Did Mary Remain a Virgin?

There are at least four key doctrines about Mary, the mother of Jesus, which are defended by the Roman Catholic Church (RCC). These dogmas are weak or outright heretical from a Biblical viewpoint, but clung to by the RCC because of church tradition. While I affirm church tradition in a general sense, such traditions must never take precedence over Scripture because God’s Spirit and His Scriptures do not contradict. Over the next few weeks here on my blog, I intend to address, and dismantle these dogmas from the Word of God. The four core dogmas of RCC Mariology include:

• Perpetual Virginity. This is the notion that Mary remained a virgin after giving birth to Jesus, and was never sexually intimate with her husband Joseph, and gave him no children aside from Jesus (who was not biologically Joseph’s son).
• Immaculate Conception. The idea behind this doctrine is that in order for Mary to have been the vessel for bringing God’s Son into the world, she too must have been sinless. Catholics will argue that Mary still needed Jesus as a Savior, but that she was saved from sinning, not saved from sin she committed like everyone else.
• Mary as “The Mother of God”. This doctrine is based on the Greek title theotokos meaning “God Bearer” or “Mother of God”. Protestants generally reject this title, and I’ll discuss why in a later post.
• The Assumption of Mary. This doctrine insists that Mary did not physically die like most people, but that she ascended into Heaven – or, God “assumed” her into Heaven – like Christ, Elijah, and Enoch are described as having experiencing.

For today, let’s address Perpetual Virginity…

Most Protestant Christians will be quick to point out that the Bible mentions Jesus having brothers, and indeed it does. In Matthew 13, Jesus is teaching in His hometown of Nazareth, and the people were having a hard time believing Jesus’ powerful words and wisdom. So they began criticizing Jesus, essentially saying “Who do you think you are?” because they knew Him and His family who grew up there in Nazareth. In Matthew 13:55-56, “Is not this the carpenter’s son? Is not His mother called Mary, and His brothers, James and Joseph and Simon and Judas? And His sisters, are they not all with us? Where then did this man get all these things?”

The Catholic response to this, is that Protestants have misinterpreted “brothers” and “sisters”, and the Greek word we interpret “brother” can be used to describe a close relative, likely a cousin. So I examined this further as it still felt like a odd interpretation to me. The Greek word in Matthew 13:55 for “brothers” is the Greek word adelphoi, the masculine of adelphai, which is translated “sisters” in verse 56. Everywhere you look in the New Testament, these words are translated “brothers” and “sisters”. Sometimes it is figurative, such as “brothers in Christ”, but it always means the common uses of the word “brother” never the broader assertion by Catholics as “relatives” or “cousins”. Never…

In fact, in Luke 21:16 Jesus says, “But you will be betrayed even by parents and brothers and relatives and friends…” This verse is perfect for studying this, because in context, we have several similar words and examples of how they are used. “Parents” means exactly as it sounds, literally “those who beget”. The word in Luke 21 for “brothers” is adelphon (same exact word for “brothers” in Matthew 13, with a different conjugation). But the word for “relatives” is the Greek word suggenes, literally meaning “relatives, kinfolk,” for which, “cousins” could be understood. Notice how completely different adelphon and suggenes are from each other in meaning, etymology, and use. And finally “friends” is the Greek philos which is related to adelphoi, but distinct from family, siblings, or relatives.

While this was enough of a slam dunk for me to move on, I pressed a little further, giving my RCC counterparts the benefit of the doubt that I – and vast numbers of far more talented translators – may have misinterpreted the meaning of this word. In Matthew 13:55 the people of Nazareth give the names Jesus’ “brothers”. In order, they appear as James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas. All of these were fairly common names (Peter was originally “Simon”, Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus, etc.), but why would Matthew feel compelled to record the names of Jesus’ four “brothers” if they were only cousins and not more closely related as siblings as the context of the verse and common use of the words would strongly suggest?

