JOHN114 - Some Christians Think Mary Was a Virgin Forever, Some Don’t

John 2:12

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Music by Jeff Foote

Transcript

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Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible Hour Podcast. And you're like, wait a minute, there wasn't music at the beginning. Yep, that means it's one of those split episodes where I talk first, then we do the music, then we pick up where we left off yesterday. Where are we picking up where we left off yesterday? Well, we're talking about a seemingly innocuous little verse in John 2, 12 that you wouldn't think would take us all the way down the rabbit hole of basically every point of tension between different Christian groups throughout history, but it comes pretty close. Here's the verse in question. We just finished the water and wine miracle at Cana. And then in verse 12 of John 2, it says, after this, he, Jesus, went down to Capernaum with his mother and brothers and his disciples. There they stayed for a few days. It's that brother's thread that we're pulling on. Does that mean brothers like other kids that Mary had because she just went on to have a normal marriage with her husband Joseph? Or is the idea of Mary having relations with her husband and other kids unacceptable theologically? Well, there's two schools of thought on that. We started unpacking that yesterday. I paused abruptly. Now we're gonna pick up right where we left off and keep unpacking that today, right after my close personal friend Jeff Foote plays us some get-in music. As you get into the 300s around the time of the Council of Nicaea, you start to see more support really developing for this idea. At about that time in history, there was also an idealization in the fourth century in the 300s A.D. among Christians of this idea of perpetual virginity. Monasticism was catching on. This is where people go be monks and they reject the flesh. After the Edict of Milan in the early 300s, Christianity was no longer persecuted. It was a tolerated religion after 314 A.D. Constantine declared Christianity a legal religion, not the official religion. That came a little bit later in the 300s when a guy named Theodosius, I think the first, made the proclamation that Christianity was the official religion of the Roman Empire. So people couldn't be martyred anymore. And martyrdom was a really big part of what fueled the Christian faith. That guy Tertullian I mentioned earlier, and another dude named Cyprian are well noted for commenting on how the martyrdom kind of fueled Christian faith. And so now that's not an option anymore. You can't get martyred anymore. Well, you got 300 years of this being a thing of great honor that points to the truth and conviction and commitment. I know it sounds weird to us now, but this thing develops in the fourth century that scholars, maybe they called it this back then. I don't know. They call white martyrdom. You don't actually die, but you think to yourself, if Jesus could do all that for me, how much should I be willing to give up for him? And this is part one of many things that fuels an exodus from normal everyday life out into difficult monastic life. And part of monastic life, for men and for women, is a vow of chastity. You're gonna reject this aspect of physical pleasure. And well, I think a lot of this crowd saw in Mary a champion of this. And also, in my opinion, in the fourth century, you start to see an uptick in people who are saying, you know, the body is kind of problematic. Pleasure is kind of problematic. You know, suffering is what gets our headspace right and our hearts right with God. Well, I mean, what could be more of an indulgence of the flesh than sex and sexuality? And so there's in the fourth century, there is kind of a dirtiness associated with sexuality that is not biblical. Song of Solomon is in the Bible for crying out loud, which I mean, you know, go look it up if you want to. Don't bring the kids. It's just a it's a book about the gift of sexuality from God to humanity and marriage and attraction. And it's just it's a lovely, beautiful glimpse into the God-ordained distant past and what love and relationships done rightly look like back then. Okay, so I disagree with the people of the fourth century who kind of got virginity fever in this regard. I'm still, you know, I I see marriage in the Bible as a wonderful institution and a gift from God. But all right, there were Christians who saw it differently. They were going through stuff I hadn't gone through. They were trying to make sense of a post-persecution Christian world. They were trying to make sense of a Christian world in which Christian faith was suddenly easy, not just easy, kind of legally mandated. It was weird. They didn't know what to do with it. And I think there was an impulse to say we need to give something up. We need to keep this thing real. It's gotta, we're gonna get soft if we don't take this seriously. And I think that it's not a coincidence that these things were happening in the minds of Christians and politically, and with persecution and martyrdom and monasticism, and that this impulse toward the the idea of Mary saying a virgin forever, uh, you know, kind of got traction at about the same time in here. Okay, well, look, after the fourth century, the scales tip, and only a few people in the 300s and 400s really publicly are willing to argue against the perpetual virginity of Mary. Jovinian Helvidius Bonessus. I've never known how to say that name. You can make fun of me if you want to. And ultimately they get struck down by church leaders, not like killed. I mean, good heavens. Yeah, I think people