Thank you, Mark, this is great. I had never made the connection between the Ark of the Covenant and the person of Mary. This answers several of my questions. However I still wonder if someone - some teacher in the Church - ever seemed to make another connection, that one about the respect a husband has to show his wife… Too much emphasis seems to have been put on the wife submitting to her husband, leading many men to assume that they could “lord it” over their wives… Of course I understand that this is the way of the world, but I have not seen much evidence of teaching to the contrary being given to men!

this is beautiful! i always thought that joseph was a good man, and this just furthers that belief. it must have been overwhelming for him to realize that God found him such a worthy vessel, that someone like joseph should be worthy to raise the Son of God as his own, under the Law must have been terrifying for him. i think it’s one thing to see someone else as holy, but to know that you, too, are worthy in the eyes of the Lord, is a very powerful thing. i can certainly see why he would have felt it easier to let mary go away without him than to try to live up to his own expectations.

You still hven’t answered my question. What is wrong with Joseph having sex with his wife, Mary. I infer from what you say that sex is dirty, or demeaning or unworthy of her or makes her “unclean.” Of course by implication that makes all of us married people unclean or dirty or unworthy. There has been a fringe in the church which has tried to make celibacy and virginity a higher calling or vocation. Nonsense!

There is nothing “wrong” with sex.  The question is “Does the evidence point to the fact that he did?”  The answer is, “No.”  And it is entirely a product of your imagination that this implies sex is dirty.  Virginity is seen as the sacrifice of something good, not the renunciation of something bad.  Calling Mary the Ark of the Covenant is not exactly declaring her unclean.  And marriage, recall, is a sacrament—one of the Big Seven.  It is gnosticism, not Catholic faith, that calls sex dirty and defiling.  Interestingly, it is also post-modern American culture that calls it that, particularly condemning Catholics for having large families.  The Church’s attitude is not “marriage and sex evil/virginity good” but “Marriage and sex good/virginity better”.  That’s not some Dark Ages corruption on the original teaching of Jesus.  It *is* the original teaching of Jesus (who was himself a virgin):

Now when Jesus had finished these sayings, he went away from Galilee and entered the region of Judea beyond the Jordan; and large crowds followed him, and he healed them there. And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” He answered, “Have you not read that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one’? So they are no longer two but one. What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder.” They said to him, “Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce, and to put her away?” He said to them, “For your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for unchastity, and marries another, commits adultery; and he who marries a divorced woman, commits adultery.” The disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is not expedient to marry.”  But he said to them, “Not all men can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. He who is able to receive this, let him receive it.” (Matthew 19:1-12)

Paul reflects exactly the same idea of marriage good, virginity better, summing it up by saying, “he who marries his betrothed does well; and he who refrains from marriage will do better.”  That’s not “fringe”.  That’s the teaching of Jesus and the apostles.

Anon
As Mark said, read Mt. 19 about eunuchs for the sake of the Kingdom. In Holy Matrimony the husband and the wife have rights to each others bodies, see 1 Cor. 7. St Paul is talking about ordinary, every day Christian life.  In Mt. 19 the eunuchs for the sake of the Kingdom are those who have been called to the service of God and His Kingdom.  Christ Himself says that not everyone is called to this state of life. In celibacy and virginity for the sake of the Kingdom the marital conjugal rights to one’s body are surrendered to God.  The body of one so dedicated to the service of God and His Kingdom becomes a reserved vessel, set aside for God alone.

Such was his intention when, behold, the angel of the Lord* appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary your wife into your home. For it is through the holy Spirit that this child has been conceived in her.
21
She will bear a son and you are to name him Jesus,* because he will save his people from their sins.”
22
All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet:
23
* k “Behold, the virgin shall be with child and bear a son,
and they shall name him Emmanuel,”
which means “God is with us.”
24
When Joseph awoke, he did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took his wife into his home.

Maybe Joseph did not want to be caught messing around with the Holy Spirt’s wife!

I’m sorry, I was really hoping you’d convince me about the perpetual virginity of Mary; it’s a doctrine I would like to believe in. I don’t think you’re saying sex is bad. But Mary and Joseph WERE married, and you’re asking us to believe that they chose to remain chaste despite this, and lacking any specific instruction from God to do so. The burden of making that case, then, is on you.

