Counter-Reformation: Mary's Perpetual Virginity

This is my response to Ben's post here. Since he titled it "95 Theses: The Issue of Mary's perpetual virginity," I felt like I had to have a snarky title too. I know it's been a long time, but I've been at my parish assignment for two weeks and things are significantly busier in the fall than during the summer.

-----

Though he may not have meant anything by it, Ben calls Mary's perpetual virginity an "issue." The problem is that, until recent history, it wasn't much of an issue. Even reformers like Calvin, Luther, Zwingli and John Wesley believed in the perpetual virginity of Mary. Yes, there are always people that question things like this, but, since the early days of the Church, the Church as a whole has held this belief.

There are reasons for believing in it, both from Scripture and from the Tradition of the Church. First, let's define what we mean. Here's what the Catechism of the Catholic Church says:

Mary—"ever-virgin"

499

The deepening of faith in the virginal motherhood led the Church to confess Mary's real and perpetual virginity even in the act of giving birth to the Son of God made man. In fact, Christ's birth "did not diminish his mother's virginal integrity but sanctified it." And so the liturgy of the Church celebrates Mary as Aeiparthenos, the "Ever-virgin."

500

Against this doctrine the objection is sometimes raised that the Bible mentions brothers and sisters of Jesus. The Church has always understood these passages as not referring to other children of the Virgin Mary. In fact James and Joseph, "brothers of Jesus," are the sons of another Mary, a disciple of Christ, whom St. Matthew significantly calls "the other Mary." They are close relations of Jesus, according to an Old Testament expression.

501

Jesus is Mary's only son, but her spiritual motherhood extends to all men whom indeed he came to save: "The Son whom she brought forth is he whom God placed as the first-born among many brethren, that is, the faithful in whose generation and formulation she cooperates with a mother's love."

So, yes, Jesus' birth is miraculous, but it does not mention anything about Jesus not exiting the birth canal. I'm sure that there are people who have thought (and written) about this, but I'm not going to get into it. The main idea is that Mary was a virgin before and after Jesus was born, meaning that she didn't have sex.

The whole question of the "brothers and sisters of Jesus" is the next objection.

The Greek word for "brother" is adelphos and it can have many meanings besides blood brother.

One way that is used is to refer to disciples of Christ. Check out Matthew 23:8, Romans 1:13, 1 Thessalonians 1:4 and Revelation 19:10 - all of these use some form of adelphos. I'm not saying that this is specifically what is going on in the passages Ben mentions, but that the word is used in this way.

It's true that Greek does have a specific word for cousin, but Hebrew and Aramaic do not. According to Dave Armstrong:

Neither Hebrew nor Aramaic has a word for cousin. Although the New Testament was written in Greek, which does have such a word, the literal rendering of the Hebrew word ach, which was used by the first disciples and Jesus, is indeed adelphos, the literal equivalent of the English "brother." But even in English, brother has multiple meanings as well.

This article also says it well:

Because neither Hebrew nor Aramaic (the language spoken by Christ and his disciples) had a special word meaning "cousin," speakers of those languages could use either the word for "brother" or a circumlocution, such as "the son of my uncle." But circumlocutions are clumsy, so the Jews often used "brother."

The writers of the New Testament were brought up using the Aramaic equivalent of "brothers" to mean both cousins and sons of the same father—plus other relatives and even non-relatives. When they wrote in Greek, they did the same thing the translators of the Septuagint did. (The Septuagint was the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible; it was translated by Hellenistic Jews a century or two before Christ’s birth and was the version of the Bible from which most of the Old Testament quotations found in the New Testament are taken.)

In the Septuagint the Hebrew word that includes both brothers and cousins was translated as adelphos, which in Greek usually has the narrow meaning that the English "brother" has. Unlike Hebrew or Aramaic, Greek has a separate word for cousin, anepsios, but the translators of the Septuagint used adelphos, even for true cousins.

You might say they transliterated instead of translated, importing the Jewish idiom into the Greek Bible. They took an exact equivalent of the Hebrew word for "brother" and did not use adelphos in one place (for sons of the same parents), and anepsios in another (for cousins). This same usage was employed by the writers of the New Testament and passed into English translations of the Bible

The Bible does not say that any of the "brothers and sisters of Jesus" were children of Mary, and simply assuming that John would have taken this for granted does not make it true.

