Transcript

Hi and welcome back to Shameless Potpourri.

I'm Joe Heschmeyer of Catholic Answers, and I want to explore a popular question about whether or not Mary was a virgin after the birth of Jesus.

Catholics and most Protestants agree Mary was a virgin at the time of the Annunciation; she was a virgin at the time of Jesus' birth.

But there's this question: Was she a virgin after?

In fact, a lot of Protestants think Catholics are just kind of making this up, that it's some kind of extra-biblical idea that Mary remained perpetually a virgin.

And maybe you're unaware that this is the view not only of Catholics but of Orthodox Christians and overwhelmingly of the early Christians as well.

So I want to explore kind of why that is and what this reveals about the divergent ways in which we read the Bible, because I think that's what this really reveals.

This is one of those doctrines where if you take the simplistic, surface-level reading of Scripture, you're going to get one answer.

And if you read it in a deeper and more ponderous way, you get a different one.

And that's not the only issue like this.

You know, for instance, in John 14, Jesus says, The Father is greater than I. Great!

And so if you deny the Trinity, this is the verse you go to, right?

You just say, Jesus says the Father is greater than I. How hard is that to understand?

And you take a really surface-level understanding of it.

If you want the right answer of what this means, you have to dig in and really say, What is meant by this?

And what assumptions am I bringing to the table where I'm assuming Jesus means one thing, and maybe He means something different?

So that's what I mean: this isn't just a question about Mary's perpetual virginity, as important as that is.

But as we'll see, it points to how we have kind of a broken understanding of sex, but also of marriage and of holiness.

That's what I hope to kind of show.

And so instead of taking that surface-level reading, I would suggest we should read Scripture in a Marian sort of way.

What do I mean by that?

In the Gospel of Luke, in Luke 2, verse 19, St. Luke says that Mary kept all these things, pondering them in her heart.

That is, she witnesses these events, but then she chews on them; she thinks about them; she ponders them.

And it's in that way that we're actually encouraged to approach the mysteries of the New Testament—not just to take the surface-level reading, but to actually go deeper.

If you read the New Testament, you'll see over and over and over again that the people who interpret Jesus at that surface level misunderstand Him; they get Him wrong.

And I want to suggest that's exactly what's going on here.

Now, another place I think is worth going is, as I've mentioned, the early Christians.

In the 300s, a guy by the name of Helvidius argued that Mary and Joseph continued to have children—the standard Protestant position.

St. Jerome replies to him in a work called Against Helvidius, or sometimes called The Perpetual Virginity of Mary.

The introduction is really biting; it's really sharp.

He says, I was requested by certain of the brethren not long ago to reply to a pamphlet written by one Helvidius.

I've deferred from doing so not because it is a difficult matter to maintain the truth and refute an ignorant bore who has scarce known the first glimmer of learning, but because I was afraid my reply might make him appear worth defeating.

Now, this is sharp.

Jerome is not known for pulling punches, but it should give any Protestants who believe that Mary was not a perpetual virgin a little bit of pause.

Here's why: Jerome lived in Bethlehem.

He was fluent in Greek, Hebrew, and Latin.

He is the chief translator of the Latin Vulgate.

He knew Judaism better than almost any Gentile Christian of antiquity.

And so he takes it as so glaringly obvious that Mary was perpetually a virgin that he finds it laughable that anyone would take a different view.

And clearly, he's not alone in this, right?

The other Christians of his day are so scandalized by Helvidius writing up pamphlets that they write to Jerome asking him to reply.

This is not the standard view; you know, the Protestant view is not the standard view at all.

And it's not the standard view among ordinary Christians; it's not the standard view among scholars of the day who understand the ancient languages and who are familiar with Jewish culture.

And so all of that should lead the modern reader to ask: Is it possible that Jerome, who lives in Bethlehem, in the cave where Jesus is born, and who knows Hebrew and Jewish sources, maybe knows something I don't about ancient Judaism and about perpetual virginity?

I think we're going to see that that's exactly the case.

But to get there, I want to first go through the arguments for why Protestants don't typically believe in the perpetual virginity of Mary and kind of answer those, and then lay out the positive case.

I'm going to start with all of the reasons you might think Mary and Joseph have other children.

So this is the case against Mary's perpetual virginity, and I'm going off of the arguments I've heard, including the arguments I've heard recently.

There may be other ones out there, but I've done my best to try to capture the popular arguments and the best arguments.

The first is that in Matthew 1, in the dream of St. Joseph, the angel says, Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary, your wife, for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit.

And so the idea is that take is a euphemism for sex.

The answer to that is just: it's not.

That is a misunderstanding of the passage.

Taking is actually about the Nisuin, which is the second stage of a Jewish marriage.

If you don't know what that means, well, good!

That's what the second half of this podcast is all about.

The taking going on here is a specific idea we have to understand on Jewish terms and not apply our own kind of understanding of those words.

So that's simple enough.

But then after that, in verse 24, Joseph gets up from the dream, and we're told he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him.

He took his wife but knew her not until she had borne a son.

Now, taking his wife is not a sexual euphemism; knowing his wife is a sexual euphemism.

You know, Adam knew Eve, and she gave birth to Cain in Genesis 4, right?

It's that knowing—that carnal knowledge.

This is about sex.

So that should immediately tell us, okay, well, taking and knowing are clearly something different to Matthew.

So what does he mean by taking?

Again, we'll get back to that.

But then he knew her not until she had borne a son.

Okay, that seems simple enough, right?

Until means until.

The Father is greater than I—what could be easier than that, right?

