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Joe Heschmeyer discusses objections to Mary’s perpetual virginity, offering a unique perspective on this Catholic Doctrine in light of Christ’s virgin tomb and the biblical meaning of “holiness.”
Transcription:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shamus Popery. I’m Joe Hess Meyer and today I want to explore the perpetual virginity of Mary. This idea Catholics and Orthodox have that Mary remained a virgin her entire life, even after Jesus was born and which sounds to many Protestant ears like a totally unbiblical and even anti-biblical kind of belief. Now, my point today is not to actually lay out a full defense of why we believe in Mary’s perpetual virginity. I’m happy to do an episode on just that. If you want, let me know in the comments below, you’ll find it conveniently below the like button. The question I want to explore today is actually why should we care? Why does it matter if Mary was perpetually a virgin and what in the world does it have to do with Jesus’s empty tomb? But I know realistically I can’t just jump into that without at least addressing two of the most common objections to Mary’s perpetual virginity. These two beliefs from the Bible that Protestants mistakenly read is showing Mary had other children. I’m going to give you one biblical proof that Mary did not have other children, and then we’ll get into what I really want to talk about, which is why we should care in the first place. So let’s start with the two major objections that Mary did have other children. The first of these is well certainly looks from the Bible like we have brothers of Jesus and sisters of Jesus, and even though the names of some of them
CLIP:
We’re told in Mark chapter six that Jesus had brothers and sisters in that passage, his brothers are even name,
The people in Nazareth among whom he had grown up are recorded as saying, is this not the carpenter’s son, is not his mother called Mary and his brothers James, Joseph, Simon and Judas and his sisters, are they not all with us? They knew Mary was Joseph’s wife and Jesus’ mother, and they knew he had numerous brothers and sisters, some of whom are named.
The Bible tells us that Jesus had four brothers, James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas. Matthew chapter 13, verse 55. The Bible also tells us that Jesus had sisters in Matthew chapter 13, verse 56, but they are not named or numbered.
Joe:
Alright, so what is going on here? It’s true. There are people called brothers of Jesus and sisters of Jesus, but what you should know at the outset is there was much more flexibility in the ancient world for how you described relationships because there was a much less precise vocabulary of relationships. I’ll give you an example. Even in English, the word nephew only means the child of a brother or sister as recently as like 1600. Before that it could mean any number of other things like grandson, it could even mean cousin in certain contexts. It actually comes from the same root word that in Greek gives rise to a nios. And so there’s this ongoing question in Colossians four verse 10, when St. Paul tells us that Mark is the iNOS of Barnabas. We don’t actually know if that means it’s his cousin or his nephew because in context it could mean either one, but not dealing here, even though the New Testament is written in Greek, we’re not dealing with English or with Greek.
The people speaking are speaking Aramaic or Hebrew, and you should know that those languages had a much more limited language to describe different relationships. So we see this in several ways. I’m probably butchering the pronunciation, I apologize there, but he’s a biblical translator and so he points out that the Hebrew word ob for father is used for basically any number and you don’t have grandpa and great-grandpa. It’s just father, father, father, father. And we see that all over the New Testament. For instance, when the angel Gabriel speaking to Mary and says that he’ll be great and we call son of the most high and the Lord God will give to him the thorn of his father David. Well, it’s not literally his biological father. Of course, likewise, Mary refers to the oath which he swore to our father Abraham. So in those contexts we would say something like ancestor, but any male ancestor could be called a father.
That’s on the, if you’re going up and down the family tree, the vertical line, you just say father or son, no matter how many steps are going up. Whereas we would only use father for one step up. Well, likewise side to side, this is what’s called generation extension. If you want the nerdy term for it, if you’re moving side to side along the family tree, you can use the term brother, not just for your literal brother, one step away, but for your cousin and so on. And so we see this all over the place in the New Testament and in the Old Testament. So remember this is coming from Hebrew, but many of the things in the New Testament are then recording things that were originally said in Aramaic, which is following these same rules. So for instance, in judges chapter nine, there’s a really clear example of this where it says his mother’s kinsman spoke all these words on their behalf in the ears of all the men of Shechem and their hearts inclined to follow ab Alek for they said he is our brother, but we know he’s not literally the brother from the same parents.
