Perpetual virginity of Mary

The exact origin of the tradition of Mary's perpetual virginity is unknown;[19] her ante-partum virginity is attested in the Gospel of Matthew and in the Gospel of Luke, but there is no biblical basis for her virginity during and after the birth.[4] Mary's virginity, pre or post natal, seems to have attracted little theological attention prior to the end of the 2nd century, Ignatius of Antioch (c.35-108), for example, discussing it only to argue for the reality of Jesus's human birth against the docetic heretics who denied him any humanity.[20]

The idea of Mary's perpetual virginity first appears in a late 2nd century text called the Gospel of James (or Protoevangelium of James),[21] "the ultimate source of almost all later Marian doctrine."[22] In this story Mary remains a life-long virgin, Joseph is an old man without physical desire, who marries her; the brothers of Jesus are explained as Joseph's sons by an earlier marriage.[23] The birth takes place in a cave near Bethlehem, and the new-born Jesus simply appears from a cloud and a blinding light and takes his mother's breast;[24] a midwife is present outside the cave, who believes, and her acquaintance Salome, who demands to touch the physical organs of the holy mother:

The midwife came out of the cave [in which the birth took place], and Salome met her. And she said to her: "Salome, Salome, I have I have a new sight to tell you; a virgin has brought forth, a thing which her nature does not allow." And Salome said: "As the Lord my God lives, unless I put (forward) my finger and test her condition, I will not believe that a virgin has brought forth." And Salome went in and made her ready to test her condition. And she cried out saying: "I have tempted the living God..." (The Protoevangelium of Gospel of James, 19:3-20, quoted in Brown, 1978).[25]

Salome's hand withers, but she prays to God for forgiveness and an angel appears and tells her to touch the Christ-child again, whereupon her hand is restored;[26][27] the episode performs the same function as "doubting Thomas" in the Gospel of John.[28]

James possibly derives from a sect called the Encratites,[22] whose founder Tatian taught that sex and marriage were symptoms of original sin;[5] its context was the growth of asceticism with its emphasis on celibacy, the monks seeing all sexual activity as tainted by sin.[29] It was widely distributed and seems to have formed the basis of the stories of Mary in the Quran.[30]

By the early 4th century the spread of monasticism had promoted celibacy as the ideal Christian state, and a moral hierarchy was established with marriage occupying the third rank below life-long virginity and widowhood.[31] Around 380 Helvidius objected to the devaluation of marriage inherent in this view and argued that the two states, of virginity and marriage, were equal;[32] but his contemporary Jerome, realising that this would lead to the Mother of God occupying a place in heaven lower than virgins and widows, defended her perpetual virginity in his immensely influential Against Helvidius, issued c.383.[33]

Helvidius soon faded from the scene, but in the early 380s the monk Jovinian wrote that if Jesus did not undergo a normal human birth then he himself was not human, which was the teaching of the heresy known as Manichaeism.[34] Jerome wrote against Jovinian but failed to mention this aspect of his teaching, and most commentators believe that he did not find it offensive.[34] The only important Christian intellectual to defend Mary's virginity in partu was Ambrose, Archbishop of Milan, who was the chief target of the charge of Manicheism.[35] For Ambrose, both the physical birth of Jesus by Mary and the baptismal birthing of Christians by the Church had to be totally virginal, even in partu, in order to cancel the stain of original sin, of which the pains of labor are the physical sign.[36] It was due to Ambrose that virginitas in partu came to be included consistently in the thinking of subsequent theologians.[37]

Jovinian's view was rejected at a Synod of Milan held under Ambrose's presidency in 390, after which Mary's perpetual virginity was established as the only orthodox view.[9] The Council of Ephesus in 431 established a full general consensus on the subject,[8] in 553 the Second Council of Constantinople gave her the title Aeiparthenons, meaning Perpetual Virgin, and at the Lateran Council of 649 Pope Martin I emphasised its threefold character, before, during, and after the birth of Christ.[9]

The Protestant Reformation rejected the sanctity of virginity, and as a result marriage and parenthood were extolled, Mary and Joseph were seen as a normal married couple, and sexual abstinence was no longer regarded as a virtue.[38] It also brought the idea of the Bible as the fundamental source of authority regarding God's word (sola scriptura),[39] and the reformers noted that while holy scripture explicitly required belief in the virgin birth, it only permitted acceptance of perpetual virginity.[40] But despite the lack of a clear biblical basis for the doctrine,[41] Martin Luther (who included it in the Smalcald Articles, a Lutheran confession of faith written in 1537)[42] wrote, "Mary realized she was the mother of the Son of God, and she did not desire to become the mother of the son of man, but to remain in this divine gift."[15]

It was supported as well as by Huldrych Zwingli, John Calvin, and later John Wesley, the co-founder of Methodism.[43][41] This was because these moderate reformers were under pressure from others more radical than themselves who held Jesus to have been no more than a prophet: Mary's perpetual virginity thus became a guarantee of the Incarnation, despite its shaky scriptural foundations.[44] Notwithstanding this early acceptance by the reformers, modern Protestants, apart from some Lutherans and Anglo-Catholics, have largely rejected the perpetual virginity and it has rarely appeared explicitly in confessions or doctrinal statements.[45]