Well, again, it doesn't really work that way because until, both in English and in Greek, can mean up to a certain point but not after.

Or it can just mean to this point.

I'll give you an example: If I say, I tried to go to that party, but the music was blaring from the time I got there until the time I left, I'm not suggesting that they started the music when I got there or turned it off when I left.

The from and until are referring to a specific point relative to the narrative; they're not actually saying the condition stopped holding after the until.

Or to take a biblical example, in 1 Corinthians, we're told that Jesus must reign until He has put all His enemies under His feet.

Does that mean Jesus doesn't reign after His enemies are put under His feet?

No, until doesn't mean that.

So assuming that until always means only up to this point and then not after is applying a connotation of until that doesn't necessarily hold here.

It can mean that, but contextually it often doesn't. If you tell your kids, Be good until I get back, you're not telling them, I want you to misbehave when I return.

It just doesn't mean that.

And the same is true in Greek.

So we should be asking, well, what is St. Matthew saying then?

Why does he say until the birth?

If he's not trying to say Mary and Joseph had sex on Christmas or that they had sex sometime after Jesus was born, why would he specify that they didn't have sex from this moment until Jesus was born?

Well, it turns out Matthew actually tells us what he's saying.

So in Matthew 1:24-25, as we said, he knew her not until she had borne a son.

Well, right before that, in verses 22 and 23, he explains, This took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet.

This is the prophecy from Isaiah: Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel.

Now, we often think of that just as one thing: that the Virgin Mary will get pregnant and have a baby.

But those are two different moments, nine months apart.

You know, if you get Christmas, you get nine months before Christmas that Mary has to be a virgin both at the moment of the Annunciation and at the moment of Christmas for this prophecy to be fulfilled.

There are two prongs to it: a virgin conception and a virgin birth.

If Mary is a virgin when she conceives Jesus but then goes on to have sex with Joseph sometime between then and Christmas, the prophecy would not be fulfilled.

And so Matthew is not trying to tell us anything at all about the sex life of Mary and Joseph one way or the other.

He's not trying to prove Mary's perpetual virginity; he's not trying to deny Mary's perpetual virginity.

In context, the until here is very clearly tied to the preceding verse that this is about conceiving and bearing.

From the moment of Mary's conception of Jesus in her womb until the moment of Jesus' birth, Mary is a virgin.

That's all he's trying to say.

That's it.

It tells us nothing about what happens after.

So the until argument is just ripping a verse out of context, reading it in a superficial way, and demanding that until means something it doesn't necessarily mean, again, either in Greek or in English.

It's another version of doing the Father is greater than I. You've got the surface reading, but you've ripped it completely out of context.

You have no understanding of the biblical context or the theological meaning.

Okay, so so far, the until argument doesn't really prove the opposite; it doesn't prove Protestants are wrong.

It just doesn't actually mean the thing they're trying to make it mean.

To read this as Matthew arguing that Mary and Joseph have children after Jesus' birth is to try to read him as saying something he very clearly is not trying to say in the context of the passage.

But there does seem to be positive evidence that points to other kids, right?

The brothers or brethren of Jesus.

So, for instance, in Mark 3, we're told that Jesus' mother and His brethren came, and the crowd says, Your mother and your brethren are outside asking for you.

Great, clear enough.

In Mark 6, the crowd says, Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, and brother of James and Joseph and Judah and Simon?

And are not His sisters here with us?

So it sounds like Jesus has a ton of siblings—at least four brothers; who knows how many sisters, right?

That's a lot of siblings that Mary and Joseph go on to have, particularly since Joseph appears to be dead by the time Jesus reaches adulthood.

It's remarkable.

In fact, we find Jesus, Mary, and Joseph with no mention of siblings going up to the temple when Jesus is 12. When He's 30, Joseph is dead, but sometime in that 18-year gap, apparently, Mary and Joseph had a ton of kids, right?

And it's great because we even know their names: James, Joseph, Judah, and Simon.

And what's the problem with this?

Well, again, we're reading this through modern 21st-century English-speaking ears and not reading it through Jewish ears or Jewish eyes.

I guess I'm reading in Genesis 14. I'm using the KJV because it's actually clearer.

Abraham and Lot are described as uncle and nephew, and his brothers.

So in verse 12, it says, They took Lot, Abraham's brother's son, who dwelt in Sodom.

And then two verses later, when Abraham heard that his brother was taken captive, people say, Oh, look at that biblical contradiction!

Is Lot his nephew or his brother?

Well, it's his brother—excuse me, it's his nephew—but it's both if you understand what brother means here.

That brother means a whole range of relations.

In fact, the reason I'm using the KJV here is that many modern Bibles will translate that second use of brother just as kinsman, which is a little bit shady, I think, because the word is just brother, but it means kinsman here.

It could just mean any kind of close relative.

So just as like your great-great-great-great-great-grandfather is just your father, you know, Father Abraham is used all over; they don't literally mean he is one generation removed from them.

So likewise, your cousin, your uncle, your nephew—those are all your brother.

There's a very limited familial vocabulary in ancient Hebrew, and so if you don't want to say constantly your brother's son, you can just say brother, and contextually we get what you mean.

Or kinsman—it means the same thing here.

So hopefully that's clear.

We're not saying every time brother comes up that it's literally a biological brother.

Now, that doesn't mean that it's not, but it should give us some pause.

So, Jesus' brothers—going back to Mark 6—remember the brothers' names?

James, Joseph, Judas, and Simon?

