Hi Todd,
You wrote, "
I responded to your original arguments, and you discredited my responses as being false".
That is the aim of a rebuttal.
they were grounded in the sound exegesis and interpretation of the Word.
I have shown you how - in logic - Mary's response to Gabriel is a
non sequitur since in her mind,
sex is imminent, and the
how has already been presented to her. She is betrothed to Joseph, and her betrothal is so strong that it would take a bill of divorce to be separated from him. If she is planning on having sex with Joseph and raising a family, then Gabriel's announcement that her future son will be the King of Israel should not evoke the response of "
How can this be, for I know not man?"
This interpretation is not my own, nor is it novel. It was used by St. Jerome against Helvidius in the fourth century.
no Catholic on this string has been able to respond to the exegetical evidence ... that the Greek term adelphos must be interpreted as brother
You are incorrect. I have shown how this premise is false on
page 6 of this thread, and, as of yet, you have not responded to it:
There are about ten instances in the New Testament where brothers and sisters of the Lord are mentioned (Matt. 12:46; Matt. 13:55; Mark 3:31–34; Mark 6:3; Luke 8:19–20; John 2:12, 7:3, 5, 10; Acts 1:14; 1 Cor. 9:5).
Because neither Hebrew nor Aramaic (the language spoken by Christ and his disciples) had a special word meaning "cousin," speakers of those languages used either the word for "brother" or a circumlocution, such as "the son of the sister of my father." But circumlocutions are clumsy, so the Jews used "brother."
The writers of the New Testament were brought up to use the Aramaic equivalent of "brothers" to mean both cousins and sons of the same father—plus other relatives and even non-relatives.
When they wrote in Greek, they did the same thing the translators of the Septuagint did. (The Septuagint or LXX was the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible; it was translated by Hellenistic Jews a century or two before Christ’s birth in Alexandria and was the version of the Bible from which most of the Old Testament quotations found in the New Testament are taken.)
In the Septuagint, the Hebrew word that includes both brothers and cousins was translated as adelphos, which in Greek usually has the narrow meaning that the English "brother" has.
Unlike Hebrew or Aramaic, Greek has a separate word for cousin, anepsios, but the translators of the Septuagint favored adelphos, even for true cousins.
You might say they transliterated instead of translated, importing the Jewish idiom into the Greek Bible. They took an exact equivalent of the Hebrew word for "brother" and did not use adelphos in one place (for sons of the same parents), and anepsios in another (for cousins). This same usage was employed by the writers of the New Testament and passed into English translations of the Bible.
"
one can not argue the Septuigant to substantiate the translation of adelphos as "cousins" or anything else - the OT was not written in Greek, it was written in Hebrew."
The fact that the Old Testament was originally authored in Hebrew and was later translated into Greek is the foundation of the argument for the Perpetual Virginity of Mary because the translators of the Septuagint favored
adelphos, even for true cousins. This demonstrates that
adelphos was used for cousins as well as full blood brothers
equally among Jews well before the time of Jesus.
This is the argument that you have not assimilated nor responded to. And how can you when it successfully demonstrates that
adelphos cannot be equated with full blood brothers? There is no response that you can provide, even if you wanted to provide one.
To understand the word "until" in Matt. 1:25 as referring only to the time before the birth of Christ is ridiculous - a forced reading of the text
Alright Todd!! Now you're actually providing arguments.. and responding for once... way to go!
You are using a narrow, modern meaning of "until," instead of the meaning it had when the Bible was written.
In the Bible, it means only that some action did not happen up to a certain point; it does not imply that the action did happen later, which is
the modern sense of the term. In fact, if the modern sense is forced on the Bible, some ridiculous meanings result.
Consider this line: "
Michal the daughter of Saul had no children until the day of her death" (2 Sam. 6:23). Are we to assume she had children after her death?
There is also the burial of Moses.
The book of Deuteronomy says that no one knew the location of his grave "
until this present day" (Deut. 34:6). But we know that no one has known since that day either.
The examples could be multiplied, but you get the idea.. nothing can be proved from the use of the word "till" in Matthew 1:25.
Recent translations give a better sense of the verse: "
He had no relations with her at any time before she bore a son" (New American Bible); "
He had not known her when she bore a son" (Knox).
It would have been nothing short of sin for Mary to have married Joseph if she had already taken a vow of virginity
You need to substantiate this claim.
If you are familiar with the controversy between Jerome and Helvidius (circa 380 AD), you know that Helvidius first brought up the notion that the "brothers of the Lord" were children born to Mary and Joseph after Jesus’ birth.
The great Scripture scholar Jerome at first declined to comment on Helvidius’ remarks because they were a "
novel, wicked, and a daring affront to the faith of the whole world." At length, though, Jerome’s friends convinced him to write a reply, which turned out to be his treatise called
On the Perpetual Virginity of the Blessed Mary.
Jerome, who had translated the entire Bible (both Old and New Testaments) from original manuscripts that are no longer extant into Vulgar Latin, cited earlier Christian writers, such as Ignatius, Polycarp, Irenaeus, and Justin Martyr. Helvidius was unable to come up with a reply, and his theory remained in disrepute (even among Luther and Calvin) and was unheard of until more recent times.
