@Nick Tamen In Mark, the literal sibling meaning is the one that fits best. But the reason isn’t “first definition wins.” It’s because of how ancient languages work, how Mark uses the term, and how interpretation is normally done. Mark consistently uses adelphos in the literal sense. He says Andrew is the adephos, the biological brother of Simon. He also says James and John are adelphoi--again, literal brothers. Mark shows a pattern: when he uses adelphos he means actual siblings unless he signals otherwise. ...
You're begging the question. How exactly do you know that Mark is using adelphos in the literal sense when he speaks of Andrew, Simon, John and James? You are assuming that they are biological brothers--and full-blood, at that. But why are you making that assumption? Because Mark calls them "adelphoi." But you just used your belief in their biological brotherhood to prove what adelphoi means to Mark! That's circular reasoning.
The fact is, we have no proof of their exact biological relationship. All we know is that the text calls them adelphoi, and huoi of Zebedee and his wife (in the case of John and James). We have no sentences that specify exactly how those relationships came into being. And that would be necessary for you to determine whether they were in fact biologically related, and how.
We do have such sentences for Jesus: "Mary gave birth to her first born son, and he named him Jesus." So that's a clearly biological mother-son relationship. We have it for John the Baptist, when the text tells us that Elizabeth gave birth, and the child was named John. Another biological mother-son relationship. As for fatherhood, in Jesus' case we have a clear statement of non-biological paternity on the part of Joseph; and in John the Baptist's case, a clear statement of Zechariah's physical paternity of John. So you can make definite statements in their cases. The verb "gave birth to" is used.
But we don't have that for any of the disciples. Sure, a couple of them get called "brothers" of each other. But we have no information on how that brotherhood began. Do they both have the same biological parents? If so, full brothers ("adelphoi"). Was one of them perhaps a brother-from-another-mother (if, for example, Zebedee had a previous wife who died giving birth to James)? In that case, they would still be called "adelphoi." Was one of them possibly altogether adopted--say, a distant cousin's child who was taken into the family after being orphaned very young? And then they grew up together? In that case, they'd be called (you guessed it) "adelphoi."
To summarize: Just because two people get called brothers now, says nothing about their actual biological relationship to each other. For that, you need a sentence or two that focuses on who gave birth to whom--and if possible, a note on who they conceived that child by.
Back to the original title for the thread. I’ve been thinking of the term “plain meaning” which has been used quite a lot by Protestants. The term was useful in defending the reading of scripture by ordinary folks, not clerical “specialists”. It was a crucial argument. “We don’t need the priestly class to tell us what it means. It’s obvious!”
The assertion was that the Bible was transparent in meaning.
That’s a best partially true, as Lamb Chopped has just asserted with reason in the example of the meaning of brothers. And it is a much more general problem. As it often is for old texts. The insight into language use at the time, changes in use since, cultural influences, accurate textual transmission and preservation of texts, effective translation from original language, textual variations, all feed into the question of meaning.
Does that mean we need a priestly class to do all that work for us. Well, since I’m a nonconformist, you know my answer to that! But it doesn’t mean I’m ignorant of the difficulties and the hard work often required to get at meaning.
By reference again to the thread title, it provokes a simple but significant question. What makes you think you know what it means?
The Orthodox belief is that Jesus or the Christ is both divine and human. He got all of his divinity from his Father, and all of his humanity from his mother. So if you want to go the tale-of-the-chromosomes route, his mother donated an X, and God supplied the Y.
@Nick Tamen In Mark, the literal sibling meaning is the one that fits best. But the reason isn’t “first definition wins.” It’s because of how ancient languages work, how Mark uses the term, and how interpretation is normally done. Mark consistently uses adelphos in the literal sense. He says Andrew is the adephos, the biological brother of Simon. He also says James and John are adelphoi--again, literal brothers. Mark shows a pattern: when he uses adelphos he means actual siblings unless he signals otherwise. There is no such signal in Mark 6:3 that he means "cousins," "step-brothers," or even kinsmen. Simply put: Mark 6:3 presents a household unit, not a kinship network.
Comparing how Mark writes with other ancient Meditieranean writing you will often find them listing the mother, the eldest son, named brothers and unnamed sisters.
While it is true adelphos can sometimes mean step siblings, cousins, clan members or other kinsmen, but more often than not Greek writers would use anepsios for cousin or syngenes for another kinsman. Mark simply does not use them.
Therefore, when Mark says James, Joseph, Judas and Simon are Jesus' brothers, he literally means what he says.
Except an awful lot of Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox scholars, who have spent just as many years studying this stuff as Protestants, don’t interpret it that way.
There is a saying in Lutheran circles, bishops and councils can error. Same is true with theologians. RCs and Orthodox, even Protestants (such as @Nick Tamen) have to come up with another way of understanding especially if they believe in the perpetual virginity of Mary. Yes, even Calvin and Luther accepted the perpetual virginity of Mary.
I point you to John P. Meier, author of the monumental multi‑volume A Marginal Jew. Meier was a priest, a highly respected RC biblical scholar, and a professor at Notre Dame.
In A Marginal Jew, he argues—on strictly historical‑critical grounds—that the most probable reading of the New Testament is that Jesus had actual siblings, children of Mary and Joseph born after Jesus.
Meier explicitly distinguishes his historical‑critical conclusions from Catholic dogma, but he does not hide the fact that the historic evidence points toward Jesus having real siblings.
On the Orthodox side.
Fr. Theodore Stylianopoulos (Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology)
Notes that the NT language prima facie suggests real siblings, even though Orthodox tradition interprets them as Joseph’s children.
Fr. John Breck
Acknowledges that the linguistic evidence favors biological siblings, but affirms the traditional interpretation for theological reasons.
Fr. Paul Nadim Tarazi (Orthodox biblical scholar, St. Vladimir’s Seminary)
Tarazi is the closest to a direct Orthodox voice saying Jesus had real siblings. In his commentaries, he argues that the NT authors meant actual brothers, and that later doctrinal developments reshaped the reading. He is the most explicit Orthodox scholar to take this position.
These theologians certainly have to deal with the cognitive dissonance of what their studies say and what their Tradition holds.
But as a Lutheran, I can say while tradition and my forefathers held to the perpetual virginity of Mary, I am not chained to them. I recognize what was held back then. I can reconcile Mary’s perpetual virginity with modern biblical scholarship by recognizing that the doctrine and the historical‑critical method operate in different modes. One is a theological claim about who Christ is and how salvation works, and the other is a historical‑literary analysis of ancient texts. They don’t have to cancel each other out — but they do need to be kept in their proper lanes.
And I grant, that in this case the lanes got a little blurred.
I can reconcile Mary’s perpetual virginity with modern biblical scholarship by recognizing that the doctrine and the historical‑critical method operate in different modes. One is a theological claim about who Christ is and how salvation works, and the other is a historical‑literary analysis of ancient texts.
@Nick Tamen In Mark, the literal sibling meaning is the one that fits best. But the reason isn’t “first definition wins.” It’s because of how ancient languages work, how Mark uses the term, and how interpretation is normally done. Mark consistently uses adelphos in the literal sense. He says Andrew is the adephos, the biological brother of Simon. He also says James and John are adelphoi--again, literal brothers. Mark shows a pattern: when he uses adelphos he means actual siblings unless he signals otherwise. There is no such signal in Mark 6:3 that he means "cousins," "step-brothers," or even kinsmen. Simply put: Mark 6:3 presents a household unit, not a kinship network.
Comparing how Mark writes with other ancient Meditieranean writing you will often find them listing the mother, the eldest son, named brothers and unnamed sisters.
While it is true adelphos can sometimes mean step siblings, cousins, clan members or other kinsmen, but more often than not Greek writers would use anepsios for cousin or syngenes for another kinsman. Mark simply does not use them.
Therefore, when Mark says James, Joseph, Judas and Simon are Jesus' brothers, he literally means what he says.
Except an awful lot of Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox scholars, who have spent just as many years studying this stuff as Protestants, don’t interpret it that way.