Well, in Mark 15, when Mark is describing the crucifixion, he tells us there were some women who were looking on from afar, among whom were Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joseph.

Hold on a second!

James and Joseph have a different mom—the other Mary, who in the parallel account in John's Gospel is listed as Mary the wife of Clopas.

So this should give us some pause.

First of all, whether you're Protestant or Catholic, you don't think brother means brother here literally.

You don't think these are the full brothers of Jesus.

You either think they're His half-brothers, His step-brothers, or His cousins.

But nobody—unless they deny the virginity of Mary, unless they deny that Jesus is virgin-born—nobody believes that James and Joseph are full brothers of Jesus.

So the only question is: what more complicated relationship is being referred to here as brother?

It could be cousin, it could be half-brother, it could be step-brother.

Well, we're given the clue in Mark 15 that James and Joseph at least have a different mom, Mary.

And then we're given the clue in John 19 that this other Mary is the wife of Clopas.

Now, so far, the biblical evidence—Eusebius in the 4th century has one of the earliest church histories.

It's just called Church History, and he quotes an earlier source, Hegesippus, who is mostly lost to us today, but he's from the second century.

Hegesippus records that Clopas was a brother of Joseph.

This is in the context of the Church in Jerusalem, and Eusebius says that the Church in Jerusalem, with one consent, pronounced Simeon, the son of Clopas, of whom the Gospel also makes mention, to be worthy of the episcopal throne.

They chose Simeon, or Simon, one of these other brothers of Jesus, who is the son of Clopas and Mary, as one of the bishops of Jerusalem.

He was a cousin, as they say, of the Savior, for Hegesippus records that Clopas was a brother of Joseph.

So you don't have to take that part; that part's not inspired Scripture, but it certainly makes sense of the evidence that if they're cousins—just like Abraham and Lot, uncle and nephew—they're called brothers.

Well, James, Joseph, Simon, all these girls, whoever else—these are all cousins.

It also makes sense of why there are so many of them when we don't see anybody in Jesus' infancy; we don't see anybody with Jesus as a sibling going up to the temple in Jerusalem.

So that's the brothers' argument.

It could mean that He has biological brothers, but it doesn't actually mean that or doesn't require that meaning.

The next one is a prophetic argument.

In Psalm 69, verse 8, it says, I've become a stranger to my brethren and an alien to my mother's sons.

And so the argument says, Aha!

See, it's a clever argument because it says, okay, sure, 'brethren' doesn't have to mean that they're your mother's children, but in Psalm 69, verse 8, it clearly says 'my mother's sons.'

The problem here is that you're using a prophetic messianic psalm and just taking it extremely literally.

And here's why that doesn't work: because in verse 5 of the same psalm, it says, O God, you know my folly; the wrongs I have done are not hidden from you.

So if you're going to just say all of this applies literally to Jesus, you're going to have to also say Jesus literally sinned, and that doesn't work.

So the mother here could easily be Jerusalem, could be Israel, could just be the psalmist.

Not every part of a prophetic psalm literally applies to Jesus.

So this is just a bad use of prophetic kind of argumentation.

This is, I would say, not a valid argument from the Old Testament.

Okay, just kind of wrapping this up, there are three other arguments I've sometimes heard.

The first is, you know, There's nothing wrong with marital sex.

Well, sure, nobody said there was, right?

We believe marriage is a sacrament and that this sacrament is consummated through sex.

So this is an example of what C.S. Lewis calls bulverism.

In Lewis's words, You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he's wrong.

You can't just say, Aha!

Well, you just think that because you're hung up about sex.

It's like, no, no, we think that because Scripture actually points in a different direction than your assumption.

The second kind of remaining argument is, Well, if they didn't have sex, it wasn't a real marriage.

Well, this is false.

Once we get into the Jewish context, we'll see that consummation, in the sense that we think of it in the West in the Christian context, is not the way it worked for Jewish weddings.

Consummation for a Jewish wedding was actually the coming together of houses.

The Nisuin, the carrying of the woman, bringing her under your roof—that's what consummated the marriage.

You could actually have sex before that, as we're going to see.

So marital consummation doesn't work the same way in ancient Judaism as it does in modern Christianity, and so that argument doesn't work.

It also isn't really true; you still have a real marriage even prior to consummation.

But we're not going to get into all of the ratification versus consummation.

When the priest says, You're man and wife, you really are man and wife even though the marriage hasn't been consummated.

Then the final argument is, It would be cruel for Joseph to get married to Mary only to find out afterwards that he couldn't have sex with her.

Joseph has been, you know, there's a bait and switch here.

And that argument grosses me out, to be honest, because I think it's an unhealthy attitude.

You know, if you get married and then your wife is paralyzed or sick or has some medical condition where you can't have sex regularly, do you feel like deprived by God?

Do you feel like God's done you an injustice?

It just seems like a really unhealthy attitude towards women, towards marriage, and towards sex—that you're not just entitled to sex on demand even when you're married.

It just doesn't work that way.

But additionally, as we're going to see, this assumes that Joseph didn't know Mary was going to perpetually be a virgin, which is not, I think, a good assumption.

Okay, so far I've only handled objections, and you might say this is not a very persuasive case.

Well, so far it isn't meant to be.

I'm just saying the arguments against don't persuasively prove the contrary.

So let's look at the arguments for—what are the arguments in favor of Mary being perpetually a virgin?

To get there, I think we've got to do a couple of things.

The first is we have to unpack the biblical view of marriage.

By this, I just mean: what did marriage look like in the first century in a Jewish context?

Because it doesn't really look like what it looks like today.

