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NHInsider
Guest
Not accepting the teaching of the Church is a whole other subject. But I would like to point out that the scholar who posited the whole sola scriptura theory also vociferously defended the Perpetual Virginity of Mary.First: we were asked why scripture apparently tells us He had siblings but the Roman church (but not all others) teaches that He didn’t. Second: I’d trust scripture over the church any day. Human run the churches.
We weren’t talking about interpretations, we were talking about translations. And when the New Testament writers quote Scripture, they quote the LLX. The Masoretic text only dates back to the tenth century.If you want to quote Hebrew Scriptures you should quote the Hebrew Scriptures, not a translation of them. Jesus would have been familiar with the interpretation of those scriptures, and so would the writer of the gospel.
I’ve observed before that I am extremely skeptical of people who think that from a distance of 18 or 19 centuries they can do a better job of figuring out what an ancient manuscript meant than those who were reading it within a few decades of its being written, and who had access to many more copies and supplemental materials which have since been lost. Even absent the guidance of the Holy Spirit, in purely human terms the ECF, most of whom still spoke the original languages, had a better contextual understanding of the gospels than we do.It was very clear to the Jesuits with whom I did post-grad study, and any examination of the context, and the contrast Jesus made between those whom the crowd described as His brothers and those whom He considered His brothers should make it clear that the word for brothers is being used firstly as siblings and then as those of like mind.
Then why should we accept the scripture? It is the teaching of the church.The Roman church has also taught, for many centuries, that Mary Magdelene was a prostitute, and there’s no reference to that in scripture. As humans we get things wrong, so we should ask scripture for answers, and not just take what the church teaches as gospel.
Circular argument. You believe that adelphi has to be “sons of the same mother” and therefore that the use of the term confirms that the adelphi are other sons of Mary. I don’t believe the word has such a limited meaning and so the use does not prove this to me. Given the fact that we have so many examples of uses of the term that clearly do not have the more limited meaning, along with all the other points made in this thread, I think the traditional position is stronger. Many Reformers, having rejected the authority of the Church, still came to the same conclusion.and in contrasting what the others were saying with what He was saying Jesus gives as strong an implication as possible without actually saying it, that those described by the crowd as His brothers were, in fact, siblings.
The reality is that the reason this issue is of any interest at all to Protestants is because they believe it proves that the Church’s teaching authority doesn’t exist. The fact that this conclusion completely undermines the authority of the Scripture on which they claim to rely doesn’t faze them. Apparently they believe that they have been given the charism of infallibility instead, at least on the doctrines they believe are important. Or, in some cases, they’ve gone so far down the road that they don’t think it really matters - even if Jesus isn’t the Son of God, he’s still a great teacher, etc.The reality is that scripture does not tell us that Mary was a perpetual virgin. That was an early church construct which has been taught, without proper examination, for centuries. The line of reasoning that says she would have been stoned to death for having a sexual relationship with another man whilst her first husband (God/Holy Spirit) was alive is not valid because it would never have been thought of, let alone accepted, in Christ’s lifetime. Please remember also that the church refused for 400 years to apologise to Galileo because of action it took in response to his claim that the earth wasn’t the centre of the universe. We get things wrong. Some of us take a lot longer to accept that we have been wrong. Sometimes that’s because we think our faith will fall in a heap if some things we’ve been taught for years is actually not valid.
