He's An Only Child -- A response to a Protestant argument against Mary's perpetual virginity

He's an Only Child
A bogus Greek argument against Mary's perpetual virginity is making the rounds.
By Ronald K. Tacelli, S.J.

Recently, in some Internet discussion groups, a few Protestant apologists have been expending quite a bit of energy trying to refute the Catholic doctrine of the Blessed Virgin Mary's perpetual virginity. "Ho hum", you might be saying to yourself. "What's new or interesting about that? The 'Mary-had-other-children' canard has been effectively demolished by Catholic apologists a hundred times over. Who cares about this latest twist on a worn-out claim?"

My reaction, each time Professor McCrossen ranted about this, was: What's the big deal? No reasonable person would take the phrase "He knew her not until she gave birth" as somehow proving that he never knew her at all. Why rail away against a position no sensible person is likely to take anyway?

Well, as one who believes in Mary's perpetual virginity, I care, and you should, too. You see, this new argument is based on two Greek terms that mean "until": heos and heos hou.

These Protestant critics of Mary's perpetual virginity are training their guns on Matthew 1:25, claiming that the Greek term for "until" used by St. Matthew - heos hou - implies a reversal or cessation of the condition that is expressed in the clause preceding it. Thus they're attempting to show from linguistic evidence alone that Scripture contradicts the Catholic dogma of Mary's perpetual virginity. And that is a very big deal.

These Internet Intellectuals willingly admit that the Greek word heos all by itself does not imply any such reversal or cessation. This is true of 1 Timothy 4:13, for example: "[heos] I come, attend to the public reading of scripture." But in Matthew 1:25, heos is not used by itself; the word for "until" is heos hou. And in the New Testament heos hou always indicates reversal of the preceding clause - or so they claim. One of the Protestant apologists involved in this Internet argument wrote:

"We have insisted that the basic meaning of heos hou in the New Testament, when it means 'until,' always implies a change of the action in the main clause" (emphasis in the original).

Now if this were true it would indeed indicate that there is linguistic reason for denying the teaching of the Catholic Church on Mary's perpetual virginity. So on that little conjunction, heos hou, a great deal seems to depend.

My old history professor at Boston College, Vincent McCrossen, God rest his soul, used to scream at us in class: "Matthew 1:25, where it says that Joseph did not know Mary until she had given birth to Jesus, does not - repeat: does not - prove that Mary was perpetually a virgin!" He went on to say (or rather scream) that the Greek word for "until" (heos) leaves the matter open. It does not necessarily imply that what didn't happen before the birth (ie. Joseph's "knowing" Mary) did happen after it.

That was my first reaction. But upon further reflection, part of what he said seemed reasonable. Even in English the word "until" need not imply that what didn't happen before some point in time did happen after it.

Think of Granny. She started taking an antibiotic last night; this morning her skin has broken out in welts. We call the doctor and he tells us: "Don't give her any of that medicine until I get there!" In this case the word "until" means pretty much the same as "before"; and there is no implication that Granny will get the medicine after the doctor arrives. In fact, it's implied that she probably won't. So I concluded at the time: Better to say that Matthew 1:25 does not disprove Mary's perpetual virginity; that considered in itself and from the point of view of language alone it does indeed leave the matter open. Catholics can read it as consistent with their Faith; Protestants, as consistent with theirs. Both readings are possible. In any case, it's no big deal. Right?

Wrong. The heos hou argument is bogus.

I'm fluent in classical and koine Greek (koine is the simpler style of Greek used by the New Testament writers), having studied it for many years prior to my ordination to the priesthood and before I earned my Ph.D. I've taught high school and university courses in Greek, and I regularly read Scripture in Greek. But none of that qualifies me as anything close to being an expert in Greek. So rather than trust my own judgment, I checked it out with the experts.

