L
larkin31
Guest
Thanks. But these don’t address my point.That is patently false. This has always been taught from the Early Church on:
In about 155 AD, Justin Martyr* (in his Dialogue with Trypho)* made the Mary-Eve parallel by saying:
“Christ became a man by a virgin to overcome the disobedience caused by the serpent …For Eve, a virgin and undefiled, conceived the word of the serpent, and bore disobedience and death. But the Virgin Mary received faith and joy when the angel Gabriel announced to her the glad tidings that the Spirit of the Lord would come upon her and the powers of the Most High would overshadow her, for which reason the Holy One being born of her would be called the Son of God. And she replied: ‘Be it done unto me according to thy word.”
(This is the Woman who is spoken of in Gen. 3:15)
Ireneus,** circa 180-199 AD** wrote, “Against Heresies”. In it, he wrote of Mary:
“Consequently, then, Mary the Virgin is found to be obedient, saying: “Behold, O Lord, your handmaid; be it done to me according to your word.” Eve, however, was disobedient; and when yet a virgin, she did not obey…. having become disobedient, was made the cause of death for herself and for the whole human race; so also Mary, betrothed to a man but nevertheless still a virgin, being obedient, was made the cause of salvation for herself and for the whole human race…. Thus, the knot of Eve’s disobedience was loosed by the obedience of Mary. What the virgin Eve had bound in unbelief, the Virgin Mary loosed through faith.”
**Tertullian **wrote in his “The Flesh of Christ” in about 208-212 AD:
“For it was while Eve was still a virgin that the word of the devil crept in to erect an edifice of death. Likewise, through a Virgin, the Word of God was introduced to set up a structure of life. Thus, what had been laid waste in ruin by this sex, was by the same sex re-established in salvation. Eve had believed the serpent; Mary believed Gabriel. That which the one destroyed by believing, the other, by believing, set straight.”
From this you can see that the idea of Mary as “the mother of all living in Christ” was something that the Church interpreted from the Scriptures from the very beginning, and would not have been alien to a First-Century reader at all - especially if they had John’s Gospel in front of them.
Just because something isn’t explicitly mentioned in the Catechism - doesn’t mean that it is not taught by the Church.