Perpetual Virginity and Tradition

The biblical data regarding the Blessed Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus of Nazareth, may be summed up as follows:

1.  According to the Bible, while there is no place for praying to Mary or worshipping her (forget all that subtlety that garden-variety adherents know nothing about, the distinction between dulia, hyperdulia and latria), we are to regard her, along with Saint Jael*, as the most blessed of women, because she was the Mater Dei in terms of the human nature of the Second Person of the Godhead. (Judges 5:24; Luke 1:42, 43)

2.  There is nothing remarkable about her conception and birth in Scripture, and there is no hint there of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception (On December 8, 1854, Pope Pius IX, while sitting on the papal throne, i.e. ex cathedra, pronounced and defined that the Virgin Mary “in the first instance of her conception, by a singular privilege and grace granted by God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the human race, was preserved exempt from all stain of original sin.” ).  According to Roman Catholic tradition, Mary’s mother and father were Anne and Joachim, but the Jewish Talmud implies that her father was Heli. (as per Luke 3:23, Cf. John Lightfoot, Hebrew and Talmudical Exercitations upon the Evangelist St.  Luke, Oxford: 1859, p. 55.)

3.  As with other biblical people of faith, such as Abraham (who in moments of weakness allowed his own wife to become part of the harem of other men, Genesis 12:10 ff.; 20:1 ff.), at times Mary vacillated in her faith. 

In the early days of our Lord’s earthly ministry, we are told “even his own brothers did not believe in him.” (John 7:5), and at one point that his family (HOI PAR’ AUTOU, probably referring to his extended family, but the phrase may be broader or narrower) came to take him away, because they believed that he had lost his mind. (Mark 3:21.).

Evidently influenced by these relatives, not only Jesus’ unbelieving brothers, but his own mother showed up shortly afterward to try to reason with him:  ‘Then Jesus’ mother and brothers arrived. Standing outside, they sent someone in to call him. A crowd was sitting around him, and they told him, “Your mother and brothers are outside looking for you.”’ (Mark 3:31, 32.)

Jesus’ response to them is most telling in its implication:  ‘”Who are my mother and my brothers?” he asked.  Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.”’ (Mark 3:33-35.) The implication is that at this stage of his ministry, not even his own mother was a believer.

At the very least, this incident underscores that, as with us, Mary was not saved by the strength of her faith, but by the strength of the object of her faith, the Lord Jesus Christ, whose active and passive obedience is the only hope of anyone, including the Virgin Mary.

 She and his brothers did eventually become a true followers of the Lord Jesus Christ:  “They all joined together constantly in prayer, along with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers.” (Acts 1:14.)

Taken at face value, the Scripture strongly implies that Mary and Joseph engaged in regular conjugal activities, and the result was a typically large Jewish family of half brothers and sisters to our Lord, as can be seen from the biblical data.

One may note that I stated, “Taken at face value,” because it is hard to read the Bible without being unduly influenced by Christian tradition.

There are many things that our Lord has given us to help us in our understanding of Scripture, and we can be thankful that we do not have to “reinvent the wheel,” but can take advantage of the decisions of the ancient Ecumenical Councils, the Protestant Confessions and the myriad of exegetical and linguistic tools available today.  But our consciences are not bound by any of these things, only by the Bible.

Sola Scriptura does not mean that we are guided only by the Bible, simply that of all the things that God has given us, only Scripture is infallible, and therefore:  “The supreme judge by which all controversies of religion are to be determined, and all decrees of councils, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private spirits, are to be examined, and in whose sentence we are to rest, can be no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture.” (Westminster Confession of Faith, I, x., hereafter, WCF.)

Furthermore, “The infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is the Scripture itself: and therefore, when there is a question about the true and full sense of any Scripture (which is not manifold, but one), it must be searched and known by other places that speak more clearly.” (WCF, I, ix.)