There is a saying in Lutheran circles, bishops and councils can error. Same is true with theologians. RCs and Orthodox, even Protestants (such as @Nick Tamen) have to come up with another way of understanding especially if they believe in the perpetual virginity of Mary. Yes, even Calvin and Luther accepted the perpetual virginity of Mary.
I point you to John P. Meier, author of the monumental multi‑volume A Marginal Jew. Meier was a priest, a highly respected RC biblical scholar, and a professor at Notre Dame.
In A Marginal Jew, he argues—on strictly historical‑critical grounds—that the most probable reading of the New Testament is that Jesus had actual siblings, children of Mary and Joseph born after Jesus.
Meier explicitly distinguishes his historical‑critical conclusions from Catholic dogma, but he does not hide the fact that the historic evidence points toward Jesus having real siblings.
On the Orthodox side.
Fr. Theodore Stylianopoulos (Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology)
Notes that the NT language prima facie suggests real siblings, even though Orthodox tradition interprets them as Joseph’s children.
Fr. John Breck
Acknowledges that the linguistic evidence favors biological siblings, but affirms the traditional interpretation for theological reasons.
Fr. Paul Nadim Tarazi (Orthodox biblical scholar, St. Vladimir’s Seminary)
Tarazi is the closest to a direct Orthodox voice saying Jesus had real siblings. In his commentaries, he argues that the NT authors meant actual brothers, and that later doctrinal developments reshaped the reading. He is the most explicit Orthodox scholar to take this position.
These theologians certainly have to deal with the cognitive dissonance of what their studies say and what their Tradition holds.
But as a Lutheran, I can say while tradition and my forefathers held to the perpetual virginity of Mary, I am not chained to them. I recognize what was held back then. I can reconcile Mary’s perpetual virginity with modern biblical scholarship by recognizing that the doctrine and the historical‑critical method operate in different modes. One is a theological claim about who Christ is and how salvation works, and the other is a historical‑literary analysis of ancient texts. They don’t have to cancel each other out — but they do need to be kept in their proper lanes.
And I grant, that in this case the lanes got a little blurred.
I think I should also add that just because there are exceptions from the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, that does not change the understanding of the majority of scholars within those traditions.
That's interesting about the RC and Orthodox voices you cite @Gramps49 and I'm grateful to you for pointing that out and I'd be interested in following those references up at some point.
The problem I'd have with the Lutheran position on 'bishops and councils can err' isn't one of 'conciliar fundamentalism' as such, but the difficulties of agreeing what the scriptural texts actually say.
Bearing in mind that bishops, councils and so forth had the last say as it were on what texts were to be considered canonical in the first place.
We've already got some daylight between other Protestant posters and your good self on whether the sibling references indicate biological relationships or kinship units.
I'm not sure it's even safe to assume that 'nuclear families' in the modern sense existed back then, but that's another issue.
Alright, we are never going to agree 100% on absolutely everything and on one level I'm far more interested in how much we share in common than those issues which divide us.
Thanks for a stimulating debate and I hope we can continue in that vein.
I can reconcile Mary’s perpetual virginity with modern biblical scholarship by recognizing that the doctrine and the historical‑critical method operate in different modes. One is a theological claim about who Christ is and how salvation works, and the other is a historical‑literary analysis of ancient texts.
But which answer are you saying is true?
When I think of the agonising over the centuries, the heresy trials, the torture, the burning at the stake, the religious wars, I am given to really, really wish humans would admit that they don't and can't know the answer to that question about any matter of faith.
To me this illustrates something about, in a very general sense, science verses religion.
With caveats, more recent science is better than old. It would be foolish to take Aristotle's concepts over accepted biological knowledge from the last 50 years. And it isn't just science of course, there are many ways that human knowledge has moved forwards.
It feels like religion is the opposite, where there are competing claims as to what the "original sense" of words was and so on.
I think he really means that if Jesus was not literally, bodily...
Literally and bodily are words you've brought to the text. One might argue that if, in Paul's logic the dead are raised as Christ was raised, then a literal bodily resurrection is only required if the dead have a literal bodily resurrection. If they have a spiritual resurrection, with new spiritual bodies (as I think Paul suggests elsewhere) then Jesus does not need a resurrection of his physical body, in Paul's logic.
The word "spiritual" in Paul doesn't mean -- well, ghostly, non-physical. It's always set in opposition to "fleshly" (sarx), which is the term he uses for stuff that belongs to our current mortal, sin-infected nature. "Spiritual" is then what belongs to God's kingdom--what belongs to the Holy Spirit and "runs" on his power. Calling something a "spiritual body" doesn't have anything to do with whether you can touch it or not. Rather it answers "no" to the questions "Is this body mortal? Is it infected by sin and therefore subject to death?"
If Paul had wanted to refer to a ghost, he wouldn't have used the term "spiritual" at all. He would have chosen a term like "bodiless."
That's an interpretation. But I for example don't think our bodies are subject to death because of sin; they're subject to death because all living things are. There's only so long that a complex metazoan can keep on temporarily locally reversing entropy (which is what organisms do, and why they have to eat or photosynthesise)
An immortal body would have to be made of something completely different; a different order of stuff made from material that doesn't exist in our universe, not subject to its physical laws.
Given that, and the fact that any given body contains atoms that have comprised many creatures - human and otherwise - before, I have to see the whole thing in terms so abstract and metaphorical that somehow the historicity of Christ's bodily resurrection no longer seems to be a show-stopper if it didn’t happen.
Maybe this is just about putting myths in their proper place. Gunditjmara stories about eels reflect the importance those animals have to their community along with passing on knowledge about landscape management.
In that context it seems bizarre to try to argue about who wrote the stories and the meaning of individual words.
On the other hand, clearly there are things that this traditional knowledge does not touch: such as aircraft maintenance.
One aspect of this that needs to be born in mind is that the belief in the perpetual virginity of Mary arose from the heavy influence of Gnostic teachings in parts of early Christianity.
What is the evidence for this? I don't mean similarity, I mean external evidence.
There is a non-canonical gospel where there is a midwife at the birth of Jesus who checked that Mary was still a virgin after the birth. For doing this she was punished with a withered hand, but then Mary healed her hand.
That's just an example of the style of thinking in creating the numerous gospels.
You will note it's non-canonical. Probabaly a reason for that.
The earliest documents we have, the letters and Mark do not mention a virgin birth. Neither do John and Revelation. Probably a reason for that.
Now we know that a man does plant a seed in a womb, where did the male and female gametes come from? Both from God, or did one come from Mary?
That consideration could not have been in the minds of the writers of the canonical and extra- canonical gospels.
I asked about gnosticism. What's the evidence of that link?
I haven't referred to Gnosticism.
Just the dating of the NT texts.
But @Rufus T Firefly did, and the post by @mousethief that your post quoted and appeared to be responding to specifically asked for evidence of the claim of Gnostic influence.
I am afraid that really don't have the time or resources any more to delve into references to Gnostic teachings and their influence on early Christianity. But it is well established that it did happen - in some places more than others. Yes it is true that Gnosticism was rejected but to deny that aspects of its influence lingered seems astonishing to me.
The distrust of the physical is well seen in many places and by many writers (Augustine of Hippo and Jerome to name just two).
I don't know if this has been done but what would be helpful would be research into WHERE and WHEN the belief in an older Joseph first emerged and compare that with what we know about what else was happening in that area at that time. Was it in an area that already had Gnostic - style beliefs?
I think he really means that if Jesus was not literally, bodily...
Literally and bodily are words you've brought to the text. One might argue that if, in Paul's logic the dead are raised as Christ was raised, then a literal bodily resurrection is only required if the dead have a literal bodily resurrection. If they have a spiritual resurrection, with new spiritual bodies (as I think Paul suggests elsewhere) then Jesus does not need a resurrection of his physical body, in Paul's logic.
The word "spiritual" in Paul doesn't mean -- well, ghostly, non-physical. It's always set in opposition to "fleshly" (sarx), which is the term he uses for stuff that belongs to our current mortal, sin-infected nature. "Spiritual" is then what belongs to God's kingdom--what belongs to the Holy Spirit and "runs" on his power. Calling something a "spiritual body" doesn't have anything to do with whether you can touch it or not. Rather it answers "no" to the questions "Is this body mortal? Is it infected by sin and therefore subject to death?"
