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I've often wondered why none of them can give a good explanation to the following statement made by Martin Luther: "It is a sweet and pious belief that the infusion of Mary's soul was effected without original sin; so that in the very infusion of her soul she was also purified from original sin and adorned with God's gifts, receiving a pure soul infused by God; thus from the first moment she began to live she was free from all sin." (This was from a sermon Luther gave in 1527, years after he had completely broken with Rome, and more than three centuries BEFORE the Immaculate Conception was proclaimed by the Pope.) If Catholics "invented" the Immaculate Conception in the 19th century, how is it that Luther was preaching about it in the 16th century?
http://ic.net/~erasmus/RAZ95.HTM
John Calvin also had the following to say about Mary's perpetual virginity: "[On Matt 1:25:] The inference he [Helvidius] drew from it was, that Mary remained a virgin no longer than till her first birth, and that afterwards she had other children by her husband . . . No just and well-grounded inference can be drawn from these words . . . as to what took place after the birth of Christ. He is called 'first-born'; but it is for the sole purpose of informing us that he was born of a virgin . . . What took place afterwards the historian does not inform us . . . No man will obstinately keep up the argument, except from an extreme fondness for disputation." But obviously Calvin, like Luther lacked the Biblical scholarship of Jack Chick's comic books, otherwise they never would have said any of this./biting sarcasm is intentional
http://ic.net/~erasmus/RAZ460.HTM