Question: Gen. 2:24 clearly commands that husband and wife are to become "one flesh" (ie. - consumation of the relationship). Also, you said nothing about Gen. 1:28 which is a clear command of God that husband and wife are to procreate (unless of course they are physically not able to do so). By remaining a virgin, Mary would have not only denied the command of Scripture to consummate the relationship, but she would have been neglecting her role as a wife to do her part in "multiplying the earth." And for such neglect, Mary would have been guilty of sin by having remained a virgin throughout her marriage. It really doesn't get much plainer than that! "The statement that Paul makes in I Cor. 7:1 is not an obligatory statement, and it is this statement that Paul was looking to when he wrote 7:6. The reason why we know this? Because in vv.2-5, Paul begins to make commands, not concessions, regarding the necessity of the marriage relationship as it pertains to sexual intimacy. For instance, Paul makes use of the imperative mood in 7:5 by using the word apostereo , a present imperative verb. Therefore, his words in v.5 are a command, not a suggestion as has been asserted by you. Thus, consistent sexual intercourse marriage is expected of husband and wife within a marriage, and neglecting that command is sin."
Answer:
By remaining a virgin, Mary would have not only denied the command of Scripture to consummate the relationship, but she would have been neglecting her role as a wife to do her part in "multiplying the earth." And for such neglect, Mary would have been guilty of sin by having remained a virgin throughout her marriage. It really doesn't get much plainer than that! This guy is a typical prot retrojecting his Lutheran idea of marriage as a necessary concession to the flesh into first Century Jewish life. He doesn't know word one about Judaism. In Jewish law, marital relations were a good but for a variety of reasons they could be set aside. This was especially true if there were health problems in either man or woman. Also, in many cases a woman was not permitted to have intercourse with her husband - for example, if she had a bloody vaginal discharge such as the woman in Luke 8:43.
Another reason would be that the wife had been found to be an adulteress. She was forever forbidden to her husband and her adulterous paramour. In such a situation, a man was NEVER permitted to have sex with his wife again. Now, he COULD divorce her, but that was not mandatory either. He could always turn her out and marry someone else becuase polygamy was permitted under the Torah. The Talmud permitted Rabbis to forego relations with their wives for a time in order to concentrate on their studies. Priests were also forbidden to have marital realtions with their wives while they were serving at the Temple. This was most especially true of the High Priest on Yom Kippur. He was actually sequestered apart from his wife during Roshashana so that he would not violate this. The rationale for this was that marital relations were a profane action that would be inappropriate in conjunction with sacred ceremonies. It was not that relations were bad. They were just not appropriate. (e.g., A bathing suit is fine at the beach, but not at Mass.)
The reason why Mary was unable to consummate her marriage with St. Joseph was based upon a combination of problems in the Jewish way of life. First of all, she was found to be pregnant before she and St. Joseph ad lived together. In fact, she had been gone for several months and then returned to town pregnant. It was obvious that St. Joseph was not the father. Since they were betrothed (which is a much more serious thing in Jewish law than mere engagement), Mary was considered under the Law to have been caught in adultery and St. Joseph could have had here stoned. Instead he was going to "divorce her quietly" (Matt 1:19). Instead, he wore the horns of a cuckold in the eyes of his peers and accepted Mary as his wife. But under the Law, he would never have been permitted to have relations with her. Mary was not an adulteress. But her family and neighbors did not know that and they would have found the story of the Annuciation quaint but not very credible. There was no way to prove that she was innocent and so she and St. Joseph had to abide by the requirements of the external forum of Jewish custom.
Mary calls herself the "handmaid of the Lord" (Luke 1:38) which is very significant. Under Jewish law, a master had the right to take his serving girl as his wife. This right superceded other claims. Mary was therefore identifying herself as accepting God's proposal as a serving girl who accedes to her master's betrothal. TECHNICALLY, she was now espoused to God. This would have voided her betrothal to St. Joseph and if she had realtions with St. Joseph, THAT would have been adultery.
