Following the Fall, the union of sacred marriage was darkened and disordered by withdrawal from divine grace and missapplied, concupiscent lust. This is what the appearance of clothing as a necessity of life indicates. Were it not for the original sin, we would walk amid the prettiest young women, all stark naked, and have lust only for our wives. However, God continued to command us to multiply and fill the Earth, and also and at the same time, seek Him and love Him. He wanted to restore the sacred union. So he put in us the yearning for truth and the sexual desire, unitive and procreative in origin, as a foretaste of Heaven. Sex done right, -- in the context of the loving marriage and open to creation of new life, -- is a glimpse at the eternal joy of paradise. Its hormonal effects are tools to an objective, not the objective itself.
Mary had arrived to the unitive and procreative marriage to the Holy Ghost abundantly. Sinless, she was united to Him at all times. Her body gave birth to the perfect new man. She was walking in paradise all her life. The hormonal urgings a lesser woman goes by had no purpose in her; if she had them they were not significant and probably not noticeable to her enlightened mind.
The Catholic world, by the way, is filled with celibate men and women that are not bothered by their celibacy in the least. They have learned to sublimate their sexual energy to intellectual and spiritual creativity. It is not a unique phenomenon.
Regarding the verses. The Greek word in Matthew 1:25 is "eos" and it simply means "prior to".
And he knew her not till she brought forth her firstborn son: and he called his name JESUS. (Matthew 1:25, Douay-Rheims)Sometimes "eos" means that the action (or in St. Joseph's case, inaction) before the moment it points to has ceased and sometimes it means that the action continued. We understand which is the case from context, and when we need to translate into English, which has a more finely defined words, we choose between "until", "till", "to" or "before". Both Douay and King James translate it as "till"; I am not suprised that mariophobic translations, that abounded in modern times and Harley is using, mistranslate it as "until". It is most similar to the English "till" which also does not have the strict "before, but not after" meaning. For example, if I say "I did not drink alcohol till the blood test" the likely context is that my blood work should be good, not that I went to the bar right after I went to the clinic. But if I say "I did not drink alcohol till I joined a fraternity in college" then the context is, most likely, that I drank once I joined because that is what fraternities are for, are they not? In Matthew 1 the context is that Christ's birth was miraculous, not the relations John and Mary had after the focus of Matthew's story shifted away. It is reasonable to assume that Mathew's focus was on the absence of marital act before the birth of Christ, not after, all the more so since the testimony of Joseph to that effect had to me made at the time of Christ's birth, but testimonies of one's sex life for reasons other than establishing paternity are not common. Matthew simply had no way of knowing what Joseph and Mary's intimate life was the rest of their days.kai ouk eginosken auten eos ou eteken ton yion autes ton prototokon kai ekalesen to onoma autou iesoun
Go to The Unbound Bible and select any Greek NT as fist choice. Byzantine/Majority (2000) is the easiest to read and is authoritative. Select any other translation unless you fluently read Greek. Configure the criteria New Testament, Matthew, 1, 25. The results should be just that verse. Find the word "eos" ("o" is "omega", looks like "W") in it, copy it and paste it in the search engine. Clear the Matthew, 1, 25 boxes. This will give you the list of all occurences of "eos". See for yourself if it is used in "before not after" sense all the time. For example, see Matthew 23:35 "That upon you may come all the just blood that hath been shed upon the earth, from the blood of Abel the just, even unto the blood of Zacharias the son of Barachias, whom you killed", -- surely the Pharisees did not stop killing the just after Zacharias. Or see Matthew 27:8 "the field was called Haceldama, that is, The field of blood, even to this day" -- did Matthew indicate here that the field is about to be renamed?
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).
With all due respect, this is another huge stretch. If the person does not drink alcohol, then the first statement is nonsequitur. It would be the same as saying "I did not axe-murder my three next door neighbors till the blood test." There is no point in mentioning it if you don't do it. By all reasonable construction, the first sentence clearly implies that the person does drink alcohol, generally. The only point of the sentence is that he did not before the blood test. We are absolutely led to believe that he did at some point after the test.
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".
Of course with this interpretation, we are now forced to throw out other Bible verses, such as the following:
Matt. 13:54-56 : "54 Coming to his hometown, he began teaching the people in their synagogue, and they were amazed. "Where did this man get this wisdom and these miraculous powers?" they asked. 55 "Isn't this the carpenter's son? Isn't his mother's name Mary, and aren't his brothers James, Joseph, Simon and Judas? 56 Aren't all his sisters with us? Where then did this man get all these things?"
So, first Jesus is identified as the carpenter's son. Then He is identified as the son of Mary. Then, His four half-brothers are specifically named, along with the fact that He has sisters. But we can't have this can we? No, we have to make a drastic veer in mid sentence no less. Son of a carpenter, fine. Son of Mary, fine. Brother of James, Joseph, Simon and Judas, NO WAY! The Church doesn't allow this family relationship so we just interpret it out of existence. No problem. This continues to floor me. :)