Ah, but the tradition, IIRC, is this. Joseph was a widower with several sons and daughters. He married Mary primarily to provide a stepmother to his family. I’m no expert, but it wouldn’t astonish me to find that such a pragmatic decision wouldn’t have been unusual in first-century Palestine.
If Joseph had been of a higher socio-economic status he might have hired a housekeeper/nurse to help raise his children, but he wasn’t; he married one instead.
He didn’t want any more children and, given the presumably primitive nature of contraceptive techniques at the time, and the possibility that he was already fairly old, and the nature of his marriage with Mary, is non-consummation entirely implausible? It might be quite a rational strategy.
Of course, none of that is supported by scripture, but it isn’t contradicted by it either, except possibly by the passage which describes the other children of Joseph as the brothers and sisters of Jesus. Nothing about half-brothers and half-sisters, which (overlooking for the moment the virgin birth) is how they would have been regarded.
This brings me to Dr Deth’s statement that “I will just have to conced to the experts who have said that the words used to designate James (for example) as Jesus’s “brother” mean exactly that “brother”. There is no scriptural reason to suppose that they were anything else. There is no mention that they are Jeusus “half-brothers” or cousins or anything but full siblings, born of Joseph & Mary.” I’m not in a position to contradict this, but I do question it. In our own society, the term “brother” would frequently be used of a half-brother, except where the half-blood nature of the relationship is particularly material to the point being made. Are the experts saying that that didn’t happen in New Testament Greek? Are the experts unanimous on this point? Are they saying that the term “brother”, in the context, couldn’t refer to a half-brother? Or merely that there’s nothing in the text itself to suggest that it did?
What puzzles me is that the doctrine of perpetual virginity is defined in the sixth century. Doctrines tend to be defined only when they are disputed, which suggests that it had been widely believed before it was defined (and yBeaf’s cites from Wikipedia appear to confirm this; the Protoevangium of James was probably written between 120 and 150). And for the next thousand or so years after Ephesus the entire church is pretty unanimous in accepting it; it doesn’t seem to be seriously challenged until some time after the Protestant reformation.
All this time, the Gospels were there to read, and those who believed in Mary’s perpetual virginity knew perfectly well that the Gospels referred to Jesus’ brothers and sisters. At least in the earlier part of the this period, most of them were themselves Greek speakers, so they knew what “brothers” and “sisters” meant, or could mean, in the context. They obviously didn’t see the text as inconsistent with a belief in Mary’s perpetual virginity (unless you’re going to argue that they attached no value to the gospels).
Now, I’m willing to accept that modern scholarship has given us an understanding of New Testament Greek which is better than most of our forebears have had, and that modern scholars may say flatly that the Greek term translated as “brother” in the New Testament could not mean a half-brother. But it’s not clear to me that they are saying that. If all they are saying is that, in this instance, there is no evidence in the text itself that it does refer to a half-brother, then it doesn’t seem to me that the scripture is inconsistent with the tradition.
It then comes down to the question of scripture versus tradition. If you take the view, whether as a matter of faith or otherwise, that canonical scripture is the only acceptable source of knowledge about Jesus, then you discount the early writings and tradition, you find no positive evidence in the gospels of Mary’s perpetual virginity, you find a passage which, on one very plausible reading, is inconsistent with Mary’s perpetual virginity, and you conclude, on the balance of evidence, that Mary did not remain perpetually virgin.
But you can only do this by taking the view that tradition is so unimportant that it does not need to be explained. If you take the view that tradition has some evidential value, then an interpretation of scripture which can be reconciled with a pretty strong tradition begins to look much more attractive.