Finally, Jesus was the Son of God. The womb of Mary was therefore a sacred place like the Ark of the Covenant. In fact this is how Mary is identified in Revelation 11:19-12:2. There were strict rules about mixing sacred and profane things as we have previously mentioned. Sacred places like the Ark of the Covenant or the Holy of Holies in the Temple were never to be even touched by a profane person. (Remember Uzzah in 2 Samuel 6?) This same idea is contained in Ezekiel 44:
Then he brought me back to the outer gate of the sanctuary, which faces east; and it was shut. And he said to me, "This gate shall remain shut; it shall not be opened, and no one shall enter by it; for the LORD, the God of Israel, has entered by it; therefore it shall remain shut." (Ezekiel 44:1-2)
If St. Joseph had had intercourse with Mary, he would have violated a sacred space that had been set aside for God's own son and would have risked being struck down just like Uzzah had been. That is also why Mary could not have ever had any other children.
Art Sippo
The Catholic Legate
August 1, 2004
Well, the main problems here, aside from the silly and quite typical Protestant attempt to draw "deeper truth" out of simple Greek grammer are as follows:
1) The mandate to "be fruitful and multiply" is clearly applied to humanity in general, and not to each and every married couple.OR, one would have to say that couples who cannot conceive are, in essence, not truly married. Yet, this is not the case, nor has it ever been the case in Jewish or Christian tradition. Thus, Joseph and Mary could have been truly married without multiplying via sexual means.
2) The case of the marriage between Joseph and Mary was clearly not a normal one insofar that Mary happened to be pregnant by the Holy Spirit prior to Joseph formally accepting Mary as his wife (thus concluding the Jewish marriage ceremony). Thus, from a theological point of view (per Genesis 1), one could justly say that the marriage of Joseph and Mary did fulfill the demands of Genesis 1 insofar that their marriage did involve the principal of being "fruitful" and "multiplying" via the Fruit of Mary's womb, Jesus. Indeed, given that the woman whom Joseph espoused himself to was already with Child, Joseph did not merely marry Mary, but rather both Mary and her Child. It was in the context of this marriage covenant that Mary delivered the Child. Thus, within the context of the marriage --a legal Jewish marriage --Joseph and Mary did multiply -- thus entitling Jesus to Joseph's family name and his legal succession from King David through Solomon.
3) Given that Scripture clearly describes Joseph as a righteous man and a devout keeper of the Law, under Mosaic law, if a man's wife (or betrothed) was found to be pregnant by another, the husband was forbidden to have relations with her from that point on. From the earliest Biblical days adultery carried with it a sense of defilement, so that a woman who had know contact with another man, even if by force, was considered no longer fit to be visited by her husband (Genesis 49:4; 2 Samuel 20:3, 16:21-22; Book of Jubilees 33:6-9; Epstein, Marriage Laws in the Biblical Talmud, p.51). The Deuteronomic code teaches that a woman who is divorced by her husband and thereafter marries another man likewise cannot return to her former husband (Dt 24:1-4). As the Lord said through the prophet Jeremiah: "If a man put away his wife and she goes from him and becomes another man's wife, shall he return to her again, shall not the land (his wife's body) be greatly polluted?" (Jr 3:1; see Targum to Dt 24:1-4). In rabbinic law, a woman who has committed adultery is "defiled" and cannot remain the wife of her husband, but must be divorced (Sifre on Dt, edit. M. Friedman (1864) 270 p. 122b; Sifre on Numbers, edit. M. Friedman (1915) 7 p. 4a and 19 p. 66). Furthermore any intimate male contact by the wife with Jew or Gentile, potent or impotent, natural or unnatural makes divorce compulsory (Sotha 26b; Yebamoth 55a, b, 87b; Kethuboth 9a, Babylonian Talmud; Kethuboth 25a; Sotah 27a, Yad, Sotah 2,2, Jerusalem Talmud). All this would have compelled a "righteous man" like Joseph to approach his marriage to an already-pregnant Mary from this perspective. In other words, she could remain his legal wife, but he would have no sexual rights to her (per Hosea).
