By RAYMOND DE SOUZA, KM
Part 6
What did the Early Christians believe about the Catholic doctrine on the perpetual virginity of the Mother of Jesus? Those men, women, and children who sacrificed everything for the true faith — even their very own lives?
They were imprisoned, tortured, murdered. Some were burned alive, racked, beheaded. Others were crucified, flayed alive, or eaten by wild beasts. And they preferred to die rather than to deny Jesus Christ and their belonging to His Church.
What did those great Christian heroes believe about Mary’s perpetual virginity? Let us see some examples from the extant documentation:
Didymus the blind lived in the fourth century. He taught St. Jerome. In his book on the Trinity, written around the year 385, twelve years before the New Testament was put together, he wrote:
“It helps us to understand the terms firstborn and only-begotten when the evangelist tells us that Mary remained a Virgin ‘until she brought forth her firstborn son’ (Matt. 1:25). For neither did Mary, who is to be honoured and praised above all others, marry anyone (else, apart from Joseph) nor did she ever become the Mother of anyone else (with Joseph her husband), but even after childbirth she remained always and forever an immaculate virgin” (WJ 2:1073).
St. Epiphanius the Pentaglot, bishop of Salamis, in Cyprus, is called the Pentaglot by St. Jerome because he was fluent in five languages, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Syriac, and Coptic. He wrote a book called Agkyrotos, or The Man Well-Anchored (AD 374). It is a treatise on theology, widely known by the learned and the simple at the time. There he composed a Creed, which was used by catechumens on their Baptism day. It is very similar to the one we say in Mass today. It is too long to read, but just one article will suffice for our purpose:
“We believe . . . in One Lord Jesus Christ…who for us men and for our salvation came down and took flesh, that is, was born perfectly of the holy ever-virgin Mary by the Holy Spirit” (WJ 2:1089a).
Shortly thereafter, he wrote the panacea Against All Heresies, in which he says, “Was there ever anyone of any breeding who dared to speak the name of Holy Mary, and being questioned, did not immediately add, ‘the Virgin’? For by such added names the positive proofs of merit are apparent. . . . . And to Holy Mary, ‘virgin’ in invariably added, for that Woman remains undefiled” (WJ 2:1111).
It is interesting to notice that to this day many call Jesus the Christ, Paul the Apostle, John the Baptist, Alexander the Great, Stephen the Martyr, and of course Mary the Virgin, among others.
St. Jerome (Against Helvidius, AD 383): “We believe that God was born of a Virgin, because we read it [in the Scriptures]. We do not believe that Mary was married after She brought forth her Son, because we do not read it. . . . Joseph himself was a virgin, so that a Virgin son might be born of a virginal wedlock.”
St. Augustine’s sermon written between AD 391 and 430: “Let us rejoice, brethren, let the nations exult and be glad. It was not the visible sun, but its invisible Creator who consecrated this day for us, when the Virgin Mother, fertile of womb and integral in her virginity, brought Him forth, made visible for us, by whom, when He was invisible, She too was created.
“A Virgin conceiving, a Virgin bearing, a Virgin pregnant, a Virgin bringing forth, a Virgin perpetual. Why do you wonder at this, O man? It was fitting for God to be born thus, when He deigned to become man.”
St. Augustine: On Holy Virginity (AD 401): “In being born of a Virgin who chose to be a Virgin even before She knew who was to be born of Her, Christ wanted to approve virginity rather than to impose it. And He wanted Virginity to be of free choice even in that woman in whom He took upon Himself the form of a slave.”
Leporius was a monk from Gaul who became a heretic but was converted by St. Augustine. In his Document of Amendment he affirms the faith of the Church (AD 426): “We confess, therefore, that Our Lord and God, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, born of the Father before all ages, and in times most recent, made man by the Holy Spirit and the Ever-virgin Mary, was born God.”
St. Cyril of Alexandria, in a work titled, Against those who do not wish to confess that the Holy Virgin is the Mother of God, quoted in a treatise written by the Emperor Justinian I against the heresy of the Monophysites (AD 542), wrote: “Jesus did not first come into being as a simple man, before the union and communion of God in Him; but the Word Himself, coming into the Blessed Virgin Herself, assumed for Himself His own Temple from the substance of the Virgin, and came forth from Her a man in all that could be externally discerned, while interiorly He was true God. Therefore He kept His Mother a Virgin even after her childbearing, which was done for none of other saints.”
St. Peter Chrysologus, a great preacher, in his Sermons, post AD 432 — he died in 450, wrote: “A Virgin conceived, a Virgin bore, and a Virgin she remains.”
St. Leo I, Pope, in his Sermons before 461, wrote: “Christ was begotten in a new kind of nativity, conceived by a Virgin, born of a Virgin. . . . By divine power it was brought about that a Virgin conceived, a Virgin bore, and Virgin she remained.”
St. Sophronius of Jerusalem, a monk born in Damascus, was patriarch of Jerusalem and died there in AD 638. In his Synodal Letter to the Patriarch of Constantinople, he referred to Mary’s “Immaculate virginity which was unblemished before the birth, during the birth, and after the birth. . . .”
St. John Damascene wrote The Source of Knowledge (AD 743): “The Ever-Virgin remains after birth a Virgin still, never having consorted with man until death. . . . For how were it possible that she, who had borne God, and had come to know the miracle from her experience of subsequent events, should receive the embrace of a man? Perish the thought.”
St. John Damascene, on the Holy Trinity, wrote: “Our Lord Jesus Christ . . . was conceived of the Holy Ever-Virgin Mary, Mother of God. . . .”
The Council of Lateran (against Monothelitism) in AD 649 said: “If anyone does not, according to the holy Fathers, confess truly and properly that Holy Mary, ever virgin and Immaculate, is Mother of God, since in this latter age She conceived in true reality without human seed from the Holy Spirit, God the Word Himself, who before the ages was born of God the Father, and gave birth to Him without corruption, Her virginity remaining equally inviolate after the birth, let him be condemned” (TCF, p.193).
So we can safely conclude that, historically speaking, the denial of Mary’s perpetual virginity is just a recent man-made tradition that denies the word of God in Scripture and the apostolic Tradition. Only anti-Catholic bigotry can lead someone to deny the faith of the early Christians, which not even the founders of Protestantism (Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli) did. Those who deny it expect us to believe them and not the Apostolic Faith of nearly 2,000 years.
Next article: The “Other Mary” and St. Joseph’s “other children.”
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(Raymond de Souza is director of the Evangelization and Apologetics Office of the Winona Diocese, Minn.; EWTN program host; regional coordinator for Portuguese-speaking countries for Human Life International [HLI], president of the Sacred Heart Institute and a member of the Sovereign, Military, and Hospitaller Order of the Knights of Malta. His web site is: www.RaymonddeSouza.com.)
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