If Paul had wanted to refer to a ghost, he wouldn't have used the term "spiritual" at all. He would have chosen a term like "bodiless."
That's an interpretation. But I for example don't think our bodies are subject to death because of sin; they're subject to death because all living things are. There's only so long that a complex metazoan can keep on temporarily locally reversing entropy (which is what organisms do, and why they have to eat or photosynthesise)
An immortal body would have to be made of something completely different; a different order of stuff made from material that doesn't exist in our universe, not subject to its physical laws.
Given that, and the fact that any given body contains atoms that have comprised many creatures - human and otherwise - before, I have to see the whole thing in terms so abstract and metaphorical that somehow the historicity of Christ's bodily resurrection no longer seems to be a show-stopper if it didn’t happen.
I don't think this is entirely true in the sense of materials in the universe. But agreed things on earth do not work like that and certainly nothing described as human would.
But then would we really expect people 2000+ years ago to know that? Regular things in their experience did appear to die, get buried and then return to life like seed planted in the ground.
Death in the sense of botanical senescence has only really been understood for the last 100 years. Is that death or not? No, but also yes.
Whilst ancient people understood about decay, I do not think it is necessarily obvious that the physical elements of a body are reintegrated into other organisms in the earth's cycles.
But then would we really expect people 2000+ years ago to know that? Regular things in their experience did appear to die, get buried and then return to life like seed planted in the ground.
Death in the sense of botanical senescence has only really been understood for the last 100 years. Is that death or not? No, but also yes.
Whilst ancient people understood about decay, I do not think it is necessarily obvious that the physical elements of a body are reintegrated into other organisms in the earth's cycles.
Even under a 4 element model there was an understanding that the elements would be reused in other things. I think farmers would have understood well enough that if you spread manure on your field you were in some way contributing to the growing plant matter.
To me this illustrates something about, in a very general sense, science verses religion.
With caveats, more recent science is better than old. It would be foolish to take Aristotle's concepts over accepted biological knowledge from the last 50 years. And it isn't just science of course, there are many ways that human knowledge has moved forwards.
It feels like religion is the opposite, where there are competing claims as to what the "original sense" of words was and so on.
I would argue 'religious' understanding has moved 'forwards' (a loaded word, you'll agree, with its implication of 'better') with the inclusion of marginalised groups, with women priests and me, a divorced person.
Still much to be done in theology and science.
Lord, have mercy!
But then would we really expect people 2000+ years ago to know that? Regular things in their experience did appear to die, get buried and then return to life like seed planted in the ground.
Death in the sense of botanical senescence has only really been understood for the last 100 years. Is that death or not? No, but also yes.
Whilst ancient people understood about decay, I do not think it is necessarily obvious that the physical elements of a body are reintegrated into other organisms in the earth's cycles.
Even under a 4 element model there was an understanding that the elements would be reused in other things. I think farmers would have understood well enough that if you spread manure on your field you were in some way contributing to the growing plant matter.
I think this understanding is a lot more recent than one might think; it was not really well understood before Von Liebig in the early 19 century.
I am not convinced that there was widespread use of organic wastes before then in the sense of believing it aided crops. The chemistry is complicated so there is no direct association between reuse of collected stable wastes and crop yields.
My belief is that fields were used for animal an human wastes for disposal and hygiene, there was poor understanding of what happened to it for a very long time.
One aspect of this that needs to be born in mind is that the belief in the perpetual virginity of Mary arose from the heavy influence of Gnostic teachings in parts of early Christianity.
What is the evidence for this? I don't mean similarity, I mean external evidence.
There is a non-canonical gospel where there is a midwife at the birth of Jesus who checked that Mary was still a virgin after the birth. For doing this she was punished with a withered hand, but then Mary healed her hand.
That's just an example of the style of thinking in creating the numerous gospels.
You will note it's non-canonical. Probabaly a reason for that.
The earliest documents we have, the letters and Mark do not mention a virgin birth. Neither do John and Revelation. Probably a reason for that.
Now we know that a man does plant a seed in a womb, where did the male and female gametes come from? Both from God, or did one come from Mary?
That consideration could not have been in the minds of the writers of the canonical and extra- canonical gospels.
I asked about gnosticism. What's the evidence of that link?
I haven't referred to Gnosticism.
Just the dating of the NT texts.
But @Rufus T Firefly did, and the post by @mousethief that your post quoted and appeared to be responding to specifically asked for evidence of the claim of Gnostic influence.
I am afraid that really don't have the time or resources any more to delve into references to Gnostic teachings and their influence on early Christianity. But it is well established that it did happen - in some places more than others. Yes it is true that Gnosticism was rejected but to deny that aspects of its influence lingered seems astonishing to me.
The distrust of the physical is well seen in many places and by many writers (Augustine of Hippo and Jerome to name just two).
I don't know if this has been done but what would be helpful would be research into WHERE and WHEN the belief in an older Joseph first emerged and compare that with what we know about what else was happening in that area at that time. Was it in an area that already had Gnostic - style beliefs?
Even as a Big T Tradition person I don't have an issue with the idea that Gnostic beliefs influenced early Christianity and hung around for a good while even though they were gradually rejected or condemned.
Heck, Augustine seems to have hung onto his Manichaen dualism to a great extent even after his Christian conversion - which is why Orthodoxy doesn't fully endorse everything he wrote and all the emphases he held.
At the risk of giving offence its also why the Orthodox often accuse the 'West' of being overly dualistic to some extent given the stronger influence of Augustine on the development of Western theology.
I'd agree that certain Fathers could be highly and overly suspicious of the physical and also highly anti-semitic too. St John Chrysostom, I'm looking at you as well as honouring you in our post-communion prayers whenever we celebrate the Liturgy attributed to you but which actually developed over many years and from various sources ...
We'd all have to do more digging to establish whether there was Gnostic influence on the NT and non-canonical Nativity stories as well as echoes of OT 'special birth' narratives and Graeco-Roman literary forms etc etc etc.
I'd agree wholeheartedly with regarding Augustine and his influence on Western Christianity. Certainly not offended! Finding out more about Eastern Christianity was very helpful for me in this respect.
For me, Tradition and the Bible always need to interpreted and understood in the light of Reason. I'm afraid I'm still a big fan of the Three-legged stool. There are times to pay close attention to Tradition but also times when we have to say "This tradition is no longer sustainable in the light of what we now know."
The Orthodox belief is that Jesus or the Christ is both divine and human. He got all of his divinity from his Father, and all of his humanity from his mother. So if you want to go the tale-of-the-chromosomes route, his mother donated an X, and God supplied the Y.
If that's the Orthodox belief I don't think it's compatible with the assertion that Jesus is fully human nor is it compatible with our understanding of God. Jesus is not a human-divine hybrid.
God does not have divine chromosomes to supply - God can create chromosomes, but they would be human chromosomes. To be fully human Jesus needs a full set of human chromosomes (or at least within the range of viable chromosomal configurations).
But it strikes me that the Church fathers aren't coming at this from a modern conceptual scheme. For us, the salient thing about the virgin birth is the fact that Jesus doesn't have a human donor of paternal genes. But in the quote from Gregory earlier the salient point seems to be that Mary hadn't had sex - from Gregory's argument the Angel Gabriel could have turned up with a pot and a turkey baster and it would still have been a virgin birth.
It seems to me that the point the early theologians were getting at in saying Jesus gets his humanity from his mother is that he wasn't created from the clay like a second Adam.
To me this illustrates something about, in a very general sense, science verses religion.
The same could be said of science vs almost any subject in the humanities.
A competent Roman consul, once they were up to speed on the technological changes, could probably do a better job of directing military strategy than the current US or Russian governments.
I don't think that passage is saying what you think it's saying.
This thread makes clear that not only can we be quite confident that the Bible doesn't say what the Bible says, someone else's reading isn't the reading we understand, or in a more emphatic tone, isn't correct (not that you've done that here re: Gregory of Nyssa, @Dafyd). Bible interpretation is The Wild West. Maybe it's better that way?
