Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] The Perpetual Virginity of Mary and Related Topics by Bart Ehrman in my post yesterday, I made an off the cuff reference to the Catholic doctrine that Mary was a perpetual virgin, and I indicated that I'd explain more about that and related issues in a later post. Well, this is the post when talking about the births of both Mary and Joseph and related topics involving sex and conception, there's a number of terms that are often confused, especially but not only by those who are or who have been most connected to Christianity through the Protestant tradition.
[00:00:36] The Immaculate Conception.
[00:00:38] This doctrine is not about Jesus mother conceiving as a virgin. It's about Mary's own mother and how she conceived Mary. Mary in Roman Catholic thinking did not have a sin nature, otherwise she would have passed it along to Jesus. But how could Mary not have one if she were born and raised like every other human?
[00:00:59] The answer came in the medieval notion of the Immaculate Conception. Mary herself was conceived by her mother Anna. Miraculously, God did a miracle so that even though Mary was conceived through the sex act, she was not given a sin nature Virginal Conception this is the actual view of Matthew and Luke that Jesus mother conceived without having sex. And it's not the same thing as the term virgin birth. Even though people, including scholars, including me, often use a shorthand description of the virgin birth stories of Matthew and Luke, that's probably confusing shorthand because of virgin birth.
[00:01:39] Technically speaking, this refers to Mary giving birth while still a virgin and in other words, she not only conceived without sex, but her hymen remained intact and even after giving birth.
[00:01:51] This was the later view of church fathers and can be found early on in the intriguing book called the Proto Gospel of James and the Perpetual Virginity of Mary.
[00:02:03] This was the view that Mary never had sex to the end of her life.
[00:02:07] This became the standard view in Roman Catholic circles. Mary was without a sin nature because of the Immaculate Conception and was never involved in sin in any way, including passing on a sin nature to others by giving them birth. The sin nature has given a child at conception during the sex act.
[00:02:25] But if Mary was a perpetual virgin, then why is it that, as I pointed out in yesterday's post, Jesus is said to have brothers and sisters in the New Testament? See Mark, chapter 6, verse 3. See also John 7:3.
[00:02:40] This was the one issue that my students at Rutgers, who were largely Roman Catholic, had problems with when I taught the New Testament there, unlike my Evangelical Protestant students at unc who had no problem with Jesus mother having other children, but who couldn't stand many of them. The idea that the Bible could have mistakes in it. My Rutgers students would often go ballistic if I claimed that Jesus had siblings. So here's what I say about the Catholic view of Jesus brothers in my book, Did Jesus Exist?
[00:03:11] As a side note, I should point out that the Roman Catholic Church has for many centuries insisted that Jesus did not actually have brothers.
[00:03:19] That does not mean that the Church denied that James and the other brothers of Jesus existed or that they were unusually closely related to Jesus. But in the Roman Catholic view, Jesus brothers were not related to Jesus by blood because they were not the children of his mother Mary.
[00:03:36] The reasons the Catholic Church put forth for claiming this, however, were not historical or based on a close examination of the New Testament texts.
[00:03:44] Instead, the reasoning involved a peculiar doctrine that had developed in the Catholic Church dating all the way back to the fourth Christian century.
[00:03:52] In traditional Catholic dogma, Mary, the mother of Jesus, was not simply a virgin when Jesus was born, but she remained a virgin until the end of her days. And this is the doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Mary.
[00:04:06] In no small measure, this doctrine is rooted in the view that sexual relations necessarily involve sinful activities.
[00:04:14] Mary, however, according to Catholic doctrine, did not have a sin nature she could not have had, otherwise she would have passed it along to Jesus when he was born. So she herself was conceived without the stain of original sin. This is the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.
[00:04:31] And since she did not have a sin nature, she was not involved in any sinful activities, including sex.
[00:04:37] That's why at the end of her life, rather than dying, Mary was taken up into heaven. And this is the doctrine of the assumption of the virgin.
[00:04:48] Protestants have long claimed that none of these doctrines about Mary is actually rooted in Scripture. And from a historian's point of view, I have to say that I think that they are right.
[00:04:59] These are theological views driven by theological concerns that have nothing to do with the earliest traditions about Jesus and his family.
[00:05:07] But if for Roman Catholics, Mary was a perpetual virgin and never did have sex, who exactly were the so called Brothers of Jesus?
[00:05:18] There were two views of the matter that Catholic thinkers developed, one of which became standard in the older of the two views. The brothers of Jesus were the sons of Joseph from a previous marriage.
[00:05:30] This made them, in effect, Jesus stepbrothers.
[00:05:33] This view can be found in later apocryphal stories about Jesus birth, where we are told that Joseph was a very old man when he became betrothed to Mary.
[00:05:42] Presumably that's one of the reasons why they never had sex. Joseph was too old.
[00:05:47] This perspective continued to exert its influence on Catholic thinkers for centuries.
[00:05:52] You may have noticed that in all those medieval paintings of Jesus Nativity, Joseph is portrayed as quite elderly, as opposed to Mary in the blossom of youth.
[00:06:03] This is why I should stress that even if this view were historically right, and there is not a single piece of reliable evidence for it, James would still have been unusually closely related to Jesus.
[00:06:17] Eventually this view came to be displaced, however, and in no small measure because of the powerful influence of the 4th century church Father Jerome.
[00:06:26] Jerome was an ascetic himself, among other things, denying himself the pleasure of sex.
[00:06:32] He thought that the superior form of Christian life for everyone involved was asceticism.
[00:06:38] But surely he was no more ascetic than the close relatives of Jesus. For Jerome, this meant that not only Jesus's mother, but also his father, who was not really his father except by adoption, were ascetics as well.
[00:06:50] Even Joseph never had sex, but obviously that means that he could not have had children from a previous marriage.
[00:06:57] And so the brothers of Jesus were not related to Joseph.
[00:07:01] They were Jesus cousins.
[00:07:04] The main problem with this view is that when the New Testament talks about Jesus brothers, it uses the Greek word that literally refers to a male sibling. And there is a different Greek word for cousin. This other word is not used of James and the others.
[00:07:19] A plain and straightforward reading of the texts in the Gospels and in Paul leads to an unambiguous result. These brothers of Jesus were his actual siblings.
[00:07:30] Since neither Mark, which first mentions Jesus having four brothers and several sisters, chapter six, verse three, nor Paul gives any indication at all of knowing anything about Jesus being born of a virgin. The most natural assumption is that they both thought that Jesus's parents were his real parents.
[00:07:48] They had sexual relations and Jesus was born, and then later came other children to the happy couple.
[00:07:56] And so Jesus brothers were his actual brothers.
