Ladies and gentlemen,
You are debating over things that are a matter of tradition and speculation, of which little can be proven. There is a lot of this storyline that people do not like, the storyline is even startling, for that reason people add things to compensate, to explain away, and there are things that they do not believe so they deny it. This is true of both Protestant fundamentalists and Catholics and the sort.
To begin with so I make myself clear; I love Miriam, I pray to Miriam, I believe she is Holy, and I believe she has been an agent of God for nearly 2000 years. I don’t need faith to believe in Miriam or Angels because I have seen both and both have spoken to me. So I am a witness.
The issues here are about virginity and if she had children with Joseph. The scripture were not written to address these issues, because they are mostly absurd. People would like it if the Angels were blowing trumpets and singing hallelujah when Christ was conceived or born, but that is not how it happened.
It was not a perfect beginning and the storyline is less than graceful, neither the Protestants nor the Catholics are going to like the facts.
Miriam was impregnated by someone other than her betrothed (her fiancé) according to Mosaic Law that was adultery, punishable by death. Her Jewish neighbors and townsmen would have never believed that she was impregnated by God. This is one of the reasons that Joseph was thinking of putting here away quietly so that her life would not be in jeopardy. And this is one of the reason that the Angel smoothed things over with Joseph. Matthew 1:20
When Miriam and Joseph went to Jerusalem they were still engaged, not married. So Yeshua was born out of Wedlock. Joseph did not marry her before, because in Jewish customs the sexual union was the act of marriage.
Knowing that the baby in her womb was the Child of God, he was going to wait to join with her. But there is zero reason to assume that after they married that they would never join. Zero reason to assume that they never had children…but there is not enough information in the scriptures to prove or disprove it. The weight of evidence only implies the norm. Mosaic Law and Jewish custom would strongly suggest that they had normal relations… still a suggestion. Then again the Gospels indicate that He had brothers and sisters. Matthew 13:55-56 Still it is likely that some of these siblings were from a former marriage, but the former wife of Joseph is not mentioned.
All prophecies indicated that the messiah had to be of the bloodline of King David. There is no wiggle room here, there is nothing in the prophecies about an adopted messiah. lol So since Joseph was not His real father, His bloodline to King David had to be through His mother. Is that startling enough for ya yet? You think that is startling! Messiah means anointed one, only women anointed Him. Only women financed His ministry, it was a woman that proclaimed His resurrection, and except for one, among His followers, the Bible lists only women at the cross with Him.
Furthermore, the phrase “Virgin Mary” does not appear in the scriptures. Nor is there a narrative that indicates she remained a virgin after she delivered Christ and definitely nothing to suggest that she remained a virgin for the rest of her life. So there is no reason to assume that she did not have children through Joseph…her husband, that is what husbands and wives do. If her virginity was a way of defining her holiness or if her perpetual virginity was a sign of a great miracle, it would have most likely been written into the narrative. Virginity after conception would have been a miracle, virginity after delivering the baby Yeshua would have been a miracle, and virginity after marriage would have been odd in a Jewish marriage....well any marriage. So all of this would have been very significant and documented in the scriptures.
Now why was it so important for people to believe that Miriam was a perpetual virgin. That even when she was impregnated by God that that did not involve sex. That blows the Protestants and the Catholics away. So if you say, if it didn’t involve sex, how do you think it happened? And then you usually get the deer in the headlights look. It is a conundrum of concepts that is not congruent. It is so important that Christ is the real Son of God, but they can’t stand the thought of it really happening…God so loved that He gave His only begotten Son…It is funny. It is like they do not know what begotten means.
So why is it that they cannot stand the thought of God having sex with Miriam? Most Christians have hang ups about that….But the Catholics go further….the idea of Christ passing through a woman’s genitalia was just not going to due. (Notice I did not say vagina, that is because even today, some Christians will freak out, thinking it is dirty, nasty, and sinful. Even though the medical anatomic term has no intent to be vulgar.)
So in their tradition the baby Yeshua was more or less beamed out…like Star Trek….He was beamed in and beamed out! lol Then of course for her to be a good person and be holy she could never have sex.
How did they come to these absurd beliefs? Well as Christianity went along, sex and women were linked to Satan and temptation. Augustine’s false doctrine of Original Sin just made things worse….of course, it is another phrase that does not appear in the scriptures. This concept lead to some of the worst atrocities known to Man, during the witch-hunts where the “private parts” of women became the target of torture under the Church’s inquisitors.
Over time the Church developed beliefs that virginity equated to purity, piety, and holiness. The priests and nuns were required to be celibate and a few of the Early Church Fathers considered marriage a sin and sex within the marriage a sin.
Here is a few examples of their thinking to back up what I am saying
Origen, St. Jerome, St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, and St. Thomas Aquinas are not only the most famous theologians of Christian history, some held the titles of Fathers and Doctors of the Church and most were canonized as Saints. The bulk of modern beliefs, doctrines, and interpretations, in nearly all denominations, can be traced to these five men. But the overall beliefs of these men were devastating to the status of women in society and in the Church. These men had very negative views towards women and taught that anything to do with sex was straight from Satan. Any type of sexuality, beauty, feelings, or pleasure were the worst of sins, and celibacy, ugly, sorrow, suffering, and pain were Godly. Romanic love in itself was considered wrong. They believed marital sex was a sin even though they acknowledged that it was a necessity. An insane conundrum of logic. A man’s desire for his wife was considered lust and the only time marital sex should be performed was to have children and after that sex should stop. Origen actually castrated himself because he thought his penis was tempting him. Ouch! This is after a slue of sexual issues and statements against the evils of women and sex.
Even though St. Jerome obviously preferred the company of women, (Because the company he kept and most of his followers were women.) He still had this to say about the status of women: “….it is contrary to the order of nature, or of law, that women should speak in the assembly of men…… and man should be commanded to love his wife, whereas the wife should fear her husband.” and he also said “Nothing is so unclean as a woman in her periods; what she touches she causes to become unclean.” Written by St. Jerome
“Because Eve caused the fall of Man she and all women were cursed to painfully deliver children between urine and feces.” Written by St. Jerome
“He who ardently loves his own wife in an adulterer.” Written by St. Jerome
On the topic of sexual desire...“Who can control this when its appetite is aroused? No one! In the very movement of this appetite, then, it has no ‘mode’ that responds to the decisions of the will. But when those who delight in this pleasure are not moved to it at their own will, whether they confine themselves to lawful or transgress to a unlawful pleasures; but sometimes this lust importunes them in spite of themselves, and sometimes fails them when they desire to feel it, so that though lust rages in the mind, it stirs not in the body Written by St. Augustine
“This diabolical excitement of the genitals…” (As St. Augustine refers to the act of sex.) …is evidence of Adam’s original sin which is now transmitted “from the mother’s womb,” tainting all human beings with sin, and leaving them incapable of choosing good over evil, or determining their own destiny.” Written by St. Augustine