It doesn't even look like what it looks like today in a Jewish context, much less a Christian one.

A way of exploring this question would be to ask the question: Was Mary an unwed mother?

A lot of people will say, Yeah, of course she was!

Doesn't it say that explicitly in the Bible?

You know, she doesn't have a husband and she gets pregnant.

Well, what's the problem with that?

Well, Jesus in the temple—that's the problem.

We're going to get back to a different dimension of Jesus in the temple, but for now, just notice that in Deuteronomy 23, it says, No bastard shall enter the assembly of the Lord; even through the tenth generation, none of his descendants shall enter the assembly of the Lord.

In other words, if you are conceived out of wedlock, you were not allowed in the temple.

And so the people saying Mary is an unwed mother are saying Jesus is a bastard.

And if you say Jesus is a bastard, then he's not allowed in the temple.

And certainly, Jesus' opponents would have loved a chance to throw that at him.

If Jesus wasn't allowed in the temple, you don't think the Pharisees would have brought that up?

You don't think the Sadducees would have mentioned that?

But in fact, in Matthew 26, when Jesus is being arrested, in verse 55, He points out, You've come out as against a robber with clubs and swords to capture me.

Day after day I sat in the temple teaching, and you did not seize me.

So Jesus is in the temple all the time, which isn't possible if He was born out of wedlock or conceived out of wedlock.

It doesn't work like that.

So that should make us ask: How are we misunderstanding Jewish weddings?

Because clearly, our reading of Luke 1 and Matthew 1 would say Jesus is conceived out of wedlock, but their reading was that He wasn't. And that's very much the case—even people who don't know about the virgin conception, even people who don't realize Jesus is miraculously conceived, who assume that Joseph is His father, still think Jesus is legitimately born.

Yet it's not just Jesus' followers who say, Hey, it's not really sinful because it was miraculous.

No, no, there is no hint of there being any sin around this.

All of the charges being raised against Jesus—nobody is arguing that Joseph and Mary sinned by having a baby.

Have you noticed this?

This is a really significant detail.

Joseph resolves to divorce Mary quietly, and the two alarm bells that should be going off in our heads are: one, why is he talking about divorcing a woman who we thought he wasn't even married to?

And two, how would divorcing her quietly avoid putting her to shame?

You know, in a modern context, if you're dating somebody, you get engaged, you get pregnant, and he leaves you, you have not been preserved from shame because it's sinful to have sex during the engagement period.

Well, as we're going to see, we're mistaken when we think that Mary and Joseph are engaged in the modern sense of that, and that it was perfectly fine for them to be having a sexual relationship—except that they weren't. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

So let's step back.

A Jewish wedding consists of two stages: it's called the Kedushin and the Nissuin.

Now, these are part of one ceremony now, but they used to be two separate ceremonies until the 11th century.

The major change is that you now have a place you live as an unmarried man that isn't just your dad's house.

In other words, like bachelor pads and things exist now; you can live with roommates, but this wasn't really a reality in antiquity.

Rabbi Aidan Steinsaltz says a Jewish wedding is made up of two parts.

This is often called the betrothal.

It's not a great word for it, but there's not really a better word for it.

Like, if you're going to translate it, betrothal is as close as we're going to get.

But it's very different from our Western concept of a betrothal.

The Kedushin is the betrothal, and the Nissuin is the marriage.

Although it is called betrothal, the Kedushin is not just a commitment to marry; it is an actual marriage.

So you see why calling it betrothal and marriage is really misleading?

Because the first one is actually the marriage.

For example, if the couple chooses not to complete the marriage with Nissuin, they will need a formal get, a divorce.

In the time of the Mishnah, these two parts normally took place about a year apart in order to give the bride and groom time to prepare for the wedding and for their marriage.

But today, they are done one after the other at the wedding ceremony.

Now, I just want to add a couple of things.

One, as we see, the rabbi's description of the two stages is absolutely supported by the biblical evidence.

In Matthew 1, verses 18 to 19, it says, Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way: when His mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together.

Okay, so there's betrothal, there's coming together—there are two stages here.

She was found to be with child of the Holy Spirit, and her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to send her away quietly.

So there are two stages: the betrothal and the coming together.

At the betrothal, Joseph is already her husband, and he needs a divorce to get out of the marriage—that's sending her away.

So just to kind of explain why this is, I alluded to this before: in the ancient world, you're a young man, you see a beautiful young woman...

You decide you're going to get married, so you get married, but you live with your dad.

She can't just come live in your house, so you need to go and prepare a place for her to live.

If her dad is dead, you have three months to do that; if her dad's alive, you have a year.

Now, there are other things, as you can imagine, with Jewish law—it gets complicated—but that's the basic idea.

You have a certain amount of time where you can go and prepare a home for her.

This is really beautifully described in the New Testament in a way that we don't notice.

Jesus, at the Last Supper in John 14, says, In my Father's house are many rooms.

If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?

And when I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am, you may be also.

That is gorgeous!

What He's saying is, Church, you are my bride.

The Kedushin is complete.

What remains to be done is for the bridegroom to go get the house ready for his wife, and then he brings her into the house.

They come together; she enters the house.

She then is under his authority, as we'll see, and that completes the second stage of the wedding.

In the Jewish Talmud, in Ketubot 48, it says, Even after she's betrothed—that is, even after the Kedushin—a daughter is always under her father's authority until she enters her husband's authority in marriage via the wedding canopy.

So the second stage of the wedding was about the transferring from being under the headship of your father to being under the headship of your husband.

