Perpetual virginity of Mary

Mary's ante-partum virginity is attested in the Gospel of Matthew and in the Gospel of Luke, but the modern scholarly consensus is that it rests on very slender historical foundations.[21] Both gospels use the virgin birth to make theological points, Matthew that the birth of Jesus is the fulfillment of prophesy and of God's promise to Israel signified in the name Emmanuel, "God is with us", for Luke, that the story of God's creation begun in Genesis is moving to its completion,[22] and in both, the emphasis is on Mary's assent to the miraculous birth rather than on her virginity.[23] Both date probably from the period AD 80-100, both are anonymous (the attributions to Matthew and Luke were added in the 2nd century), and it is almost certain that neither was based on an eyewitness account.[24][25][26] (Raymond E. Brown suggested in 1973 that Joseph was the source of Matthew's account and Mary of Luke's, but modern scholars consider this highly unlikely).[27] It is not otherwise mentioned in the New Testament writings,[5] and it follows that the narratives were created by the two gospel-authors, drawing on ideas in circulation in some Christian circles perhaps by around 65 AD.[28]

Mary's perpetual virginity first appears in a late 2nd century text called the Protoevangelium of James,[29] which was the ultimate source of almost all later Marian doctrine.[30] Probably deriving from a sect called the Encratites,[30] whose founder Tatian taught that sex and marriage were symptoms of original sin,[7] it tells how the new-born Jesus simply appears from a dark cloud and a blinding light and takes his mother's breast;[31] Mary remains a life-long virgin, Joseph is an old man who marries her without physical desire, and the brothers of Jesus are explained as Joseph's sons by an earlier marriage.[32]

The context of the Protoevangelium was the growth of asceticism with its emphasis on celibacy and the chastity of the mother of Christ, the monks seeing all sexual activity as tainted by sin.[33] It was widely distributed and seems to have formed the stories of Mary found in the Quran,[34] but while Muslims agree with Christians that Mary was a virgin at the moment of the conception of Jesus, the idea of her perpetual virginity thereafter is contrary to the Islamic ideal of women as wives and mothers.[35]

Mary's virginity seems seems to have attracted little theological attention prior to the end of the 2nd century, Ignatius of Antioch (c.35-108), for example, discussing it only to argue for the reality of Jesus's human birth against the Docetic heretics who denied him any humanity.[36] By the early 4th century the spread of monasticism had promoted celibacy as the ideal state, and a moral hierarchy was established with marriage occupying the third rank below life-long virginity and widowhood.[37] Around 380 Helvidius objected to the devaluation of marriage inherent in this view and argued that the two states, of virginity and marriage, were equal;[38] but his contemporary Jerome, realising that this would lead to the Mother of God occupying a lower place in heaven than virgins and widows, defended her perpetual virginity in his immensely influential Against Helvidius, issued c.383.[39]

Helvidius soon faded from the scene, but in the early 380s the monk Jovinian wrote that if Jesus did not undergo a normal human birth then he himself was not human, which was the teaching of the heresy known as Manicheism.[40] Jerome wrote against Jovinian but failed to mention this aspect of his teaching, and most commentators believe that he did not find it offensive.[40] The only important Christian intellectual to defend Mary's virginity in partu was Ambrose, Archbishop of Milan, who was the chief target of the charge of Manicheism.[41] For Ambrose, both the physical birth of Jesus by Mary and the baptismal birthing of Christians by the Church had to be totally virginal, even in partu, in order to cancel the stain of original sin, of which the pains of labor are the physical sign.[42] It was due to Ambrose that virginitas in partu came to be included consistently in the thinking of subsequent theologians.[43]

Jovinian's view was rejected at a Synod of Milan under Ambrose's presidency in 390, after which Mary's perpetual virginity was established as the only orthodox view.[44] The Council of Ephesus in 431 established a fully general consensus on the subject,[45] in 553 the Second Council of Constantinople gave her the title "Aeiparthenons", meaning Perpetual Virgin, and at the Lateran Synod of 649 Pope Martin I emphasised its threefold character, before, during, and after the birth of Christ.[44]

The Protestant Reformation saw a rejection of the sanctity of virginity, and as a result marriage and parenthood were extolled, Mary and Joseph were seen as a normal married couple, and sexual abstinence was no longer regarded as a virtue.[46] It also brought the idea of the Bible as the fundamental source of authority regarding God's word (sola scriptura),[47] and the reformers noted that while holy scripture explicitly required belief in the virgin birth, it only permitted acceptance of perpetual virginity.[48] But despite the lack of a clear biblical basis for the doctrine,[49] it was supported by Martin Luther (who included it in the Smalcald Articles, a Lutheran confession of faith written in 1537)[50] as well as by Huldrych Zwingli, John Calvin, and later John Wesley, the co-founder of Methodism.[51][49] This was because these moderate reformers were under pressure from others more radical than themselves who held Jesus to have been no more than a prophet: Mary's perpetual virginity thus became a guarantee of the Incarnation, despite its shaky scriptural foundations.[52] Notwithstanding this early acceptance by the reformers, modern Protestants, apart from some Lutherans and Anglo-Catholics, have largely rejected the perpetual virginity and it has rarely appeared explicitly in confessions or doctrinal statements.[53]