Mother Mary as perpetual Virgin

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Gorgias said:
Hang on a second: are you really saying that it’s not part of the Church’s teaching that Mary didn’t intend perpetual virginity?
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She intended it once she knew she would be the Mother of God.
But did she intend it at the time she was betrothed to Joseph, which was before the message from the angel?

I understand there’s a tradition in non-canonical writings that Mary’s mother consecrated her to God at an early age, that she was a “Temple Virgin” and then at a certain age temple virgins were married to men who would respect their virginity. If one believes this non-canonical tradition, then Joseph would have married Mary with the understanding that he would protect and defend her virginity because she was consecrated to God - at that point neither he nor Mary nor anyone else would have thought she was going to become Jesus’ mother.

But to my knowledge, this is not part of the official teaching of the Church, nor is it in Scripture at all. To my knowledge, it’s “Pious Legend”. (Joseph being an old man or a widower is also “Pious Legend”.)

Do you have a different understanding?

Indeed I have heard homilies and read Catholic books where Mary and Joseph are presented as just another ordinary young Jewish couple starting out in life, and planning to have their own family in the normal way, but then they suddenly learned God had planned something very different for them.
 
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Rozellelily said:
Generally speaking,did any Jews in this time commit to being lifelong virgins?
Also,was it the same for men as for women?
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We have evidence that Essenes were vowed celibates. That would be men only, but we know by that example that a life of vowed virginity was not the impossibility (or presumed sinful behavior) that some assert (in an attempt to deny the dogma of Mary’s perpetual virginity).
Rozellelily said:
If it was the case,and Joseph was a committed virgin(?)
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The traditions of the Church are that Joseph was a widower, presumably with grown children from his first marriage.
 
Gorgias said:
Ahh, but the angel asserted conception in the future , not at the present .
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It would have to be “in the future” because Mary first had to consent to this happening.

“In the future” could have been 1 minute in the future right after Mary’s “Fiat”.
 
Rozellelily said:
It just seems unrealistic that he wouldn’t in this society as expectations were grow up,get married fairly early,then have children etc…
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If I understand you right, you accept that Mary conceived from the Holy Spirit. Well, what could be more “unrealistic”, more at odds with all expectations and more life-changing than that ?

From the very start, Mary and Joseph’s marriage was destined to be quite out of the norm. When God intervenes directly in a human life, things rarely are “normal”. Think about the prophets: Jonah who is spared nothing to make him to go to Nineveh; Jeremiah whom God orders to wear a rotten belt, break pots in public, generally behave like a madman, and forbids to marry; Hosea who has to marry a prostitute.

I do not think it is coincidental if Jesus’ genealogy in Matthew mentions Rahab, a prostitute, Ruth, a non-Jew, and Bathsheba, a woman whose husband was sent to his death by the king who wanted to marry her. These are three women whose lives did not fit the social norms of their time either and who, through these “ab-normal” lives, were the instrument of God’s salvation for mankind, building up Christ’s ancestry.

Generally speaking, I am not convinced that obeying social norms and obeying God go particularly well together.
 
Betrothed can be defined as a time of “engagement period” as we know of today. It was a time period which they were regarded as husband and wife, although the marriage was not consummated until the man had prepared a place in his father’s house for them to celebrate their wedding at a future non-specified time. That said Mary would have still been a virgin since the marriage hadn’t been consummated.
 
4Reverence said:
Betrothed can be defined as a time of “engagement period” as we know of today. It was a time period which they were regarded as husband and wife, although the marriage was not consummated until the man had prepared a place in his father’s house for them to celebrate their wedding at a future non-specified time. That said Mary would have still been a virgin since the marriage hadn’t been consummated.
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Just to be clear I support the teaching of Mary’s Perpetual virginity
 
Tis_Bearself said:
She intended it once she knew she would be the Mother of God.
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Clearly.
Tis_Bearself said:
But did she intend it at the time she was betrothed to Joseph, which was before the message from the angel?
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What evidence (or even support for the assertion!) do you have that it was the case that she did not intend it prior to Gabriel’s visit?
Tis_Bearself said:
But to my knowledge, this is not part of the official teaching of the Church, nor is it in Scripture at all. To my knowledge, it’s “Pious Legend”.
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Right. But the Protoevangelium supports the dogma, not the other way around. It’s not that we believe in Mary’s perpetual virginity because the Protoevangelium says it’s so.
Tis_Bearself said:
Do you have a different understanding?
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Yes.

It almost seems that we have an anachronistic understanding of the scandal of Mary’s pregnancy, as if her being pregnant was the problem. It wasn’t. In fact, sexual relations (and conception) between betrothed spouses wasn’t unheard of and wasn’t considered sinful. So, let’s go with your idea that Mary hadn’t yet had sex with Joseph, but wasn’t planning on being a lifelong virgin until Gabriel showed up. That means that she would have had the understanding that marital sexual relations were in the cards for her. We still have the problem, then, that she asks “how?” to a question about a future event that she’s already planning on. Unless we posit that she didn’t know “the birds and the bees”, or that (as you suggest) Mary had a fundamental misunderstanding of what Gabriel was telling her, then her question “how?” makes no sense in context.

It almost seems that we have a fundamental (and anachronistic) understanding of the “problem” that the Scriptures report. When Joseph reacts to Mary’s pregnancy, he doesn’t want to “divorce her quietly” because she’s pregnant (after all, that won’t get her stoned to death!). Rather, he knows that he’s not the father, which tells him that Mary committed adultery (which would lead to capital punishment for her!). So, his concern wasn’t that Mary had sex and gotten pregnant, but that she had had sex with another man other than him.

