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 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

This thesis titled

Breaking with Tradition: Jerome, the Virgin Mary, and the Troublesome “Brethren” of

Jesus

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.

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

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 fact, more than a few Scriptural loci seemed on their face to disprove the claim of perpetual virginity. While the verse brought up by Herminus

(Matthew 1.25) often sparked debate on the subject, some of the most difficult passages were those like Matthew 13.55 and Galatians 1.19, which reference Jesus’s brothers and sisters.

Naturally, this put many of the pro-perpetual virginity biblical commentators in a bit of a quandary. If Jesus had siblings, the first and natural assumption would be that they were Mary’s children. To defend this tradition, these exegetes confronted the 12

Scriptural problem with different explanations and hermeneutical work-arounds. In the case of Jesus’s alleged siblings, two distinct approaches appear in the historical record.

The first, the apocryphal (or sometimes alternatively called the “Epiphanian”) theory, attributes them to a prior marriage of Joseph: They are thus Jesus’s step-siblings. The second, sometimes labeled the Hieronymian theory (after St. Jerome, who first came up with the idea) posits that any mention of Jesus’s “brothers and sisters” should be taken in a general sense denoting extended family relations (or “brethren” in most English renderings): They are his cousins.2 Needless to say, while these interpretations would each leave Mary’s virginity intact, they cannot both be true—and therein lies much of the historical intrigue.

This historical study traces the development and reception of these Mariological ideas from the texts of the New Testament itself up to as late as medieval scholasticism.

Its main focus falls upon a key moment in the late fourth century, when Jerome presents his novel understanding of Jesus’s brethren in defense of the perpetual virginity against one of its critics, Helvidius. This study examines several questions related to the introduction of Jerome’s novel exegetical position: What motivated Jerome to come up with this new interpretation in the first place? How did his contemporaries react to his abandonment of the traditional line of argument? Why did his ideas on this matter dominate in the West while simultaneously failing to gain comparable traction in the

East? Itt concludes by considering how Jerome’s new exegesis offers us a unique window

2 It is the Hieronymian theory that one finds in the modern Roman Catholic catechism. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 499-501, http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p122a3p2.htm accessed March 19, 2018.

13 into early Christian theological consensus, its mechanics, and how (as early as the fourth century) historical forces were already carving out distinct Christian communities and traditions. Chapter One lays out the two centuries of historical background prior to

Jerome, showing how the perpetual virginity tradition developed from a notion foreign to the New Testament authors into a popular and widely received tradition about Mary and her purity. Chapter Two juxtaposes Jerome’s apparent break with the apocryphal narrative in 383 with the position of his friend and fellow heresy-hunter, Epiphanius of

Salamis, who himself invoked the apocrypha stories to defend the ascetically-idealized

Mary. In Chapter Three, we examine the immediate reaction of Jerome’s Latin contemporaries and the effect his new theory had upon contemporary Marian discourse.

Looking at the long-term reception of the Hieronymian thesis, Chapter Four compares the dissimilar reactions to Jerome’s ideas that appear in the Latin West and the Greek East.

Finally, the last section turns away from the historically specific toward the larger implications of this study and its findings.

Overview of Seminal Secondary Sources

Before delving directly into Chapter One, several pieces of scholarship deserve a brief introduction as they have served a substantial role in the formation and conceptualization of this study, reappearing many times in the text and footnotes below.

The first of these, Peter Brown’s The Body and Society, is an essential component of any bibliography for the complex topic of sexuality in early Christianity.3 It would indeed be

3 Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, Twentieth anniversary ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

14 difficult to catalog all of the helpful contributions Brown makes in this monograph, but one of his more salient points is that sexuality and its renunciation had different meanings and significance for different early Christian communities separated by era and region.

This monograph has proven especially useful in thinking through the differences in

Eastern and Western Mariology.

Of the relevant secondary sources, David Hunter has probably written the most extensively on the roots of perpetual virginity tradition itself and its fuller context in religious celibacy and asceticism. By reconstructing the history of the perpetual virginity tradition and its adherents from the New Testament up through the polemical controversies the tradition evoked in the late fourth century, Hunter argues that the perpetual virginity was never fully embraced as the standard orthodox position until fairly late in the fourth century, and that those who opposed the tradition of Mary’s perpetual virginity could be fairly understood as defending an older orthodoxy. As one of the loudest and shrillest voices of the time, Jerome features prominently in Hunter’s work, the two most relevant pieces are his monograph, Marriage, Celibacy, and Heresy in

Ancient Christianity, and an earlier article, “Helvidius, Jovinian, and the Virginity of

Mary in Late Fourth-Century Rome.”4 The question of Jesus’s “brethren” and its relation to Mary’s virginity, however, are at most a secondary concern in these works, and Hunter does not address the shift in exegetical strategy pertaining to the problematic Scriptures.