And maybe you’ve got more to add. But concerning Joseph, you:

1. Failed to establish that Joseph made any connection in his own mind between Mary and the Ark. You just assume that he did, and ask us to make the same assumption.

2. Then you ask us to believe that Joseph would have further assumed that God did not want him to have relations with his wife, on the basis of what happened to Uzzah. But Uzzah was smote after merely putting his hand on the Ark. Why wouldn’t Joseph have believed, by this logic, that merely touching Mary would have angered God? Surely, at some point in their marriage, he would have touched her, as Uzzah touched the Ark.

3. You fail to explain why Joseph would not have taken his own message from the angel—“do not fear to take Mary your wife”—as precisely the sort of “permission” you say he didn’t think he had. If someone told me to take someone as my wife, I would assume that they understood all the activities that marriages usually include. I would not assume that they were telling me to have a sexless marriage.

Numbers, chapter 30, sets down all the requirements, under the Mosaic Law, for consecrated virgins to be married. In these cases, the prospective husband would be required to either affirm or deny the continued virginity of the prospective bride. Once the husband gave his consent, both would be permanently bound by their vow. Read it carefully and I think you’ll see that Numbers, chapter 30, was written with the Blessed Virgin Mary in mind. God believes in fully informed consent.

Quibbling point, Origen was a great scholar but not a “father” of the Church. Not “saint” Origen, but someone to take seriously.

Having had 2 comments rejected all I can say is that Joseph and Mary were advised by God and accepted His choice for them. Virginity and chastity are not the norm in today’s society. It is not easy today for young people to follow the word of God. To doubt His words is easily debated but we have a duty to express a desire to see virginity and chastity more widely accepted by our youth.

Some of the comments are a distraction. May I switch gears. Mary was asked to be a mother, said she did not have sexual relations yet. Some interpret that to mean she had taken a vow of chastity yet was engaged, our modern word not exactly the original. Now, Joseph wanted to set her aside, the Angel’s dream, take her as your wife. His desire to divorce her quietly in a small town would have scandalised both families and close-knit neighbours. Did he have a choice to decide on celibacy, there is absolutely no evidence to indicate Mary told him she was pregnant by the power of God, why would be want to run? Overwhelmed by the burden is not rational, would be have walked given the culture/ Being a just man seems to indicate he was willing to accept this and arguments about a mutual commitment to celibacy is not an obvious choice from the actual texts.

Jon:

You wrote:

I’m sorry, I was really hoping you’d convince me about the perpetual virginity of Mary; it’s a doctrine I would like to believe in. I don’t think you’re saying sex is bad. But Mary and Joseph WERE married, and you’re asking us to believe that they chose to remain chaste despite this, and lacking any specific instruction from God to do so. The burden of making that case, then, is on you.

Only if you believe that the way you arrive at Christian teaching is to simply read the Bible and then construct a belief system all on your own.  If, however, you believe as Catholics do that the way you arrive at the Christian faith is not by simply reading a text, deciding for yourself what it means, and moving full speed ahead with your private interpretation, then the shoe is on the other foot.  Because revelation then proceeds with a Teaching Church (which exists before the Bible) handing you a Bible and saying, “Here is what this book means.”  So when the Church says, with enormous unanimity, “This book means that Mary was ever-virgin” the onus is on you to tell that ancient tradition it is unequivocally wrong.  Good luck with that.  Particular since you already rely on that Church’s tradition for a lot of other tools to interpret ambiguous texts. (Go here to get a sense of what I mean.)

And maybe you’ve got more to add. But concerning Joseph, you:

1. Failed to establish that Joseph made any connection in his own mind between Mary and the Ark. You just assume that he did, and ask us to make the same assumption.

My point is not to “prove” that Joseph made these connections.  My point is to show that the very recent dogmatic assumption of a small minority of Protestants that Scripture flatly contradicts the perpetual virginity of Mary is false.  There is, in fact, no real scriptural evidence against it (the “brothers of Jesus” are, in fact, the children of “the other Mary” the wife of Clopas) and the text is very patient of a read that supports the ancient tradition, including this text.  I don’t have the burden of “proving” the Perpetual virginity of Mary from the Bible.  The Protestant has the task of showing why, after accepting lots of other Sacred Tradition from the Catholic Church (see the link I provide) he suddenly has the right to ignore Sacred Tradition on this point.  In order to do that, the Protestant must show that Scripture absolutely contradicts the Tradition.  My point is that he cannot show this and that the Scripture provides abundant clues that the tradition is, in fact, derived from the apostolic witness.