4) It must also be appreciated that the marriage between Joseph and Mary was NOT Sacramental in nature, but a Jewish legal marriage --a pre-Christian (pre-Sacramental) form of marriage which is not like the "Mystery" ("Mysterion" = "Sacrament") of Christian marriage as it is described in Ephesians 5:25-32 and elsewhere. For example, Joseph did have the option of divorcing Mary without penalty of sin. The Gospel of Matthew is very clear about that. However, this very same Gospel of Matthew presents Jesus as condemning divorce. Thus, we are speaking of two different types of marriage. Joseph and Mary were married under the Law (complete with the Law's bill of divorce) and not according to the normal application of the Christian Sacrament of marriage.
5) Given that Joseph and Mary were married under the Law (a legal covenant and not a Sacramental Covenant), the option not to consummate the marriage was there; and, indeed, as 1 Corinth 7:36-38 shows us, this option to take a legal wife (who would cook, clean, and manage your household), but to "keep her" as a virgin was always there and, indeed, as we know from the Dead Sea Scrolls and other ancient documentation, this option was exercised by many devout Jewish men ("righteous men" per Matthew's description of Joseph) who were awaiting the coming of the Kingdom of God. And, indeed, when Jesus speaks of celibacy, He tells the Apostles how "some men are eunuchs because they are born that way; some because they are made that way by others (to oversee harems, etc.), and some men ARE (i.e. PRESENT TENSE!!!) eunuchs for the sake of the Kingdom of God." Notice here how Jesus does not say that some men should be eunuchs, but rather that some men ARE - meaning that some Jewish men of His own time were already living this way. His own foster father being one of them. And, indeed, as we know from tradition, if a man (or a woman ...e.g. the story of Suzanna in Book of Daniel --the Catholic version) were naturally incapable of having relations with their spouse, they were still (esp, in the case of a man) permitted to take a legal spouse because issues involving wealth and property and household management (a woman to take care of a man) were also taken into account. Why shouldn't they be, given that Jewish marriage was, first and foremost, a mere legal contract in which a man acquired a woman as his personal property! Let's propose for a moment that Joseph did not engage in relations with Mary because of piety (an appreciation of who and what she and her Son were), but because he was physically impotent. Well, in that event, then their marriage would STILL stand, and Mary would still be legally bound to him as long as he lived (per 1 Corinth 7:39-41).
6) Per 1 Corinth 7:36-41, it has always been the Tradition of the Church that Joseph and Mary never intended, even before Gabriel's announcement to Mary, to live a normal marital life. This is seen most clearly, as St. Augustine points out, in Mary's response to the angel: After being told that she is about to conceive a son who will inherit the throne of David, Mary --a woman about to marry a man from the house of David (as we are told just a few verses earlier in Luke 1) --says: "How can this be since I do not know man?" Unless Mary was a complete and total idiot, who did not yet know how children are conceived, the only justification for this question would be that Joseph himself never intended to have relations with her --that she was to be the kind of "virgin bride" described in 1 Corinth 7:36-38 . This was because Joseph was one of the men who were living "as eunuchs for the sake of the Kingdom of God." Indeed, earliest Christian tradition describes Joseph as an man in his 80's at the time of his marriage to Mary. Thus, Mary's question must, by necessity, be read in the light of her not understanding how or why an angel of God would be asking Joseph to break his vow --his commitment to chastity. And so Gabriel explains to her that Joseph will not be the father, but God Himself will.
7) In essence, Joseph was a devout Jew who knew that God Himself had used Mary's womb for His own Divine purpose. It would therefore be unthinkable to a devout Jew that he would have the right to use this same womb for his own purpose --that is, for a normal and natural purpose. And, because of this fact alone, any normal mandate to "be fruitful and multiply" (assuming it existed at all) within the marriage covenant between Joseph and Mary would have been superseded by the very special sacredness of Mary's womb, which would have made normal sexual relations out of the question. ...Not because sex in marriage is bad, but because sacredness (in this case especially) is better per the instructions in 1 Corinth 7:36-37. Remember, these are ancient Jews were are talking about here, not modern Americans.
Mark Bonocore
The Catholic Legate
August 1, 2004