So I reasoned that if these were the half-brothers of Jesus, and Mary had given Joseph four sons (named in these verses) and an unknown number of daughters (unnamed in Scripture), then it stands to reason that these names given, were given in order from oldest to youngest, as was the custom of the culture (For example, the sons of Jacob in the OT, Genesis 35:22-26). That would mean that after Jesus, Mary gave birth to four more sons starting with James and Joseph. So I explored that possibility in more depth…

I realized that “Joseph” was Mary’s husband’s name, and tradition would warrant naming a son after their father. We see this in Luke 1 with the naming of John the Baptist (ironically, cousin to Jesus). “And it happened that on the eighth day they came to circumcise the child, and they were going to call him Zacharias, after his father. But his mother answered and said, ‘No indeed; but he shall be called John.’ And they said to her, ‘There is no one among your relatives who is called by that name‘.” (Luke 1:59-61). By the way, “relatives” in Luke 1, is the word suggenes again, but I digress…

This seems to lend more support to the idea that Mary did in fact have more children naturally with her husband Joseph. But why would Joseph name his second son after himself rather than his first son who is named “James”? Some Catholics may use that to suggest that “Joseph” was a family name and a cousin on Mary’s husband’s side – lending to their assertion that Jesus had no siblings and Mary had no other children. Until you look closer at the first son, James.

This James is mentioned by name elsewhere in the NT (Acts 1:14, Acts 15, Galatians 1:19, 1 Corinthians 15:7…), even being referred to as the “brother of the Lord”. So out of curiosity, I went back to Matthew 1, which records the paternal lineage of Jesus through his foster-father Joseph, and found that Mary’s husband had a father named “Jacob” (Matthew 1:16). And that was when I realized that “James” and “Jacob” are the same name. In fact, “James” is the English version of the Greek name “Jakob” in the same way that “Juan” is the Spanish name for the English name “John”.

This means that according to Matthew 13:55, Joseph and Mary had four sons after Jesus. They named the first one after Joseph’s father “James” or “Jakob”, and they named the second one after their father “Joseph” before having at least two more sons, Simon and Judas, and an unknown number of daughters along the way.

Add to this the fact that Matthew 1 tells us that Joseph received a dream before dismissing Mary for being pregnant with a child that he knew was not his. And after the dream, Matthew 1:24-25 says, “And Joseph awoke from his sleep and did as the angel of the Lord commanded him, and took Mary as his wife, but kept her a virgin until she gave birth to a Son; and he called His name Jesus.” The clear implication here is that Joseph waited “until” Mary delivered Jesus, and then took her to be his wife in every sense of the wording. The clearest, and most intelligent conclusion is that they had several children, at least one of which became a leader in the church, wrote the epistle of James, and later died as a martyr for his faith in his Savior and half-brother. To suggest anything else is eisegetical.

In conclusion: There is no merit in asserting the perpetual virginity of Mary after having delivered Jesus. Nothing is gained and nothing is lost theologically for accepting the clear teachings of Scripture and church history, that God blessed Joseph and Mary after delivering Jesus, with several more children of their own. I am also somewhat disturbed by Catholicism’s obsession with Mary’s sex life within her marriage after giving birth to the Lord. As if her perpetual virginity were of theological significance in the first place. Why does it matter if she lived as a married woman, had sex with her husband, and gave birth to other children after fulfilling God’s purpose for her to give birth to Jesus? Why does anyone care?! And if we do need to explore that (for some bizarre reason), 1 Corinthians 7:1-5 teaches us that it is sin for a wife and husband to withhold sex from one another. So the idea that God commanded Joseph to wed Mary, and then forbade him from living as husband and wife (which is recorded no where), is ridiculous to the extreme of cultish superstition.

Protestants are routinely accused as “hating” Mary, and this is utterly false and slanderous. As we continue this series of blog posts, I will address a proper, Biblical approach to how we should view Mary. But in my next addition to this series, I will address the Catholic theology of Mary being sinless, known as the dogma of the Immaculate Conception.