This is the mother’s kinfolk and they’re still using the word brother to refer to someone that level removed. So sure Jesus has plenty of people who could be called brother and sister to a Jewish audience that does not tell us they have the same biological parents because commonly that wasn’t the case. But next we can actually say something about the particular ones mentioned. There’s James and Joseph and Judas and Simon. So what do we know about those four? Well, first of all, mark VI records them as brothers of Jesus, but in Mark 15 he mentions another Mary watching the crucifixion who he describes as Mary the mother of James and Joseph. Now that appears to be, we don’t know this part for sure, that appears to be the same. Mary Mary, the mother of James and Joseph appears to be described by John as Mary the wife of clo.
Now we don’t know this part, I’m just laying out what’s probably going on here based on the little bit of evidence. We do have K clo we’re told by Heuss is the brother of St. Joseph. So if you imagine the family tree and he also at UCBS, the fourth century church historian who mentions all this also mentions that Simeon was one of the early leaders in the church in Jerusalem and that he was another son of CLOs. So if that’s right, you have something like this. Joseph and CLOs are brothers. They both marry women named Mary. This is a very common name. You see it all over the New Testament. It’s pretty confusing. And Mary, the mother of James and Joseph May also, we don’t know for sure, may also be the mother of Simon and Jude or Judas. It’s the same name in which case these are cousins and it explains why you would call her marry the mother of James and Joseph and refer to them as Jesus’ brothers because that is absolutely close enough to be called brothers in Hebrew.
It also explains why when the apostle Jude introduces himself, he doesn’t say he’s a brother of Jesus, he does say he’s a servant of Jesus and a brother of James. If this is the same Jude or Judas being referred here by the people of Nazareth, this would be Jesus’s cousin. So that certainly is not a clear argument that Mary had other children because the sheer number of them suggests this is probably kin’s folk, cousins, et cetera. The other argument that’s very common is the intel argument that Joseph did not know Mary until the birth of Jesus,
CLIP:
The perpetual virginity of Mary, which is itself clearly unbiblical, but he, Joseph had no union with her Mary until she gave birth to a son and he gave him the name Jesus. Matthew chapter one, verse 25,
The Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox church also teach that Mary remained a virgin for all of her life. Now, we know this is not supported by scripture because in Matthew 1 25 the scriptures tell us that Joseph did not know his wife until after Jesus was born. So we know that Mary did not remain a virgin throughout her life.
Then Joseph being aroused from sleep did as the angel of the Lord commanded him and took to him his wife and did not know her till she had brought forth her firstborn son and he called his name Jesus. The phrase did not know her till is realized by all linguists to refer to having a marital relation subsequent to Jesus’ birth.
Joe:
So there’s two things you should know at the outset. First intel can mean what those guys are telling you it means but doesn’t have to and linguists actually know that it doesn’t have to mean that. And second, the passage doesn’t say he knew her not until after the birth of Jesus it said he knew her not until the birth of Jesus. That’s going to matter for reasons we’ll see in a second. First thing you should know is the word intel in English in Hebrew and in Greek works the same way. It has two possible meanings. One meaning is it’s got intel plus an implied reversal. What that means is something like this, they were playing loud music until I asked them to stop. Now ordinarily when you hear that, you think, okay, they were playing loud music. Then you ask them to stop and then presumably they stopped.
You could say they were playing loud music until I asked ’em to stop, and then they played it even louder. But without any other context, you would usually imply a reversal there. It’s not required because the other category is just intel with no implied reversal. So they were blaring music from the time I arrived until the time I left. You’re not suggesting ordinarily and someone hearing that wouldn’t think, oh, they must’ve turned it down as soon as he walked out of the room. You would just think, okay, well the reason that the speaker demarcated when they arrived when they left is that was the part relevant for their story, not because it actually changed. Hopefully that makes sense that we use intel in those two different contexts. There’s plenty of examples in scripture of the word intel or variations thereof being used with no implied reversal at all.