Now to cut to the chase:

The ancient extra-biblical writings are of very uneven value when it comes to shedding light on Apostolic doctrine.  One of the best things that Bishop Ryle ever wrote was:  “There are many who talk much in the present day about ‘the voice of the primitive Church.’  They would have us believe that those who lived nearest the time of the Apostles, must of course know more about truth than we can.  There is no foundation for any such opinion.  It is a fact, that the most ancient writers in the Church of Christ are often at variance with one another.  It is a fact that they often changed their own minds, and retracted their own former opinions.  It is a fact that they often wrote foolish and weak things, and often showed great ignorance in their explanations of Scripture.  It is vain to expect to find them free from mistakes. Infallibility is not to be found in the early fathers, but in the Bible.”  (J. C. Ryle, Warnings to the Churches (London, 1967), p. 100)

Every time I read of people’s appealing to the ancient writers, I wonder if they are using secondary sources or if they have actually ever waded through some of this stuff.  Even before I became a Christian, I loved to buy books, and about thirty years ago I bought some from a Methodist preacher down the road.  That afternoon, as I sat down in my study with my latest treasure, I began to read the Didache.  As I read, I came across this gem:  “Your fasts must not be identical with those of the hypocrites.  They fast on Mondays and Thursdays; but you should fast on Wednesdays and Fridays.” (The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, Commonly Called the Didache in The Library of Christian Classics, Volume I.  Early Christian Fathers (Philadelphia, 1953), p. 174)

Sometimes, as I have read the ancients, I have been reminded of the Wisdom of Jesus:  “In a shaken sieve manure (KOPRIA) is left behind, so the crap (SKYBALA**) of man (is seen) in his reflections (calculations, reasoning, sentiments).” (Sirach 27:4)

Our knowledge of the Church from the time of the Apostles until the time of Constantine has many gaps.  Certainly, we have isolated texts that have been preserved, but nothing like the comprehensive and accurate record of theological development that can be studied from the Renaissance and Reformation forward because of Gutenberg’s invention.  Also, prior to the Edict of Milan in A. D. 313, Christianity was an outlaw religion, and its adherents were ofttimes sadistically tortured by the civil authorities.  In such a milieu, where the Church was likely to be sucked into the maelstrom of persecution, much of what they did was hidden from public view.

What we know of the Church after Constantine’s vision at the Milvian Bridge is that when Christianity became the established religion of the Empire in 324, the Church frequently became suborned by the intrigues of politicians, emperors throwing their weight to one party or another as they thought would best strengthen their political power.  It was politics that gave us both the Third and Fourth Ecumenical Councils:  Ephesus in 431, and Chalcedon in 451.  The first real pope in the modern sense,*** Leo the Great, wrote that both the Nestorian and Eutychian heresies had been overcome largely by the efforts of the Roman Empress Pulcheria. 

Even though I believe that God gave us a biblically accurate definition of the relationship of the two natures of Christ in his one person at Chalcedon in A.D. 451, the proceedings were hardly a gathering of objective scholars, piously studying the Scriptures.  The Empress Pulcheria was a true, power hungry, somewhat paranoid, Byzantine, dwarfing the later Niccolo Machiavelli with her cabals.  She had been politically threatened by Eudoxia, the wife of her brother, the Emperor Theodosius II, and both women looked to the leaders of the Church in order to gain the upper hand.  In the providence of God, both the Patriarch of Constantinople, Nestorius, and the archimandrite of a nearby influential monastery, Eutyches, crossed Pulcheria, and the rest is history.

After Pulcheria’s brother’s death on July 28, 450, she was officially proclaimed Empress, but she needed a husband in order to secure her political power, and she chose a general named Marcian on the condition that he should never attempt to have sex with her.  Her strange demand was rooted in her fanatical desire to imitate her notion of the mother of our Lord.

My point is this:  if we did not have the influence of a huge number of people with repressed libidos, no one would ever read the perpetual virginity of Mary back into the biblical record.

*  Identical words are found in the LXX and the GNT, but with different parsing of the same verb, aorist passive optative versus perfect passive participle.

* * Ceslas Spicq, The Theological Lexicon of the New Testament, (Peabody, MA, 1994) Vol. 3, pp. 263-265.

* * * Leo I wore the title well when he returned from stopping Attila the Hun from sacking the city of Rome in 452, and the citizens shouted “Il Papa.” In the East the State was dominant over the Church even after Constantine XI was killed by Osama bin Laden’s predecessors in A.D. 1453.  In the West, after the implosion of Roman civil authority, the Church came to function in the role of the State, the Pope becoming a kind of glorified Kofi Annan.

Bob Vincent