Well of course not. That's because all plain meanings of scripture are first filtered through the Church for interpretation as to what the plain meaning is. After that, it is natural that all these plain meanings will agree completely with Tradition.
For example, the plain meaning of "your brothers are outside" as perceived by the modern usage is biological brothers. But the plain meaning of the same phrase 2,000 years ago was kinsfolk.
That's a good example. You DECLARE that the plain meaning was kinsfolk, but there is no way you can prove that definitively. The Church says that is what it means, so you declare it as fact. I remember when we were talking about this a long time ago. I asked someone (or several) that if your interpretation was correct, then how did people refer to their actual blood siblings. I really can't remember a clear answer. I still find it not credible that a named "mother" means blood mother, but in the same sentence a named "brother" means friend.
But you never pointed out a case where a Church father would say something like "OK, Matthew says they were Jesus's biological brothers, but I declare Matthew wrong and establish the Tradition that they were not".
I really have no idea how or why the Church Fathers wrote what they wrote. All I know is that they were fallible, they made mistakes, they were subject to all of the influences of power and politics just like anyone else, and I have no Biblical reason to trust them over and above the Bible.
In all cases that Church father simply read the same text you are reading and the meaning was plain to him, because he had the cultural proximity to the evangelist and had the unwritten knowledge.
In that case God failed to author a book that would stand the test of time, and Christianity is not a revealed faith. It also means that God is the most cryptic author in the history of literature. (But thank goodness we have a bunch of men to bail us out from God's shortcomings.)
We should be interested in the plain meaning per men of 1st century. I have little interest in the plain meaning per men of 16-21 centuries as such, Catholic or Protestant. But the plain meaning of the 1st century is known through tradition. It is a lense, not a filter.
You DECLARE that the plain meaning was kinsfolk, but there is no way you can prove that definitively. The Church says that is what it means, so you declare it as fact. I remember when we were talking about this a long time ago.
This is what I posted or referred to on this thread about the "brethren". Please point out where the "brethren" are interpreted by kinsfolk by DECLARATION. All I see are references to the scripture itself or lingustical facts. Now, if I were teaching a catechumen about the perpetual virginity of Our Lady I would indeed simply declare that the Church tells us so and move on; however you imagined that would be a case of Scripture contradicting Tradition, so all the reasoning was done without a reference to Tradition.
As to the "brothers", Jesus Himself loved calling people brothers and they were not blood relatives; he in fact taught us all to do the same. In large families there is a mixture of cousins, second cousins, half brothers, milk brothers, and of course bolld brothers. It is natural to refer to all of them collectively as "brothers". In Greek to this day "adelphoi" (the word used in the Gospel) is used to indicate all kinds of kinsfolk. Likewise, in the Old Testament Lot is called "brother" of Abraham even though the Bible is explicit about his genealogy and he is his nephew. There is no warrant to assume that "adelphoi" in Matthew 12 referred to physical children of Mary (we are all her spiritual children).In 2982 I referred you to this post by InterestedQuestioner:
*** But this is consistent with the fact that a man has one father and one mother, but many relatives of the same generation. "Brother" can be used expansively; "mother" cannot. Besides, "son of carpenter" is indeed used imprecisely here, just like "brothers" is used imprecisely.
***
I can certainly see that your belief that Jesus had brothers is entirely reasonable. After all, that's what the Word of God literally says, at least in my translation! One thing, however, is that none of us in this discussion believe that verse to be precisely true. We are all reading into that Scripture something else beside brother.Some are reading it to mean half-brothers. That is, they had Mary as a mother, but not God as a father. To interpret it to mean full brother, the plain meaning of the text in translation, would mean there are multiple messiahs. None of us believe that. Now to believe that the term brother actually means "half-brother," children not born of God and Mary, but rather of Joesph and Mary is entirely reasonable, but it's good to recognize that we are reading something into Scripture that it does not actually say. To support this argument, we would have to argue pretty much in the same way that many have done on this thread, and say that the Greeks or Jews simply didn't have a word for half-brothers, although with a distant history of polygamy and concubinage among the Israelites and the Roman practice of serial monogamy, they may have had an intuitive understanding of the concept. The problem with this interpretation is that, according to Scripture, some of the people listed as his brothers appear to not have had the same Mother as Jesus.