2. Then you ask us to believe that Joseph would have further assumed that God did not want him to have relations with his wife, on the basis of what happened to Uzzah. But Uzzah was smote after merely putting his hand on the Ark. Why wouldn’t Joseph have believed, by this logic, that merely touching Mary would have angered God? Surely, at some point in their marriage, he would have touched her, as Uzzah touched the Ark.

I’m simply suggesting that there is a reasonable psychological rationale for Joseph’s behavior that, in fact, reflects the Tradition.  The really surprising thing is that Protestantism so easily accepts the notion that Joseph, who was “afraid”, just snapped out of it and went back to regarding his family as being just as ordinary as any suburban American family.

3. You fail to explain why Joseph would not have taken his own message from the angel—“do not fear to take Mary your wife”—as precisely the sort of “permission” you say he didn’t think he had. If someone told me to take someone as my wife, I would assume that they understood all the activities that marriages usually include. I would not assume that they were telling me to have a sexless marriage.

Again, the point is not to prove the PVoM from the text.  It is to point out that the Protestant who mysteriously assumes that the Bible is a slam-dunk witness against the Tradition has not really thought that claim through.  Scripture can, in fact, be read in a way that bears witness to the Tradition, while the passages the Protestant uses to “prove” the Tradition false do nothing of the kind.  In short, you are reading Scripture through the lens of a human tradition, while the bulk of the evidence favors the Catholic tradition of interpretation here.  What there is zero evidence for is sola scriptura.

You cite that Jesus was a virgin, celibate. Well he had to be either celibate or married. If He was married and had a wife that would mess up a lot of Marian theology. I have heard that argument used to defend priestly celibacy. Following that kind of logic, Christ was a Jew, therefore caucasian. Does that mean that African Americans and Asians cannot be priests. Of course not. Iis faulty logic.

It appears to me that you are really strtching this revelation approach a long way to try and find a rationale for Mary as a perpetual virgin. You also haven’t made the case that virginity is better than marriage. I repeat that there are those in the church whose agenda makes them look better by establishing that principle. And I still don’t see how Mary having sex with Joseph dimishes her. I bet there are theologians who could make the case that it enhaces her. Of course they don’t dare say anything to that effect.

Yes there have been enuchs in the church. I seriouly doubt that they did that as mature adults and without pressure. There is a new book out about a whole lot of eunuchs. It is called “The Castrada.” Two or three hundred years ago the institutional church would not allow women in the sanctuary. The choirs were thus deprived of soprano voices and so they used young boys. But young boys grow up and their voices change. A number of those were “persuaded” to accept castration for the good of the choir. Today we would call that sex abuse.

You cite that Jesus was a virgin, celibate. Well he had to be either celibate or married. If He was married and had a wife that would mess up a lot of Marian theology. I have heard that argument used to defend priestly celibacy. Following that kind of logic, Christ was a Jew, therefore caucasian. Does that mean that African Americans and Asians cannot be priests. Of course not. Iis faulty logic.

This made no sense.

</i>It appears to me that you are really strtching this revelation approach a long way to try and find a rationale for Mary as a perpetual virgin.</i>

No.  What I am doing is pointing out that the very recent rejection of the PVoM by a small minority of Protestants who believe the false human tradition of sola Scriptura depends on showing that the PVoM *contradicts* Scripture.  My point is that it does not.  Since Protestants already accept all sorts of other aspects of Sacred Tradition, the burden is on the Protestant to show that their innovative rejection of Sacred Tradition is justified.  It’s not, since Scripture does not, in fact, contradict the Tradition.

You also haven’t made the case that virginity is better than marriage. I repeat that there are those in the church whose agenda makes them look better by establishing that principle. And I still don’t see how Mary having sex with Joseph dimishes her. I bet there are theologians who could make the case that it enhaces her. Of course they don’t dare say anything to that effect.

I repeat: It is Jesus and Paul who make the case that virginity is a higher state than marriage.  Meanwhile, it is you who insist in thinking the Church says “Marriage bad/virginity good” despite having been clearly shown that the the Church says “Marriage good/virginity better”.