It was not about consummating the marriage sexually; it was about coming to live together in the spiritual significance of whose headship you're under as a woman.

Michael Satwell, who is a Jewish scholar, talks about how during this first stage, the Kedushin, you could have sex, and there's a move away from this...

So when you're reading about this, it depends on what era you're kind of looking at because the rabbis hate the fact that they want to preserve sex until the second stage.

But in antiquity, sex was widespread in the first stage.

He says rabbinic sources indicate that at least among some Jewish communities, the perhaps lengthy period of betrothal was accompanied by decreasing expectations of chastity.

Now, I'm going to quibble with that a tiny bit, but he then quotes a Babylonian source that says in Judea, he would be together with her during the betrothal.

And then he says even in Palestinian sources, Jewish couples betrothed in Judea had a reputation for having sexual relations before the marriage itself.

Now, I would quibble with this because this suggests that they're basically getting away with something, you know, having sex during the engagement, and that's just not what's going on here.

The reason it's not scandalous for them to be having sex is because they're legally married during the Kedushin; they're just not living together in the same house.

We know this from Jewish sources.

So there's an entire part of the Talmud that's all about how the Kedushin works, and it says a woman is acquired by—i.e., becomes betrothed to a man to be his wife—in three ways.

It elaborates: through money, through a document, and through sexual intercourse.

You can contract the Kedushin either by paying a dowry, by signing a contract, or just by having sex with each other.

This is why St. Paul warns you not to have sex with prostitutes because if you and an unmarried prostitute have sex, in the eyes of Jewish law, you just got married—assuming you're both unmarried, right?

And this is how it worked sometimes.

For instance, in Genesis 24, when Isaac and Rebecca meet each other, Isaac just brings her into the tent, and they have sex, and she becomes his wife.

It's that easy.

So there's no scandal attached; there's not even a hint or a whiff of scandal with this.

They're not fornicating; they're not committing adultery; they're contracting marriage through sex.

Now, that is strange from a Western perspective.

That is not how we think of the relationship of sex and marriage.

And, you know, obviously, this is a private way of contracting marriage.

The rabbis prefer it to be done publicly through dowry or through a contract, and so they push against this third way of contracting the Kedushin.

But the fact is, you could have sex, and now you were legally betrothed.

Then you go back home to your parents' houses; you don't live together yet because now the clock starts ticking.

He can go and prepare a house for you and bring you into his home—that's how it works.

So why do I go to this length explaining this Jewish context?

Because when the angel Gabriel appears to the Virgin Mary, Mary and Joseph have already completed the Kedushin; they are legally married.

They may freely have sex without a whiff of scandal.

They also live in Judea; this is widespread; this is normal.

And yet they aren't having sex.

In Luke 1, verse 34, the RSVCE, which is the version I usually like, has a terrible translation.

Mary says to the angel Gabriel, How can this be since I have no husband?

Well, we just saw from Matthew 1 that she does have a husband, right?

Her husband Joseph is what it says.

But it turns out that's not what it actually says.

This is a euphemistic translation.

The KJV is a lot better here; she says, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?

In other words, she's not saying she's not married; she's saying she's not sexually active.

So how is she going to have a baby?

Now, that is a weird question for a married woman to ask.

You tell a married woman you're going to have beautiful children, and she says, How?

I'm not having sex with any man.

That should set off alarm bells—something weird is going on in this marriage.

The other thing that's weird going on in the marriage is, as we're told in Matthew 1, we've already seen this passage, but let's look at it with new eyes.

After Joseph is told to take Mary, his wife—that is, to complete the Nissuin—he took his wife but knew her not until she had borne a son.

Now, we focus all this attention on the until, but nobody is asking, Why in the world are Mary and Joseph not having sex?

The angel Gabriel didn't tell them to.

Are they just trying to make sure Isaiah 7 gets fulfilled?

Are they, by their own human power, trying to work the fulfillment of this prophecy?

For God's sake, what's going on here?

Why are they not having sex?

Because Gabriel didn't tell them not to have sex.

Mary acts like she's not going to have sex, and they continue for nine more months at least not having sex.

What is going on?

So this should be setting off alarm bells—something weird is going on here.

Well, let me add to this: in the Dead Sea Scrolls, we find the provisions laid out for what to do if a young girl or a young woman makes a perpetual virginity pledge in the temple.

When is it binding?

Under what conditions?

Those kinds of questions.

So the idea that the early Christians had—that Mary had taken some kind of promise, some kind of vow of perpetual virginity—makes sense in light of the Jewish understanding of marriage.

It makes sense in light of the Jewish understanding of perpetual virginity vows.

If that's true, then what Joseph and Mary are expecting out of marriage is not a sexual relationship; they're expecting something like companionship.

Women in the ancient world were really vulnerable...

Think about the care Jesus shows to the widow of Nain when her son dies.

Why?

Because she's a widow, and so she's very vulnerable as a woman in this world.

When her only son dies, she becomes much more vulnerable.

Likewise, if Mary is taking a vow of perpetual virginity, it's not unreasonable that Joseph would be an important aid and ally for her in navigating a world that was often pretty harsh, especially to women.

So it makes sense, in other words, in light of the Jewish context.

If we don't have that context, the whole thing is just mystifying to us.

Okay, so let's jump from Jesus' conception and birth to His death.

In John 19, we already saw part of this passage: By the cross of Jesus were His mother and His mother's sister, Mary the wife of Clopas.

I didn't even mention this detail: if Mary is the wife of Clopas, this is the Virgin Mary's sister-in-law.