I think this post makes it clear that the problem of interpretation applies to all texts, including this thread. If one wants to read the thread as confirming ones preconceived ideas then it does so.
To me this illustrates something about, in a very general sense, science verses religion.
The same could be said of science vs almost any subject in the humanities.
A competent Roman consul, once they were up to speed on the technological changes, could probably do a better job of directing military strategy than the current US or Russian governments.
So you mean here that humanities have not progressed since ancient times? If so then no.
@Dafyd, the Orthodox Christian belief is of course that Christ is fully human and fully divine at one and the same time.
Not 60% divine and 40% human or 25% divine and 75% human or ...
We also believe in the Virgin Birth.
How does all this work? Well, here's our stock answer - it's a Divine Mystery.
And I don't mean that glibly. There have been some Patristic sources cited upthread where St John Chrysostom and others perhaps scratch their heads and say, 'How does this work? Search me, gov' ...'
On the Anglican 'three-legged stool' thing - Scripture, Reason and Tradition - the idea of course is that none of the legs are longer than the others. Otherwise the whole thing would unbalance and topple over. The Wesleyan tradition added another leg - Experience.
That's all fine as far as it goes but a counter-claim might be that if we make Scripture the longest leg we end up with biblical fundamentalism, if we make Tradition the longest leg we end up with kind of 'church-fundamentalism', if Experience then subjectivism and illuminism, if Reason then my own ideas become the final arbiter and I become my own rationalist Pope.
I think the Orthodox would prefer to see Tradition not so much as one leg alongside the others but the collective milieu if you like in which the others are 'received' and function - which doesn't mean switching our brains off.
It's interesting what @Gramps49 has shared regarding views some Orthodox and RC scholars have expressed on these issues. I wonder if Athonite monks or hard-line RCs are calling for them to be excommunicated?
It's also made me wonder whether Big T Traditions as a whole would modify and adjust their views should those ideas gain traction and a future Pope, Ecumenical Council or other body were to say, 'Look, we've got it wrong, we need to adjust our thinking on this issue ...'
It's not beyond the realms of possibility but given how slowly these things move ...
And look what happened when dear old Patriarch Bartholomew called an Ecumenical Council ...
Would the RCs, Orthodox (Oriental and Eastern) and the various Protestant churches all get around a table and thrash these things out once and for all?
To me this illustrates something about, in a very general sense, science verses religion.
The same could be said of science vs almost any subject in the humanities.
A competent Roman consul, once they were up to speed on the technological changes, could probably do a better job of directing military strategy than the current US or Russian governments.
So you mean here that humanities have not progressed since ancient times? If so then no.
A STEM supremacist who wanted to argue the point could just as easily do so from a discussion of Aristotle or Plato.
There has been two thousand years of theology more or less. It just hasn't explicitly come up in this particular discussion.
To me this illustrates something about, in a very general sense, science verses religion.
The same could be said of science vs almost any subject in the humanities.
A competent Roman consul, once they were up to speed on the technological changes, could probably do a better job of directing military strategy than the current US or Russian governments.
So you mean here that humanities have not progressed since ancient times? If so then no.
A STEM supremacist who wanted to argue the point could just as easily do so from a discussion of Aristotle or Plato.
There has been two thousand years of theology more or less. It just hasn't explicitly come up in this particular discussion.
Which point? I don't understand what you are saying.
It’s relevant to the thread title. I’ve argued for years that the historical critical approach to old texts has much in common with the scientific method. The three elements of looking, questioning and checking apply to both. The scientific method has uncovered loads of counter-intuitive findings about the material universe. The historical critical approach to old texts has uncovered loads of counter-intuitive findings about old texts. Both processes are illuminating and lead to greater understandings.
What I think is different about religious texts is the question of relevance. Does the historical meaning and its significance at the time have the same relevance today? How should it influence our thinking about what is right and fair?
My own view FWIW is that the Christian scriptures and the Traditions associated with them contain eternal verities which can help to inform our behaviour for the better. But that certainly does not apply to all of the material. Some of it made more sense in the culture of the times, but not today.
Slightly, but not entirely, switching the subject, has it ever struck any other shipmates that much of the doctrinal wrestling over the first few centuries of Christian history about the relationship between Christ's human and divine natures might have come about as people began to imagine what it might feel like inside to be both human and divine, and represent an attempt to come to terms with this?
Even if they do not formulate it in these terms, I suspect most people in the world, now and in history have asked themselves the question 'who am I?' Most I suspect have also asked some version of 'what would it be like to be king, queen, famous, or whatever?' Once one has encountered Christianity, it is a fairly short step to conjecturing, 'if I had been born Jesus, Son of God and Son of Man, who would I be and what would that be like?
To quote Gamaliel, the fully divine fully human Christ is a Divine Mystery!
Rather like the Trinity. I think the old Church Fathers were trying, quite humbly, to draw boundaries of understanding within which the faith once given could be protected. Within those boundaries folks could grow up in the faith.
They had seen the community risks involved with some of the diverse opinions (heresies). I think a lot was learned from Irenaeus whose writings exposed some of the indifference to poverty and suffering he had discovered amongst Gnostics. Much of the energy of “Against Heresies” was driven by pastoral outrage at the dismissal of those outside the clique.
Today, I think we’ve lost that awareness of risk. Beliefs do condition behaviour. I’m sure you have a point in the source of some of the present day questioning. But on the whole I rate Divine Mystery. If accepted, it can help us to avoid throwing out babies with bathwater!
I'm with @Barnabas62 here - there was certainly a lot of politicking, pettiness and cajoling going on in those ancient Councils but whether we concur with their conclusions or not then I suspect their motives were as he has outlined - an intention to protect and defend the faith from perceived harm.
That would be scant consolation to anyone excommunicated or exiled for non-compliance of course.
And yes, later on we've got heresy trials and executions and so on. Just as there were maimings and other horribly violent punishments meted out by both sides during the Iconoclastic controversy.
If we hold to any form of orthodoxy, whether Big O or small o it behoves us to do so generously and yes, to hold out the possibility that we might be mistaken.
Towards the end of his life the late Metropolitan Kallistos Ware invited Orthodox clergy from the Oxford area and beyond to a meal.
At one point he learned back and said in his inimitable Oxford Don accent - which everyone who knew him or heard him imitates - and said, 'Would I shock you if I told you I sometimes wonder whether there's anything in it and I'm not just simply imagining it to be true?'
Lord, I believe, help thou mine unbelief.
And help me also not to dismiss, disrespect or disregard those who might think differently to me.
Yes. After I wrote that, I started thinking about Crusades and Inquistions. There’s a place in Norwich called the Lollards pit where they used to burn people for blasphemy. I’m not sure the early Church Fathers foresaw how bad imperial Christendom would get.
There is of course a lot of built in protection within the Christian faith which declares those excesses against others to be completely wrong. But somehow or other it got trampled under foot in Christendom because of imperial imperatives.
I’m very aware of the imperfections of well meaning protection.
Thanks for the insight about Kallistos Ware. A good man.
@Gramps49, I was going to respond more fully, but @Lamb Chopped has covered it well. Your argument is completely based on your assumption about something the text doesn’t specify one way or the other.
@Gramps49, I was going to respond more fully, but @Lamb Chopped has covered it well. Your argument is completely based on your assumption about something the text doesn’t specify one way or the other.
@Nick Tamen In Mark, the literal sibling meaning is the one that fits best. But the reason isn’t “first definition wins.” It’s because of how ancient languages work, how Mark uses the term, and how interpretation is normally done. Mark consistently uses adelphos in the literal sense. He says Andrew is the adephos, the biological brother of Simon. He also says James and John are adelphoi--again, literal brothers. Mark shows a pattern: when he uses adelphos he means actual siblings unless he signals otherwise. ...
You're begging the question. How exactly do you know that Mark is using adelphos in the literal sense when he speaks of Andrew, Simon, John and James? You are assuming that they are biological brothers--and full-blood, at that. But why are you making that assumption? Because Mark calls them "adelphoi." But you just used your belief in their biological brotherhood to prove what adelphoi means to Mark! That's circular reasoning.
