The post will make the point.EVERVIRGIN has been a title of our Lady from the earliest days; it appears, albeit obiter, in the documents of councils from Chalcedon onwards. It still appears (confiteor) in the Novus Ordo Mass; was rather more frequent in the Classical Roman Rite; and comes very often in the Byzantine Rite. It is part of the Church's Marian dogma, and was treated respectfully, if rather evasively, by the ARCIC document on Mary. Non-Catholics sneer at it. The great Tom Wright is dismissive.
The Gospels make it quite clear that Jesus had brothers. They don't. Adelphoi can mean kinsmen. It doesn't have to mean uterine (that is, born of the same womb) brothers.
So you say. But that's the obvious meaning if anyone talks about "Jesus' brothers" in any language, isn't it? Not at all. Mark's and Matthew's Gospels, in their accounts of the Crucifixion, both talk about "Mary the mother of James and Joses [or Joseph]". If this Mary had been the same as Christ's own mother, it would have been very odd for them not to refer to her as the Mother of Jesus.
So what? Well, in Mark 6:3 and Matthew 13:55, the places where those "brothers of Jesus" are mentioned, the full text reads: " Jesus the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses [or Joseph] and Judas and Simon". We've just seen that James and Joses are apparently the sons of some Mary who was clearly not the same as Mary the Mother of Jesus. And they're the first two on the list here. The list is thus clearly not itemising individuals who were uterine brothers of Jesus.
Well, I still think it's obvious that ... If it's so "obvious", you've got some explaining to do. Throughout the second century the Gospels were increasingly regarded as 'canonical' and authoritative. If it is so "obvious" that James and the rest of those listed in the Gospels were uterine brothers of Jesus, then the tradition that Jesus was Mary's only child must have arisen well before those Gospels came to be regarded as authorities. Otherwise, when somebody started saying "she never had any more children", somebody who had read the Gospels would have said "Aha, you're wrong: here's a list of his brothers". So, if you're right about it being so "obvious", you're going to have to admit that Mary's perpetual virginity is so early as to predate the acquisition of authority by the Gospels; which modern scholarship dates to the beginning of the second century at the latest. I've got you either way.
That's all gobbledegook. It's obvious ...That's the problem with you Prods and you Liberals. You're impervious to reason.
Of course we are. Reason is the Devil's Whore. Martin Luther said so. It's obvious.
12 comments:
Who wrote the Letter of James?
He may be 'fun' (not my idea of ..), but the deployment of biblical evidence is capricious and self-indulgent. Item: Paul (writing at least two decades before any of the Gospels) is explicit that Jesus' father 'kata sarka' was Joseph. Therefore, either (a) he didn't know of the tradition of the virginal conception; or (b) he did, but rejected it. In either case, his evidence overrides minority (stress it - minority) attestation in the Gospels.
Anonymous,
Am I missing something? Are you asserting that Joseph was Jesus' biological Father?
Well, I personally am convinced he was and I don't think it has any impact whatsoever on the doctrine of the Incarnation. But that doesn't matter for the purposes of this debate, which is about the proper, scholarly, use of New Testament evidence. From that point of view, I think/maintain/criticise that Father Hunwicke's and Father Jeff's failure even to consider the Pauline evidence is intellectually shoddy.
When I worked in Pakistan for a time I noticed that boys would often refer to their cousins as brothers, especially when brought up in the same extended family household, or when living nearby so that they played together and grew up together. They also refer to their great aunts and uncles as grandmothers and grandfathers, such is the closeness of the family network. In our society we have lost this family closeness so tend to interpret Scripture through Western eyes when it is in fact a thoroughly Eastern book. After this experience I now have no difficulty in accepting that Jesus' brothers in Scripture would not be his natural brothers, and that his Mother was EverVirgin.
John,
How would one maintain the hypostatic union (among other dogmas) with Joseph being the biological father of Jesus Christ?
Andy B.
This is what happens when you stop seeing things with the Church, you begin to let heretical thought enter.
Herecy can only spawn herecy.
…the deployment of biblical evidence is capricious and self-indulgent. Item: Paul (writing at least two decades before any of the Gospels) is explicit that Jesus' father 'kata sarka' was Joseph.
But Paul consistently uses the phrase kata sarka to mean viewed from a human perspective. There are no convincing grounds - apart from caprice - for attributing such a strictly biological sense to the phrase in this single context.
Item: Paul (writing at least two decades before any of the Gospels)
I've yet to see a serious discrediting of Robinson's
Redating the New Testament
Even if it is now 33 years since it was published.
John UK
Yes, john UK, one thinks in that context of Austin Farrer's famous remark about the dating of the NT books in the current scholarship of his day: they are like a group of undergraduates making their way back from an indulgent evening at the pub: none of them can stand steadily, yet they stagger home leaning against one another -- but should one of them fall, the rest tumble down as well.
Since Joseph isn't mentioned in S Paul, I'm at a loss to know how S Paul can be said EXPLICITLY to say that Joseph was the Lord's Father. At best this would have to be a (vastly forced) IMPLICIT INFERENCE from such phrases as the reference in the opening para of Romans to his descent from David. People who don't want to be called intellectually shoddy should buy a Dictionary and find out what the difference is between EXplicit and IMplicit. It's quite big. It would be jolly, too, if they could be rude over their own signature rather than a comfortable namelessness.
One of the most convincing arguments for the perpetual virginity of Our Lady is her own reaction to the message of the angel. She was betrothed to Joseph. One would expect that, if she had no intentions of maintaining her virginity perpetually, her response to the angel would have been quite different than it was. After all, a young woman engaged to be married would expect in due course to have a child. But Our Lady's response is not, 'How can this be, that I who am so lowly and am to be married to a man of low social standing, should give birth to one who will be great?' Her answer instead is, 'How can this be, since I am a virgin?' This implies 'and shall always be a virgin'. Her response can lead us to no other reasonable conclusion; it is very different from the other similiar examples in Scripture of a childless woman told she will have a son who will be great (Sarai, Rachel, Samson's mother, Hannah, and Elizabeth).
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