The Jesus of history proclaimed final judgment on the Israel of his generation, the Christ of faith offers mercy interminably into the future to all generations

 

 That upon you may come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel unto the blood of Zacharias son of Barachias, whom ye slew between the temple and the altar. Verily I say unto you, All these things shall come upon this generation.

-- Matthew 23:35f.

That the blood of all the prophets, which was shed from the foundation of the world, may be required of this generation; From the blood of Abel unto the blood of Zacharias, which perished between the altar and the temple: verily I say unto you, It shall be required of this generation.

-- Luke 11:50f. 

For, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed. For he that is mighty hath done to me great things; and holy is his name. And his mercy is on them that fear him from generation to generation.

-- Luke 1:48ff.   

Well, Mr. Pope, sir, the ladies aren't going to shut up about that Mary co-redeemer of the world stuff lol

 

Mary Helped Jesus Save the World

Monica Miller, Crisis 

 

Monica Miller must have had this essay in her desk drawer ready to go, just waiting for this moment to arrive. She begins right out of the gate reminding the pope, an Augustinian, that none other than St. Augustine had said

Two parents have generated us for death; two parents have generated us for life. 

The observation is as true as the comparison is false. Adam and Eve were husband and wife. Mary and the Holy Ghost were not.

Yes, St. Augustine's mother was also named Monica.

Later in her essay our Monica reminds the pope that Mary instigated her son's mission at the Wedding at Cana, dontchaknow.

She is the New Eve, the true and effective helpmate of the New Adam. 

Apart from how this is creepy connubial Christ talk, our Monica apparently sees herself in a similar light, trying to move her son the pope along in the right direction.

But kinda more like the old Eve than St. Monica, to be perfectly frank, our Monica finds her "hath God said" opening:

The [pope's] Note doesn’t say that the Co-redemptrix title for Mary is heretical but, rather, “inappropriate” and is discouraging its use for the reasons indicated. It is important to note that the document certainly acknowledges that Mary is “the first and foremost collaborator in the work of Redemption and grace.”

Doesn't say?

This is absolutely comic.

But wait! There's more:

My purpose here is to clarify and highlight that while, thus far, the Vatican has rejected the Marian title “Co-redemptrix,” nonetheless, Mary was and is God’s chief co-worker in the salvific mission of her Son.       

Thus far?

Monica is nothing if not hopeful about the future for Mary, Co-Redemptrix. And subversive:

And while the Church, for now, will not honor Mary formally under the title of Co-redemptrix, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the faithful cannot, in our private devotions, honor her in this way. 

For now?

You see what I mean. 

But our Monica rightly has every reason to be hopeful, because she understands the logic of her position, a logic which was born when the early followers of Jesus decided that their crucified master wasn't dead but was a resurrected god.

Once you introduce that first novelty, however, you have to explain where this god came from, hence the virgin birth idea, which is totally absent from Mark's Gospel, and under attack in John's. From there the novelties just multiplied.

It took a long time for that logic to do its work to elevate Jesus' mother, although our Monica highlights it already acting upon the imaginations of early Christian luminaries like Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Irenaeus, and others.

We did not get, formally, the Immaculate Conception of Mary until 1854, and the Assumption of Mary until 1950. These are modern age developments! Papal infallibility dates to 1870, Daily Reception of Holy Communion to 1905.

Mary The Co-Redeemer in 2052 anyone?

The Reformation tried, not entirely successfully, to rescue the church from this line of thinking through its rediscovery of Paul, whose thinking was nowhere Marian but Christ-centered.

The first Adam, completely counter trend, was the only man not born of woman until the last Adam. Of course Paul was not thinking this through when he said that Jesus was "born of a woman" in Galatians 4:4.

Well how did Jesus escape original sin then?

We are not told, only that as Paul's theology developed Paul plainly said that Jesus "knew no sin" (II Corinthians 5:21), and was made of different stuff:

Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam's transgression, who is the figure of him that was to come.

-- Romans 5:14

For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive. ...

And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit. ...

The first man is of the earth, earthy: the second man is the Lord from heaven.

-- I Corinthians 15: 22, 45, 47.

The answer of Matthew 1:18, 20 and Luke 1:35 is that that different stuff was "of the Holy Ghost". And that pretty much explains how the fourth and fifth centuries came to be spent, not on Marian concerns, but Christological.

The Marianists major in the minors. 