The fact is, we have no proof of their exact biological relationship. All we know is that the text calls them adelphoi, and huoi of Zebedee and his wife (in the case of John and James). We have no sentences that specify exactly how those relationships came into being. And that would be necessary for you to determine whether they were in fact biologically related, and how.
We do have such sentences for Jesus: "Mary gave birth to her first born son, and he named him Jesus." So that's a clearly biological mother-son relationship. We have it for John the Baptist, when the text tells us that Elizabeth gave birth, and the child was named John. Another biological mother-son relationship. As for fatherhood, in Jesus' case we have a clear statement of non-biological paternity on the part of Joseph; and in John the Baptist's case, a clear statement of Zechariah's physical paternity of John. So you can make definite statements in their cases. The verb "gave birth to" is used.
But we don't have that for any of the disciples. Sure, a couple of them get called "brothers" of each other. But we have no information on how that brotherhood began. Do they both have the same biological parents? If so, full brothers ("adelphoi"). Was one of them perhaps a brother-from-another-mother (if, for example, Zebedee had a previous wife who died giving birth to James)? In that case, they would still be called "adelphoi." Was one of them possibly altogether adopted--say, a distant cousin's child who was taken into the family after being orphaned very young? And then they grew up together? In that case, they'd be called (you guessed it) "adelphoi."
To summarize: Just because two people get called brothers now, says nothing about their actual biological relationship to each other. For that, you need a sentence or two that focuses on who gave birth to whom--and if possible, a note on who they conceived that child by.
I can only relate what I understand recent Biblical scholarship suggests. I admit, this side of eternity, we can only see through a glass but dimly. Eventually. we will see clearly.
I can reconcile Mary’s perpetual virginity with modern biblical scholarship by recognizing that the doctrine and the historical‑critical method operate in different modes. One is a theological claim about who Christ is and how salvation works, and the other is a historical‑literary analysis of ancient texts.
But which answer are you saying is true?
True for whom? If you prefer the tradition of the Perpetual Virginity of Mary, so be it. I don't happen to go that way. It means more to me that Jesus experienced a nuclear family just like rest of us.
Does anyone ever suggest that Joseph died and then Mary remarried and thus the half-brothers and half-sisters were this stepfather's children and younger than Jesus?
Does anyone ever suggest that Joseph died and then Mary remarried and thus the half-brothers and half-sisters were this stepfather's children and younger than Jesus?
(Just trying to be imaginative.)
This just seems like a bad penny that will not go away.
Simply put, there is no indication Mary ever remarried either in Scripture or in Tradition.
I think I remember reading that there was debate in the ancient world about whether both men and women contributed to conception. I think, but I could be wrong, that Aristotle thought that semen was the necessary agent of reproduction and the womb was nothing more than a vessel. Hence the male contribution was considered far more important than the female.
And the whole point of the argument about whether they were full siblings or half-siblings is that it became Very Important that Mary was a perpetual virgin.
This part of why I don't buy the half-siblings theory. It is easy to see how views about physicality (and especially sex) led to a requirement that the Mother of Christ must have remained "pure" and so to the half-sibling theory. But once you remove the "sex is nasty" stuff, there is no reason to suppose the siblings were anything other than full siblings. There is no suggestion anywhere in the Gospels that they weren't full siblings. The only reason to start doubting this is if you have already decided that Mary could never have had sexual relations with Joseph.
And, to be blunt, Matthew 1:25 contradicts that view: "he had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son." The clear implication of this statement is that there WERE marital relations after Jesus had been born.
It is easy to see how views about physicality (and especially sex) led to a requirement that the Mother of Christ must have remained "pure" and so to the half-sibling theory. But once you remove the "sex is nasty" stuff, there is no reason to suppose the siblings were anything other than full siblings.
See, that doesn’t follow for me. To me, it’s just not a matter of whether there’s a reason to suppose the siblings were step-siblings. It’s simply a matter that the text doesn’t actually specify the exact way in which they were “brothers” and “sisters” one way or another, and therefore settling on any of the choices is a guess. It may be an educated guess, but it’s still a guess.
And, to be blunt, Matthew 1:25 contradicts that view: "he had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son." The clear implication of this statement is that there WERE marital relations after Jesus had been born.
As I noted earlier, my understanding from NT scholars I’ve heard or read is that the Greek preposition there is more ambiguous than the English “until.” Prepositions are weird things, and translating them isn’t always straightforward.
I think I remember reading that there was debate in the ancient world about whether both men and women contributed to conception. I think, but I could be wrong, that Aristotle thought that semen was the necessary agent of reproduction and the womb was nothing more than a vessel. Hence the male contribution was considered far more important than the female.
This half remembered thought may not be helpful.
That is correct, Aristotle thought semen would provide the embryonic form whilst women provided the nutrition for the embryo via menstrual blood, hence periods stopping during pregnancy. This belief continued until the Enlightenment.
He also thought the female body was imperfect, with female genitals being an inversion of the male.
As I noted earlier, my understanding from NT scholars I’ve heard or read is that the Greek preposition there is more ambiguous than the English “until.” Prepositions are weird things, and translating them isn’t always straightforward.
And yet the weird thing is that every English translation of Matthew I have come across uses " until" (or similar words). If there was ambiguity there, I would expect some translations to indicate this.
The phrase that comes to mind at the moment is "clutching at straws". I can quite believe that (for example) a Roman Catholic scholar might find the plain meaning of Matt. 1:25 uncomfortable and so go looking for a way to reinterpret it. But none of the commentaries that I've seen have ever raised a question mark about this.
@Barnabas62, I'm not sure we can second guess what the Church Fathers (and Mothers) could or couldn't have 'foreseen'.
For all we know some of them might have been entirely comfortable with how things developed. Others less so.
They were people of their time and as prone to complexities and moral ambiguities as the rest of us.
St John Chrysostom wasn't afraid to 'speak truth to power' and rail at the civil authorities of his day over moral issues yet he also came out with highly problematic views about the Jews.
And it it wasn't just 'imperial Christianity' or Christendom that can get nasty. The Munster Anabaptists anyone? The Branch Davidians? Jim Jones?
As I noted earlier, my understanding from NT scholars I’ve heard or read is that the Greek preposition there is more ambiguous than the English “until.” Prepositions are weird things, and translating them isn’t always straightforward.
And yet the weird thing is that every English translation of Matthew I have come across uses " until" (or similar words). If there was ambiguity there, I would expect some translations to indicate this.
Yes, because “until” is the best English translation we have. But my understanding—again, happy to be corrected by people who actually know the Greek—is that the original Greek hēos does not imply, as the English “until” arguably does, that whatever is being described as not happening “until” Event X did happen after Event X. It simply means from the time of the announcement until Jesus was born they didn’t have sex. Hēos doesn’t imply anything about what happened after Jesus was born.
The phrase that comes to mind at the moment is "clutching at straws".
I would have to have a stake in a question like the perpetual virginity of Mary to need to clutch at straws. As I’ve already said, I’m agnostic on the issue, and it matters not a whit to my faith, nor does it matter to my faith whether James, Joseph, Judas and Simon were Jesus’s full brothers, half-brothers, step-brothers or cousins.
What I’m trying to do here, in the context of this thread, is deal with what the text actually says and doesn’t say, and separate that from assumptions we bring to the text or inferences we draw from the text. And that includes assumptions and inferences we make based on contemporary English translations when the text wasn’t written in contemporary English.
@Barnabas62, I'm not sure we can second guess what the Church Fathers (and Mothers) could or couldn't have 'foreseen'.
For all we know some of them might have been entirely comfortable with how things developed. Others less so.
They were people of their time and as prone to complexities and moral ambiguities as the rest of us.
St John Chrysostom wasn't afraid to 'speak truth to power' and rail at the civil authorities of his day over moral issues yet he also came out with highly problematic views about the Jews.
And it it wasn't just 'imperial Christianity' or Christendom that can get nasty. The Munster Anabaptists anyone? The Branch Davidians? Jim Jones?
Agreed. What I was trying to get at was that there was almost certainly a pastoral intention as well as a concern for theological truth behind the central
doctrines. But it didn’t necessarily make people behave any better. Sanctification can be a slow process - 2 steps up, 2 steps down!
