Before Our Lord's Birth and
After It, Mary is...Virgin Still As many faithful Catholics are painfully aware, the Church's doctrines are always under attack by Her enemies. When the attacks are veiled by an air of scholarly research and presentation, they can become a source of doubt to some Catholics or a stumbling block to those wishing to become Catholic. In recent years, Eric Svendsen of New Testament Research Ministries has taken aim at the Catholic Church's teaching about Mary and in particular her perpetual virginity. He has even written a book entitled Who is My Mother? - The Role and Status of the Mother of Jesus in the New Testament and Roman Catholicism, attacking the Church's teaching about Mary and her virginity. This is a book which has such a veneer of scholarly research and professional detachment. It is, in fact, neither. In order to convince Catholics that Our Lady lost her virginity, Svendsen utilizes the conspicuous until in Matthew 1:25. Instead of focusing on the traditional Protestant polemic surrounding 'until', he concentrates on a particular Greek grammatical construction for the 'until' in Matthew 1:25. It is alleged that this Greek phrase in question, heõs hou for the uninitiated, proves that Mary did indeed lose her virginity. It is my pleasure to release a thorough refutation of this claim, presented below and entitled Heõs Hou and the Protestant Polemic. It will hopefully shatter all pretense and veiled legitimacy of this argument, which, for too long now, has been floating around cyberspace with impunity. The Heõs Hou polemic is now over - for good.
