Yes it would really matter. Yes, it would change, in a word, everything.
Either something is true or it isn’t.
We have been told, as a dogmatic truth, that Mary was ‘ever virgin’. That teaching goes back to the 2nd century AD; it isn’t something recent.
Let me give you an example. In 1899 my husband’s grandmother, on a visit in Europe, met her grandmother, aged at that time 100. IOW, the grandma’s grandma was born in 1799. And the story was told to me in 1987 when my husband’s grandmother also turned 100.
So, I was talking with a woman whose own memory encompassed talking with a woman who would remember Waterloo, the war of 1812, and as an elderly woman, the U.S. Civil War. This woman was born at the time George Washington died.
So let’s picture the 2nd century AD which is the years 101-199 or so. Let’s say Jesus died in AD 33, St Peter in AD 66. A person born in AD 33 could live to be 100 in AD 133. That person could have a 12 year old granddaughter born in AD 121 who lived to be 100 in AD 221 --which is the THIRD CENTURY AD. So that grandchild by the middle of the SECOND CENTURY would have had first hand knowledge from somebody born around the time Jesus died, who would have been an adult when St., Peter died.
IF Mary had had other children, there would be enough witnesses in the SECOND CENTURY AD (and even the early THIRD) who would have known people (probably grandparents or great aunts, uncles, or cousins) who were alive when Jesus died and rose from the dead, and who personally knew the apostles AND who knew the whole family connection, etc. There would have been plenty of oral stories about Jesus’s ‘uterine brothers and sisters’ too. Nobody could HOPE to go around making up stories about ‘perpetual virgin’ if Mary had NOT been one–there were too many people who ‘knew the truth’ and who made DANG SURE the truth got told. Anybody who has studied the early Church Fathers knows that even the slightest tinge of UNTRUTH got addressed ASAP.
But instead, we have loads of uncontested teaching that Mary was a perpetual virgin. And we have absolutely NO EVIDENCE WHATSOEVER that she had any other children than JESUS.
Why does it matter? Because TRUTH MATTERS. ANY LIE is an offense against truth. . .an offense against God. And a lie which by its nature attacks God by stating that He is NOT who He is (and arguing that Mary was not a perpetual virgin is an attack which indeed states that Christ is NOT who He is) is the worst lie of all.
It matters, It matters very much.
And no, I’m not saying sex is bad between ‘married people’. But tell me, when did God divorce Mary so that she would be ffree by Jewish law to marry and have children by somebody else than God?
I mean, God is the Father of Christ, right? So either God cuckolded Joseph, just like all the ‘other’ gods, the Greeks, Romans, Egyptiansm etc, to make a ‘half god’ like Hercules. . .
Or God really thinks of women as not being ‘human’, being property, so that He can ‘use’ Mary and then turn her back over to her ‘owner’ Joseph. . .
or else God really enters into a true marriage, physical and spiritual, with Mary. . .in which case by Divine Law, which Jesus later brings up with the Pharisees, would make Joseph an adulterer if he had relations with Mary after Jesus was born. . .but would be NO PROBLEM AT ALL if Joseph and Mary never INTENDED to have relations but that he intended to protect her as women in that society were not permitted to function without a living male relative as guardian.
You see, people who leap at the 'after ’ and think Mary and Joseph were just your normal everyday couple who happened to have a half-god in the family, and then had the ‘normal kids’ later, really ARE implying that God USED Mary as an incubator, and that He then threw her as an unwanted ‘leftover’ to Joseph (who apparently didn’t CARE that she was now the mother of a half-god and just wanted to have lots of his OWN rugrats. . .)