Yes there have been enuchs in the church. I seriouly doubt that they did that as mature adults and without pressure.

“Eunuchs for the kingdom of God” is Jesus’ reference, not to physical castration, but to celibacy.  Church teaching opposes mutilation.  In the same way, when Jesus says it is better to cut off your hand than enter into hell with both hands, he is using a figure of speech, not urging people to go around lopping off hands.  The point here is that Jesus, himself a celibate, commends celibacy, just as St. Paul does.  So it is not a “fringe” idea, as you claimed, but something comes from Jesus and the apostles.

Mark, I really appreciate that you are able to take the time to personally reply to some of these comments. Not that I need to be convinced myself, since I come from a different culture (French Canadian from Quebec) that seems to be less argumentative about such matters than some people who’se opinions I often see coming from US Catholics… But you still help me to much better understand some points of my faith, and your further explanations are very good. And (if it is not too much of an infringement of copyrights) I have been copying some of this in my own computer, for further use, for example with discussions with other non-Catholic Christians among my friends. Thank you.
However I would still like to read your opinion on Joseph as a model to be presented to Christian husbands…

Thanks Marthe:

Feel free to copy away.  I haven’t given a lot of thought to Joseph.  Maybe someday!

Mark, you are bringing some strange things to my attention—and yet, perhaps in proper context, not so strange. When I entered the Eastern Orthodox Church after many years of Protestant iconoclasm, there were a number of things taught by the tradition of the Church that I found strange and difficult. But the very wise older priest who catechized me used to patiently urge me to “let it settle” (in other words, avoid a knee-jerk reaction). Now that I have completely returned to the Catholic fold, I find this counsel still valuable. This is one of those “let it settle” things.

Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I second the other comboxer who expressed appreciation for you taking time to respond directly to some of the comments.

Just for clarity, I’m not a Protestant. I’m comfortable entirely with your assertion that Protestants have failed to prove that Scripture denies the PVoM, as you seem to be willing to concede that it does not prove the PVoM. In my view the Scripture is ambiguous on the subject. I don’t know whether Mary was or wasn’t perpetually a virgin. To me, the simple fact that she was a married woman whom God did not command to remain chaste suggests that she probably wasn’t, and while I think it would be nice to believe otherwise, there’s nothing you’ve offered that would allow me to.

Certainly not your contention that I should believe it because the Church says so, so nyah nyah, nyah. Unless I can “prove” otherwise. Please. No such onus is on me. There is no proof one way or the other. Again: I’m not a Protestant. I’m not a “bible only” person. Nor am I looking for proof, really. But to say that one religion must prove its assertions while another may simply make thinly supported assertions that are to be taken as Truth because of “the Tradition” is simply preposterous. So what I’m looking for, instead of proof, is simply a basis for an “infallible” church belief that can’t be shot full of holes by a rank amateur.

The church, like all churches, is comprised of men and women, entirely fallible. It’s doctrines are as prone to error as any other church. Including the “infallible” ones.

Jon:

With respect, you are a Protestant.  It is characteristically Protestant to regard apostolic tradition and the Church as fallible and subject entirely to your private interpretation.  It’s quite true that the Scriptures are ambiguous about the PVoM.  They are also ambiguous on a host of other matters, including most things that orthodox Christians regard as “clear biblical teaching”.  That’s the point of the link I shared above to chapter from my book By What Authority.  The reality is that the way Christians till Protestantism read the Bible was *through* the lens of Sacred Tradition.  Post-Reformation, various Protestants started reading Scripture through a cracked lens of Sacred Tradition, human opinion, and private judgement.  Scripture says the Church is the pillar and bulwark of the truth.  You are essentially arguing that your private opinion now fills that role.  So when the Church says something is infallibly so (which is what a dogma means) you reserve to yourself the right to chuck it if you feel like.  That’s Protestantism.  And you are right that rank amateur shoot holes in that all the time.  Rank amateurs shoot holes things they do not understand all the time.  Just look at six day creationists.  They shoot those fancy pant scientists who know what they are talking about full of holes all the time.  What they don’t do is understand what they are talking about.