Just a thought on the fascinating discussions over Jesus’ make up! I don’t dismiss the value of such discussions but personally they pass me by. As C S Lewis said, God becoming Man is a great miracle. Beside which other miracles fall into some kind of lesser category. Once one has accepted the enormity of that miracle, the mechanisms behind Jesus’ human body seem to fall into proportion somehow. At least they do for me. I’m with St John Chrysostom in freely admitting that I cannot comprehend it. God was Man in Palestine.
As I noted earlier, my understanding from NT scholars I’ve heard or read is that the Greek preposition there is more ambiguous than the English “until.” Prepositions are weird things, and translating them isn’t always straightforward.
And yet the weird thing is that every English translation of Matthew I have come across uses " until" (or similar words). If there was ambiguity there, I would expect some translations to indicate this.
Yes, because “until” is the best English translation we have. But my understanding—again, happy to be corrected by people who actually know the Greek—is that the original Greek hēos does not imply, as the English “until” arguably does, that whatever is being described as not happening “until” Event X did happen after Event X. It simply means from the time of the announcement until Jesus was born they didn’t have sex. Hēos doesn’t imply anything about what happened after Jesus was born.
The phrase that comes to mind at the moment is "clutching at straws".
I would have to have a stake in a question like the perpetual virginity of Mary to need to clutch at straws. As I’ve already said, I’m agnostic on the issue, and it matters not a whit to my faith, nor does it matter to my faith whether James, Joseph, Judas and Simon were Jesus’s full brothers, half-brothers, step-brothers or cousins.
What I’m trying to do here, in the context of this thread, is deal with what the text actually says and doesn’t say, and separate that from assumptions we bring to the text or inferences we draw from the text. And that includes assumptions and inferences we make based on contemporary English translations when the text wasn’t written in contemporary English.
But you a) don't speak the language and b) don't live in the culture. So how are you going to separate your own "assumptions and inferences" from the text?
It seems like if you were raised a Roman Catholic you would have one set of "assumptions and inferences" and if you are one of the varieties of Protestant you will be working from a different set, neither really based on the text in any significant way.
Furthermore, there's a whole interesting topic about the connections between early Christian thought and Aristotle which I was reading earlier. So what you think you know has been given to you filtered through various papers. The one from Plato, the one from Aristotle and so on.
As I noted earlier, my understanding from NT scholars I’ve heard or read is that the Greek preposition there is more ambiguous than the English “until.” Prepositions are weird things, and translating them isn’t always straightforward.
And yet the weird thing is that every English translation of Matthew I have come across uses " until" (or similar words). If there was ambiguity there, I would expect some translations to indicate this.
Yes, because “until” is the best English translation we have. But my understanding—again, happy to be corrected by people who actually know the Greek—is that the original Greek hēos does not imply, as the English “until” arguably does, that whatever is being described as not happening “until” Event X did happen after Event X. It simply means from the time of the announcement until Jesus was born they didn’t have sex. Hēos doesn’t imply anything about what happened after Jesus was born.
The phrase that comes to mind at the moment is "clutching at straws".
I would have to have a stake in a question like the perpetual virginity of Mary to need to clutch at straws. As I’ve already said, I’m agnostic on the issue, and it matters not a whit to my faith, nor does it matter to my faith whether James, Joseph, Judas and Simon were Jesus’s full brothers, half-brothers, step-brothers or cousins.
What I’m trying to do here, in the context of this thread, is deal with what the text actually says and doesn’t say, and separate that from assumptions we bring to the text or inferences we draw from the text. And that includes assumptions and inferences we make based on contemporary English translations when the text wasn’t written in contemporary English.
But you a) don't speak the language and b) don't live in the culture. So how are you going to separate your own "assumptions and inferences" from the text?
How does one do that when one studies any text, particularly a text from a different culture in a different language? Study and more study.
The Orthodox belief is that Jesus or the Christ is both divine and human. He got all of his divinity from his Father, and all of his humanity from his mother. So if you want to go the tale-of-the-chromosomes route, his mother donated an X, and God supplied the Y.
If that's the Orthodox belief I don't think it's compatible with the assertion that Jesus is fully human nor is it compatible with our understanding of God. Jesus is not a human-divine hybrid.
God does not have divine chromosomes to supply - God can create chromosomes, but they would be human chromosomes. To be fully human Jesus needs a full set of human chromosomes (or at least within the range of viable chromosomal configurations).
But it strikes me that the Church fathers aren't coming at this from a modern conceptual scheme. For us, the salient thing about the virgin birth is the fact that Jesus doesn't have a human donor of paternal genes. But in the quote from Gregory earlier the salient point seems to be that Mary hadn't had sex - from Gregory's argument the Angel Gabriel could have turned up with a pot and a turkey baster and it would still have been a virgin birth.
It seems to me that the point the early theologians were getting at in saying Jesus gets his humanity from his mother is that he wasn't created from the clay like a second Adam.
I think you're splitting hairs, but I suppose you could say he got two X chromosomes from Mary but identified as a male.
Comments
You're begging the question. How exactly do you know that Mark is using adelphos in the literal sense when he speaks of Andrew, Simon, John and James? You are assuming that they are biological brothers--and full-blood, at that. But why are you making that assumption? Because Mark calls them "adelphoi." But you just used your belief in their biological brotherhood to prove what adelphoi means to Mark! That's circular reasoning.
The fact is, we have no proof of their exact biological relationship. All we know is that the text calls them adelphoi, and huoi of Zebedee and his wife (in the case of John and James). We have no sentences that specify exactly how those relationships came into being. And that would be necessary for you to determine whether they were in fact biologically related, and how.
We do have such sentences for Jesus: "Mary gave birth to her first born son, and he named him Jesus." So that's a clearly biological mother-son relationship. We have it for John the Baptist, when the text tells us that Elizabeth gave birth, and the child was named John. Another biological mother-son relationship. As for fatherhood, in Jesus' case we have a clear statement of non-biological paternity on the part of Joseph; and in John the Baptist's case, a clear statement of Zechariah's physical paternity of John. So you can make definite statements in their cases. The verb "gave birth to" is used.
But we don't have that for any of the disciples. Sure, a couple of them get called "brothers" of each other. But we have no information on how that brotherhood began. Do they both have the same biological parents? If so, full brothers ("adelphoi"). Was one of them perhaps a brother-from-another-mother (if, for example, Zebedee had a previous wife who died giving birth to James)? In that case, they would still be called "adelphoi." Was one of them possibly altogether adopted--say, a distant cousin's child who was taken into the family after being orphaned very young? And then they grew up together? In that case, they'd be called (you guessed it) "adelphoi."
To summarize: Just because two people get called brothers now, says nothing about their actual biological relationship to each other. For that, you need a sentence or two that focuses on who gave birth to whom--and if possible, a note on who they conceived that child by.
The assertion was that the Bible was transparent in meaning.
That’s a best partially true, as Lamb Chopped has just asserted with reason in the example of the meaning of brothers. And it is a much more general problem. As it often is for old texts. The insight into language use at the time, changes in use since, cultural influences, accurate textual transmission and preservation of texts, effective translation from original language, textual variations, all feed into the question of meaning.
Does that mean we need a priestly class to do all that work for us. Well, since I’m a nonconformist, you know my answer to that! But it doesn’t mean I’m ignorant of the difficulties and the hard work often required to get at meaning.
By reference again to the thread title, it provokes a simple but significant question. What makes you think you know what it means?
There is a saying in Lutheran circles, bishops and councils can error. Same is true with theologians. RCs and Orthodox, even Protestants (such as @Nick Tamen) have to come up with another way of understanding especially if they believe in the perpetual virginity of Mary. Yes, even Calvin and Luther accepted the perpetual virginity of Mary.
I point you to John P. Meier, author of the monumental multi‑volume A Marginal Jew. Meier was a priest, a highly respected RC biblical scholar, and a professor at Notre Dame.
In A Marginal Jew, he argues—on strictly historical‑critical grounds—that the most probable reading of the New Testament is that Jesus had actual siblings, children of Mary and Joseph born after Jesus.