I printed out transcripts of the online heos hou arguments made by these Protestant apologists and showed them to several Greek scholars. They laughed, treating them with scornful derision. They confirmed what I already knew: that heos hou is just shorthand for heos hou chronou en hoi (literally: until the time when), and that both heos and heos hou have the same range of meaning. But do they? Professional scholars can sometimes be dismissive because they've been scooped by unpedigreed amateurs. Could that be the case here? What does a hard look at the evidence reveal?

For one thing, it reveals that not every occurrence of heos hou in the New Testament plainly indicates reversal of the condition being described in the main clause.

Consider Acts 25:21: "But when Paul demanded to be kept in custody until [eis] the Emperor's verdict, I gave orders that he should be kept in custody until [heos hou] I could send him on to Caesar" (Anchor Bible translation, slightly amended; my bracketing).

Now when St. Paul was to be sent on, he was surely going to remain in custody; for his original request was to be kept in custody until the Emperor's verdict. Hence the use of heos hou in this verse does not imply that Paul ceased to be kept in custody after he had been remanded to Caesar. It implies the very opposite.

Another example of heos hou being used without any sense of a change in condition after the "until" happens is 2 Peter 1:19:

"Moreover, we possess the prophetic message that is altogether reliable. You will do well to be attentive to it, as a lamp shining in a dark place, until (heos hou) the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts." Clearly, St. Peter was not insinuating that we should cease being attentive to the truths he was presenting after "the day dawns and the morning star rises in [our] hearts." Here, as in Matthew 1:25, heos hou does not imply a change.

Think of a comparable case. Luigi, a mob informant in Chicago, tells agent Smith that he wants to be held in protective custody till he can meet with the head of the FBI in DC. Agent Smith phones his superiors and says: "I've put Luigi in protective custody until I can arrange for transportation to DC." Will Luigi cease to remain in protective custody once he leaves for DC? Of course not. The force of agent Smith's "until" obviously concerns the time before Luigi's leaving. He might have said to his superiors: "Luigi is in protective custody now and will remain in protective custody during the whole time before I'm able to arrange for his transportation to DC." But we express this in normal English by the word "until." If agent Smith had been speaking koine Greek, it seems clear he'd have said heos hou.

But suppose all this is wrong. Suppose that, apart from Matthew 1:25, every occurrence of heos hou in the New Testament clearly indicates a reversal of the main clause. That would still not prove that reversal is implied by Matthew 1:25. It would merely prove that Matthew 1:25 may be the only place in the New Testament where reversal is not implied. If this is supposed to be a linguistic argument, we need to ask ourselves: Did heos hou really have a range of meaning significantly different from heos all by itself? Is there evidence that between (say) 300 B.C. and 300 A.D., Greek speakers recognized that heos hou, unlike heos by itself, always implied reversal or cessation of what is expressed in the main clause?

The answer is no.

One Greek text well known to the authors of the New Testament was the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament. It was in place roughly two hundred years before Christ. And there, lo and behold, we find that heos hou does not always indicate reversal or cessation. In Psalm 111 (112):8 we read: "His heart is steadfast, he shall not be afraid until [heos hou] he looks down upon his foes." Obviously the man who delights in the Lord's commands is going to continue to have a steadfast heart and to be unafraid even after he looks down upon his foes.

Skip ahead now to the third century A.D. Clement of Alexandria wrote: "Thus thirty years were completed until [heos hou] He [Jesus] suffered" (Stromateis, 1.21; Patrologia Graeca, 8.885a). There is no reversal of the main clause here; once again, heos hou is equivalent to "before." So two hundred years before the New Testament and two hundred years after the New Testament, heos hou could be used, like heos all by itself, to mean extent of time up to a point - but with no negation of the idea expressed in the main clause.

