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)
