James inhaled and clapped his hands together. “He was one of us, a common man of the earth who earned his daily bread with the sweat of his brow and the muscles of his back. He had grown up in Nazareth, played in our streets, and the only schooling he had ever received had been from the villagers themselves, in our small synagogue that had no rabbi. How could they possibly accept his outrageous announcement that God had anointed him, of all the great and wise men in Israel, to be his special messenger of liberty and vengeance—the Messiah?”

“And you?” I asked. “Did you believe he was something special? If not the Messiah, at least a prophet perhaps, such as John or Elijah or the others who had come before?”

“No. Jesus was my brother, whom I had always loved and respected—at least until that morning, when he rebuked all of us. Then I was glad to be rid of him, despite my mother’s anguish when he ran off.”

“Later, did you or any of the family go to hear him preach while he traveled through Galilee?”

“Only once, after we had received a visit from four men of the Law, called Pharisees, from the Temple here. They asked many questions about him, just as you have today, and we became fearful that if Herod did not move against him there was now a new danger that he might be called to explain his words and actions before the Sanhedrin, our chief judicial court. Although the Sanhedrin has no authority in Galilee, only here in the province of Judaea, my mother was desperate to warn Jesus that he was in grave trouble. When we heard that he was in nearby Capernaum she prevailed on my brother and me to accompany her there, so that she could plead with him to return home before it was too late.”

Another famous scene, one that had been discussed and sermonized and twisted to fit various points of view so often, through the years, that it had lost all sense of reality. “Did Jesus respond to your warning?” I asked.

“He would not even see us! He was preaching in a house that was so filled with fishermen and the poor of the streets and harbor that the crowd overflowed into the yard so that we were unable to enter. When I sent word in to him that his mother and brothers were outside, he replied in a voice that all could hear, ‘Who are my mother and my brothers? Behold, here are my mother and my brothers, for whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother.’ That time my mother did not cry. She grasped my arm and said, ‘Let us go home.’ ”

“Did Jesus ever return to Nazareth?”