Do our Cyberspace Savants really expect anyone to believe that for a brief period in the middle of this consistent usage, heos hou suddenly had to indicate reversal of the main clause? Or maybe they think that the New Testament was written in a special kind of Greek - one raised uniquely above the mundane flow of usage that preceded and followed it. Or maybe they're blowing smoke concerning a language they really don't know very much about. Or maybe these Protestant apologists do know a good deal about Greek, but they are either ignorant of this particular issue (and are trumpeting their ignorance over the Internet), or they do know their argument has no merit on linguistic grounds and are sneakily persisting in using it.

But regardless of how well or poorly these men know Greek, St. John Chrysostom, one of the greatest early Church Fathers, surely knew the Greek language immensely well (he wrote and spoke it fluently) and was sensitive to its every nuance. Let's look at what he had to say on the subject of Mary's perpetual virginity and the meaning of heos hou.

In his sermons on St. Matthew's Gospel (cf. Patrologia Graeca, 7.58), St. John Chrysostom quotes Matthew 1:25 and then asks, "But why . . . did [St. Matthew] use the word 'until'?" Note well here: In quoting the verse, Chrysostom had used heos hou; but in asking the question, the word he uses for "until" is heos all by itself - as if he were unaware of a difference in meaning between these two expressions.

He answers his question by saying that it is usual and frequent for Scripture to use the word "until" (heos) without reference to limited times. Then he gives three examples. The first is his own paraphrase of Genesis 8:7: "The raven did not return until the earth was dried up." Here Chrysostom uses heos hou for "until." (But the actual text of the Septuagint has heos alone.) The second example is from Psalm 90:2: "From everlasting to everlasting you are." The verse quoted (correctly) by Chrysostom has heos all by itself. The third example is from Psalm 72:7: "In his days justice shall flourish and fullness of peace until the moon be taken away." And here the word for "until," as in the Septuagint text, is heos hou.

If Joseph was a just man and a faithful Jew, if he believed that the God he worshipped, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God who was present in the Holy of Holies, was present also in Mary's womb as Father of her Child, is it really likely that he would have had relations with his wife once the Child had been born?

It's clear that for St. John Chrysostom, heos has exactly the same meaning as heos hou. That's why he framed his question about "until" in terms of heos alone, even though the verse giving rise to the question, which he'd just finished quoting, had heos hou instead. That's why it was natural for him to use heos hou in his paraphrase of Genesis 8:7. And that is why, in his list of analogues to Matthew 1:25, he used both heos and heos hou without the slightest hesitation - his linguistically sensitive ear registered no difference in meaning between them. (But there is a syntactical difference: heos hou came normally to be used as a conjunction; heos by itself as a preposition.)

If an unbridgeable linguistic chasm separated these two expressions, how could it be that the greatest master of the Greek language in all Christendom was unaware of it? The plain answer is that there was no such chasm. The whole "heos hou vs. heos" argument is a bunch of hooey. And both Sophocles in his Greek Lexicon of the Roman and Byzantine Periods and Stephanus in his Thesaurus Graecae Linguae agree; they state explicitly that heos and heos hou are equivalent in meaning.

And finally, we have the testimony of the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Old Testament that the Apostles and the early Church Fathers almost always quoted from in their writings.

So in this corner, ladies and gentlemen, we have Sophocles, Stephanus, the Septuagint, St. John Chrysostom, and modern Greek scholars; in that corner, we have the "Pentium Pamphleteers," swashbuckling Internet polemicists who are pretty clumsy in their wielding of this particular "argument" from the Greek. If you were inclined to wager money, I'd ask you: Where would you place your bets?

But beyond all this, it's the surrounding context, not words considered simply in themselves, that will usually tip the balance of interpretation. If we hear someone say: "I'm not going to eat anything until Thursday," we figure that come Thursday he's going to eat something - because people normally eat. Likewise when we read that a married couple did not have intercourse until a certain time, we figure that they did have intercourse after that time - because this is one of the ways married people normally express their love. And no doubt most (though not all) Protestants read Matthew 1:25 as they do, not out of any pedantic pseudo-scholarship or desire to derogate Mary or compulsive hatred for the Catholic Church.