I’ll give you just a few examples and Matthew chapter 11, Jesus says, from the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence and men of violence take it by force. He’s not saying, and this changes today. No, it didn’t change. He continues like the violence continues, right? Likewise, later on in Matthew 11, it says, for if the mighty works done in you, Capernaum had been done and Sodom, it would’ve remained until this day. Is Jesus saying it would’ve remained until now and then Capernaum would’ve been destroyed? No, of course not. That’s not at all what he’s trying to say there until there just means, until it’s not, until plus an implied reversal or to take the example St. Jerome gives in one Corinthians 15, Jesus must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. Is Jesus going to cease to be king then?
No, of course not. So in this context, how should we interpret this language that Joseph took his wife but knew her not until she had born a son? Here’s where it matters that the intel doesn’t say in until after the way that one of the people we just heard from substitutes. So if the intel has an implied reversal, the reversal happens when the intel happens, if I say they play loud music intel, I ask them to turn it down. That means then they turn it down. So if it’s until she’d born a son, Jerome makes the point. You can’t then add any time between delivery and intercourse. If it’s she didn’t have sex with her husband until she gave birth, that’s a very different kind of labor day. This is, I mean, you would have to say she violated the Jewish law in which a woman was ritually, impure.
I mean even leaving aside the Jewish law find me a woman who said, yeah, we immediately resumed sexual relations right after I gave birth to a baby. It’s a ridiculous reading, which is why people mentally, whether they do it explicitly or not read until to mean until after that at some point after Christmas, then they went back to having sexual or then they began having sexual relations because it’s absurd to read it as literally until with an implied reversal because Christmas, it’s implausible. That would be when they consummated a marriage. If you know anything about labor and delivery, husbands and wives, any of that, it’s unthinkable. But is there another way of reading this? Because then the logical question is why then does Matthew say he knew her? Not until she’d born a son. Think about it in the example earlier, they blared loud music from the time I got there until the time I left, even though they continued to blare loud music.
It still makes sense in my story why I would focus on those two points because I leave the scene there. Well, in this case it also makes sense why Matthew would tell us to look at the fact that she was a virgin when she conceived Jesus and was a virgin when she bore him and he tells us explicitly this is what he’s focusing on. He tells us in the two proceeding verses that this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet that a virgin would conceive and bear a son. Today we hear that as one thing. She’s a virgin when she conceives, but no, at the time she had to still be a virgin when she gave birth. People in the ancient world didn’t understand how procreation worked. And so if Mary and Joseph were engaged in sexual relations while she was pregnant with Jesus, it would not have been a virgin birth.
It would be a virgin conception, not a virgin birth. So the reason Matthew tells us they were not having relations from the beginning to the end of the pregnancy is to tell us exactly that Isaiah seven is fulfilled. He is not trying to tell us that they slept with each other on Christmas and the Protestant reformer John Calvin points this out. This is not just a Catholic take. He says, let’s read satisfied with this that no just and well-grounded inference can be laid down from these words of the evangelists as to what took place after the birth of Christ. In other words, Matthew’s not trying to tell you what happens after Jesus’ birth. He’s trying to tell you what happens before then. He points out also when Jesus is called firstborn. That’s like the Jewish term. You could say firstborn, whether or not there’s a second born or not.
Similarly, we could say the US is the first country to make it to the moon, even if nobody else ever does it. It is not. He says that Joseph knew her, not till she had brought forth her firstborn son, but this is limited to that very time. Excuse me. It said that Joseph knew her not until she had brought her firstborn son, but this is limited to that very time. What took place afterwards. The historian does not inform us such as well known to have been the practice of the inspired writers, right? They’re not trying to tell you every bit of curiosity you might have. Certainly. He says, no man will ever raise a question on this subject except from curiosity and no man will absolutely keep up the argument except from an extreme fondness for disputation and coming from Calvin who had an extreme fondness for disputation.
I find that a very funny kind of charge, but he’s right to read the infancy narrative as if it’s trying to tell you Mary and Joseph had sex, is to read a whole question in there that he is not answering for you and very obviously not answering for you. He tells you why he says in tell and if you insist on reading intel in a different way than he meant it, it’s not from lack of context clues, okay? But none of those things, none of what I’ve said now proves that Mary didn’t have other children though. So why do we think she didn’t have other children? There’s several reasons. I’m going to mention two of them and talk about one of them.