were fairly cool about it, but their teachings get struck down and rejected. And then over the centuries, there's increased codification of this teaching of Mary being a perpetual virgin that eventually makes it into canonicity in the Catholic Church. It's a little different understanding in the Orthodox Church, but the gist is pretty similar. Well, this uh ends up kind of affecting how the church thinks about clerical marriage in the West. The East doesn't go the same route. They're like, Mary can be a virgin, and our clergy can still get married. In the West, they were after the ninth century, they were like, Mary can still be a virgin, and so can our priests, because they're not getting married anymore. Now, in fairness, there were other pressures that caused that. Priests out in the sticks were starting to hand their title of village priest down to their sons, and the sons weren't catechized and they couldn't teach the material. They didn't even know Latin, and so the church tried to crack down on that. That's part of where the ban on clerical marriage came from. It's also part of what drove a wedge between the Eastern Church, the Greeks, and the Western Church in Rome. Okay, I'm getting pretty deep into the woods here. Eventually, you get to the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s, and an impulse had been building for a while to say, we maybe see this a little differently, we maybe see the clerical marriage thing a little differently, and the Protestants go different directions. Some of them, to this day, still affirm the Catholic teaching, which much later became officialized by the church, while other Protestants would say, no, of course Mary and Joseph had normal husband-wife relations. And when the Bible says again and again Jesus had brothers, it means Jesus had brothers, and this is all very simple. And that's how the whole thing kind of splits out. Which brings us to the final big question of the whole thing. And that is, what does it matter? How big is the ripple effect in terms of you know how it affects the rest of your theology and your church tradition and your how you read the rest of the Bible? How big a deal is it if you believe that Mary was a virgin forever versus if you believe that she was not a virgin forever? Now, some of you right now are screaming out loud, it makes a huge difference. And you see it that way from a Catholic perspective. I'll give you my take. I don't think it makes that big of a difference at all. I think, you know, it it creates some Bible gymnastics if you say that Mary was a perpetual virgin, because you got to figure out what to do with all of those mentions of brother and stuff. And it's not convenient, but you explain it away. Maybe the theory that these were brothers from a previous marriage for Joseph is it. I mean, in that case, they aren't really brothers of Jesus in any way, because Jesus' father is God and his mother is Mary, so we wouldn't actually be related to those brothers at all. Then you kind of think the text would clarify that, but it doesn't. But oh, okay, you know, maybe explain it away that way. Some people say it means cousins, that every time we see the Greek word Adelphos, that means cousins. I mean, I don't see that. Adelphos means brother, just as much as the word brother means brother, it's completely unambiguous. But smart people I respect say, well, if you look at some Hebrew traditions that predate all of this, you know, maybe in Hebrew or Aramaic, sometimes cousins would get lumped in with brothers and stepbrothers. You might use brothers for extended family. Maybe that was a Hebraism that just carried over into the Greek language here. Uh, but Luke is a Gentile, and in Acts we have an occurrence of a plural of brothers, Adelphoi. He wouldn't have thought in those categories, uh, like Hebraisms in that way at all. In Luke 8, we have another Adelphoi. So I don't know that that really holds up, but for some people, that's what they do with it. It makes sense to them. Cool. To me, it doesn't matter that much. It's not huge. I think it's weird. It's I'm not totally comfortable with it, but I'm not terribly threatened if people you want, just want to say, Well, I think Mary was a virgin forever. All right. Well, we can get along. We can go to church, no big deal. Now, I know a lot of people who believe that Mary was a virgin forever, and they would say they don't feel the same way about me. They're like, no, that's what's wrong with the you Protestants, you evangelical-ish types, is you're soft on church tradition, and you just pitch the ones that you know you you don't like, that don't fit with your presuppositions. I could make the same counteraccusation, I suppose, but you know, they feel like this is one of those places where the betrayal of the Reformation really stings. They feel like you walked away, you waded up, and you threw away some of the most beautiful traditions of the church, including this thing that really gives us a magnificently set apart female figure, not God, but female figure worthy of the highest veneration and honor to an outsider looking at it like bordering on stuff that looks like worship, but they would all be quick to say, no, no, no, it's not that. It's just high, high, high honor and veneration that we pay to her. And you Protestants, you evangelicals, you sully her by making her just a normal woman who had normal relations. You befoul the sanctified, set apart womb of Mary when you talk about it in such crass terms. But I know I've had these conversations. I know that people feel very strongly about this from an Orthodox and Catholic perspective. I totally get it. I also understand that Catholics have a complex