I’ve always found it interesting that while the Jesus story doesn’t make a lot of sense in the Jewish tradition, as you say, it makes tons of sense in the Greek and Roman tradition. Those gods cuckolded men all the time, and half human half god people were quite common. There might not have been that much Greek influence in Israel at the time, but there certainly was outside where some of the Gospels were written.
Not necessarily so. That term, like we used “Maiden” generally implies virginity, as it means “unmarried” which in those days heavily implied virginity.
Here’s a Q&A on the Catholic viewpoint (which I dont accept, fyi):
LOL. That would be the two biggest ‘sects’ of Christianity in the world, as well as the significantly sized Coptic-Ethiopian church (and Anglicanism is divided on the question).
Even the early Reformers didn’t think that Mary had other children (I think Zwingli might have, but Calvin and Luther certainly didn’t). The same early traditions from which we get the New Testament also held quite strongly that Mary was ever-virgin, so it seems to be to be painfully obvious that they didn’t mean ‘brother’ in the sense in which 21st century Americans interpret it.
Very few things in the Bible are ‘clear’, except the big and obvious stuff like “thou shalt not kill”.
Judaism doesn’t merely not have a “tradition” of consecrated virgins, it does not have a concept of them. It’s hard to explain to someone who comes from a tradition with nuns and monks how foreign the idea of swearing off sex for G-d is to Jews.
I wasn’t going to say it, but I’m glad someone did. Consecrated virgins comes from the Hellenic tradition as well.
Nitpick: Judah; there was no Israel at the time. The country had long earlier divided into the Northern kingdom and the Southern kingdom, and then the Northern kingdom got kidnapped and assimilated by the Assyrians.
In Mark 1,10 the voice that spoke to Jesus after John baptised him was that of his deceased father: You are my beloved son in whom I was well pleased (did delight). All the nonsense about Jesus being conceived by God through the virgin Mary came later. Mark, as it exists today, came about as a consequence of someone altering the text and adding large chunks to support the alterations. The original text was the script of a play that would have only been understood by a very sophisticated audience. The 12 disciples were not in this original text (definitely no St Peter). I have strong sense that Jesus in the text had a different name … the mythical basis was Greek … not Jewish.
I entirely agree with that, I just put more reliance in the fact that people often do weird and unusual things, than you or the historico-critical scholars do.
I would argue that, even. The usual interpretation is that it refers to murder, and only of fellow Israelites, at that.
But I stand by my comment. It’s a strained parsing of otherwise **unambiguous **language. If you didn’t already have that interpretation to defend there’s nothing in the language that would draw a reasonable person to that conclusion. Not once have you presented any positive evidence for the interpretation, only parsing the language to infer that it could possibly mean something different than it actually states. That brother can mean cousin does not mean that it does. I want to see some evidence that belief is intended rather than just because the people that came up with the special pleading Immaculate Conception insist upon it.
The evidence that the belief was ‘intended’ is that the earliest Christian sources outside the Bible make reference to Mary being ever-virgin, and most early Christians (with some exceptions, Helvidius and apparently Tertullian) seem to have believed it. Without a time machine we can’t interrogate the gospel writers and ask them what they meant, and unfortunately they used ambiguous terms.
“But it could happen!” isn’t really a strong basis for an argument.
I’m responding to the original question, which was “Do Christians believe the Virgin Mary stayed a virgin later in life?”
Some do, some don’t.
My father was an extremely fundamentalist minister and Biblical scholar/author. His opinion is that Jesus had siblings (actually half-siblings), who were natural children of Mary and Joseph.
I am emailing my uncle, who does not use the phone or computers on Shabbes, to see whether Aramaic indeed does not have a word for “cousin,” and if it did not, that the word for “brother” could be used instead. He’s a retired professor who actually knows Aramaic.
