Was the term ‘Virgin Mother’ used to refer to the early Church?

[hmikell7]

I’m currently reading through the Penguin Classics edition of Eusebius’ ”The History of the Church”, translated by G.A. Williamson. I’m having some trouble with some of the footnotes in his translation. On one page where Eusebius is talking about how there was another Cephas besides St. Peter who was guilty of some pretty serious iniquities Williamson says in the footnotes that Eusebius was mistaken. He provides no evidence for this, he just says that the author was wrong. I didn’t make too much of a big deal out of it until I came across the following passage:

and martyrs were bestowing graces on those who had failed to be martyrs, and there was great joy in the heart of the Virgin Mother, who was receiving her stillborn children back alive.

The footnote for the passage referencing the Virgin Mother claimed that the term Virgin Mother was referring not to Mary but rather to the Church itself. I searched for a good twenty minutes for any evidence at all that early Christians had used this term to refer to the Church, but couldn’t find any outside of the translator’s own writings.

Am I just making a big deal out of nothing, or is there a bit of a bias against the Catholic Church on the translator’s part? Does anyone else know something I don’t regarding the terminology used by the early Christians? Was the Church ever referred to as the ‘Virgin Mother’?

 

[Todd_Easton]

The earliest occurrence of “Virgin Mother” in reference to the Church that I could find is in a work of St Clement of Alexandria, who died about 215:

The universal Father is one, and one the universal Word; and the Holy Spirit is one and the same everywhere, and one is the only virgin mother. I love to call her the Church. This mother, when alone, had not milk, because alone she was not a woman. But she is once virgin and mother — pure as a virgin, loving as a mother. And calling her children to her, she nurses them with holy milk, viz., with the Word for childhood. (St Clement of Alexandria, The Paedagogus, Book 1, Chapter 6)

I also found some places in the writings of Tertullian, who died about 225, where he separately referred to the Church as a virgin or as a mother.