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Breaking with Tradition: Jerome, the Virgin Mary, and the Troublesome “Brethren” of Jesus a Thesis Presented to the Faculty

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Breaking with Tradition: Jerome, the Virgin Mary, and the Troublesome “Brethren” of Jesus a Thesis Presented to the Faculty Breaking with Tradition: Jerome, the Virgin Mary, and the Troublesome “Brethren” of Jesus A thesis presented to the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts Andrew R. Koperski May 2018 © 2018 Andrew R. Koperski. All Rights Reserved. 2 This thesis titled Breaking with Tradition: Jerome, the Virgin Mary, and the Troublesome “Brethren” of Jesus by ANDREW R. KOPERSKI has been approved for the Department of History and the College of Arts and Sciences by Jaclyn Maxwell Associate Professor of History Robert Frank Dean, College of Arts and Sciences 3 ABSTRACT KOPERSKI ANDREW R., Master of Arts, May 2018, History Breaking with Tradition: Jerome, the Virgin Mary, and the Troublesome “Brethren” of Jesus Director of thesis: Jaclyn Maxwell In the broad stream of ancient Christian thought, one finds varying understandings of Jesus’s mother Mary and the meaning of her virginity. Despite little evidence in the Bible itself to support the view, some early Christians came to assert her “perpetual virginity.” This idea came out of legends found in apocryphal texts, whose contents alleged that Mary had retained her virginal status through the entirety of her life, even after Jesus’s birth and her apparent marriage to Joseph. By the late fourth century, belief in Mary’s perpetual virginity had become the dominant though not universal perspective found among Christian theological authorities. Several passages in Scripture, however, remained a problem for this camp, not least selections from the New Testament suggesting that Jesus had siblings, which implicitly challenged the permanence of Mary’s abstinence. In order to surmount this hurdle, the church father, biblical scholar, and polemicist Jerome argued that these “brothers” were in fact cousins, not siblings in a literal sense. While this overcame the Scriptural problem, it also deliberately contradicted the well-established, popular traditions that were based in the apocrypha. This study examines the immediate response to his new theory in the fourth and fifth centuries. By measuring the reaction from Jerome’s contemporaries and later readers, it draws 4 conclusions about the nature of late antique theological dialogue and the development of Christian dogma from its ancient origins into the middle ages. 5 DEDICATION Cui, facit mirabilia magna solus, quoniam in aeternum misericordia eius. 6 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many contributed to the success of this project. First and foremost, I thank my committee members, Dr. Jaclyn Maxwell, Dr. Kevin Uhalde, and Dr. Miriam Shadis, who have volunteered many hours of their time offering guidance and insight while reviewing this project. In the whole course of my Master’s degree, their direction has proven invaluable to me as I developed the questions that appear in this thesis. Further, I sincerely appreciate the aid of my friends and family who have offered feedback, provided additional proofreading, and listened to me talk far too much about Jerome, Mary, and the intricacies of virginity in the last year and a half. Chief among these include Alex Guerra, Casey McKee, and of course my wife, Caroline. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to my undergraduate professors in History and Classics at Hillsdale College, without whose dedication to their scholarly craft and pedagogy, I would never have developed many of the basic skills required to do this kind of research in the first place. 7 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract ...........................................................................................................................3 Dedication .......................................................................................................................5 Acknowledgments ...........................................................................................................6 Abbreviations…………………………………………………………………………..….8 Introduction…………………………….………………………………………………… 9 Chapter 1: Backgound………………………...………………………………………….17 Chapter 2: Epiphanius and Jerome ................................................................................. 36 Chapter 3: Jerome’s Motives and the Contemporary Western Reaction .......................... 54 Chapter 4: The Divergence of East and West……………………………………………81 Conclusions……………………………………………………………………………. 108 Bibliography ................................................................................................................ 