So, to sum up:
  • if Mary hadn’t expected to be perpetually virgin, then we can’t make sense of her asking “how?”.
  • we can’t posit that the “how?” came from an expectation of having intercourse but only after the betrothal, since that wasn’t the custom of the day.
In this light, then, Mary’s “how?” seems to point to the only other possibility: she had expected to remain virgin all her life, and doesn’t see how to square that with the assertion that she will become pregnant (in her womb) and will bear a child.
 
Tis_Bearself said:
It would have to be “in the future” because Mary first had to consent to this happening.

“In the future” could have been 1 minute in the future right after Mary’s “Fiat”.
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Still, “how?” doesn’t make sense, for the reasons outlined above. “When?”, maybe. If she had expected to have relations, “how?” is the wrong question.
4Reverence said:
although the marriage was not consummated until the man had prepared a place in his father’s house for them to celebrate their wedding at a future non-specified time.
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Not so. Although this would be the most common situation, it was by no means prescriptive. In fact, sexual intercourse could precede the action of “taking one’s wife into one’s house.”
 
Well, it’s interesting to read your thought processes, but as usual, I’m not interested in arguing them.

You don’t have any “evidence” supporting your point either, since we’re not required to accept the Protoevangelium as Catholic teaching.

I myself am fine with just accepting that Mary was a virgin her whole life; whether she was planning on that before or only after the angel’s visit is a moot point, and I am not convinced by your mostly speculative arguments.

Pious legends and private revelations are interesting to read and speculate on, but at the end of the day, Catholics are free to not believe in them.
 
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By “taking ones wife into ones house” one would presume that the marriage had been consummated. In regards to the original question Mary and Joseph, had not yet consummated their marriage. Thus Her sense of confusion as to “how can this be”?
 
I don’t want this to sound disrespectful but I find it hard to grasp the idea of Mother Mary as lifelong virgin primarily because of the culture and times that she was born in in the Middle East.

I can accept that Mary was a lifelong virgin… I just do not see her being a virgin as adding any real value. I do not believe that being a virgin makes her any more holy than if she and Joseph had a normal marriage. If she and Joseph had normal relations and she had other children it would not take anything away from her…
 
Rozellelily said:
I find it hard to grasp the idea of Mother Mary as lifelong virgin primarily because of the culture and times that she was born in in the Middle East.
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This is a misunderstanding on your part. The Essenes were very much active in the 1st century AD. They gave us the Dead Sea scrolls and are mentioned by the Jewish historian Josephus, as a spiritual sect who valued highly abstinence from sex. So this concept was not unusual.
 
Rozellelily said:
I don’t want this to sound disrespectful but I find it hard to grasp the idea of Mother Mary as lifelong virgin primarily because of the culture and times that she was born in in the Middle East.
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It is not disrespectful, but actually wise to discern that some theologies are just … well … what’s the right word to use here … erroneous.

Mary was simply a woman, who was married to Joseph. The marriage bed is not defiled.

Heb_13:4 Marriage is honourable in all, and the bed undefiled: but whoremongers and adulterers God will judge.

Mary and Joseph had a normal marriage relationship, and even during the keeping apart for a period of time (as for the prgnancy) is normal:

1Co_7:5 Defraud ye not one the other, except it be with consent for a time, that ye may give yourselves to fasting and prayer; and come together again, that Satan tempt you not for your incontinency.

The blessing to both Joseph and Mary were for their comfort to one another:

Pro_18:22 Whoso findeth a wife findeth a good thing, and obtaineth favour of the LORD.

The whole ‘perpetual virginity’ is grossly erroneous and distorts the marriage relation, and the image of God (of which marriage shows), and for someone who is supposed to be the “new Eve”, as claimed, they sure miss the whole point of marriage from Genesis to begin with.
 
Dan_Defender said:
The Essenes …
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Which is non-sequitur, since there is no evidence that either Joseph or Mary ever were, and all evidence against such. They were Jews, of David’s line, who went to the Temple, and believed in the Messiah, performed that which is written in Torah, and believed in the resurrection to come (as the Pharisees did). The scripture even shows Mary listening to her relatives about the scribes and pharisees when she came looking for Jesus:

Mat 12:46 While he yet talked to the people, behold, his mother and his brethren stood without, desiring to speak with him.
Mat 12:47 Then one said unto him, Behold, thy mother and thy brethren stand without, desiring to speak with thee.

Mar 3:31 There came then his brethren and his mother, and, standing without, sent unto him, calling him.
Mar 3:32 And the multitude sat about him, and they said unto him, Behold, thy mother and thy brethren without seek for thee.
 
SetInMotion said:
they sure miss the whole point of marriage from Genesis to begin with.
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By that logic, the greatest prophet, St John the Baptist, along with Elijah and Jeremiah, also missed the ‘whole point’ then. But hey, believe what you will.
 
Dan_Defender said:
By that logic, the greatest prophet, St John the Baptist, along with Elijah and Jeremiah, also missed the ‘whole point’ then. But hey, believe what you will.
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They weren’t married. Again, non-sequitur.
 
The entire Christian Faith has held that belief, since the time of the Apostles for 1,600 years, yet your new, innovative interpretation is to be believed?

Deacon Christopher
 
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