Pope Leo attempts to put an end to all that Mary "co-redeemer" jibber jabber

 

 Jesus, not Virgin Mary, saved the world, Vatican says

... In a new decree approved by Pope Leo, the Vatican's top doctrinal office instructed the world's 1.4 billion Catholics not to refer to Mary as the "co-redeemer" of the world.

Jesus alone saved the world, said the new instruction, settling an internal debate that had befuddled senior Church figures for decades, and even sparked rare open disagreement among recent popes.

"It would not be appropriate to use the title 'co-redemptrix'," said the text. "This title ... (can) create confusion and an imbalance in the harmony of the truths of the Christian faith." ...

The Roman Catholic miracle machine just keeps pumping them out, this time in the spirit of trendy inclusiveness lol

They really had to reach back for this one.

 Lourdes confirms 71st miracle — the first for an English speaker; miracle occurred in 1926

The miracle at the French Marian shrine actually occurred in 1923, but what is important, you see, is that the Lourdes Bureau confirmed it in 1926. But because of communication difficulties, the Archbishop of Liverpool never got the necessary documentation until now.

The subject had lost use of his right arm, suffered from epileptic seizures, and had partial paralysis in his legs due to "medical treatment" after being wounded in 1915 during the Great War. He was "immediately, instantly" cured by immersion in the waters of the spring at Lourdes, on the third day of a pilgrimage, of course. 

“And John Traynor is the first case of healing of an English-speaking patient,” de Franciscis said. “Most of the miracles are French. There are Italians too, a Belgian and a German. But there were not any English speakers yet.”

“I am personally sensitive to this,” the doctor concluded with a smile. “I myself am Italian, born in Naples, but of an American mother, from Connecticut!”

 

 

Advocates for Mary as co-redemptrix suffer blow, Vatican decides there is no Lourdes on the Amstel

 

In a letter dated 11 July, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) informed Bishop Johannes Hendriks of Haarlem-Amsterdam that the alleged Marian apparitions in the Dutch capital had been ruled non supernaturalitate and were therefore not recognised by the Vatican. ... 

A foundation called “Lourdes on the Amstel” ... collects funds for a planned pilgrimage church modelled on Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia to be built in the south of the city to mark these visions. It also wants Mary to be proclaimed “co-redemptrix” in Marian dogma, a cause among some conservative Catholics but not supported by the Vatican. Catholic teaching says Jesus is the only redeemer of mankind.

Read the whole thing here.

Vatican issues new norms to try to keep phenomena like Medjugorje in Bosnia-Herzegovina from getting out of hand again

Christopher R. Altieri for The Catholic World Report tends to think "Our Lady" made no appearance in Medjugorje in 1981, but will believe it if the church ever says he must.

 

He notes that the (phony) miracle is a hard case, which has, however, helped millions become better Catholics. (No word is offered on how many millions the superstition has driven away from the faith).

Altieri doesn't tell you that by 1983 the local bishop had decided that the apparitions were Franciscan fabrications, but by then it was too late because the hysteria for the site had already become a worldwide phenomenon.

On the new Vatican norms for the discernment of supernatural phenomena :

Much of the talk last week was about the new Vatican norms for the discernment of supernatural phenomena—apparitions especially, but not exclusively—presented at a press conference in Rome on Friday. ...

Under the old norms, local bishops had to talk with Rome but were free to make their own determinations. Also, and more importantly, the locals had to keep mum about their consultations. Local bishops, in other words, couldn’t say what Rome said to them about the thing(s) the locals were examining.

Local bishops, in other words, bore all of the public responsibility for judgments that were theirs only in part (if they were really the locals’ judgments at all). ...

Under the old disposition, a local bishop could issue a judgment: Constat de supernaturalitate. A judgment of constat de supernaturalitate does not quite say that a phenomenon is certainly of supernatural origin, but only that “it [clearly] evinces [signs of the] supernatural.”

The opposite of constat under the old scheme was—you guessed it—non constat (de supernaturalitate), which simply meant that there were lacking sufficient grounds for agreement on the origin of the phenomenon.

A judgment of constat de supernaturalitate did not compel an assent of faith, in other words, but only proposed its object as worthy of belief. The point is that it did propose something.

The new norms, on the other hand, borrow from bureaucratic argot to create a new category: Nihil obstat, which does not propose anything as worthy of belief but only says that there is nothing standing in the way of believing in the supernatural origin of a given phenomenon. That’s nice to know, but it really only tells us something about what isn’t there. ...

