What Does Matthew 13:55 Mean?
Is this not the builder's son? Is his mother not called Mary? And his brothers, James and Joses and Simon and Judas?
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
Is not this the carpenter’s son? is not his mother called Mary? and his brethren, James, and Joses, and Simon, and Judas?THE KEY
The crowd can name Jesus’s household in detail, yet that very familiarity becomes the limit of what it sees.
THE MEANING
You can know true things about someone, their work, their mother, their siblings, and still not fully know them. Familiar details can make a person seem already explained, even when they do not contain the whole of that person.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
Knowing someone’s family and occupation means you know all there is to know about them.
THE ROOT
ἀδελφοί
adelphoi
GROWS FROM
δελφύς
delphys
Womb; traditionally connected with the word-family for siblings born of the same womb.
The Greek word translated “brethren” carries an image of shared birth. These are not vague connections: the verse names Jesus’s concrete family ties, while those true details still do not exhaust who he is.
ALSO GROWS
adelphos: brother, male sibling
ἀδελφός
The singular form of the family word used for “brethren” in this verse.
adelphē: sister, female sibling
ἀδελφή
The feminine sibling term from the same Greek word-family, showing how kinship is named through shared birth.
THE PATTERN
People can mistake a person’s visible origins for the limits of who that person is.
But the LORD said to Samuel, Do not look at his appearance or at the height of his stature, for I have pushed him away. The LORD does not see as the human sees. The human sees what is outside, but the LORD sees the heart.And Nathanael said to him, Can any good thing come out of Nazareth? Philip said to him, Come and see.And he said, Truly, I say to you, No prophet is welcome in his own father's land.THE THREAD
For whoever does the will of my Father in the heavens, that one is my brother, and sister, and mother.“Brother” here is ἀδελφός (adelphos, brother), from the same word-family as ἀδελφοί (adelphoi, brethren) in Matthew 13:55. The family word that names Jesus’s siblings also extends to a kinship beyond the household named in this verse.
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