Why didn't the Apostle John call Jesus's 'brothers' cousins if they were only cousins?
A viewer asks why John did not use the Greek word for cousin to describe the brothers and sisters of Jesus if they were not His actual siblings, a common objection against the perpetual virginity of Mary.
Answer
That is because Hebrew did not have a word for cousin, and John, being of Hebrew extraction, did not even know that Greek had one. Hebrew had a very limited vocabulary of about 8,000 words, with no separate words for uncle, aunt, or cousin; everybody was a brother. John knew Jewish idioms and Jewish vocabulary and that was it, at least when he wrote his Gospel; only later, when he wrote the Apocalypse in the 80s and 90s, did he have a grasp of more sophisticated Greek. Luke, on the other hand, was an educated Gentile, a doctor, very familiar with Greek, and he uses more sophisticated language because he had a much bigger vocabulary and did not come from that Hebrew milieu. So John's use of 'brother' for Jesus's relatives simply reflects the Hebrew way of speaking, not a claim that they were siblings.