Catholic priest and scholar, Richard McBrien, wrote the following about the New Testament’s Mariology; one has to appreciate the honesty McBrien displays, basically admitting that the Mariology of the New Testament is substantially “lower” than that of the dogmatic teachings of Roman Catholicism; one would wish that apologists such as Tim Staples would demonstrate such honesty in their discussion of Mary:
We find a somewhat negative portrait of Mary in the Gospel of Mark (3:20-25). It is just after Jesus’ selection of the Twelve (3:13-19). He is in a house with them and a great crowd gathers outside. His own family concludes that “He has gone out of his mind” (3:21). When his other and his brothers arrive, they send word for him to come out. Jesus is given the message. “Who are my mother and my brothers?” he asks. Then he looks at his disciples gathered in the circle: “Here are my mother and my brothers. Whoever does the will of God is my brother and my sister and mother” (3:33-35). The negative view is strengthened in 6:4, which reports Jesus’ return to his home in Nazareth and the sceptical reaction of his neighbors, friends, and relatives. Jesus complains: “Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house.”
The Matthaen and Lucan parallels to Mark 3:20-25 (Matthew 12:24-50; Luke 8:19-21) present a different picture. Both drop the harsh introduction in Mark 3:20-21. Luke goes further and eliminates Jesus’ question, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” Neither Gospel excludes Mary from the spiritual, or eschatological, family of Jesus. In Luke especially she is the obedient handmaid of the Lord from the beginning. Later in 11:27-28 Jesus responds to a woman who declares his mother blessed by saying that those are blessed who hear the word of God and keep it. In light of Luke’s positive description of Mar in 8:19-21, it is likely Jesus is emphasizing here that Mary’s chief blessedness lies in her being one who obediently hears the word of God rather than in being his biological mother. Consistently with this interpretation, Luke’s version of the rejection of Jesus at Nazareth speaks only of a prophet’s being unacceptable “in the prophet’s hometown” (4:24). There is no reference to “their own kin,” as in Mark. Matthew, on the other hand, retains the phrase “in their own house” (13:57)
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The Book of Revelation, chapter 12, tells of “a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars” (v. 1) who gives birth to a son “who is to rule all the nations” (v. 5). A huge dragon appears in hopes of devouring the child. When he fails in that, he pursues the woman. But he fails there, too, and goes off “to make war on the rest of her children, those who keep the commandments of God and hold the testimony of Jesus” (v. 17). Pious commentaries notwithstanding, the “woman” here is of Mary. Interpretations differ about the primary reference: the heavenly Jerusalem, personified wisdom, or the People of God, both Israel, which brings forth the Messiah, and the Church, which relives the experience of Israel and brings forth other children on the image of Christ. A secondary reference to Mary remains possible but uncertain. What is more certain is that the author’s symbol of the woman who is the mother of the Messiah might well lend itself to Marian interpretation once Marian interest developed in the later Christian community. Eventually, when the Book of Revelation was placed in the same canon of Scripture with the Gospel of Luke and the Gospel of John, the various images of the virgin, the woman and the cross, and the woman who gave birth to the Messiah would reinforce each other.
Before we leave the New Testament, some more explicit mention should be made of Mary’s virginity . . . The New Testament says nothing at all about Mary’s virginity in partu (“in the act of giving birth”), i.e., that Jesus was born miraculously, without the normal biological disruptions, nor about her virginity post partum (“after birth”), i.e., that she had no normal sexual relationships after the birth of Jesus. On the contrary, the New Testament speaks of the brothers and sisters of Jesus. This does not constitute an insuperable barrier to the belief that Mary remains a virgin after the birth of Jesus, but neither is there any convincing argument from the New Testament alone against the literal meaning of the words brother and sister when they are used of Jesus’ relatives. (Richard P. McBrien, Catholicism [rev ed.; San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1994], 1079-81)