At the end of the day, the only way you even know what books belong in the Bible, much less how to understand them, is because those books are the written testimony of the Church.  Chesterton described your position very well:

“[L]ooking back on older religious crises, I seem
to see a certain coincidence, or rather, a set of things too coincident
to be called a coincidence After all, when I come to think of it,
all the other revolts against the Church, before the Revolution and
especially since the Reformation, had told the same strange story.
Every great heretic had always exhibit three remarkable characteristics
in combination.  First, he picked out some mystical idea from
the Church’s bundle or balance of mystical ideas.  Second, he used
that one mystical idea against all the other mystical ideas.
Third (and most singular), he seems generally to have had no
notion that his own favourite mystical idea was a mystical idea,
at least in the sense of a mysterious or dubious or dogmatic idea.
With a queer uncanny innocence, he seems always to have taken
this one thing for granted.  He assumed it to be unassailable,
even when he was using it to assail all sorts of similar things.
The most popular and obvious example is the Bible.  To an impartial
pagan or sceptical observer, it must always seem the strangest story
in the world; that men rushing in to wreck a temple, overturning the
altar and driving out the priest, found there certain sacred volumes
inscribed “Psalms” or “Gospels”; and (instead of throwing them on
the fire with the rest) began to use them as infallible oracles rebuking
all the other arrangements.  If the sacred high altar was all wrong,
why were the secondary sacred documents necessarily all right?
If the priest had faked his Sacraments, why could he not have
faked his Scriptures?  Yet it was long before it even occurred
to those who brandished this one piece of Church furniture
to break up all the other Church furniture that anybody could be
so profane as to examine this one fragment of furniture itself.
People were quite surprised, and in some parts of the world are
still surprised, that anybody should dare to do so.”

The result today is what I call the semi-permeable membranes of the various Protestantisms.  It works this way and is on full display in your approach here:

If a thing is condemned by the Church, but permitted by the Protestant (say, gay marriage) the demand is for an explicit text forbidding it (“Show me where Jesus said one word about not allowing gay marriage! That’s just the Church imposing its purely human ideas on what Jesus came to say.”).
 
Conversely, if a thing is allowed by the Church but condemned by the Protestant, the demand is for an explicit text commanding it. So, for instance, we get demands like, “Where in the Bible do you find anyone asking us to pray to dead people? That’s just the Church imposing it’s purely human ideas on what Jesus came to say.”

Result: Protestants affirm the Trinity and demand all Christians to likewise because Scripture doesn’t forbid it, but get to reject the PVoM because the Scripture doesn’t command it.  Catholics are consistent: reading all Scripture in light of apostolic tradition and taking seriously the word of Jesus to the apostles and their successors the bishops: “He who listens to you, listens to him who sent me”. 

My recommendation: go and read By What Authority.  The reality is not that Catholics believe in Sacred Tradition and you don’t.  It’s that Catholics believe in Sacred Tradition and know they do, while you believe in Sacred Tradition and don’t know you do.  All I’m saying is, “Since you already accept large chunks of Sacred Tradition, you need to be consistent and either show why the rest is contradicted by the Bible or accept the whole magillah.”

Why do say I “already accept large chunks of Sacred Tradition”?

On the contrary, I reject most of it. I’m actually a former Catholic. And while I’ve never set foot in a Protestant church (save for weddings and such), I think you’d be hard pressed to find one (certainly a conservative one) whose members wouldn’t run me straight out as fast as they could.

Protestantism AND the Sacred Tradition are both wrong on some things, imho.

“So when the Church says something is infallibly so (which is what a dogma means) you reserve to yourself the right to chuck it if you feel like. That’s Protestantism.”

Quite so. And yes, it is characteristic of Protestantism, but not uniquely so. It’s also characteristic of non-Christian religions, non-theists, and the fastest-growing church in the US, Not Religiously Affiliated.

Jon:

Do you accept the canon of the New Testament?  Do you support monogamy?  How do you know how to go about the process of getting married?  Where do you find that process detailed in the Bible?  Do you believe Jesus is God?  Do you believe the Holy Spirit is God? Do you think God created the universe from nothing? Do you think human life is sacred from the moment of conception?  Do you think public revelation closed with the death of the apostles?  If you answered Yes to any of these questions, you already accept Sacred Tradition to some degree and read Scripture through the lens of Sacred Tradition.