There are of course other possible speculations besides interpreting this to mean that there were literally multiple Christs born of God and Mary. For example, we might believe that Joseph was a widower who had children from a previous marriage, and that these were the brothers spoken of in the text. A fine theory, but it's entirely speculative, as Scripture never says this is the case. Another problem with this theory is that the Mother of two of these brothers is still alive at the time of the Crucifixion, which would mean that Joseph either divorced Mary later on, was actually a divorcee at the time of his espousal to Mary, or that Joesph was married to more than one woman. Those are all problematic contingencies if we attempt to force them upon Scripture.
Another interpretation is that these "brothers" were cousins of some sort or other. (First cousin, second cousin, third cousin two times removed....) It's not an unreasonable argument, in that Scripture often mentions brothers and sisters when it is in fact seems to be talking about some other relationship. There are manyf examples of this, but one is the following:
"So the soldiers did this. But standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother's sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. (John 19:25)
Now, we can see that there were a lot of Marys at the foot of the Cross with Jesus when he was dying. The Scripture I would like to call your attention to, however, is "standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother's sister, Mary...." Now, if we take this translation in an entirely literal sense, Mary has a sister named Mary. That would be sort of like George Foreman's family, everybody gets named "George," So you have a George 1 and George 2, and George 3, and however many other sons named George that big George actually has. (I'm not making this up.) Perhaps a more plausible reading of this verse is to say that the language used in this Scripture did not distinguish between sister and cousin or other relative, even though our language forces us to translate in such a way as use a word that either conveys one class of relationship or the other. It's sort of like my Thai friends who's language specifies maternal vs paternal relations. As I understand it, if all I say to them is "my aunt," they are left in a pickle when they translate it, because they have to translate it into a word that means either "maternal aunt" or "paternal aunt," and they don't have enough information to do that.
Another problem that we Catholics have with the Scriptural reference to the brothers and sisters of Jesus is that Scripture else were tells us that at least two of them were not his actual brothers, so we have to assume that at least two of his presumptive (half) brothers are in fact cousins or other relatives. Scripture says His brothers' names were "James and Joseph and Simon and Judas." (Mark 6:3) Elsewhere, however, we learn that Joses and James actually had a different mother. (Mr 15:40, Mr 15:47.)
Paul describes James as the brother of our Lord. (Gal 1: 19) Jude describes himself as the brother of James. (Jude 1: 1) Luke describes Jude as the son of James (Luke 6:16, Acts 1:13) Clearly, Scripture is not using the same degree of precision in describing relations that we typically use in English. And Scripture was not written in English.
When it gets right down to it, Full Court, we simply don't have any Scripture which says that Mary had any children besides Jesus. The broader context of Scripture insists that we believe that at least some of the people who are listed as brothers of our Lord in fact had a different Mother. Any claim that Mary had other children is in fact an inference, and not something that is actually stated in Scripture. Although you may reasonably believe the assertion that Mary did not have other biological children is unwarranted in Scripture, the Scripture never tells us that Mary had other children, and to believe that Mary had no other biological children is not a contradiction of Scripture.
I asked someone (or several) that if your interpretation was correct, then how did people refer to their actual blood siblings
I don't know factually, they probably used the same word "adelphos" as they do today, and if greater precision were necessary they would say "direct brother" or something. Likewise, in modern English we do not distinguish between paternal and maternal aunts, uncles or grandparents; we do not distinguish between cousins once and twice removed, and do fine. And the eskimos have five words for "snow", and the Greeks have four words for "love", and probably wonder how we manage with one. Words of different languages do not map 1:1 generally.
I have no Biblical reason to trust [the Church fathers] over and above the Bible.
This is funny. Actually, you do have a biblical reason, 2 Thessalonians 2:14, in particular, and you do not have a biblical reason to believe in the Bible as self-interpreted. But the point made to you repeatedly is, the fathers illumine the Bible, so even if you only trust the Bible you still have to know the fathers.
In that case God failed to author a book that would stand the test of time, and Christianity is not a revealed faith.
The Revelation is the Word made flesh, Lord Jesus Christ, who is alive and incorrupt today. If for some reason all the Bibles physically vanished or became linguistically incomprehensible through the passage of time and semantic drifts, the Word would still be the same and Christianity would still be the same. The Scripture is a product of the Revelation, produced in a specific linguistic historical and cultural context; the Revelation in its fullness abides in the Church.