" meant brothers, and "cousins"
something different. No one, not starting with the theories of St.
Jerome, let us say, on marriage and matter and the decencies of the
Incarnation, would ever dream from the Greek narrative of the
episode of the critical neighbours at Nazareth, who will not accept
Jesus as a prophet because they know his family--a delightfully
natural and absurd reason, with history written plain on the face of
it--that Jesus had no brothers, only cousins or half-brothers at
best. When History gives us brothers, and Dogma says they must be
cousins--in any other case the decision of the historian would be
clea