Being not religiously affiliated is simply a sociological outcome of Protestantism.  Theologically, the idea comes from Protestantism and nowhere else.  It’s fine if “not affiliated” happens to be where you are right now.  I’ve been there myself.  But the point remains that, as Chesterton said, the purpose of an open mind, as of an open mouth, is to bite down on something solid.  The Bible is not a book that floated down from heaven.  It’s the written tradition of a particular community and if you want to really understand it well, you need to situate in that community, just as, if you want to know what the Constitution meant to the people who wrote and preserved it, you don’t just read it and say, “here’s what it means to me personally.”  You read the Federalist Papers and look at who the American people have understood it via such institutions as the Supreme Court, the Congress, and the Executive.

That’s not a perfect analogy, since the Constitution precedes and is the foundation of the US, while the Church precedes and her tradition is the foundation of the Bible (the Bible was no fully collated till nearly four centuries after the founding of the Church, though all the biblical documents hail from pre-Christian Judaism or the first century).  But the point is that reading the Bible apart from apostolic tradition is not going to get you a “pure” reading uncluttered by human junk.  It will just get you an encounter with Scripture completely cluttered up with you personal junk and no voice to correct your mistaken impressions, notions, fetishes, and misunderstandings.  Listen to the Church and you have a million wiser heads to help you navigate a difficult and complex text.  Listen only to yourself and you’re stuck in an echo chamber.  It’s the reflexively “safe” option of a generation and a culture that long for community while being deathly afraid of it.  But it’s not how we would approach any other text—especially any other ancient text—in a dead language from a foreign culture.  Nobody says “I don’t need any help understanding Homer or the Epic of Gilgamesh.  My heart tells me what them mean.”  But people talk such nonsense about the Bible all the time.  If you read Homer, you find a commentary in order to understand what all the allusions and references and puns are and you listen to experts who have studied the text for a long time.  Common sense says, you do the same with Scripture since the odds are extremely good you are missing about 99% of what’s there.  My point in this discussion is that those who instantly reject the PVoM are on the basis of a snap judgement are missing an awful lot of what’s there.

You’re putting words in my mouth.

I have not said in this discussion, nor ever, that simply reading the Bible alone is enough by itself. In fact the reason I’ve been reading your columns on the PVoM is in my attempt attempt to understand its basis. Your prior column, exploding the myths and half-baked interpretations of many Protestants (concerning the incorrect use of the word “until,” for example) was spot-on. So this time I was expecting not a refutation of others’ beliefs but a firm explanation of the basis of Catholic belief—if not a Biblical passage that clarifies matters, then something extra-Biblical (if that’s a word), from perhaps other source material of the time. (Something akin to the Federalist papers, to borrow your analogy.)

I couldn’t agree more that “reading the Bible apart from apostolic tradition is not going to get you a ‘pure’ reading uncluttered by human junk.” I’ve not said that reading the Bible alone is a good way to understand it, and I don’t think that.

But you say the church is a teaching church. Yet a teacher explains. A teacher lays all her cards on the table. A teacher transparently clarifies the basis of her lessons. A teacher does not say “This is true because I say it’s true, and I’m wiser than you so just believe it.” That is a bad teacher, even if what she’s badly teaching is, in fact, true.

Chesterton was right about the purpose of an open mind. But the person who rejects this manner of “teaching” does so because he finds it not “solid,” but brittle.

Thanks again for a good discussion.

You’re putting words in my mouth.

I have not said in this discussion, nor ever, that simply reading the Bible alone is enough by itself.

No.  What you are saying is that your private judgement about the Bible trumps the teaching of the Church and is the final arbiter of the Bible’s meaning.  I’m pointing out that this is not how the apostles or the Church they founded read their Bibles.  For Paul, it is the Church, not the Bible, that is the pillar and ground of the truth.

In fact the reason I’ve been reading your columns on the PVoM is in my attempt to understand its basis.

And I appreciate that.  My point though, is that the Protestant culture in which Americans swim teaches them to look for, as you put it, a “basis” for a belief in a text.  But gospel is not, according to the Church, “Bible-based”.  The Bible is not the “foundation” or “basis” for Catholic belief.  It is the *witness* to Catholic belief.  Sometimes that witness is explicit in the text.  Sometimes it is implicit in the text.  But since the whole Tradition is handed down, not simply in the text, but in the common life, worship and teaching of the Church, the Church often knows things through its tradition that the text does not spell out clearly.  I gave a potpourri of such matters in my reply to you.

