When a “discovery” “proved” that Our Lady conceived and bore naturally, Time and Newsweek were all over the story. “Ha ha, you smug Catholics!”

I have yet to see a print retraction, even though their “source” is now in jail:

Israeli police have put under house arrest, Oded Golan, the owner of the so-called “James Ossuary”, the fake ossuary that attempted to promote the idea that Jesus Christ had brothers casting doubt on the virgin birth of Christ.. The trial has begun. The next session, will be held in Jerusalem, September 4, 2005…

(H/T Danny Carlton)

For the record, Aramaic did not have a words that distringished male relatives one from another. Thuse, “brother of Jesus” is English from Latin from Greek from Aramaic. If you conclude that the Aramaic word distills down to “brother,” then it also distills down to “cousin,” “nephew,” and “close friend.”

According to Jimmy Akin,

In fact, there was no word for “cousin” in Aramaic. If one wanted to refer to the cousin relationship, one has to use a circumlocution such as “the son of his uncle” (brona d-`ammeh). This often is too much trouble, so broader kinship terms are used that don’t mean “cousin” in particular; e.g., ahyana (“kinsman”), qariwa (“close relation”), or nasha (“relative”). One such term is aha, which literally means “brother” but is also frequently used in the sense of “relative, kinsman.”

Jesus had no biological half-brothers, though he likely had some step-brothers brought into the family by Joseph, who was most likely a widower when he married Our Lady.