Mark confirms Matthew about the size of Mary's family.
I tried to learn something concerning this case, but silence a yard wide lay all about it. I fancy the teacher was silenced in some way. Leastwise I could learn nothing.
It doesn't take much to silence a teacher, or it didn't fifty years ago, especially if she were dependent upon teaching for her bread and butter, which I was.
I, at one time, tried to substitute one of Ralph Waldo Emerson's books to be read in school in the morning instead of the Christian Bible. I was informed by one of the committee that the Bible must be read every morning and the Ten Commandments repeated. The next morning I selected the "truthful" and startling account of Jonah whilst he was sojourning at the Submarine Hotel. I at that time made up my mind that if I were ever financially independent I'd say what I thought concerning the Christian religion, and no one doubts that I've done so.
Jesus is the last hope of Christian theology. It can be but a few years at most when faith in Jesus as God will be the mark of intellectual stupidity. It seems to me that mankind will soon be sensible enough to dismiss this dogma to eternal oblivion.
It is the last relic of heathen mythology that clings to modern civilization. The Christian church is put to its utmost ingenuity to hide the absurdity in this dogma.
The dogma of the divinity of Jesus rests upon fictitious events, and hence its fate is sealed.
Many persons regard any one that calls Jesus a man as a blasphemer. There is a great amount of pious nonsense in the world, and there is more connected with Jesus than with any other character whom Christendom honors.
The reverence paid to Jesus by Christians is the homage of idolatry.