Jerome wrote a response to Helvidius regarding the virginity of Mary. This post is the ninth in a series of responses to what Jerome wrote.
Jerome wrote:
Helvidius will answer, “What you say, is in my opinion mere trifling. Your arguments are so much waste of time, and the discussion shows more subtlety than truth. Why could not Scripture say, as it said of Thamar and Judah, ‘And he took his wife, and knew her again no more’? Could not Matthew find words to express his meaning? ‘He knew her not,’ he says, ‘until she brought forth a son.’ He did then, after her delivery, know her, whom he had refrained from knowing until she was delivered.”
If Helvidius did not think of this argument himself, I must praise Jerome for providing an excellent example of what has recently come to be called a steel man argument. This is indeed correct. It would not have been hard for the Evangelist to write that Joseph took his wife, but never knew her, or that Mary remained a virgin, or the like, if the Holy Spirit had wished us to think that.
Moreover, had the Holy Spirit intended to convey the perpetual virginity with such a statement, one would expect the Holy Spirit to elsewhere clarify that the brothers and sisters were not actually sons and daughters of Mary.
Of course, the word of caution here is that we cannot dictate to the Holy Spirit how the Holy Spirit expresses himself. Just because a statement could be made more clearly, we cannot demand that the Holy Spirit do so.
In this case, however, the plain meaning of the words is simply that the Joseph abstained from knowing his wife until Jesus was born. The implication, therefore, is that Joseph began to know Mary after Jesus was born, though presumably also after the time of purification set forth in the law of Moses and described in Luke.
-TurretinFan
No comments:
Post a Comment