On the one hand, it is now unmistakably clear that the Vatican not only gets the final word but is involved in the investigation and adjudication of purportedly supernatural phenomena from the start. On the other hand, the Vatican will henceforth refrain from proposing even thoroughly vetted phenomena as worthy of belief and will limit itself to saying that nothing stands in the way of believing a given phenomenon to be of supernatural origin.

Mary the mother of Jesus attempted a family intervention

 

A plot for His assassination was secretly on foot. And at this juncture the incident of my text, which we owe to Mark alone of the Evangelists, occurs. Christ’s friends, apparently the members of His own family--sad to say, as would appear from the context, including His mother--came with a kindly design to rescue their misguided kinsman from danger, and laying hands upon Him, to carry Him off to some safe restraint in Nazareth, where He might indulge His delusions without doing any harm to Himself. They wish to excuse His eccentricities on the ground that He is not quite responsible--scarcely Himself; and so to blunt the point of the more hostile explanation of the Pharisees that He is in league with Beelzebub.

Conceive of that! The Incarnate Wisdom shielded by friends from the accusation that He is a demoniac by the apology that He is a lunatic! . . . 

There is nothing that commonplace men hate like anything fresh and original. 

-- Alexander Maclaren (1826-1910), Exposition on Mark 3:21

At Christmas thoughts do not naturally turn to Mary's crazy, problem child of the Gospel of Mark

Bart Ehrman, December 2014, here:

Mark does not narrate an account of Jesus’ birth. Mark never says a word about Jesus’ mother being a virgin. Mark does not presuppose that Jesus had an unusual birth of any kind. And in Mark (you don’t find this story in Matthew and Luke!!), Jesus’ mother does not seem to know that he is a divinely born son of God. On the contrary, she thinks he has gone out of his mind. Mark not only lacks a virgin birth story; it seems to presuppose that they [sic] never could have been a virgin birth. Or Mary would understand who Jesus is. But she does not.

It’s no wonder that when Matthew and Luke took over so many of the stories of Mark, they decided, both of them, *not* to take over Mark 3:20-21. They had completely different view of Jesus’ mother and his birth.

They tell me 'tis my birthday

 

 

They tell me 'tis my birthday, and I'll keep it

with double pomp of sadness;

'Tis what the day deserves,

which gave me breath.

-- John Dryden

Pope Francis decrees universal feast for Mary, "Mother of the Church", about which St. Paul knew NOTHING

You will search in vain in the New Testament for the sure basis for this Roman Catholic obsession with Mary the mother of Jesus.

Had St. Paul, for example, the slightest knowledge of this notion of contemporary Marianism, one might have expected him to have alluded to it in the straightforward way the Mary mystics do, especially whenever he discussed the related topics of virginity, fatherhood and motherhood, and the church.

It never happens.

Paul esteems virginity, for example, at considerable length in 1 Corinthians 7 (while acquiescing to marriage), however not on the grounds of Mary's supposed perpetual virginity, which he does not know. To Paul virginity was preferable not because of the example of Mary but only because of the pressures of the eschatological moment.

What's more, in Paul's theological imagination the father of us all is Abraham, and for two reasons: because of circumcision to which Abraham submitted as the first Jew; but also because of Abraham's faith in respect of Isaac, the child of the promise, through which same faith the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ now incorporates the Gentiles who similarly believe into the people of God, of whom the Jews were the first. Paul makes these arguments about the "father" at considerable length in Galatians and Romans, but there is hardly a word about the "mother". 

The only time it occurs to Paul to speak of spiritual motherhood at all, it is not to Mary to whom he refers, but to the source of faith, the heavenly Jerusalem:

 

But Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all.

 

-- Galatians 4:26

Paul's countless opportunities in his works to introduce the mundane conceptions of Marianism characteristically are passed by, doubtlessly because they never occurred to him and he probably did not know them, even from others in the church. Whatever proto-Marianism one might think to find in the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke is for this reason self-evidently quite late compared with the date of the Pauline corpus.    

The basis for contemporary Marianism is sheer casuistry, which notably raises its ugly head in the story here:

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis has decreed that Latin-rite Catholics around the world will mark the feast of "the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of the Church" on the Monday after Pentecost each year.

The Gospel reading for the feast, which technically is called a "memorial," is John 19:25-31, which recounts how from the cross Jesus entrusted Mary to his disciples as their mother and entrusted his disciples to Mary as her children. ...

