(December 15, 2015 at 9:14 pm)CapnAwesome Wrote: It depends on your religious tradition. As Min pointed out, Catholics believe her (and Joseph) remained virgins. Also the eastern Othodox and many protestants hold this belief as well. Most others say that they got it on and some believe they did have kids afterwards. This is actually a pretty new belief, as the bible explicitly mentions the brothers of Jesus.
From wikipedia:
Quote: The Gospel of Mark 6:3 and the Gospel of Matthew 13:55-56 state that James, Joses (or Joseph), Judas, and Simon were the brothers of Jesus, the son of Mary. The same verses also mention unnamed sisters of Jesus. Another verse in the Epistle to the Galatians 1:19 mentions seeing James, "the Lord's brother", and none other of the apostles except Peter, when Paul went to Jerusalem after his conversion. The "brothers of the Lord" are also mentioned, alongside (but separate from) Cephas and the apostles in 1 Corinthians 9:5, in which it is mentioned that they had wives. Some scholars claim that Jesus' relatives may have held positions of authority in the Jerusalem area until Trajan excluded Jews from the new city that he built on its ruins.[4]
I don't know how you really get around that one. I think my CCD teacher (who ironically believed in a literal Adam and Eve) said that the brothers of Jesus were metaphorical.
Note: It's also 'Query' Queery sounds like something else entirely.
I've read a bit about this.
The ancient Christian belief is that Mary remained a virgin. Joseph MAY have been a widower and married her in order to provide a safe home where her vow of virginity would be respected. But it's also possible that he, too, remained a virgin.
In the fourth of fifth century, Helvidius proposed that Mary was not perpetually virgin, and Jerome came down on him like a ton of bricks. IOW, the idea that Mary was NOT ever-virgin was considered the novelty. Even the reformers such as Luther, Calvin and John Wesley held that Mary was perpetually virgin, so the notion that Mary had other children besides Jesus is the theological novelty.
The reason that the New Testament mentions Jesus' "brothers" is that the Aramaic language does not have a word for "cousin" or nephew, etc. ALL distant relatives were simply called "brothers". And although the NT was written in Greek, the underlying thought of the authors was undoubtedly Aramaic - even for Mark who got his understanding of the gospel from Peter/Cephas.
This is why the NT never refers to "sons of Mary" or "daughters of Mary" - such people did not exist. But "brothers" and "sisters" - who were technically "cousins" of Jesus did exist.
For example, John the Baptist and James and John (the sons of Zebedee) were relatives of Jesus.