Meier explicitly distinguishes his historical‑critical conclusions from Catholic dogma, but he does not hide the fact that the historic evidence points toward Jesus having real siblings.
On the Orthodox side.
Fr. Theodore Stylianopoulos (Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology)
Notes that the NT language prima facie suggests real siblings, even though Orthodox tradition interprets them as Joseph’s children.
Fr. John Breck
Acknowledges that the linguistic evidence favors biological siblings, but affirms the traditional interpretation for theological reasons.
Fr. Paul Nadim Tarazi (Orthodox biblical scholar, St. Vladimir’s Seminary)
Tarazi is the closest to a direct Orthodox voice saying Jesus had real siblings. In his commentaries, he argues that the NT authors meant actual brothers, and that later doctrinal developments reshaped the reading. He is the most explicit Orthodox scholar to take this position.
These theologians certainly have to deal with the cognitive dissonance of what their studies say and what their Tradition holds.
But as a Lutheran, I can say while tradition and my forefathers held to the perpetual virginity of Mary, I am not chained to them. I recognize what was held back then. I can reconcile Mary’s perpetual virginity with modern biblical scholarship by recognizing that the doctrine and the historical‑critical method operate in different modes. One is a theological claim about who Christ is and how salvation works, and the other is a historical‑literary analysis of ancient texts. They don’t have to cancel each other out — but they do need to be kept in their proper lanes.
And I grant, that in this case the lanes got a little blurred.
But which answer are you saying is true?
I think I should also add that just because there are exceptions from the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, that does not change the understanding of the majority of scholars within those traditions.
The problem I'd have with the Lutheran position on 'bishops and councils can err' isn't one of 'conciliar fundamentalism' as such, but the difficulties of agreeing what the scriptural texts actually say.
Bearing in mind that bishops, councils and so forth had the last say as it were on what texts were to be considered canonical in the first place.
We've already got some daylight between other Protestant posters and your good self on whether the sibling references indicate biological relationships or kinship units.
I'm not sure it's even safe to assume that 'nuclear families' in the modern sense existed back then, but that's another issue.
Alright, we are never going to agree 100% on absolutely everything and on one level I'm far more interested in how much we share in common than those issues which divide us.
Thanks for a stimulating debate and I hope we can continue in that vein.
When I think of the agonising over the centuries, the heresy trials, the torture, the burning at the stake, the religious wars, I am given to really, really wish humans would admit that they don't and can't know the answer to that question about any matter of faith.
With caveats, more recent science is better than old. It would be foolish to take Aristotle's concepts over accepted biological knowledge from the last 50 years. And it isn't just science of course, there are many ways that human knowledge has moved forwards.
It feels like religion is the opposite, where there are competing claims as to what the "original sense" of words was and so on.
That's an interpretation. But I for example don't think our bodies are subject to death because of sin; they're subject to death because all living things are. There's only so long that a complex metazoan can keep on temporarily locally reversing entropy (which is what organisms do, and why they have to eat or photosynthesise)
An immortal body would have to be made of something completely different; a different order of stuff made from material that doesn't exist in our universe, not subject to its physical laws.
Given that, and the fact that any given body contains atoms that have comprised many creatures - human and otherwise - before, I have to see the whole thing in terms so abstract and metaphorical that somehow the historicity of Christ's bodily resurrection no longer seems to be a show-stopper if it didn’t happen.
In that context it seems bizarre to try to argue about who wrote the stories and the meaning of individual words.
On the other hand, clearly there are things that this traditional knowledge does not touch: such as aircraft maintenance.
I am afraid that really don't have the time or resources any more to delve into references to Gnostic teachings and their influence on early Christianity. But it is well established that it did happen - in some places more than others. Yes it is true that Gnosticism was rejected but to deny that aspects of its influence lingered seems astonishing to me.
The distrust of the physical is well seen in many places and by many writers (Augustine of Hippo and Jerome to name just two).
I don't know if this has been done but what would be helpful would be research into WHERE and WHEN the belief in an older Joseph first emerged and compare that with what we know about what else was happening in that area at that time. Was it in an area that already had Gnostic - style beliefs?
I don't think this is entirely true in the sense of materials in the universe. But agreed things on earth do not work like that and certainly nothing described as human would.
Death in the sense of botanical senescence has only really been understood for the last 100 years. Is that death or not? No, but also yes.
Whilst ancient people understood about decay, I do not think it is necessarily obvious that the physical elements of a body are reintegrated into other organisms in the earth's cycles.
Even under a 4 element model there was an understanding that the elements would be reused in other things. I think farmers would have understood well enough that if you spread manure on your field you were in some way contributing to the growing plant matter.
I would argue 'religious' understanding has moved 'forwards' (a loaded word, you'll agree, with its implication of 'better') with the inclusion of marginalised groups, with women priests and me, a divorced person.
Still much to be done in theology and science.
Lord, have mercy!
I think this understanding is a lot more recent than one might think; it was not really well understood before Von Liebig in the early 19 century.
I am not convinced that there was widespread use of organic wastes before then in the sense of believing it aided crops. The chemistry is complicated so there is no direct association between reuse of collected stable wastes and crop yields.
My belief is that fields were used for animal an human wastes for disposal and hygiene, there was poor understanding of what happened to it for a very long time.
Even as a Big T Tradition person I don't have an issue with the idea that Gnostic beliefs influenced early Christianity and hung around for a good while even though they were gradually rejected or condemned.
Heck, Augustine seems to have hung onto his Manichaen dualism to a great extent even after his Christian conversion - which is why Orthodoxy doesn't fully endorse everything he wrote and all the emphases he held.
At the risk of giving offence its also why the Orthodox often accuse the 'West' of being overly dualistic to some extent given the stronger influence of Augustine on the development of Western theology.
I'd agree that certain Fathers could be highly and overly suspicious of the physical and also highly anti-semitic too. St John Chrysostom, I'm looking at you as well as honouring you in our post-communion prayers whenever we celebrate the Liturgy attributed to you but which actually developed over many years and from various sources ...
We'd all have to do more digging to establish whether there was Gnostic influence on the NT and non-canonical Nativity stories as well as echoes of OT 'special birth' narratives and Graeco-Roman literary forms etc etc etc.
For me, Tradition and the Bible always need to interpreted and understood in the light of Reason. I'm afraid I'm still a big fan of the Three-legged stool. There are times to pay close attention to Tradition but also times when we have to say "This tradition is no longer sustainable in the light of what we now know."
God does not have divine chromosomes to supply - God can create chromosomes, but they would be human chromosomes. To be fully human Jesus needs a full set of human chromosomes (or at least within the range of viable chromosomal configurations).
But it strikes me that the Church fathers aren't coming at this from a modern conceptual scheme. For us, the salient thing about the virgin birth is the fact that Jesus doesn't have a human donor of paternal genes. But in the quote from Gregory earlier the salient point seems to be that Mary hadn't had sex - from Gregory's argument the Angel Gabriel could have turned up with a pot and a turkey baster and it would still have been a virgin birth.
It seems to me that the point the early theologians were getting at in saying Jesus gets his humanity from his mother is that he wasn't created from the clay like a second Adam.
A competent Roman consul, once they were up to speed on the technological changes, could probably do a better job of directing military strategy than the current US or Russian governments.
So you mean here that humanities have not progressed since ancient times? If so then no.
Not 60% divine and 40% human or 25% divine and 75% human or ...
We also believe in the Virgin Birth.
How does all this work? Well, here's our stock answer - it's a Divine Mystery.
And I don't mean that glibly. There have been some Patristic sources cited upthread where St John Chrysostom and others perhaps scratch their heads and say, 'How does this work? Search me, gov' ...'
On the Anglican 'three-legged stool' thing - Scripture, Reason and Tradition - the idea of course is that none of the legs are longer than the others. Otherwise the whole thing would unbalance and topple over. The Wesleyan tradition added another leg - Experience.
That's all fine as far as it goes but a counter-claim might be that if we make Scripture the longest leg we end up with biblical fundamentalism, if we make Tradition the longest leg we end up with kind of 'church-fundamentalism', if Experience then subjectivism and illuminism, if Reason then my own ideas become the final arbiter and I become my own rationalist Pope.