Francis approved the decree after "having attentively considered how greatly the promotion of this devotion might encourage the growth of the maternal sense of the church in the pastors, religious and faithful, as well as a growth of genuine Marian piety," the decree said. /end

Of course John 19 says no such thing about "his disciples", only about the disciple whom Jesus loved,  "who from that hour took her into his own home" because Jesus in his final words on the cross had said to Mary "behold thy son" and to the disciple "behold thy mother", and promptly died.

Jesus had abandoned his mother and sisters and brothers to fend for themselves when he had embarked upon his itinerant career of preaching a similar repentance. Presumably as the carpenter's son and the carpenter, which are both attested in the evidence, Jesus had been apprentice to his father and took over as the breadwinner when Joseph was no longer in the picture. When this ne'er-do-well of a first born son left it all behind it had to hurt, for all sorts of reasons, but not the least of which was pecuniary.

In this light John's account of the final arrangements for Mary from the cross are pathetic in the extreme, Jesus' concession to his mother and friend that it hadn't turned out quite as he had expected.

If anyone had lacked the maternal sense, it had been Mary's own infamous son . . . by design. 

A Roman Catholic wants you to believe "sinless Mary" is biblical

Here:

Grace is presented (esp. in Paul) as the antithesis of sin.

To be full of such grace (simple logic) is to be without sin.

Mary was proclaimed by an angel as “full of grace” (Lk 1:28); therefore, she is without sin.

You will search in vain for the translation "full of grace" in Luke 1:28 in the King James Version, the New King James Version, the New Living Translation, the New International Version, the English Standard Version, the Christian Standard Bible, the New American Standard Bible, the New English Translation, the Revised Standard Version and the American Standard Version. Most of these say Mary is "highly favored".

Evidently the translators of these editions all must have been either a bunch of dummies, or a pack of anti-Catholic Protestant heretics to a man to get it so wrong, for so long.

The birth narratives of Jesus in Matthew and Luke were most likely composed to counter the calumny (to Christians) that Jesus was born of fornication (John 8:41). This became a bone of contention once Jesus' reputation had risen above mere "prophet" to deity. The solution to the charge of being a product of fornication was a miraculous birth to a virgin involving no human father at all.

But, of course, Mary then becomes the problem. She herself participated in sinful human nature, did she not, and therefore must have communicated it to her son, did she not?

So in Catholic theology a sinless Mary becomes necessary to stop the communication of sinful human nature to Jesus, based on tenous arguments such as above.

But then how did Mary escape the great chain of being? And if she did why was the birth of Jesus even necessary?

The whole thing quickly descends into more absurdity.

The Virgin Birth kerfuffle erupts among the Baptists, WaPo artfully avoids Roman Catholic Mariolatry and its Holy Quaternity

WaPo ends the story with this whopper, as if Roman Catholicism's thinking about Mary were less of a spectacle than that of the rubes in flyover country:

The Catholic Church teaches that the Virgin Mary was also conceived without sin to carry Jesus (the “Immaculate Conception” applies to hers, not his) and that she was “assumed” into heaven at the end of her life. Catholics name Mary as “blessed among women” and venerate her as a saint for her miraculous life.

Well not just "as a saint". She is the Queen of Heaven who reigns over the entire world and is to be worshipped, according to Pius XII in 1954:

From the earliest ages of the catholic church a Christian people, whether in time of triumph or more especially in time of crisis, has addressed prayers of petition and hymns of praise and veneration to the Queen of Heaven. And never has that hope wavered which they placed in the Mother of the Divine King, Jesus Christ; nor has that faith ever failed by which we are taught that Mary, the Virgin Mother of God, reigns with a mother's solicitude over the entire world, just as she is crowned in heavenly blessedness with the glory of a Queen. ...

It is gratifying to recall that We ourselves, on the first day of November of the Holy Year 1950, before a huge multitude of Cardinals, Bishops, priests, and of the faithful who had assembled from every part of the world, defined the dogma of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into heaven where she is present in soul and body reigning, together with her only Son, amid the heavenly choirs of angels and Saints. Moreover, since almost a century has passed since Our predecessor of immortal memory, Pius IX, proclaimed and defined the dogma that the great Mother of God had been conceived without any stain of original sin, We instituted the current Marian Year And now it is a great consolation to Us to see great multitudes here in Rome - and especially in the Liberian Basilica - giving testimony in a striking way to their faith and ardent love for their heavenly Mother. In all parts of the world We learn that devotion to the Virgin Mother of God is flourishing more and more, and that the principal shrines of Mary have been visited and are still being visited by many throngs of Catholic pilgrims gathered in prayer. ...

