Saturday, October 17, 2020

Catholic Apologists on Why Various (Purported) Marian Typologies Have Only Recently Been Noticed

 

Commenting on the purported parallels between Mary in the Gospel of Luke and the LXX (e.g., Mary as the New Ark of the Covenant), and why they have only in modern times been “discovered,” two Catholic apologists wrote:

 

I agree and apply an important principle advocated by Brown, Mary in the New Testament, 130:

 

Some methodological consideration are in order here. If the Greek term [in Luke] in question is not uncommon, one cannot assume that Luke borrowed it from the LXX; if it is common in the LXX, one must prove that Luke had one passage in mind rather than others; and one cannot assume that Luke had a concordance enabling him to relate all the passages containing the same term. And finally, even if a certain possibility is established of a subtle reference to the OT, one must still ask whether an audience would ever have understood such subtleties without clear indications by Luke.

 

The last caveat is stated, I believe, weakly. If Luke is on the one hand elevating style of his predecessors and, like Greek historians of his context and past, looking for models, then – in addition to being literate beyond a mere bureaucrat or merchant recording data – we should expect Luke to be much less accessible to readers in a poorly literate Greek world and an unimaginative world of bureaucrats among many of the literate. Any and all subtle references by that fact would likely go over the heads of non-literary hearers and readers. (Christiaan Kappes and William Albrect, The Definitive Guide for Solving Biblical Questions About Mary: Mary Among the Evangelists [Biblical Dogmatics Vol. 1; 2020], 114-15 n. 117)

 

Albrecht has often stated on Reason & Theology and other venues that he prefers what early Christians believed about biblical texts, not modern scholarship. However, here he and Kappes must explain why many of their “discoveries” in their book, and the other work by their fellow Roman Catholic apologists, were unknown in the opening centuries of Christianity. In other words, the Catholic apologist’s modus operandi is “when the early Church Fathers can be used to support later defined dogmas, I will go with them, but when I can come up with novel interpretations no one heard of until very recently, often by myself, I will privilege those, again, to support defined dogmas.”

 

In reality, in this book, and others like it that uses (read: abuses) typology (e.g., Scott Hahn, Hail Holy Queen: The Mother of God in the Word of God and the more careful treatment in John McHugh’s The Mother of Jesus in the New Testament) are eisegetical.

 

For my own discussion of the topic of Mary, the Mother of Jesus, see:

 

Behold the Mother of My Lord: Towards a Mormon Mariology (2017)