Mary as ever virgin

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Said it before… The passage Mt 1:25 says “And he knew her not till she brought forth her firstborn son; and he called his name Jesus.” (Source, Douay Rheims and KJV - NAB uses the word “until”.)
Till/until can have two meanings. One,something will occur after a certain point. " I will wait until you arrive and then we will go to the party." or,until - up to a certain point yet not beyond. " I will not touch another cigarette until the day I die."
The church defines the word till/until in Mt 1:25 in the second sense. Those who find Catholic anathema, use the first sense of the word.

Oops, broke my promise that I was finished with this thread. Tired of those who find in scripture what they want to believe rather than what it actually says. JC, sorry I didn’t us your $24 words.
 
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I think you replied to the wrong person because I was trying to say what you said.
 
I didn’t say that Joseph knew Mary it was Sean77.
 
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Have you never read the Psalms, how it says “The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at My Right Hand til I make Your enemies Your footstool?” So according to you, doesn’t that mean after God the Father makes Jesus’s enemies His footstool, the Lord won’t sit at the The Father’s right hand?
 
joeybaggz said:
The church defines the word till/until in Mt 1:25 in the second sense. Those who find Catholic anathema, use the first sense of the word.
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This is entirely the issue on many of the problematic doctrines within the Church. Words which mean one thing, are being defined completely outside of their normal usage in order to defend a dogma, rather than allowing the clear meaning of the grammar and syntax to define what the dogma should state.

As you stated, the phrasing of the sentence is as follows: When Joseph woke from sleep, he did as the angel of the lord commanded him: he took his wife, but knew her not until she had given birth to a son. There are three clauses, he took his wife (stands alone), but (a conjunction used to demonstrate either a contrast or a dependent clause) her knew her not until (the condition which fulfills the dependent clause) she had given birth to a son.

If I had made a statement such as: But I am not going home until my work day is over… you would have no issue with the normal use of the word until meaning this action will be completed when the other is finished. However, because you have an outside source bending the rules of grammar to defend a dogma, it forces you to ignore the plain meaning of the text.

Quite frankly this is probably the least troublesome of the Marian dogmas as far as how they contradict scripture and detract from Christ, but its a great example of how far we have to go to pour meaning into the text that the text itself doesn’t support.
 
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For centuries the RCC has, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, asserted that Joseph and Mary lived a celibate life. If that is in error, I don’t believe that truth could have stood the test of time. The perpetual virginity of Mary is an Infallible Teaching of the Church. Semantics aside.
As to the problem with the word until, where would Matthew even have gotten this teaching. It had to be either from Mary herself, or from others very close to the Holy Family. And their relating of what occurred would most likely have been in the original Aramaic spoken by the people of Nazareth and Galilee. What uis the word for “until” in Aramaic? To make a hand wringing issue of the word “until” is ludicrous.
If you want to deny what the RCC teaches. As to the Church (and everyone faithful to it) should respond, “and if you come to a place that doesn’t receive you, shake the dust from your sandals as you leave that place ………” Goes for people too!
 
I would point out that Martin Luther himself taught Mary’s perpetual virginity and held the use of the word “until” to mean up to and after that point.
 
joeybaggz said:
What uis the word for “until” in Aramaic? To make a hand wringing issue of the word “until” is ludicrous.
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You can speculate all you like based on an Aramaic version of Matthew, the fact is that there is no physical evidence that an Aramaic version of Matthew ever existed. Thus far, any proposition that Matthew was written in Aramaic is purely speculation. Unless you want to base your doctrine off the exegesis of a non-existent text, we need to look at what Matthew actually says. Its a bit disturbing that you consider actual exegesis of the biblical text, and the syntax and grammar of that a secondary issue in favor of tradition that developed in the third or fourth century, relying on pseudepigraphal works. If we lay aside the apostolic witness for later works of questionable credit, why not just accept the Gnostic gospels while you are at it? Then again, that’s already been done when you read the Protoevangelion of James…
 
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Sean77 said:
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joeybaggz:
What uis the word for “until” in Aramaic? To make a hand wringing issue of the word “until” is ludicrous.
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You can speculate all you like based on an Aramaic version of Matthew, the fact is that there is no physical evidence that an Aramaic version of Matthew ever existed.
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Never said there was an Aramaic version. What I said, if you care to read it, is that the Holy Family (all 3) were from Nazareth in Galilee. They spoke Aramaic. And they spoke Aramaic to the fisherman whom Jesus called as apostles. The Gospel of Matthew, written to a Jewish audience may well have originally been in Hebrew or possibly some Greek, but either way, there had to be an translation from the Aramaic word that is now in English as “until.” It is the bane of everyone who uses Scripture that the version we read today is a translation of a translation of a translation from English to any number of languages. But the language of Nazareth and Galilee at that time was ancient Aramaic. So tell me, what is the ancient Aramaic wording that the writers of Matthew encountered in their writing of the gospel.
 
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Again you miss the point. It doesn’t matter what language the sentence was initially spoken in. Matthew was written in Greek to a Greek speaking Jewish audience. Matthew related the story to us in Greek, therefore, we have to assume he chose his words to accurately communicate his meaning. Playing the Aramaic card doesn’t all of a sudden make the sentence to mean something opposite to what was handed down to us in the Gospel of Matthew. I would say that you have a very low view of scripture if your argument is that we have no idea what Matthew related to his readers.
 
Sean77 said:
I would say that you have a very low view of scripture if your argument is that we have no idea what Matthew related to his readers.
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I miss no points. And I don’t have a low estimation of Scripture. It is just that over the years, the translations cannot be neatly perfect because of the differentiation of language. Scripture scholars have alluded to this many times.

And if anyone has a low opinion of something, it is your opinion of the 1600 years of Scripture given to us by the RCC and interpreted by them. It is the teaching of the Church that Mary was ever virgin. If you want to translate Scripture to fit your beliefs and purposes, go ahead. There are many other denominations that will welcome you and your scholarship.

I’m out of this discussion.
 
No need to get upset. All I am saying is that the word used by Matthew means X. Trying to force it to say Y without something within the text itself that leads you to that conclusion is problematic. Is there anything within that passage that leads you to believe that Matthew is saying the opposite of what this sentence does? I am all ears.
 
Obviously you never read Saint Jerome. Or Cancticles or Ezekiel for that matter.
 
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Only Protestants insist that Mary and Joseph had natural children together.
And, it is completely illogical to think that they ever did.
 
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I have read Jerome, and quite frankly his comments on the subject are embarrassingly poor in support. He essentially departs from the scriptural texts that we have that discuss Mary and Jesus siblings in favor of pseudepigraphal works written in some cases two to three centuries later.
 
The original language that the Bible is written in probably supports Jerome better than it supports you. I don’t know Greek so I trust what the apologetics say about it.
 
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It is illogical to think that Mary and Joseph, who were married, had natural children together after Christ was born? Considering Matthew states that Joseph knew his wife after she had given birth to Jesus and all the synoptic gospels mention Jesus brothers and sisters, it would seem that the most logical and natural conclusion would be to accept those statements at face value.
 
Until and did are two different things.
 
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