Summer hours continue. Daily Episcopalian will publish every other day this week.
By Derek Olsen
The second argument over Mary’s virginal status is a little different. In asking whether Mary had relations with Joseph after the birth of Jesus, we leave the realm of the creeds and what must be believed and we enter the realm of tradition and what may (or may not) be believed. We also enter into a much more speculative domain. Like the issue of Jesus’ own virginity, this is a question that later interpreters were more interested in than the evangelists. As a result, later interpreters sift through the texts, looking for evidence and weighing nuances that may or may not be there. At the end of the day, what is found seems to be driven more by interpretive agendas than by the (very) limited evidence itself.
This question, like the first question, is not a new one. The status of Mary’s perpetual virginity was debated then as it is now. As a result, there’s less point in hashing out the arguments then in pointing back to when these arguments originally took place. Right around the year 383, an otherwise unknown author named Helvidus wrote a tract on the Blessed Virgin Mary. It doesn’t survive, but apparently he argued that Mary and Joseph really did consummate their marriage physically, that the individuals referred to in the gospels as the brothers and sisters of Jesus were the biological children of Mary and Joseph, and—building on these points—that the married estate was a more natural and preferable estate for Christians than celibacy. And there we get to the crux of the argument; it’s less about what Mary did then and more about what we should do now.
A little background is helpful here. By the year 383, Christianity had been legalized, and, in 380, had just been declared the state religion by Theodosius I. Furthermore, in 382, Theodosius had issued an edict that, among others, passed a death sentence on a group called the Encratites. Groups identified as Encratites had been around since the first century. The historian Eusebius links them with Tatian around 172; the later heresy-hunter Epiphanius connects a group holding similar views with a leader named Severus who probably flourished after Tatian. In any case, these folks were noted for their ascetical extremism. They drank no wine, ate no meat, and had no sex. Their practices represent a gnostic rejection of creation as a good act by the good God, and they were suppressed by the Church as being either Gnostics or a form of Manicheans.
Around the same time, though, the early monastic movement was on the rise. A reaction against the Constantinian acceptance of Christianity and a flood of politically motivated converts, monasticism sought to embody the rigors of the Gospel and to search for the kingdom of God and its virtues through ascetical means. Monastics ended up looking quite a bit like the Encratites to some. The key difference between the Encratites and the early monks, though, was that the monks maintained that one could be a Christian and be married: celibacy was preferable but not necessary. For the Encratites, one could not be both sexually active and a Christian. At the end of the day, the Encratites were suppressed while the monks went on to gain ascendency, and, in the West, achieved the legislation of clerical celibacy as well.
So, Helvidus was writing in order to deny the perpetual virginity of Mary and, it seems quite likely, was arguing against a variety of Gnostics, Manicheans, and Encratites at the same time. His treatise was answered by none other than Jerome, the great translator of Scripture and one of the great transmitters of monasticism from the Greek-speaking East to the Latinate West. Needless to say, as a monk and a tireless promoter of virginity, Jerome argued for the perpetual virginity of Mary and suggested that celibacy was the preferred state for Christians, although he allowed that not all Christians are called to it.
In his work, Jerome moves point by point through the technical and grammatical parts of Helvidus’s argument, slowly shredding each one. In each case, whether it’s in the biblical description of Mary and Joseph’s relationship or whether it’s the potential siblings of Jesus, Jerome is able to bring his encyclopedic knowledge of the Scriptures and of the Greek of the Scriptures to bear on the topic. Now—my Greek’s decent, but it can’t hold a candle to Jerome’s; furthermore, few if any in the modern age have the kind of grasp of Scripture that Jerome did. We may use different interpretive techniques, we may hold more of an hermeneutic of suspicion than he, but as for knowing the vocabulary and grammar of Scripture in both the Hebrew and Greek—I’m not willing to compete with him. What Jerome accomplishes, in my eyes, is not to definitively solve the issue, but to throw sufficient doubt on the counter-arguments that the perpetual virginity of Mary remains an open question—one that the extremely limited gospel evidence does not conclude decisively one way or the other.
As a result, we’re back to agendas. The very first thing that we must note is that an over-reliance on agendas make for bad history. The valences of sexual expression and virginity are wildly different between then and now. The current notion that self-actualization is dependent on unfettered sexual expression smacks up hard against the statistics for deaths in childbirth in Antiquity and the absence of reliable contraception. As feminist scholars of Early Christianity have noted, particularly in reference to works like the Apocryphal Acts (with their Encratite influence), virginity could be a route to empowerment for women in Antiquity.
Furthermore, we note that Helvidus and Jerome are essentially playing the same game—they’re both attempting to retroject their own social and theological understandings of marriage onto Mary; it’s history as a proxy battlefield for the culture wars of the past. Nor is this technique a stranger to us. One of the classic moves in the latest round of culture wars is looking at “biblical relationships” by means of retrojecting present realities upon textual situations where they fit uncomfortably. Both sides do it, and in doing so, neither honors the text, because both are attempting force a meaning beyond what the evidence will bear. Let me suggest that this is the wrong way to go about the task of either doing history or establishing normative practices for today’s Christians.
So where do we go from here? Our faith is rooted in a number of concrete historical events, preeminently the incarnation, life, crucifixion, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ. However, we have no historical access to these events: no DNA, no vitals, no photos or videos, not even much in the way of independent confirmation by outside sources. Instead, we access this history through two sets of veils: first, the New Testament itself which gives us literary rather than directly historical data; and second, the creeds which are literary guides to the interpretation of the Scripture. As a result, any appeals to Christian history are complicated at best and pure projection at worst. Should our understanding of human sexuality and how we should act now be based on what we believe Mary did historically as tortured from literary texts that weren’t trying to answer that question? I can’t see how that would be helpful.
So what do we do? How do we adjudicate the issue at hand, and once that’s been accomplished, what do we do with it?
For my place, barring any hard evidence one way or the other, my preference is to go with the historic teaching of the Church. Now, what does this belief mean for me? On an intellectual level, it serves as a reminder that our mental space is not the same as the mental space of the Scriptures and the Early Church. That is, chastity and celibacy played a different role in their time than ours and we ignore that difference at our peril. Indeed, I think recovering a more Scriptural perspective on celibacy and sexuality may even be a helpful point in today’s arguments as I’ve stated before (part I and part II).
On a spiritual level, it means that Mary focused all of her time and energy directly on Jesus. After all, that’s Paul’s whole argument on behalf of celibacy in 1 Cor 7:32-35—Christian celibacy is not about what you don’t do but about what you’re freed to do: focus utterly on God. Thus, upholding the notion of Mary’s perpetual virginity means that, in all of my devotions to Mary, I keep her foremost as a model of the soul wholly devoted to God who constantly admonishes us as she did the servants at the Cana wedding, “Do whatever he tells you” (John 2:5).
As a result, until I hear an argument that I find both more compelling and more edifying, I’ll keep referring to “Blessed Mary Ever-Virgin.”
Derek Olsen recently finished his Ph.D. in New Testament at Emory University. He has taught seminary courses in biblical studies, preaching, and liturgics; he currently resides in Maryland. His reflections on life, liturgical spirituality, and being a Gen-X/Y dad appear at Haligweorc.