126 8 ABBREVIATIONS CCSL Corpus Christianorum, Series Latinum CCCM Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis SC Sources Chrétiennes PG Patrologia Graeca (Migne) PL Patrologia Latina (Migne) 9 INTRODUCTION Isidore was not particularly pleased with the question that had been put to him. That he had to bother with a reply to this theological inquiry did not itself annoy him. After all, in his career as a prominent ascetic and teacher in fifth century Pelusium in Egypt, he wrote thousands of letters to various individuals on many different subjects pertaining to Christian faith and practice. No, the problem had come from the nature of the query put to him by this Herminus. Herminus had asked Isidore about Scripture’s words concerning the Theotokos, Christ’s mother Mary. As all the truly orthodox taught, Mary had not only been a virgin through the conception and birth of her son but had remained sexually pure through the whole course of her life. Yet, whether the thought had originally come from himself or had been put in his head by someone else, Herminus had brought up to Isidore a verse from Matthew that seemed to suggest otherwise. The verse said that Joseph had not known Mary “until” she had given birth to Jesus. Did not this word “until” mean, asked Herminus, that Joseph had known her thereafter? Perhaps revealing a bit of annoyance with this heretical insinuation, Isidore wrote back to Herminus, explaining how the word “until” should not be taken so literally. Indeed, the Bible frequently used “until” in a looser, non-literal manner. The alternative interpretation implied by Herminus—that Mary had had an otherwise normal marital relationship with Joseph—sounded like something uttered by that “blasphemous and ungrateful people,” the Jews. Isidore concluded that if his explanation about “until” did not persuade the Jew, then Herminus was just “sowing on the rocks” and “writing on water,” and he ought to cease from such vain efforts. It remains unclear whether Isidore 10 meant this last bit about actually persuading Jews about Mary or whether he simply intended to put Herminus in his place for posing such a stupid question.1 Herminus, however, was neither the first nor the last Christian to hold some reservations about Mary’s lifelong celibacy because of what the Scriptural texts themselves said about her. In fact, this had been a point of contention for more than two centuries by the time Isidore arrived on the scene in the early 400s. Well into the present day, the figure of the Virgin Mary has occupied a prestigious and sometimes contentious space in the long history of Christian doctrine, tradition, and piety. The roots of this history go deep into ancient Christianity. As early as the second century, we find hints of a primitive Marian theology and devotion appearing in Christian apocryphal legend as well as in the peripheries of patristic theology, which often took her as typological reflection of Eve. Two hundred years later in the late fourth century, the veneration of Jesus’s mother had begun to acquire a veritably cultic status as one of the chief exemplars for Christian asceticism—not least in regards to sexual renunciation. Yet like many religious developments, the story about the rise of Marian devotion does not lack for strife and controversy. In late antiquity, perhaps the most contested and historically-tangled tradition about Mary was the one that appears in Isidore’s letter to Herminus: the tradition of her alleged perpetual virginity, which claimed that she had remained sexually abstinent through her entire life, not just before Jesus’s birth. Complementing the ubiquitous and Scripturally-supported belief that she had conceived Jesus without sexual intercourse, adherents to the perpetual virginity 1 Isidore of Pelusium, Epistles 1.18, PG 78:192-3. 11 tradition usually added two other claims concerning Mary: her virginity in partu and post partum. Virginity in partu referred to the idea that Mary had miraculously remained intact gynecologically through the very process of giving birth to Jesus. Virginity post partum simply meant that she remained sexually abstinent after that birth. By the late fourth and early fifth centuries, upholders of the perpetual virginity are thus known to have employed the Latin formula: Virgo concipit, virgo parturit, virgo permanet. Undoubtedly, in the complex context of Christian asceticism, the tradition’s proponents saw perpetual virginity as a mark of honor for Christ’s mother, and perhaps also as a means to reinforce the unique origin of Christ himself. Still, there were several factors that impeded the total acceptance of this tradition into the orthodox consensus until about the turn of the fifth century. For one, even if most of the post-Nicenes appear to have supported this tradition, at least a few of the major pre-Nicene father had contradicted it, the early Latin apologist Tertullian chief among them. Second and more fundamentally problematic, the New Testament itself said nothing at all about this apocryphal tradition. In
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