"So, first Jesus is identified as the carpenter's son. Then He is identified as the son of Mary. Then, His four half-brothers are specifically named, along with the fact that He has sisters. But we can't have this can we? No, we have to make a drastic veer in mid sentence no less. Son of a carpenter, fine. Son of Mary, fine. Brother of James, Joseph, Simon and Judas, NO WAY! The Church doesn't allow this family relationship so we just interpret it out of existence. No problem. This continues to floor me. :)"
Actually, your interpretation comes from a Western European context. In the east the term brothers or sisters could as well have meant members of the extended family. There are parts of Greece where this is true to this day. There is tradition which says these people were cousins and another which holds that +Joseph was a widower with children, thus the 1/2 brother business, the people of course assuming that +Joseph was Christ's father. Again, you must remember that the men who decided what was to be in the canon of scripture believed in the perpetual virginity of Mary and saw no contradiction at all in these passages of scripture you present with that belief. That's because they lived in the cultural context the scriptures were written in.
God, of course, would know all of this so he gave us Holy Tradition and the Fathers so people 2100 centuries later in another culture entirely could understand what was written and not assume that the culture they live in and the language they speak are and were the only languages and cultures which ever existed. :)
To this day, in Serbia, 1st cousins are referred to as "brothers" or "sisters." In Serbian, there isn't even a word for the fist cousin. The complete neme is "borther/sister of aunt." This is, however, alient to the West.
Well, if that's true then I suppose I could give you half a point and say it's possible. :) I know there are places in the Bible when "brother" means biological brother and others where it means spiritual brother. I wonder how one would go about identifying only his bio-brother to someone who didn't know?