In order to understand better this sublime dignity of the Mother of God over all creatures let us recall that the holy Mother of God was, at the very moment of her Immaculate Conception, so filled with grace as to surpass the grace of all the Saints. Wherefore, as Our Predecessor of happy memory, Pius IX wrote, God "showered her with heavenly gifts and graces from the treasury of His divinity so far beyond what He gave to all the angels and saints that she was ever free from the least stain of sin; she is so beautiful and perfect, and possesses such fullness of innocence and holiness, that under God a greater could not be dreamed, and only God can comprehend the marvel." ...

"With a heart that is truly a mother's," to quote again Our Predecessor of immortal memory, Pius IX, "does she approach the problem of our salvation, and is solicitous for the whole human race; made Queen of heaven and earth by the Lord, exalted above all choirs of angels and saints, and standing at the right hand of her only Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, she intercedes powerfully for us with a mother's prayers, obtains what she seeks, and cannot be refused." On this point another of Our Predecessors of happy memory, Leo XIII, has said that an "almost immeasurable" power has been given Mary in the distribution of graces; St. Pius X adds that she fills this office "as by the right of a mother."

Let all Christians, therefore, glory in being subjects of the Virgin Mother of God, who, while wielding royal power, is on fire with a mother's love. ...

[M]ay Christians gather, in small numbers and large, to sing her praises in churches, in homes, in hospitals, in prisons. May Mary's name be held in highest reverence, a name sweeter than honey and more precious than jewels; may none utter blasphemous words, the sign of a defiled soul, against that name graced with such dignity and revered for its motherly goodness; let no one be so bold as to speak a syllable which lacks the respect due to her name. ...

By this Encyclical Letter We are instituting a feast so that all may recognize more clearly and venerate more devoutly the merciful and maternal sway of the Mother of God. 

-- AD CAELI REGINAM

ENCYCLICAL OF POPE PIUS XII ON PROCLAIMING THE QUEENSHIP OF MARY TO THE VENERABLE BRETHREN, THE PATRIARCHS, PRIMATES, ARCHBISHOPS, BISHIOPS, AND OTHER LOCAL ORDINARIES IN PEACE AND COMMUNION WITH THE HOLY SEE

The near poverty of Jesus' family was shown by what Mary offered for her purification after Jesus' birth

Doves in America today run about $25 while ewe lambs run upwards of $500

 

 

  

And when the days of her purification according to the law of Moses were accomplished, they brought him to Jerusalem, to present him to the Lord; (As it is written in the law of the Lord, Every male that openeth the womb shall be called holy to the Lord;) And to offer a sacrifice according to that which is said in the law of the Lord, A pair of turtledoves, or two young pigeons.

-- Luke 2:22ff.

And when the days of her purifying are fulfilled, for a son, or for a daughter, she shall bring a lamb of the first year for a burnt offering, and a young pigeon, or a turtledove, for a sin offering, unto the door of the tabernacle of the congregation, unto the priest: ... And if she be not able to bring a lamb, then she shall bring two turtles, or two young pigeons; the one for the burnt offering, and the other for a sin offering: and the priest shall make an atonement for her, and she shall be clean.

-- Leviticus 12:6,8

Perhaps it was Jesus' personal experience of exploitation of his own family's poverty which lurks in the background to this passage where he speaks directly to the sellers of doves:

And found in the temple those that sold oxen and sheep and doves, and the changers of money sitting: And when he had made a scourge of small cords, he drove them all out of the temple, and the sheep, and the oxen; and poured out the changers' money, and overthrew the tables; And said unto them that sold doves, Take these things hence; make not my Father's house an house of merchandise. 

-- John 2:14ff.

See also:

And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves,  

-- Matthew 21:12

And they come to Jerusalem: and Jesus went into the temple, and began to cast out them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves; 

-- Mark 11:15

The detail is missing in Luke 19, where the cleansing of the temple is only a summary affair.

Woman, behold thy son! Disciple, behold thy mother!

Now there stood by the cross of Jesus his mother, and his mother's sister, Mary the wife of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus therefore saw his mother, and the disciple standing by, whom he loved, he saith unto his mother, Woman, behold thy son! Then saith he to the disciple, Behold thy mother! And from that hour that disciple took her unto his own home.

