Identity and Family
According to Church tradition recorded in the Orthodox synaxarion, Mary was a daughter of Saint Joseph the Betrothed by his first wife. While still young, she was present in Joseph's household when the Most Holy Theotokos was betrothed to him and brought to his home, and so she became a childhood companion of the Virgin Mary.
After Joseph returned to Nazareth from Egypt with the Savior and His Mother, he gave his daughter in marriage to his younger brother Cleopas, and from this union she is known as Mary, the wife of Cleopas. Tradition records that the fruit of this marriage was the Hieromartyr Symeon, numbered among the Apostles of the Seventy, a kinsman of the Lord, and the second bishop of the Church of Jerusalem.
In the Gospel text the Greek phrasing of John 19:25 leaves it ambiguous whether she was the daughter or the wife of Clopas, and scholarship generally favors the reading 'wife of Clopas.' Early Christian tradition, preserved through Hegesippus, held that Clopas was a brother of Joseph; the parallel accounts in Mark and Matthew that name 'Mary the mother of James and Joses' are commonly identified with her.