The Perpetual Virginity of Mary (Part 1 of 4)

     St. Joseph is nowhere mentioned during Jesus' ministry, least of all in places where you would expect it, so it is normally assumed that he had already passed away by then. Nevertheless, complications would have arisen if he had died while Jesus was still a teenager. Probably, therefore, Mary and Joseph were married for 20 to 25 years. Yet it is an article of faith in the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, and accepted by many of the Reformers, that this marriage was never consummated, that it was completely sexless and, not only that, that this was a good thing, an act of piety. This doctrine is held with an emotion which is highly resistant to logic. Centuries of devotion to the Holy Mother has turned her, in the view of many, into an ethereal figure on a pedestal far above normal human experience. Along with centuries of the monastic adulation of celibacy, it means that idea of her being carnally touched by a man produces an almost visceral response that it is an attack on her sanctity. Anyone would think that a virtuous wife and mother is less holy than a virgin! Also, it is a teaching of their church, and their world would start to collapse if they at once admitted that the church might have got it wrong.

      Nevertheless, it has got it wrong.

The Perpetual Virginity of Mary. (Part 2 of 4: Sacred Tradition)

     In Part 1 we looked at what the Bible says, or doesn't say, about the purported perpetual virginity of Mary, the mother of Jesus. Now we shall examine the earliest Christian writings to see whether they can provide any evidence for the doctrine.

The Perpetual Virginity of Mary (Part 3 of 4: Stepsiblings)

      You will often hear it said that Jesus' brothers and sisters were the children of Joseph by an earlier marriage. After all, their attitude towards Jesus resembles the resentment of older children over the success of the baby of the family. I suppose younger children never resent their eldest brother. Nevertheless, there are a couple of problems with this, irrespective of the lack of evidence.

The Perpetual Virginity of Mary (Part 4 of 4: Cousins)

      St. Jerome is famous as the scholar who produced the Vulgate, the standard Latin translation of the Bible. As such, his other writings became hugely influential. Jerome was a monk particularly obsessed with ascetism: the denial of the pleasures of the flesh. And he had a special animus against marriage, even going so far as to say that St. Peter had wiped out the filth of marriage with blood of martyrdom. The warmth of married love was outside of his world view; he seems to have no concept of marriage except as a channel for sexual desires. Virginity was the highest virtue, and marriage, according to him, was of value only in producing more virgins. So you may guarantee that he did not take it lightly when another writer contradicted this world view.