-- John 19:25ff

What Kind Of Faith Is It When You Say Jesus Is Your Husband And The Father Of Your Child?

From The New York Times, here:

Evangelicals are assuring single moms that God has a plan for them, and it still includes marriage — just not in the way they expected. Rita Viselli found herself pregnant at age 35 with the child of a man she was casually dating. She was a recovering drug addict, the troubled daughter of a single mother herself, and a recent convert to evangelical Christianity. In 2000 she began a Bible study for single mothers in her living room in Southern California. She taught them what she had realized: “I have a husband. His name is Jesus Christ. I have decided that he will be my daughter’s father, and she has grown up being told that God is her father. He is real in our house,” she told me. “He has provided for me and my child better than 10 husbands could have.”

This connubial language pervades the small but growing world of evangelical single mothers’ ministries. It has deep roots in Christian spirituality. In mystical marriage to Jesus, medieval nuns and laywomen found one of the few paths to spiritual authority open to them, an escape from repressive reality. When Margery Kempe, an English mystic born around 1373, heard Jesus say “I take you, Margery, for my wedded wife,” she “felt the fire of love burning in her breast.”

----------------------------------------------------------------

What if Mary the mother of Jesus thought the same way? That God was the father of her bastard baby? Is that how the Son of God idea started in Christianity, and the idea of the virgin birth, as a kind of spiritual rationalization of a poor woman's predicament which fatefully imbedded itself in the mind of Jesus because that's what Mary kept telling him all his life?

"And call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven."

-- Matthew 23:9

For Most Protestants, It's Mary's Perpetual Virginity Which Is The Problem

Philip Jenkins, here, who notes the Feast of the Nativity of Mary on September 8th:

As recently as 1950, Pope Pius XII stated that “we pronounce, declare, and define it to be a divinely revealed dogma: that the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory.” ... [F]or most Protestants (and some Catholics), the ideas I am describing – the whole Marian lore – is so bizarre, so outré, so sentimental, and so blatantly superstitious that it just does not belong within the proper study of Christianity. If anything, it’s actively anti-Christian. Even scholars prepared to wrestle with the intricacies of Gnostic cosmic mythology throw up their hands at what they consider a farrago of medieval nonsense. ... [T]hat response is profoundly mistaken. If we don’t understand devotion to Mary, together with such specifics as the Assumption, we are missing a very large portion of the Christian experience throughout history. It’s not “just medieval,” any more than it is a trivial or superstitious accretion.

---------------------------------------------------------

That's right. The perpetual virginity of Mary is no more outrageous than the virgin birth of Christ, except that for Protestants it conflicts with the evidence that Jesus had brothers during his lifetime. To them the Romanists engage in special pleading when they say that the plain sense of these texts isn't the plain sense and should be understood in the light of the much later "apocryphal" evidence which maintained Mary's perpetual virginity and that his "brothers" must have been only his nephews or cousins.

More to the point, however, missed by most commentators, is that Jesus' rejection of normal family relationships is paramount in the Synoptic narratives mentioning his brothers and mother, and is rooted in his apocalyptic worldview of an imminent end of the world. Being tied down by a wife and children or a mother and a father and siblings, or a job or possessions or the cares of this life generally, all will hold you back and keep you from escaping from the wrath which is to come, and come soon. To repent is to turn your back on all this. The historical development is that when this Apocalypse he preached failed to materialize, this part of the teaching was transformed into an idealization of celibacy and virginity.

Was Mary's Pregnancy With Jesus "Wanted"?

Well?

"And Mary arose in those days, and went into the hill country with haste, into a city of Juda; ... And Mary abode with her about three months, and returned to her own house."

 -- Luke 1:39,56

True Religion

 

 

 

 

 

And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner.

-- Luke 18:13

The Virgin Birth Claim Was Already Strong Enough To Be Attacked By The Time Of John

Jesus saith unto them,

"If ye were Abraham's children, ye would do the works of Abraham. But now ye seek to kill me, a man that hath told you the truth, which I have heard of God: this did not Abraham. Ye do the deeds of your father.

Then said they to him,

"We be not born of fornication; we have one Father, [even] God."

Jesus said unto them,

"If God were your Father, ye would love me: for I proceeded forth and came from God; neither came I of myself, but he sent me."

-- John 8:39-42