First, I don't know if Mary had sex and bore children after Jesus. What I do know from scripture is that there were some described as Jesus' brethren. Brothers... And sisters... But they couldn't have been spiritual brethren as some suggest because they didn't believe in their brother. They thought He was a hoax. They believed the Pharisees. They likely didn't half their lives mocking Jesus...ha! You think you're better than us!! Holier than is?? Do you ever get taught by the Rabbis? What do you know??? Nothing! Etc etc. I know this because their descendants are still doing that today on this firm. But anyway. I still can't prove they are blood brothers, the Bible simply doesn't say so.
But what I don't agree with is your contention that firstborn cannot mean there were others that would be like having a bunch of people in a race, and because one was declared first, therefore there can't be others following. Thing is, it can work both ways. In this instance, and I'm this context, there literally no proof either way.
The difficulty for the Protestant critique here is that the supposed Scriptural evidence for "Mary's other children" is only an apparent, not a real, contradiction of the Church's tradition. For, in fact, every text adduced to "prove" Mary had other natural-born children encounters some fatal difficulty when we look closely.
So, for instance, the attempt to find absolute, ironclad proof of sexual relations between Joseph and Mary in Matthew's remark that Joseph "knew her not until she had borne a son" suffers from the fatal ambiguity of the word "until." The whole value of the passage as an argument against Mary's virginity depends on some supposed "rule" that "until" means "the same before, but different afterward."
But if we try to apply this "rule," we wind up with strange results. Thus,
Deuteronomy 1:31 tells Israel, "The LORD your God bore you, as a man bears his son, in all the way that you went until you came to this place." Does the author really mean to say that God would henceforth not be carrying Israel?
Likewise,
Deuteronomy 9:7 says, "From the day you came out of the land of Egypt, until you came to this place, you have been rebellious against the LORD." Does the sacred author mean to imply that Israel magically stopped being rebellious after that? Or again, John the Baptist "was in the wilderness
until the day of his manifestation to Israel" (
Lk 1:80, emphasis added). Does Luke therefore mean to imply that once John appeared to Israel, he never lived in the desert again? No. Similarly, neither is Matthew saying anything beyond, "Mary conceived Jesus in virginity." He is making no implications whatever about any sexual relations between Mary and Joseph.
In the same way, the texts concerning Jesus' brothers and sisters were consistently read by the early Church with the understanding that the apostles had taught that Jesus was the only son of the Blessed Virgin.
And once we get past our modern prejudice that "they simply can't mean that," we find to our surprise that they easily can.
Take James. Paul describes him as the "brother of the Lord," but James himself does not. Why not? And even more oddly, Jude describes himself as "a servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James" (
Jude 1). If Jude is a sibling of Jesus, why does he talk in this weird way?
The answer comes from a close reading of the Gospels. Matthew and Mark name the following as "brothers" of Jesus: James, Joseph (or "Joses," depending on the manuscript), Simon, and Judas (i.e., "Jude"). But Matthew 27:56 says that at the cross were Mary Magdalene and "Mary the mother of James and Joseph," whom he significantly calls "the other Mary" (Matthew 27:61) (i.e., the Mary who was not Mary the Mother of Jesus). John concurs with this, telling us that "standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother,
and his mother's sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene" (John 19:25, emphasis added).
In short, James, Jude, and their brothers are the children of "the other Mary," the wife of Clopas, not Mary, the Mother of Jesus. This is further supported in an almost accidental way by the early Church historian Eusebius, who routinely records the succession of bishops in the major churches of antiquity. After recording his account of the martyrdom of James, the first bishop of Jerusalem (commonly referred to as "the brother of the Lord"), he tells us that James's successor was none other than "Symeon, son of Clopas." Why choose Symeon/Simon for the next bishop? Because James, the "brother of the Lord," and Symeon/Simon were the sibling children of Clopas and the "other Mary," and we are looking at a kind of dynastic succession.
Interestingly, this "other Mary" is described as the Blessed Virgin's "sister." Is it really possible that two siblings were both named Mary? Probably not. Rather it's far more likely they were "sisters" in the same sense Jesus and the other Mary's son, James, were "brothers." That is, they were cousins or some other extended relation. And, indeed, we find Jewish culture could play fast and loose with the terms "brother" and "sister." For instance, Lot, who was the nephew of Abraham (cf.
Gen 11:27-31), is called Abraham's
'âch ("brother") in
Genesis 14:14-16 (which is exactly how the translators of both the New International Version and the King James Version render it). And these English-speaking translators are simply following the example of the ancient Jewish translators of the Septuagint version of Genesis, who also rendered the Hebrew word as
adelphos: the same Greek word that is also used to describe Jesus' relatives.
So the biblical evidence for siblings of Jesus slips steadily away until all that is left is the school of criticism that argues that, since Jesus is called the "firstborn" (
Lk 2:7), this implied other children for Mary. But in fact the term "firstborn" was used mainly to express the privileged position of the that child, whether or not other children were born. That is why a Greek tomb at Tel el Yaoudieh bears this inscription for a mother who died in childbirth: "In the pain of delivering my firstborn child, destiny brought me to the end of life."
Beyond that, all the critic of perpetual virginity has left is just the gut sensation that "it's weird for a normal married couple to practice celibacy." And that might be an argument -- if Joseph and Mary were a normal married couple and not the parents of the God of Israel.
Read more:
https://www.catholicfidelity.com/apologetics-topics/mary/biblical-evidence-for-the-perpetual-virginity-of-mary/