Remember, Clopas and Joseph are married to each other, so it makes sense why His mother's sister would also be named Mary.

It would be very strange if you had like a George Foreman situation where Mary's parents are just naming all of their daughters Mary.

But if you take sister like brother to be a much more fluid term that you use for a variety of relationships, then sister-in-law you can freely call her Mary's sister.

So, His mother's sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene.

When Jesus saw His mother and the disciple whom He loved standing near, He said to His mother, Woman, behold your son.

Then He said to the disciple, Behold your mother.

And from that hour, the disciple took her to his own home.

This is remarkable.

I think if you've got to look at one passage to quickly understand why the perpetual virginity of Mary is true and why it's silly to think Mary had other children, this is the one.

This is where to go because Jesus just entrusted His mother to a non-relative, the Apostle John.

It just doesn't make sense that He would have done that otherwise.

In the Ten Commandments, Honor your father and mother, we often think about that now as like children listening to your parents.

That's not what it means.

The Ten Commandments aren't written primarily for kids.

I mean, it means that as well, but that's not all it means.

That it's about taking care of your aged parents.

And so here's Mary, like the widow of Nain, who has no husband anymore and whose son is dying.

Jesus is seen to her care, and that makes sense if Jesus is her only son.

But if she has other children, it is unthinkable in either a Jewish or a Christian context that you would entrust Mary to John.

You would entrust Mary instead to any of the other brothers.

You wouldn't even need to entrust Mary because they would step up to the plate and do that if they're even halfway decent.

What usually gets said in response to this is that Protestants will say, Well, maybe these brothers were not believers.

It doesn't matter.

First of all, the Ten Commandments were binding on Jews and Christians alike; they had a moral duty.

In fact, 1 Timothy 5, verse 8 says, Anyone who doesn't provide for his relatives, and especially for his own family, has disowned the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.

That's the Christian kind of stakes; that's how seriously we take this.

You'll find similar kinds of admonitions in the Talmud that as a Jew or as a Christian, you have a strong moral duty to take care of your aging parents.

But this also doesn't make sense because these same Protestants will say that James, the Lord's brother, is literally the son of Mary, and we know he's one of the faithful Christians because in Galatians 1:19, St. Paul says, I saw none of the other apostles except James, the Lord's brother.

So we're supposed to believe that among the apostles, our biological descendants of Mary—now sure, maybe they don't show up on Good Friday; only John does—but they get punished for life by having their mother taken away from them?

Does that make even an ounce of sense?

That even after this, when James, this allegedly biological brother of Jesus, is an upstanding member of the early Church in Jerusalem, he doesn't get his mom back ever again?

This is such a bad reading of Scripture.

You see what I mean?

When you actually try to put these pieces together and say James and Joseph, Jesus' brothers, have a different mom and dad, but we're still going to say they're His brothers...

And by the way, Mary has just been entrusted to John, who isn't one of these brothers—James, Joseph, Simon, or any of the sisters.

Allegedly, Jesus has a whole slew of family, and He just gave His mom to the permanent care of a non-relative to go live with him for the rest of her life.

Does that make any sense?

And the answer is no, it doesn't. It doesn't work.

It is such a bad argument to think that's what's going on here.

Okay, so the final thing, having looked at this through the eyes of a Jewish rather than a modern American vision of marriage, we should also reclaim a biblical vision of holiness.

Here's what I mean by that: today, when you think about holy, what comes to mind?

For many people, it is something like morally upright—someone who does good things—or, you know, maybe even like holier than thou, right?

We use it in kind of a negative sense.

But it's all about just goodness, and that is a very incomplete understanding of holiness because holiness in the biblical sense means so much more than that and is something actually radically distinct from that.

When we're talking about the Hebrew version, the Hebrew word for holiness—the definition, first and foremost—is apartness.

Holiness, sacredness, separateness—that is, something being set apart for God.

That's kodesh.

Well, likewise, the Greek hagios means something set aside for God.

It means other.

It's something separate that is just set aside, consecrated for God.

You know, think about Moses and the burning bush, where God says to Moses to remove his sandals because this is holy ground.

It doesn't mean the ground is morally upstanding; the ground hasn't done anything virtuous.

The ground is consecrated to God; it's set aside for God and to God alone.

And so to put your dirty sandals on this ground is offensive.

That's going to be a really important sense of holiness we don't use very much today, unfortunately.

That's really important for understanding how to make sense of this.

I would say Catholics do use that; you know, like holy water.

When we talk about holy water, we mean it's set aside for divine use.

But so often when we talk about holy people, we think about, you know, saintliness; we think about virtue.

But we can lose that sense of being set aside for God.

So with that important understanding, where do we see holiness in that sense in the Bible?

Well, one place we see it is the Ark of the Covenant.

In 2 Samuel 6, there's an important passage for making sense of Mary.

It says, David arose and went with all the people who were with him from Baal-Judah to bring up from there the Ark of God, which is called by the name of the Lord of hosts, who is enthroned on the cherubim.

So the Ark was this sacred container, so holy it could not be touched, that housed the Shekinah, the glory of God, the presence of God.

They're in the hill country of Judah, and David has just created the new capital in Jerusalem, so he wants to bring the Ark from the hill country of Judah into Jerusalem.

We're told he arose and went from the hill country of Judah to try to bring in the Ark, but he doesn't do it the right way.

He doesn't do it the way God told him to do it.

He just has some guys trying to move the Ark on a cart with some oxen, and they're going through the hill country of Judah.

They get to the threshing floor of Nacon, and the oxen stumble.