If we look at all of the "brothers of Jesus" named in the Gospels we come up with four (from Matthew and Mark): James, Joseph (sometimes called Joses), Simon and Judas (also called Jude). At the cross (in Matthew 27:56), we see Mary Magdelene and "Mary the mother of James and Joseph" who he also calls "the other Mary" in verse 61. We can safely read this as meaning that she is not Mary, Jesus' mother. John agrees, saying, "Standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother and his mother's sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary of Magdala." Isn't it reasonable that these "brothers" could have been Jesus' cousins?

Mark Shea supports it further with some Church history:

This is further supported in an almost accidental way by the early Church historian Eusebius, who routinely records the succession of bishops in the major Churches of antiquity. After recording his account of the martyrdom of James, the first bishop of Jerusalem (commonly referred to as "the brother of the Lord"), he tells us that James' successor was none other than "Symeon, son of Clopas." Why choose Symeon/Simon for the next bishop? Because James, the "brother of the Lord," and Symeon/Simon were the sibling children of Clopas and the "other Mary," and we are in all likelihood looking at a kind of dynastic succession.

Interestingly, this "other Mary" is described as the Blessed Virgin's "sister." Is it possible that two siblings were both named Mary? Probably not. Rather it's far more likely they were "sisters" in the same sense Jesus and the other Mary's son, James, were "brothers." That is, they were cousins or some other extended relation.

From this, we can look at what Ben says about Jesus entrusting Mary to John at the crucifixion. Children were expected to take care of their widowed mothers in Jewish culture and to not do this was considered worse than being an unbeliever (1 Timothy 5:3-8). Why would Jesus entrust Mary to John if he had brothers who would and should take care of her. Ben says that it is because John was a believer and Jesus' brothers were not. But, if James was Jesus' real brother, he was just as much of a believer as John was. Both were surprised by the Resurrection and neither had yet received the Holy Spirit. Why would Jesus choose John over James unless he had no other siblings?

The last thing Ben brings up is the idea that Mary and Joseph refraining from sex is against the Judeo-Christian idea of marriage. I agree that the mystery of union and self-giving can be traced back to creation. How does this work out with Mary's perpetual virginity?

Judaism, like Christianity, had a tradition of celibacy for religious reasons. People like Jeremiah, then later Paul and especially Jesus himself were not married. There is even a tradition for celibacy within marriage coming from the Jewish tradition that Moses (Exodus 19:15), the seventy elders and the prophets abstained from sex after their call.

But how does this work with Mary? When Gabriel comes to her and announces that she will bear a son, Mary responds, "How can this be, since I have no relations with a man?" This only makes sense if she had not intended to have relations in the first place. Mary was betrothed to be married; when a married woman in the Bible was promised a child, it usually meant that she and her husband would bear a child together. This shouldn't surprise Mary unless she had already intended to abstain from sex.

And Joseph? Joseph was a "righteous man" (Matthew 1:19), a devout Jew who lived in a world where God was real. The supernatural was much more familiar to a man of his time than for us. If he truly believed that Mary was bearing the Son of God, he would have respectfully refrain from sex. If someone wasn't supposed to touch the ark of the covenant, how much more should they reverence the true ark carrying God Himself?

I don't expect all of this to be utterly convincing and doubt-destroying for someone, but I think it does show that it is not unreasonable or unscriptural to believe in Mary's perpetual virginity.

But why does it matter? Why does the Catholic Church hold to a belief like this?

Well, the perpetual virginity of Mary shows us that God is responsible for our salvation. It is entirely in His hands. Mary signifies the Church's union with Jesus. Her virginity shows the goodness of this total consecration to God that goes beyond earthly marriage (1 Cor. 7:39, Matthew 19:10-12). It shows us the fundamental truth that self-sacrifice is what brings life.

Stay tuned for my challenge to Ben.

Note: I highly recommend Mark Shea's Mary, Mother of the Son series for non-Catholics who want to know what Catholic believe about Mary and why. He writes from the position of a former protestant and explains things clearly in terms everyone can understand.