Saturday, April 18, 2020

Donald Harman Akenson vs. the Post-Partum Virginity of Mary in the New Testament


Discussing Mary’s virginity in the New Testament, historian Donald Akenson wrote the following against (1) the claim that Jesus alone being called “son of Mary” means he was Mary’s only  child and (2) how the Hieronymian view of the brothers/sisters of Jesus (being relatives [e.g. cousins]) is an exegetical stretch, wrote:

In Mark 6:3, there is a fascinating identification of Jesus. “Is this not the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James and Joses, and of Judas, and Simon? and are not his sisters here with us?” This identification of Jesus is not ambiguous either in the original or in any major translation: two sets of figures are present. Jesus (“the carpenter”) and his siblings. Jesus is identified solely by his maternal ancestry (“Mary’s boy” is how the Living Bible puts it), with no reference to his father. In a society that was highly patriarchal (in the modern sense of the word), not identifying Joseph as Jesus’ father was tantamount to saying that he was not indeed the father . . . [the phrase] implies physical illegitimacy on the part of Jesus . . . The second diagnostic marker is found in Mark 3:21 and occurs when Jesus’ half-brothers and half-sisters try to have him taken away for being out of his head: “beside himself,” in the King James Bible. (Incidentally, the KJB, in employing the old term for what is today called “family” or “relatives,” leaves a slightly misleading impression, that it was Jesus’ “friends” who wanted to drag him home because of his apparent lunacy. It was his family, and since neither his father or mother are mentioned—as would have been the normal notation in an historical narrative such as Mark—one infers that it was his half-brothers and half-sisters who were involved.)  At minimum, one observes here a significant intra-family split, with Jesus on one side, his half-siblings on the other.

Notice here that I have been referring to Jesus’ half-brothers and half-sisters. This usage is vexed, but I think defensible. During the Middle Ages, the western church developed a para-biblical belief that Mary remained a virgin for her entire life, and, obviously, this produced problems in dealing with the several biblical references to Jesus’ brothers and sisters. One solution, the one which the Roman Catholic church held until recently, has been that all those brothers and sisters were really cousins of Jesus. This idea strains the text beyond the breaking point and Catholic scholars are at present largely abandoning it. However, a second approach (also motivated by Mary’s medievally-declared perpetual virginity) is that what the Gospels report as Jesus’ brothers and sisters were half-siblings, stemming, presumably, from an earlier family that Joseph had formed. This leads to the postulate that Joseph was a widower before he became betrothed to Mary. And to this must be added a third option, which sits more comfortably with the Gospels, namely that Mary did not remain a perpetual virgin, but that Jesus was her first-born son and that she and Joseph had several subsequent children, each of whom in the technical sense was Jesus’ half-brother or half-sister, sharing as they did the same biological mother. (Donald Harman Akenson, Surpassing Wonder: The Invention of the Bible and the Talmuds [New York: Harcourt Bruce and Company, 1999], 460-61 n. 19, emphasis added)

For more on the perpetual virginity, see "Chapter 4: The Perpetual Virginity of Mary," pp. 83-138 of my book, Behold the Mother of My Lord: Towards a Mormon Mariology (2017)