Rather, they simply desire to see Mary and Joseph as a normal, loving couple. And to all such people of good will, I would close with the following question I'd ask them to ponder before they deny Mary's perpetual virginity: If Joseph was a just man and a faithful Jew, if he believed that the God he worshipped, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God who was present in the Holy of Holies, was present also in Mary's womb as Father of her Child - is it really likely that he would have had relations with his wife once the Child had been born?

And if that question does not give you pause, be assured of my prayers until (heos hou) it does (and afterwards as well).

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Why was it neccessary for Mary to remain a virgin after the birth of Jesus? Is there something inherently less-than-Godly in becoming one flesh with a lawful spouse, i.e. sexuality is detrimental to righteousness?

Its sounds as though you need to ponder the last question in the article some more.

However, to give you a short answer, read the entirety of 1 Corinthians 7. Marriage is "honourable in all" (Hebrews 13.4), but Virginity is "more blessed" (1 Cor. 7.40). Two snippets are below.

1 Now concerning the things whereof you wrote to me: It is good for a man not to touch a woman.

2 But for fear of fornication, let every man have his own wife: and let every woman have her own husband.

3 Let the husband render the debt to his wife: and the wife also in like manner to the husband.

4 The wife hath not power of her own body: but the husband. And in like manner the husband also hath not power of his own body: but the wife.

5 Defraud not one another, except, perhaps, by consent, for a time, that you may give yourselves to prayer: and return together again, lest Satan tempt you for your incontinency.

32 But I would have you to be without solicitude. He that is without a wife is solicitous for the things that belong to the Lord: how he may please God.

33 But he that is with a wife is solicitous for the things of the world: how he may please his wife. And he is divided.

34 And the unmarried woman and the virgin thinketh on the things of the Lord: that she may be holy both in body and in spirit. But she that is married thinketh on the things of the world: how she may please her husband.

35 And this I speak for your profit, not to cast a snare upon you, but for that which is decent and which may give you power to attend upon the Lord, without impediment.

36 But if any man think that he seemeth dishonoured with regard to his virgin, for that she is above the age, and it must so be: let him do what he will. He sinneth not if she marry.

37 For he that hath determined, being steadfast in his heart, having no necessity, but having power of his own will: and hath judged this in his heart, to keep his virgin, doth well.

38 Therefore both he that giveth his virgin in marriage doth well: and he that giveth her not doth better.

39 A woman is bound by the law as long as her husband liveth: but if her husband die, she is at liberty. Let her marry to whom she will: only in the Lord.

40 But more blessed shall she be, if she so remain, according to my counsel. And I think that I also have the spirit of God.

Blessed Mary and St. Joseph did not make use of their marriage because it was more blessed not to, because they could more easily in this manner attune their minds in prayer to their son, God the Son, living under their roof, and because it would have been unfitting to do so once God had made holy the womb of Mary by his miraculous conception within it.

Is sexuality detrimental to righteousness? Yes and no. Yes, in that it tends to take the mind away from God and to carnal pleasure. This necessitates the periodic abstinence St. Paul speaks of in verse 5 to redevote ourselves to prayer. No in that it is the natural and sacramentally blessed manner of man and wife expressing their union which symbolizes the eternal union of Christ with his Church (Ephesians 5.21-33).

A question back to you in return. If St. Joseph and Blessed Mary had intercourse after the birth of Christ, where are his supposed brothers and sisters 13 years later when on the journey back from Jerusalem, the Holy Family is clearly portrayed as St. Joseph, Blessed Mary, and Jesus only (Luke 2.41-52)?

43 And having fulfilled the days, when they returned, the child Jesus remained in Jerusalem. And his parents knew it not.

44 And thinking that he was in the company, they came a day's journey and sought him among their kinsfolks and acquaintance.

45 And not finding him, they returned into Jerusalem, seeking him.

Verse 44 is the perfect place to note Jesus' brothers and sisters, had he had any. None are mentioned. Verse 45 is explicit that the family consisted of Jesus, who was missing, and Mary and Joseph, who went to find him.

