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"As the veneration of Mary increased throughout the centuries, the vehicle of Sacred Tradition became the means of promoting new doctrines not explicitly taught in the Bible."

Again, another problem with the Protestant doctrine of Scriptural exclusivity that suggests that all that was revealed by God, for all purposes, is contained in one handy-dandy book. Let's examine the Bible, not by a dissection of each word and verse, but at the level of its intended scope and purpose.

The Bible was not intended to be a science or a history book, it is a religious book, and consequently one cannot obtain information about the natural sciences or history from it. In the words of (then) Cardinal Ratzinger; "Holy Scripture in its entirety was not written from beginning to end like a novel or a textbook. It is, rather, the echo of God's history with his people. It arose out of the struggles and the vagaries of this history, and all through it we can catch a glimpse of the rises and falls, the sufferings and hopes, and the greatness and failures of this history. The Bible is thus the story of God's struggle with human beings to make himself understandable to them over the course of time; but it is also the story of their struggle to seize hold of God over the course of time."

One cannot get from Holy Scripture a scientific explanation of how the world arose or a detailed historical account of irrelevant happenings. Again n the words of Cardinal Ratzinger; "one can only glean religious experience from it. Anything else is an image and a way of describing things whose aim is to make profound realities graspable to human beings. One must distinguish between the form of portrayal and the content that is portrayed. The form would have been chosen from what was understandable at the time -- from the images which surrounded the people who lived then, which they used in speaking and in thinking, and thanks to which they were able to understand the greater realities. And only the reality that shines through these images would be what was intended and what was truly enduring."

The Holy Scripture is ambiguous on this issue but the Holy Tradition holds that Mary was otherwise childless and that is good enough for me.