In response to the angel Gabriel, her literal response to Gabriel announcing she’s going to give birth to a child is How can this be? Since I know not a man. Some translations like the R-S-V-C-E say, I have not a husband. That’s false. She does have a husband under Jewish law, and this is where I’ve done another episode on this. I’m going to leave it aside for now. She has not had sex. So she’s a married woman who is not sleeping with her husband and she was allowed to at the time again talk about it in a different episode, and yet she’s still confused as to how it could be that she could get pregnant. That befuddlement is highly indicative of the fact that she was planning on remaining a virgin. This also explains Matthew 1 24 to 25, the passage we just looked at because Joseph took his wife, meaning brought her into his own home, the second stage of a Jewish wedding, but knew her not meaning he didn’t have sexual relationships with her.
So what we all agree on unless you deny the virgin birth, is that Joseph and Mary are married and not sleeping together and there’s no indication that the angel told them not to. So why is that? The best argument is that they were planning on not having a sexual relationship because Mary was a vowed virgin. This is how the early Christians like Augustine read this passage and we have indication from the first century of temple vows of virginity being made by young women. Another bit of suggestive evidence is in Luke chapter two when it says that Jesus’ parents went to Jerusalem each year for the Passover and he went up with them when he was 12, and then when it describes who’s there, it’s Jesus. He then gets separated from the party of his parents, their kinfolk and acquaintances. There’s no mention of brothers or sisters, Alina allegedly if the Protestant interpretation is right, he’s got a bunch of brothers and sisters, where are they when the family’s going up to Passover?
All of that though was just suggestive. I think it points to the fact that he is an only child. It doesn’t prove it. What proves it is John chapter 19, at the foot of the cross, Jesus turns to his mother and says, woman, behold your son to John who is a non-relative. And then he tells John, behold, your mother and John takes care of Mary for the rest of her life. That absolutely proves that she did not have other children. Why? Because under both Jewish law and the Christian moral precepts, you cannot just pawn your aging parents off to a non-relative. And one Timothy we’re explicitly told that anyone who does not provide for his relatives and especially for his own family, has disowned the faith and is worse than an unbeliever. And so this idea that Jesus had brothers, sisters, and they just weren’t taking care of their mom is unthinkable.
And sometimes Protestants when confronted this will say, well, maybe there were non-believing brothers and sisters, even if they’re non-believers, that’s unthinkable, but it’s also not consistent with the biblical evidence. One of the brothers of Jesus is described as an apostle by St. Paul in Galatians one verse 19. And so there’s plenty of indication that the brothers of Jesus are believers. And so why are they not doing this basic thing that if they don’t do, they’re worse than unbelievers? How do we believe both that James, the brother of the Lord is an apostle and is worse than an unbeliever? Based on what St. Paul says, it doesn’t make sense, right? But even if they weren’t Christians, let’s say they’re not believers, let’s say they don’t follow Jesus and they’re instead devout Jews, well, devout Jews still have the 10 Commandments which tell you to honor your father and mother.
We hear those words today to mean like kids listen to mom and dad stop acting up about little kids. That’s not what the 10 Commandments is originally referring to. It’s about adults taking care of their aging parents. And so the Jewish Talmud talks about what it means to honor your father and mother. He gives his father food and drink dresses and covers him and brings him in and takes him out for all his household needs. That is it’s about caring for an aging parent. So whether you think the brothers of Jesus were Jews or Christians, either way, if they’re literally marries children, they have a moral duty, an extremely serious one under the 10 Commandments and under the New Testament as well to care for their mom. The fact that nobody is doing that shows there are no brothers and sisters around to do that duty.
