40 And entered into the house of Zacharias, and saluted Elisabeth.
41 And it came to pass, that, when Elisabeth heard the salutation of Mary, the babe leaped in her womb; and Elisabeth was filled with the Holy Ghost:
42 And she spake out with a loud voice, and said, Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.
43 And whence is this to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?
44 For, lo, as soon as the voice of thy salutation sounded in mine ears, the babe leaped in my womb for joy.
45 And blessed is she that believed: for there shall be a performance of those things which were told her from the Lord.
46 And Mary said, My soul doth magnify the Lord,
47 And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.
48 For he hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden: for, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.
Did the early church know about the above? Not all the little groups necessarily knew about all the things that were later put in writing.
The above passage validates the "mother of my Lord" and the title Theotokos.
No, it does not. Jesus the man was born. The Deity is eternal and has no birth nor death.
Children are blessings. Women who did not have children were deemed not blessed. Nothing more, nothing less. Magnify the LORD and rejoice in God our savior alone, as did Mary.
I’ve not waded into this until now and I just chose this post to respond to because it was lacking in any acrimony ,.. which I’m not really interested in starting or continuing.
I only wanted to point out that the title is not the full Marian doctrine, as there is more to the latter than just a title.
I see no issues with the title.
It’s other notions that are the issue: immaculate conception in particular.
Consider that a number of guys, Abraham etc, got the promise concerning their seed. This was given with the clear understanding that it would actually be a descendant, and not just only appear to be. Joseph, to those living around his family, only still appeared to be His father. Mary was certainly His mother. But if Mary wasn’t herself truly a daughter of those who had received the promise before her their their link to Him is broken and the promise to them concerning their seed undone.
Immaculate conception merely put off any potential problem from Christ to Mary. If she needed to be special in that way so he could why didn’t her mother likewise? That sort of thing.
It is much simpler to maintain that God has so arranged things that people in general inherit their spiritual natures from their father, a view that is actually fairly easy to support from Adam being said to beget children in his own image to the idea that it is in Adam that all have sin.
There is no physical need for the doctrine of immaculate conception as in any normal pregnancy the placental barrier keeps all blood from the mother out of the baby.
It would seem that “legally” and “spiritually” Adam was responsible for sin: not just for what is said later but we may take note that the woman didn’t see either her or his nakedness before he ate ... in the past I’ve gone on about the text not showing God ever directly telling the Woman about not eating the fruit of tTotKoG&E which means she could have only learned that command later from Him or from Adam ... scripture is silent on which; but, that she didn’t become aware of nakedness till Adam ate may argue that the command was really only given to Adam and that it was later Adam who told her, presuming that she should obey it too.
This seemingly odd observation might help account for how human beings are set up to inherit their natures from their fathers. Thus in His humanity Christ would not have needed Mary to be more than what Scripture plainly says she was and could arguably have great need for her to be a very literal daughter of everyone before her who got the promise concerning Him, their seed and (logically as His mother) the last to receive that very special promise, for without her being their seed then He isn’t either.
So the title remains and it’s sad it seems so problematic.
But that it, the title, appears in a relatively early hymn doesn’t mean that the rest of Marian theology was involved in same song ... for you can have the one without the other.