Like normal parents, they assumed their young man was among the other relatives on the journey. But when they missed him the very first night, they alone returned immediately to Jerusalem to find him. Their concern for Jesus was enough to prompt this reversal of their return trip. Had they other younger children, it seems inconceivable they would have left them with relatives to continue onwards, when they were not willing to let Jesus be out of their company with relatives more than a days time.

12 years interval from the birth is a LONG time for no natural conceptions to occur, especially in a young woman of Blessed Mary's age. The obvious conclusion is that she and St. Joseph were not having intercourse because at the very least, Blessed Mary had vowed her self to perpetual virginity.

Luke 1.34 And Mary said to the angel: How shall this be done, because I know not man?

Mary is not punished for her question, as Zachariah was in asking about the conception of St. John the Baptist, as related earlier in Luke 1:

18 And Zachary said to the angel: Whereby shall I know this? For I am an old man, and my wife is advanced in years.

19 And the angel answering, said to him: I am Gabriel, who stand before God and am sent to speak to thee and to bring thee these good tidings.

20 And behold, thou shalt be dumb and shalt not be able to speak until the day wherein these things shall come to pass: because thou hast not believed my words, which shall be fulfilled in their time.

What is the difference here? Zachariah doubted the word of the Lord because he was old, forgetting the lesson of Abram and Sarah. Blessed Mary's question would fall into the same category of doubting God if she had any expectation of shortly commencing sexual relations with St. Joseph, to whom she was espoused. Had she that expectation, the question would have made no sense, she would have expected that the conception come about in the normal manner, as Zachariah obviously did (although he doubted his and his wife's capabilities because of age).

Blessed Mary's question, and the Archangel Gabriel's response, only makes sense if a moral impediment existed to Mary ever conceiving a child in the normal manner, despite her upcoming marrage, namely a vow of perpetual virginity on the part of Blessed Mary. Were that the case, the question in Luke 1.34 would then be understood: "How shall I conceive when I have pledged to refrain always from sexual intercourse?"

Now if Blessed Mary had made such a vow, and I believe the evidence points to it, we would know it rested upon the premise that St. Paul explained in 1 Corinthians 7 - that virginity is more blessed than marriage and enables one to more fully to attend to God. Certainly this is why Elijah, Elisha, Jeremiah, and St. John the Baptist all did not marry. Mary's marriage would then be seen as her or her parents seeking a natural protector for her to enable her to live this vow unmolested by the world.

This would also explain the thought of St. Joseph upon learning of her pregnancy as recounted in Matthew 1, probably shortly after the 3rd month, when Blessed Mary returned from being with St. Elizabeth after the Birth of St. John the Baptist:

18 Now the generation of Christ was in this wise. When as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child, of the Holy Ghost.

19 Whereupon Joseph her husband, being a just man, and not willing publicly to expose her, was minded to put her away privately.

Why would Joseph be considering putting Mary away once she became pregnant? It only makes sense if he had understood his role as that of marrying an avowed virgin to offer her protection and comfort towards the world's hostility. How bewildering to then find pregnant after a long absence, the one whom he asusmed we never be in such a state! His action only makes sense if he could not believe that given her known character Blessed Mary could commit adultery, which would require a public condemnation, and knew that the pregnancy was not the result of rape; and yet how he must have been puzzled at that pregnancy!

It appears that it was still the night that he discovered her pregnancy that the truth of it was revealed, because the Bible says in Matthew 1:

20 But while he thought on these things, behold the Angel of the Lord appeared to him in his sleep, saying: Joseph, son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife, for that which is conceived in her, is of the Holy Ghost.

It could not have been very long yet, and he must have decided to sleep on the conundrum, hoping to have a good resolution in the morning. He did. The vow of virginity of Mary had not been broken, nor would it be broken.

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