I think the Orthodox would prefer to see Tradition not so much as one leg alongside the others but the collective milieu if you like in which the others are 'received' and function - which doesn't mean switching our brains off.
It's interesting what @Gramps49 has shared regarding views some Orthodox and RC scholars have expressed on these issues. I wonder if Athonite monks or hard-line RCs are calling for them to be excommunicated?
It's also made me wonder whether Big T Traditions as a whole would modify and adjust their views should those ideas gain traction and a future Pope, Ecumenical Council or other body were to say, 'Look, we've got it wrong, we need to adjust our thinking on this issue ...'
It's not beyond the realms of possibility but given how slowly these things move ...
And look what happened when dear old Patriarch Bartholomew called an Ecumenical Council ...
Would the RCs, Orthodox (Oriental and Eastern) and the various Protestant churches all get around a table and thrash these things out once and for all?
There has been two thousand years of theology more or less. It just hasn't explicitly come up in this particular discussion.
Which point? I don't understand what you are saying.
What I think is different about religious texts is the question of relevance. Does the historical meaning and its significance at the time have the same relevance today? How should it influence our thinking about what is right and fair?
My own view FWIW is that the Christian scriptures and the Traditions associated with them contain eternal verities which can help to inform our behaviour for the better. But that certainly does not apply to all of the material. Some of it made more sense in the culture of the times, but not today.
Even if they do not formulate it in these terms, I suspect most people in the world, now and in history have asked themselves the question 'who am I?' Most I suspect have also asked some version of 'what would it be like to be king, queen, famous, or whatever?' Once one has encountered Christianity, it is a fairly short step to conjecturing, 'if I had been born Jesus, Son of God and Son of Man, who would I be and what would that be like?
To quote Gamaliel, the fully divine fully human Christ is a Divine Mystery!
Rather like the Trinity. I think the old Church Fathers were trying, quite humbly, to draw boundaries of understanding within which the faith once given could be protected. Within those boundaries folks could grow up in the faith.
They had seen the community risks involved with some of the diverse opinions (heresies). I think a lot was learned from Irenaeus whose writings exposed some of the indifference to poverty and suffering he had discovered amongst Gnostics. Much of the energy of “Against Heresies” was driven by pastoral outrage at the dismissal of those outside the clique.
Today, I think we’ve lost that awareness of risk. Beliefs do condition behaviour. I’m sure you have a point in the source of some of the present day questioning. But on the whole I rate Divine Mystery. If accepted, it can help us to avoid throwing out babies with bathwater!
That would be scant consolation to anyone excommunicated or exiled for non-compliance of course.
And yes, later on we've got heresy trials and executions and so on. Just as there were maimings and other horribly violent punishments meted out by both sides during the Iconoclastic controversy.
If we hold to any form of orthodoxy, whether Big O or small o it behoves us to do so generously and yes, to hold out the possibility that we might be mistaken.
Towards the end of his life the late Metropolitan Kallistos Ware invited Orthodox clergy from the Oxford area and beyond to a meal.
At one point he learned back and said in his inimitable Oxford Don accent - which everyone who knew him or heard him imitates - and said, 'Would I shock you if I told you I sometimes wonder whether there's anything in it and I'm not just simply imagining it to be true?'
Lord, I believe, help thou mine unbelief.
And help me also not to dismiss, disrespect or disregard those who might think differently to me.
Yes. After I wrote that, I started thinking about Crusades and Inquistions. There’s a place in Norwich called the Lollards pit where they used to burn people for blasphemy. I’m not sure the early Church Fathers foresaw how bad imperial Christendom would get.
There is of course a lot of built in protection within the Christian faith which declares those excesses against others to be completely wrong. But somehow or other it got trampled under foot in Christendom because of imperial imperatives.
I’m very aware of the imperfections of well meaning protection.
Thanks for the insight about Kallistos Ware. A good man.
Then we will have to agree to disagree.
Moving on.
I can only relate what I understand recent Biblical scholarship suggests. I admit, this side of eternity, we can only see through a glass but dimly. Eventually. we will see clearly.
True for whom? If you prefer the tradition of the Perpetual Virginity of Mary, so be it. I don't happen to go that way. It means more to me that Jesus experienced a nuclear family just like rest of us.
(Just trying to be imaginative.)
This just seems like a bad penny that will not go away.
Simply put, there is no indication Mary ever remarried either in Scripture or in Tradition.
I can only address what I understand Scripture to be saying.
Sorry for the double post. I had intended on including this response above.
This half remembered thought may not be helpful.
And the whole point of the argument about whether they were full siblings or half-siblings is that it became Very Important that Mary was a perpetual virgin.
This part of why I don't buy the half-siblings theory. It is easy to see how views about physicality (and especially sex) led to a requirement that the Mother of Christ must have remained "pure" and so to the half-sibling theory. But once you remove the "sex is nasty" stuff, there is no reason to suppose the siblings were anything other than full siblings. There is no suggestion anywhere in the Gospels that they weren't full siblings. The only reason to start doubting this is if you have already decided that Mary could never have had sexual relations with Joseph.
And, to be blunt, Matthew 1:25 contradicts that view: "he had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son." The clear implication of this statement is that there WERE marital relations after Jesus had been born.
As I noted earlier, my understanding from NT scholars I’ve heard or read is that the Greek preposition there is more ambiguous than the English “until.” Prepositions are weird things, and translating them isn’t always straightforward.
He also thought the female body was imperfect, with female genitals being an inversion of the male.
And yet the weird thing is that every English translation of Matthew I have come across uses " until" (or similar words). If there was ambiguity there, I would expect some translations to indicate this.
The phrase that comes to mind at the moment is "clutching at straws". I can quite believe that (for example) a Roman Catholic scholar might find the plain meaning of Matt. 1:25 uncomfortable and so go looking for a way to reinterpret it. But none of the commentaries that I've seen have ever raised a question mark about this.
For all we know some of them might have been entirely comfortable with how things developed. Others less so.
They were people of their time and as prone to complexities and moral ambiguities as the rest of us.
St John Chrysostom wasn't afraid to 'speak truth to power' and rail at the civil authorities of his day over moral issues yet he also came out with highly problematic views about the Jews.
And it it wasn't just 'imperial Christianity' or Christendom that can get nasty. The Munster Anabaptists anyone? The Branch Davidians? Jim Jones?
I would have to have a stake in a question like the perpetual virginity of Mary to need to clutch at straws. As I’ve already said, I’m agnostic on the issue, and it matters not a whit to my faith, nor does it matter to my faith whether James, Joseph, Judas and Simon were Jesus’s full brothers, half-brothers, step-brothers or cousins.
What I’m trying to do here, in the context of this thread, is deal with what the text actually says and doesn’t say, and separate that from assumptions we bring to the text or inferences we draw from the text. And that includes assumptions and inferences we make based on contemporary English translations when the text wasn’t written in contemporary English.
Agreed. What I was trying to get at was that there was almost certainly a pastoral intention as well as a concern for theological truth behind the central
doctrines. But it didn’t necessarily make people behave any better. Sanctification can be a slow process - 2 steps up, 2 steps down!
Just a thought on the fascinating discussions over Jesus’ make up! I don’t dismiss the value of such discussions but personally they pass me by. As C S Lewis said, God becoming Man is a great miracle. Beside which other miracles fall into some kind of lesser category. Once one has accepted the enormity of that miracle, the mechanisms behind Jesus’ human body seem to fall into proportion somehow. At least they do for me. I’m with St John Chrysostom in freely admitting that I cannot comprehend it. God was Man in Palestine.
Yeah, I need a nap.
But you a) don't speak the language and b) don't live in the culture. So how are you going to separate your own "assumptions and inferences" from the text?
It seems like if you were raised a Roman Catholic you would have one set of "assumptions and inferences" and if you are one of the varieties of Protestant you will be working from a different set, neither really based on the text in any significant way.
I think you're splitting hairs, but I suppose you could say he got two X chromosomes from Mary but identified as a male.