At any rate, Greek does seem to have had words for “cousin” and “brother,” and Josephus uses the word for “cousin” more than a dozen times in his Antiquities, according to a couple of different sources I have found, but specifically refers to James as the “brother” of Jesus, suggesting that he believed that James was the son of Mary and Joseph. I doubt, just to head off this argument, that Josephus used “brother” to mean something like “disciple,” because he has another word he uses that gets translated as “follower” in most English versions of Antiquities I have seen. Josephus has a very large vocabulary (unlike, say, Mark), and if he said something specific like brother, he probably meant that in the simplest interpretation. I doubt that he meant anything theological, the way adherents of the faith may have called one another “brothers and sisters in Christ,” since Josephus was not an adherent of the faith.
Again, a quick reminder: Virgin Birth, Eternal Virginity and Immaculate Conception are not the same thing. The first is about Jesus, is biblical and universally accepted by Christianity; the second is Catholic/Orthodox/Ethiopian teaching about Mary; the last is Catholic+(not all Orthodox) belief about Mary and only officially proclaimed as infallible teaching by the RCC.
Mary having a normal marital life with Joseph would NOT run afoul of the Immaculate Conception since marital sex is not sin.
I don’t believe they used ambiguous terms. They wrote in Greek, which has separate words for “brother” and “cousin,” and they did not seem to have a good grasp of Hebrew, let alone Aramaic-- they screwed up the “son of a carpenter” idiom, and clearly used the Septuagint instead of a Hebrew version of Jewish scriptures. They also wrote long after Jesus’ own lifetime. I doubt they actually met anyone they were writing about, or even anyone who met anyone they were writing about. They were not interested in verisimilitude, because they miss many, many opportunities for it. To use a Greek word to mean something it doesn’t, when they have a precise Greek word for their meaning (plus, a Greek word that means “relatives”), just to try to reflect the spoken language of Jesus on this one specific occasion, when they never did so on any other occasion, and in general don’t appear even to know that language, is really, special, special pleading.
Then, I don’t know that Aramaic doesn’t have a word for cousin. I’m waiting to hear from my uncle.
Genesis 13:8 “And Abram said to Lot, Let there be no strife, I pray you, between me and you, and between my herdsmen and your herdsmen; for we be brothers.”
But they were Uncle and nephew.
1 Cor. 15:6 "After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep."
Matthew 5:22King James Version (KJV)
22 But I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment: and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council: but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.
The term “Brother” was not always used to mean biological sharing same Mother and Father. Just like today.
Mind you, I am pretty sure that James, ect were Jesus’s biological siblings, but but no means is it “clear”.
English has separate words for ‘cousin’ and ‘brother’ too, but again, I know plenty of Indians (including some who speak English better than any other language and live in America) who use ‘cousin’ to mean ‘brother’, in English.
Likewise, “But their religion and culture forbids it!” isn’t a strong basis for the claim that someone didn’t do something.
It’s evidence, however, which “It could happen!” is not.
Yes, but if there was a doctrine, or at least a knowledge, that Mary was ever-virgin, why say something that would, on a plain reading, be confusing?
And every example of “brother” used non-literally in the Tanakh has a very obvious and specific reason-- to communicate that the relationship feels (or should feel) as close as a sibling, even if the people are not actual siblings.
I don’t sense anything in the gospel passage that these are cousins to whom Jesus felt especially close-- in fact, it’s the opposite.
And FWIW, Hebrew does not have single words for “cousin,” but it has expressions, “uncle’s daughter,” “aunt’s son,” etc., which are actually more specific. And they are treated like single words, sort of like “fair play.” It’s a compound term.
No one who speaks Hebrew would say “brother” for cousin, because Hebrew “doesn’t have a word for cousin,” anymore than an American would stumble around searching for a term for the concept “fair play,” just because English does not have a single word term.
I’m going to guess that Aramaic will turn out to be similar.
So does Tamil (you can in theory say 'son of the father’s brother") but I very commonly hear people say “brother/sister” anyway, used by people speaking in English.