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You offered, regarding Jesus speaking to John and His Mother from the cross, "This would have been a very odd thing to do if Mary had other children." I would say it is not at all unreasonable.

The family -His Mother and siblings- came to try and stop Him from openly preaching the things He was teaching, that were being twisted by the devout Pharisees and Sadducees, alarming the Roman occupiers. When the Romans turned Jesus over to the Sanhedrin to be tried as a criminal, this would taint the family and this in turn would cause the siblings to do much as Peter did, deny The Lord as their brother. Mary the Mother of Jesus came to the execution but it is not likely that her other children would risk that in that time, given the rustling of tensions between Rome and the Jews in Palestine.

By assigning John to be the son of Mary and Mary to live in his home thereafter was a sort of rebuke to the unbelieving siblings. It was only later that the brothers of Jesus believed and were born from above. James even presided over the first great Ekklesia council as portrayed in Acts 15.

What siblings?

That's just another misreading of adelphos, adelphe and/or adelphoi

These terms appear throughout scripture and are usually used in the sense of kinsman or relative.

Lot, for example, is called Abraham’s 'brother' (Genesis 14:14), even though he's the son of Haran, Abraham’s brother. He was actually Abraham’s nephew.

The term "brother" (Greek: adelphos) has a wide meaning in the Bible. It's not restricted to the literal meaning of a full brother or half-brother. The same goes for "sister" (adelphe) and the plural form "brothers" (adelphoi).

The Old Testament shows that "brother" had a wide semantic range of meaning and could refer to

* any male relative from whom you are not descended

* kinsmen such as cousins

* those who are members of the family by marriage or by law rather than by blood

* friends or mere political allies - for instance:

2 Samuel. 1:26

How I weep for you, my brother Jonathan! Oh, how much I loved you!

and in Amos 1:9

The people of Tyre have sinned again and again, and I will not let them go unpunished! They broke their treaty of brotherhood with Israel, selling whole villages as slaves to Edom.

Exactly what I was thinking. Good explanation as a possibility. But only Jesus and John and Mary knew what it was all about, so I don't waste the time answering a conjecture with a hypothesis, only to receive a speculation claimed by hucksters of Mariolatry to be "true." A con artist is a con artist, no matter what robes they put on or what kind of religious degrees they have.

Roll on to Glory, Bro!