Desposyni
As Desposyni ( ancient Greek δεσπόσυνοι despósynoi "relatives of the Lord") supposed descendants of the brothers and sisters of Jesus were referred to in the old church .
Julius Africanus coined the term in a letter to Aristides, which is only preserved in the excerpt of Eusebius of Caesarea . In this context, it is about the deviations in the family trees of Jesus in the Gospels according to Matthew and Luke : Extensive genealogical records were handed down in the Jewish people, but Herod had them destroyed out of resentment in order to relativize his own Idumaean ancestry. “A few, however,” continued Africanus, “because they had obtained private registers either from memory or by using copies of copies, could boast of having saved the memory of their noble ancestry. These included those mentioned, who were called 'lord relatives' (δεσπόσυνοι) because of their relationship to the family of the Redeemer and which spread from the Jewish villages of Nazareth and Kochaba over the rest of the country and the present genealogical table partly according to memory, partly from explained their family books as well as possible. "
Presumably members of this family had a special honorary position in Jewish Christianity ; In Seleucia on the Tigris , according to Gregorius Bar-Hebraeus , three bishops succeeded each other in office in the 3rd century AD, who regarded themselves as descendants of the carpenter Joseph of Nazareth ; their names were Abrisios, Abraham and Jacob.
literature
- Ethelbert Stauffer : To the Caliphate of Jacobus . In: Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 4/1952, pp. 193–214.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Eusebius of Caesarea: Church History I, 17, 4.
- ↑ Martin Hengel , Anna Maria Schwemer : Jesus und das Judentum , Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2007, p. 288.
- ↑ Ethelbert Stauffer: Zum Kalifat des Jacobus, 1952, p. 200.