The Ark starts to fall off, and a poor guy named Uzzah, who shouldn't be in the situation he's in, reaches out, puts his hand to the Ark of God, takes hold of it, and he's struck dead for touching something that holy.

Now, it's easy to say, Poor guy named Uzzah, as I did, but the truth is he should not be messing around with something this holy.

It's set aside for divine use; it should not be on an ox cart led by some layman.

That's not what they're supposed to do.

It's supposed to be carried by a priestly procession.

And so he is struck dead.

David then replies, How can the Ark of the Lord come to me?

And so while he's scheming the answer to that, he stays in the hill country of Judah for three months.

He eventually is able to bring the Ark into Jerusalem, and we're told that he danced before the Lord with all his might; he was girded with a linen ephod—that's a priestly vestment.

Now, I want you to compare that to St. Luke's description of the Visitation in Luke 1, verse 39. It says, In those days, Mary arose and went with haste to the hill country, to the city of Judah.

Okay, so the verbiage is the same: she arose and went.

The location is the same; she's going to the hill country of Judah.

She goes into the house of Zechariah and greets Elizabeth.

When Elizabeth hears the greeting of Mary, the babe leaps in her womb.

So just as David danced before the Ark, John the Baptist—who is of the priestly line; he's the son of a priest, Zechariah—is dancing in the womb of Elizabeth.

And Elizabeth, filled with the Holy Spirit, cries out, Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.

And so just as David had said, How can the Ark of the Lord come to me?

Elizabeth now says, And why is this granted me that the mother of my Lord should come to me?

It's a beautiful parallel.

Then it goes on, and then jump down to verse 56. So you've got all of these very obvious parallels: she arose and went, she goes into the hill country of Judah, she has this very similar greeting between Elizabeth and David—where David says Ark of the Lord, Elizabeth says Mother of my Lord.

The dancing of John the Baptist before the Ark, Mary just like the dancing before the original Ark, David doing the linen ephod, John being of the priestly line—like all of these parallels.

And they stay for three months, and then they go back to the area of Jerusalem.

These are not coincidental, right?

This is not just like a Huh, that's a weird coincidence.

No. No, Luke expects you to be able to read this with a Jewish understanding of holiness and knowledge of the Old Testament, neither of which I think many Christians have.

He wants you to know he's depicting Mary as the new Ark of the Covenant, or if you prefer, the Ark of the New Covenant.

The Ark of the Covenant contains the heavenly manna, the bread that came down from heaven, which Jesus says He is; the Law, which Jesus fulfills perfectly; and the staff of Aaron, the symbol of priesthood—Jesus is our great high priest.

That's what's inside the Ark, and so the Ark is this sacred, totally holy vessel, so holy that it cannot be touched.

Mary, Luke wants you to know, is the fulfillment of that.

The passage that he is comparing Mary to is one where you see with the story of Uzzah that she's so holy she cannot be touched.

That's the understanding of holiness we should have there—that's the holiness of the Ark.

I want to talk now about the holiness of the Temple and of the Temple gate.

In the last nine chapters of the prophet Ezekiel, there's this lengthy description of the new Temple.

This is at the time when the first Temple has been destroyed, and the second Temple hasn't been built yet.

But it's not a blueprint for the second Temple, and in fact, when the second Temple is built, it doesn't match the things that the prophecies in Ezekiel said because there are these, frankly, supernatural descriptions.

You know, there are streams of water flowing from the side of the Temple that are living water, meaning it's fresh water, and it's turning salt water fresh.

So it's streams of living water that can take a dead thing and make it alive.

The designers of the second Temple were never going to be able to do that, and that's not what the prophecies in Ezekiel are really about.

In John 2, Jesus says, Destroy this temple, and in three days I'll raise it up.

And John tells us in John 2, verse 21, that He spoke of the temple of His body.

This is an important theme, particularly in the Gospel of John—that Jesus is the fulfillment of the Ezekiel prophecies.

So a bit later on in John 7, He says, If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink.

He who believes in me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water.

Well, the Old Testament doesn't say, Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water.

Jesus is applying the Temple prophecy to the transformation of the heart—that Jesus, from whose side will flow blood and water on the cross, those are the streams of living water that are transforming through the blood and the water, through baptism, through the Eucharist.

This is the transformation; that's what He's talking about.

He's saying what looked like a prophecy about a building is actually a prophecy of the place of divine dwelling, first and foremost Jesus, and by extension, all Christians in whom God is dwelling.

That's what Ezekiel is really talking about.

Why does this matter?

Because in Ezekiel 44, around the Temple is a gate, and it’s shut.

The angel says to Ezekiel, This 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; therefore, it shall remain shut.

That's a pretty clear description, right?

And so the early Christians looked at this and said this is about the Virgin Mary.

For instance, Rufinus, in his commentary on the Apostles' Creed, said, The prophet Ezekiel too had predicted the miraculous manner of that birth, calling Mary figuratively the gate of the Lord—the gate, namely, through which the Lord entered the world.

For he says, 'The gate which looks toward the east shall be closed and shall not be opened, and no one shall pass through it because the Lord God of Israel shall pass through it, and it shall be closed.'

He goes on, What could be said with such evident reference to the inviolable preservation of the virgin's condition?

That is, that she remains a virgin.

The gate of virginity was closed; through it, the Lord God of Israel entered.

He came forth from the virgin's womb into this world in the virgin state, being preserved inviolate.

The gate of the virgin remained closed forever; therefore, the Holy Ghost is spoken of as the creator of the Lord's flesh and of His temple.