That then gets us to the question why care at all? And here I want to turn in a strange direction and say, why does the empty tomb have to be new? Never lay in, never used. Why does it have to be a virgin tomb? In Matthew 27, we hear that Joseph Arimathea took Jesus’ body wrapped in a clean linen shroud, matters that it’s clean and laid it in his own new tomb, which he had hu in the rock. This is a strange couple of details to include. Why mention the purity of the linen shroud? Why mention the fact that no one has ever been in that tomb before? And to make it stranger, John also mentions the same detail. He describes it as a new tomb and then says where no one had ever been LA Why does he mention both of those things? So you’ve got two evangelists who go out of their way to mention nobody’s been in this tomb before, and I would suggest to understand this, you have to make sense of the Jewish concept of holiness.
So often Protestants and Catholics alike misunderstand holiness is just something like moral goodness or being devout. But holiness is a much richer thing than that. When God says to Moses to take off his sandals because this is holy ground, he doesn’t mean the ground has been really well behaved and has followed the commandments when we’re told to keep the Sabbath holy. The response I heard as a kid was, why not keep everyday holy? If you understand what holy means, then you’ll know the answer to that. Holy Kash means set aside. It’s set apart for God. So six days you can work and you have to work. You can’t just take every day as a Sabbath, you will not live. So you are set aside for God in this special way. And so the ground is set aside for God. So you don’t wear shoes when you’re on it if you’re Moses, but you don’t want the entire world to be set aside for God in that way where you can’t wear shoes or do your business or do any of these things.
So the idea is that there are certain things in this world that are set aside. They’re hollowed, they are dedicated to God, closely tied to this is the idea of virginity. This is a regular image of this and for good reason as St. Paul points out, the Christian who’s married has split loyalties. You got to take care of the family and serve God. And sometimes it can get complicated. Do I go pray right now? Do I go home to help the kids go to bed? What do I do here? And so the unmarried person can be wholly dedicated to God in this sense of kadosh holiness. And this is why we have clerical celibacy because as Jesus says, their un have made themselves un for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. This is a type of holiness that many modern Christians have lost sight of that being entirely dedicated to God is the original sense of what it means for a thing to be holy.
In second Corinthians verse 11, St. Paul uses this image of the church as a pure bride for one husband to mean the church is entirely dedicated, but he uses the imagery of virginity to express this. Likewise, we see the reverse in Revelation 14 with 144,000. We’re told that they are those who have not defiled themselves with women for they’re chaste. They’re presented as virginal to show their dedication and their purity in their holiness in this original sense. This by the way, is how you can have phrases like pure evil, and it’s not a contradiction in terms because pure means undiluted. You don’t know if it’s undiluted in a good way or a bad way. It just means it’s undiluted. It’s entirely one thing. This is critical for understanding Judaism. If you want to know why you couldn’t wear mixed fabrics, it’s because they were unholy why you couldn’t eat shrimp?
Because it’s not really a fish. It’s not really, it’s some weird in between sort of thing. The idea is commit to being something. And so the kosher laws, deary rules, all of this stuff is tied to this idea of holiness. To remind the Jewish people that they’re to be a people set aside for God, a holy nation. Well, likewise, why do we care that the tomb has never been slept in before or after by anybody? Because it shows that it is holy. It exists only for our Lord. And likewise, this is true for Mary. The reason we care about the perpetual virginity of Mary, it’s not that we think marriage and family is evil or that marital sex is evil or anything like that, that we believe Mary is given entirely to God and pursues wholeheartedly the Lord alone. And this is also why even on a bodily level, the early Christians read passages like Ezekiel 44 about the temple to come and realize that temple is our Lord Jesus and the temple gate around it.
We’re told in Ezekiel 44, the gate shall remain shut, it shall not be opened, and no one shall enter by it for the Lord, the God of Israel has entered by it. The beautiful thing about holiness in the biblical sense is there are things that belong entirely to God. Mary is perpetually a virgin because she has given herself entirely to God. Even though she’s married, she is not pursuing, oh, I got to take care of these other eight kids and then try to follow Jesus. No, she is able to wholly fixate on Jesus and pursue this holiness. This is why Mary’s perpetual virginity matters. This is why clerical celibacy matters. This is why the Sabbath matters as a day of rest. And if we lose sight of that, if we lose sight of this sense of having times and places and things, and yes, even people set aside entirely for God, we are missing what it means to be holy in the biblical sins. For shameless, I’m Joe Hess Meyer. God bless you.