Ordinary Time Week 6

Psalm: Psalm 48 or Psalm 123

Old Testament: 2 Samuel 5:1-5, 9-10

  or Ezekiel 2:1-5

Gospel: Mark 6:1-13

Epistle: 2 Corinthians 12:2-10

I somehow have managed to get way behind on the Blog this last few weeks because of vacation and other things. So I am trying to catch up. So this is last Sunday's reading that I am just getting to.

I was drawn this week to the Gospel reading because I found the topic to be pretty interesting. In Mark ch. 6 Jesus returns to his Hometown of Nazareth to teach and perform miracles like he had done in other places since the beginning of his public ministry. Scholars use these types of verses to try and parse out and fill in the gaps of what the Gospels fail to tell us about Jesus' life. For example, Jesus is called "the son of Mary" so it is believed generally from this and other examples that Joseph must have died earlier in Jesus' life. In fact, Joseph isn't mentioned at all in Mark's gospel. This verse and others also show that after Jesus birth in Bethlehem  he spent the majority is his childhood and early life in Nazareth. We take this information for granted but there are very few non-Christian sources that mention Jesus and the Gospels, especially Mark, are sometimes scarce on things we would like included.

But I think the interesting thing from a purely historical perspective is that Mark mentions Jesus' brothers and sisters. I have been under the impression that Protestants generally agree that Mary didn't remain a virgin after Jesus' birth, due to their rejection of the Immaculate Conception and other Roman Catholic doctrines concerning Mary. I  would have put myself in this category of believing that Jesus had half-brothers and half-sisters through later relations between Mary and Joseph. I have often wondered in reading this verse and others what the Catholic view of this verse is. So I looked up a few commentaries and into the Greek lexicon. My NASB bible commentary, the Abingdon Bible Commentary (1929), and the Greek-English Lexicon (Walter Bauer, 1979) all agree that the best possible and most straight-forward reading is that Mary and Joseph did later have children after Jesus was born.

However, I then when to Wikipedia and did some reading on the doctrine of Mary's perpetual virginity. Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of Catholic and historical biblical commentary on this issue, so Wikipedia was a good place to start and try and verify some of the information there. For starters it appears that the majority of Christians, both Protestant and Catholic, for the majority of Church history have believed in the perpetual virginity of Mary. Before the Protestant reformation there was basically one main opposing voice, a man named Helvidius. Even those figures we look up to in the Protestant Reformation, Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin believed in Mary's perpetual virginity. Most surprising for me was that John Wesley also believed this. He wrote in A Letter to a Roman Catholic, that Mary was "as well after as before she brought him forth, continued a pure and unspotted virgin." In this regard Wesley was following his fellow Anglican's in their beliefs.

The general reading of his passage, and others like it, is that the biblical writer was using term "brother" loosely, and that it really means "cousin" or some other other close familial relation. It could also be that Joseph had children from another marriage before he was betrothed to be wed to Mary. What I am coming to realize is that both views are valid and neither can be "proven from the text alone. Thus we must rely on tradition and the implications of each view for other theology. In that regard I think Mary's perpetual virginity has a much stronger case than her having children with Joseph after Jesus' birth.

Ultimately however, I think I will have to agree with John Calvin on this one who wrote, "Certainly, no man will ever raise a question on this subject, except from curiosity; and no man will obstinately keep up the argument, except from an extreme fondness for disputation." I am not sure that this issue is really one central to our salvation and the work God is doing in the World through Christ. No doubt some might disagree with me, but I don't think it has great implications one way of the other. So for now, I think I am just a little bit clearer on the doctrine and debate and if you want to check out the Wikipedia page yourself it is found HERE, and maybe you will be spurred to do some more research from there.


Grace and Peace.

Here are couple of websites I looked at:
http://www.aleteia.org/en/religion/article/a-protestant-defense-of-marys-perpetual-virginity-4803001
http://hitch.south.cx/john-wesleys-letter-to-a-roman-catholic.htm