theology of how Jesus was able to be born untouched by sin. And whereas the extremely early church and Protestants and evangelicals and me would say, well, God just picked a moment in the continuity of moms and kids being born and kind of snipped the sin out right there. And I would say, and that happened with Jesus. That's that's when that occurred. Well, Catholic theology has evolved, or uh more charitably, you could say, has been clarified and expanded over the years to talk about um what happened with Mary before all of that, to prepare her to be a holy and set-apart vessel. And indeed, some Catholic Catholics believe that Mary is sinless. They would qualify that a little differently than Jesus, but sinless. Now, I just read a document from the Catholic Church, kind of slapping the hand of Catholics for getting a little too ambitious lately in how they talk about Mary and saying, like, she needed a savior. She, like all of us, she was in need of a savior, and we should be careful about attributing to Mary some titles that we as a Catholic Church do not affirm. So this can get a little bit out of control. Even Rome, even the Pope, has affirmed as much as I'm recording this within the last year and change. Uh, Mater Populi Fidelis is the name of the document, if you want to go and look that up and put eyes on it for yourself, to just clarify exactly what Catholics mean when they speak so highly, deservedly very highly, of Mary, and to clarify what the church does not officially mean when they say that. So I say, what are the theological consequences? You know, we can get along. I know very traditional Catholics, who I value greatly, who I think are brilliant and I care about, who would say I'm missing it big time right here, and that it matters a tremendous amount, and that my playing fast and loose with historic Catholic theology about Mary actually endangers my theology and how I think about the sinless righteousness and perfection of Jesus Himself. I don't see that. I totally disagree with them. I think they are wrong, but I understand that that is their perspective. We'll work through the Bible together and you can see what you make of it for yourself. The biggest place, though, where I guess I would say I do think this question has theological consequences, is on the question of who decides. The Catholic Church affirms this and they affirm it formally, like for realsies, as you know, as doctrine. This is dogma. I mean, the church has to be right when they say things with that level of officialness. It's it's right and it's binding. So for me, the only big theological issue here is I look at it as someone who isn't Catholic and I say, uh I don't see it, and I don't submit to the authority of the organization that makes this binding claim that I don't see in the text and that I don't see in the first 130, 150 years after Jesus. And they would say, Well, it's binding. This is what the church teaches, and these are the reasons why. I'm very comfortable with cool, agree to disagree. We can still push the rock in the same direction, we can still study the Bible together and hang out. Heck, I'll go to your church if you'll have me. I'd take communion with you if you would let me. And so many Catholics I know and am friends with would just turn around and reciprocate that and be like, yeah, cool. Uh, we're gonna see this one differently. Love you. We're cool. Um, you know, some have been a little less willing to um to extend me that olive branch, and that's okay. It's a big internet, you're gonna run into all kinds of people out there, and that's all right. Long story short, we got one verse here. John 2.12. After this, he, Jesus, went down to Capernaum with his mother and brothers and his disciples, and they stayed for a few days. Seems pretty innocuous, seems like it wouldn't cause any problems, but it really does touch a sore spot. It gets into how you read the Bible, it gets into how heavily you weight the opinions of the church fathers, and it gets into the question of how heavily you weight the opinions of which church fathers. It also accidentally gets us into the question of authority to interpret the Bible in general and to declare doctrine in general. It gets us into the question of do you believe that a central organization can do that? Well, which one? Is it Rome or is it the East? Or do you believe that this is something that all Christians or all individual congregations can open the word and the scriptures are clear enough and authoritative enough that we can do that for ourselves? Christians see these things differently. It's just weird. It's wild to me that this one simple verse is what takes us all the way down that rabbit hole in all of these different directions, but we are men and women of action. Lies do not become us. I speak honestly with you. You tell me honestly what you think. I try to disclose to you my presuppositions and why I hold them. And we're adults about it, and we do not have to agree on every single thing. And I am so grateful for your charity when we touch on hard things like this, because what your charity and your grace does is it sets us up to have adult conversations and just do stuff and think together and not freak out about everything as it comes up. So the reason we can have nice things is because you're cool in agreement and in disagreement. And I respect the heck out of you for that. Okay, we got a little bit more to break down here in verse 12 and into verse 13 about what's going on story-wise, because remember, we're working through John. It's gonna be great. And we will get to all of that tomorrow. I appreciate you all so much. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.