Your prior column, exploding the myths and half-baked interpretations of many Protestants (concerning the incorrect use of the word “until,” for example) was spot-on. So this time I was expecting not a refutation of others’ beliefs but a firm explanation of the basis of Catholic belief—if not a Biblical passage that clarifies matters, then something extra-Biblical (if that’s a word), from perhaps other source material of the time. (Something akin to the Federalist papers, to borrow your analogy.)

I’m getting to that in future columns.  Please be patient.  The simple fact is, the post apostolic Church habitually refers to Mary as “ever virgin” because that is the common memory of the Church in north, south, east, and west, across a dozen languages, tribes, and tongue.  There are two ways of approaching that broadly preserved tradition.  We can say that everybody everywhere all accidently got it wrong in exactly the same way everywhere the Church spread—or we can assume the much more reasonable idea that a tradition attested with massive unanimity is due to the fact that that is what the apostle taught the Church’s they founded.

I couldn’t agree more that “reading the Bible apart from apostolic tradition is not going to get you a ‘pure’ reading uncluttered by human junk.” I’ve not said that reading the Bible alone is a good way to understand it, and I don’t think that.

Okay.

But you say the church is a teaching church. Yet a teacher explains. A teacher lays all her cards on the table. A teacher transparently clarifies the basis of her lessons. A teacher does not say “This is true because I say it’s true, and I’m wiser than you so just believe it.” That is a bad teacher, even if what she’s badly teaching is, in fact, true.

That’s not what I’m saying.  I’m not done making the case yet.  What I’m trying to head off is the notion that one’s private judgement trumps the testimony of broadly attested apostolic tradition (and Mary Ever-Virgin is extremely broadly attested).

Chesterton was right about the purpose of an open mind. But the person who rejects this manner of “teaching” does so because he finds it not “solid,” but brittle.

Have patience till I’m finished, please.

Thanks again for a good discussion.

And thank you.

Read more: http://www.ncregister.com/blog/mark-shea/josephs-witness-to-marys-perpetual-virginity#ixzz28H3icAb2

I think a lot of Protestants misunderstand us when we claim their “interpretation” of Scripture is wrong.  We tend to sound as if OUR interpretation is correct.  Like it’s OURS against THEIRS.  It’s not that their interpretation isn’t reasonable.  It’s not that we can’t see it their way.

In fact, it is precisely because we CAN see it their way that we reject it.  We know that if left up to each individual, there are hundreds of perfectly reasonable ways to read Scripture.  But Scripture is not meant to be reasoned out.  It’s Divinely Revealed Truth and there is an God appointed Authority that gives us the valid interpretation.  So while I can say “Yes, I see why you would say that the Bread of Life discourse could be viewed as metaphor”, I must also say that “seeing” it does not make it so.  I defer to the Authority.

Mark: I went to your link regarding Evangelical dependence on Holt Tradition. It was excellent.  With Gnosticism again in the ascendancy in our post-modern paranoid culture, your caution to the Evangelical community becomes especially apropos. It is a particularly seductive heresy. Thank you.

“Holt” is, of course, “Holy.”

Billy:

Thank you!

Mark, very good article.  I like your perspective on how people thought back then (more spiritual, not over-sexed) as opposed to how they think today (materialistic, over-sexed, etc.)

Greetings,

I came upon this blog after promising a Protestant Bible Study that I would do some research to answer a question.  How do you reconcile the doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Mary with Matthew 1:25 which says that after Joseph awoke from his dream he took Mary as his wife but “knew her not until she had given birth to a son.”  Since the phrase “knew her not” is a Biblical euphemism for sexual relations how do we reconcile this verse with the doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Mary.  Not trying to be argumentative here.  Just trying to be enlightened and expand my understanding of Scripture and another faith tradition.

Blessings to you all in this Advent Season.

Cannot recall author or Bible OT reference Dr H but learned a long time back about an exact use of the phrase in the OT which explains that UNTIL did not presume action later. We know that being MOTHER OF GOD’S own SON would leave a poor couple- two doves for the TEMPLE offering for Purification, not the more expensive lamb - either cash or emotional energy to raise another Kid!