The Perpetual Virginity of Mary

The claim appears first in a text the churches never admitted to the canon. The Protevangelium of James, from about the middle of the second century, tells the story of Mary childhood, her dedication in the temple, her betrothal to an elderly widower with sons of his own, and a birth that leaves her virginity intact. Most of the later devotional material about Mary parents and her upbringing comes from this book rather than from the gospels, and so does the framework in which perpetual virginity became thinkable.

The doctrine was contested in the fourth century by writers, Helvidius among them, who held that Mary and Joseph lived as an ordinary married couple after the birth. Jerome answered with a treatise arguing that the brothers of Jesus were cousins, a solution that keeps Joseph as well as Mary continent, and his position became standard in the Latin West.

The tradition distinguishes three moments and affirms all three: virginity before the birth, in the birth and after it. The title aeiparthenos, ever-virgin, is used at the Second Council of Constantinople in 553, and the Lateran Synod of 649 states the three phases explicitly. It is affirmed today in Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox teaching, and it appears in the liturgy far more often than in doctrinal argument, which is generally where it is actually transmitted.

The gospels name four brothers of Jesus, James, Joses, Judas and Simon, and mention sisters without naming them. James is a substantial figure in the early church, leading the Jerusalem community, and Paul calls him the brother of the Lord in a letter written within a few decades of the events. Any account of perpetual virginity has to say what those texts are describing.

Three answers have been given and each has a name. The Helvidian reading takes them as later children of Mary and Joseph. The Epiphanian reading takes them as children of Joseph by a previous marriage, which is the position of the Eastern churches and the one the Protevangelium supports. The Hieronymian reading, Jerome own, takes them as cousins, on the argument that the Greek word for brother renders a Semitic term with a wider range. The Greek of the gospels has a specific word for cousin and does not use it here, which is the standing objection to Jerome.

The fault line is not where a reader might expect. Luther, Calvin and Zwingli all held the perpetual virginity, and Luther defended it explicitly. Its rejection is a later Protestant development, spreading from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the plain sense of the brother texts came to be preferred over the tradition. So the disagreement runs between periods more than between the Reformation and Rome.