So that's the idea.

But this is not about, you know, early Christians having some weird sexual hang-up.

They realized, look, the east gate of the Temple in the Ezekiel prophecy is holy.

God has gone through it personally, and so no one else gets to touch it.

It's not that there's anything inherently wrong with going through gates; it's that you don't go through the gate God Himself has gone through because that belongs to Him forever.

Likewise, there's nothing wrong with sex or childbirth or anything like that.

Pregnancy is great.

The problem is you don't have sex with the Mother of God; she doesn't give birth to any other children.

No one goes through the gate except Jesus because Jesus has gone through that gate.

That's the idea.

It's not that there's, again, nothing wrong with sex, nothing wrong with pregnancy, nothing wrong with childbirth.

Those are all very good things; they're all praised, right?

Like, Protestants don't think marriage is a sacrament; Catholics do.

It's weird to say both that Catholics are anti-sex and have way too many kids.

Something doesn't match up in that critique.

Well, let's go on from there because a third area we should look at is the holy tomb.

In Matthew 27, after Jesus dies, Joseph of Arimathea takes His body, wraps it in a clean linen shroud, and lays it, we're told, in his own new tomb, which he had hewn in the rock.

The question we should be asking is: why does it matter to Matthew that this is a new tomb?

Because John says the same thing; he says that Jesus is placed in the garden in a new tomb where no one had ever been laid.

Why does that matter?

Well, because the tomb of Christ is holy.

Here’s a place where God Himself rests after death; no one else is buried there.

It would be contrary to the holiness of the tomb to bury someone else in the empty tomb of Jesus.

And likewise, it would be contrary to the holiness of Mary's womb to take this womb set aside for God and have some other child.

Again, it doesn't mean there's anything wrong with burial...

It just means this is consecrated to God.

What's so hard about holiness and this understanding?

The final place we should look at are the holy virgins, and this is going to be the most controversial one because this is going to make people think, Oh, what about all these sexual hang-ups?

But listen to the actual biblical evidence.

In 1 Corinthians 7, St. Paul says, I want you to be free from anxieties.

The unmarried man is anxious about the affairs of the Lord, how to please the Lord, but the married man is anxious about worldly affairs, how to please his wife, and his interests are divided.

Then he says the same thing for women.

In other words, the virgin is able to be consecrated to God, set aside for God, in a way the married person practically isn't. I cannot live radical poverty, chastity, and obedience in the way a monk can because it would be unfitting to my married state.

It would be an injustice to my wife if I said, Honey, I sold the entire house so I can go live as a mendicant.

Bring the kids; we're going to go knock on doors and try to get food.

That's holy for a monk; it's not holy for me.

So the holiness that is described here—this being set aside for God, this consecration that Paul is describing—is a holiness of virginity.

The Book of Revelation echoes this theme.

The 144,000 who have been redeemed from the earth have a special song only they can sing, and we're told, It is these who have not defiled themselves with women, for they are chaste.

It is these who follow the Lamb wherever He goes.

These have been redeemed from mankind as firstfruits for God and the Lamb, and in their mouth no lie was found, for they are spotless.

This is a two-fold holiness being depicted here: a holiness of soul—the spotlessness of the soul, the soul inhabited by God—so no one else, namely sin, gets to dwell there.

And likewise, a bodily holiness, a bodily consecration for God, that their body is given over to God in such a way that it's incompatible with them then having sex and marriage.

Again, it doesn't mean that sex or marriage are evil; it just means a thing given to God isn't for dual use.

So, you know, the example to imagine—and this is only going to work for those of you who have enough of a sense of holiness for it to work—is that you would never, hopefully, use the chalice from Mass for a tea party or for supper because it would be radically contrary to the goodness and the holiness of the thing.

That is the biblical understanding: that there are some things that are holy, that are set aside for God, and that virginity is one way of living that out.

Now, obviously, the virginity signified bodily is only part of the story.

You could be a virgin and still be a horribly sinful person; you haven't set your soul aside, you've only set your body aside.

But the point is that to set aside body and soul for God is a rich offering to the Lord.

So that's the idea.

The reason that the early Christians cared both about Mary's sinlessness and about her perpetual virginity is because they wanted you to know she is set aside for God; she is consecrated to God.

She's like the east gate of the Temple; she's like the tomb; she's like the holy virgin as St. Paul talks about.

But most of all, we might say she's like the Ark of the New Covenant, and the Ark of the New Covenant is uniquely and radically set aside to God in such a way that nobody else touches it.

It would be totally inappropriate to put even your fine china in the Ark of the Covenant, so likewise, it would be totally inappropriate to put a child in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

So hopefully that's clear.

If you understand marriage properly and if you understand holiness properly, then you realize that the Protestant case against the perpetual virginity of Mary just misunderstands both of those in a radical and profound kind of way.

They don't get that there's something weird going on about Mary and Joseph's marriage; they don't get that marriage in first-century Judaism looks very little like 21st-century Western marriage; and they don't get that the holiness of Mary is signified and accomplished in her perpetual virginity as well as in her sinlessness.

So I hope that makes sense.

I hope that helps.

I know that was a lot of information today, but I'm hoping that it lets you see these passages in a new light because this is one of those areas where it's very obvious today to so many people that Mary was not a perpetual virgin, but it was even more obvious to the early Christians that she was.

And if we want to understand that disjuncture, we have to uncover what we've lost in our understanding of the Bible.

For Shameless Potpourri, I'm Joe Heschmeyer.

Thank you so much, and God bless you.

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