In all, while Hunter’s work provided some of the basic framework that shaped the

4 David G. Hunter, “Helvidius, Jovinian, and the Virginity of Mary in Late Fourth-Century Rome,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 1, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 47–71. David G. Hunter, Marriage, Celibacy, and Heresy in Ancient Christianity: The Jovinianist Controversy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

15 direction of this research, he also left some interesting issues to be explored. Moreover, some of the arguments that appear in the conclusion aim to take a few of his own findings a step further.

In his recent book, Mary in Early Christian Faith and Devotion, Stephen

Shoemaker offers one of the more thorough scholarly treatments of Mary in early

Christianity.5 Shoemaker’s interests are focused particularly on the “piety and veneration” given to Mary in this period rather than Marian doctrine per se. While he does not address the matter of perpetual virginity itself in as much depth as Hunter, much of Shoemaker’s book relates to the questions this research project has attempted to answer, since the question of perpetual virginity is inextricably linked to the matter of

Marian veneration in the fourth and fifth centuries. Much as The Body and Society traces the changing significance of sexuality and celibacy in early Christianity, Mary in Early

Christian Faith and Devotion achieves much the same thing with Jesus’s mother herself, and it has proven a markedly useful piece of scholarship for this project.

Though largely (and unfortunately) forgotten by more recent scholars, Joseph

Lightfoot’s 1865 commentary St. Paul’s Letter to the Galatians merits mention. In this studye, Lightfoot provides a lengthy standalone dissertation that delves deeply into the matter of Mary’s lifelong virginity and the identity of Jesus’s “brothers” that appear in the New Testament.6 While certainly dated, Lightfoot’s work with the ancient Christian

5 Stephen J. Shoemaker, Mary in Early Christian Faith and Devotion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016).

6 Joseph Barber Lightfoot, St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians (Andover: W. F. Draper, 1870).

16 sources—the New Testament and patristics alike—is meticulous. Lightfoot was not the only scholar of his day to write extensively on this subject, but his treatment of the patristic sources may be the fullest in relation to the church fathers: a higher concern here than the analysis of the New Testament material itself. In fact, some of Lightfoot’s better observations have seemingly escaped the notice of more recent scholarship. Thus, despite its age, this commentary has held up surprisingly well in the century and half since it was first published.

Originally discovered through Shoemaker’s recommendation, two very similar compilations, Hilda Graef’s Mary: A History of Doctrine and Devotion and Brian

Reynold’s Gateway to Heaven, catalog many of the primary sources that appear in this study.7 While they list an enormous range of authors and texts, their analysis for most of these remains necessarily brief, leaving much room for deeper commentary. Nonetheless, both books provided an accessible listing of the main ancient and medieval texts that were used as a starting point in the search for pertinent primary sources. Their work proved especially helpful for Chapter Four, which delves into some of the main medieval writings about Mary.

7 Hilda C. Graef, Mary: A History of Doctrine and Devotion (Notre Dame: Christian Classics, 2009). Brian Reynolds, Gateway to Heaven: Marian Doctrine and Devotion, Image and Typology in the Patristic and Medieval Periods, vol. 1 (Hyde Park, New York: New City Press, 2012). 17

CHAPTER ONE: MARIAN VIRGINITY IN THE FIRST THREE CENTURIES

To understand the theological context of the late fourth and early fifth centuries, we must begin by mapping out some of the basic landmarks of the perpetual virginity’s tangled history prior to Jerome. After all, the authors of the fourth century were not working in a vacuum. Plenty had already been written and said about Mary’s virginity in various contexts before the late fourth century, and much of it loomed in the background as Jerome fired his polemic at Helvidius in 383. Not a few scholars have already written thorough treatments of this background material.8 Though bits of this secondary literature have problematic elements,9 the existing scholarship paints a fairly consistent portrait of the traditions and teachings in question. Mainly, the goal here then is not to retell, revise, or otherwise modify the reigning historical narrative, but rather to provide a brief and succinct summary as far as it concerns our own research questions. As such, more than a few potential sources have been elided in favor of brevity, and so what follows is merely a representative sampling of the evidence. In any case, like many histories of early

Christianity, our story begins with the relevant texts of Scripture itself.

Mary’s Virginity in the New Testament

For the earliest Christians who posited Mary’s ever-virgin status, the New

Testament itself had little to say in support. Indeed, Mary seems to have played a far more modest role in the New Testament’s own framework of history and theology than

8 See especially large sections of Shoemaker, Graef, Reynolds, and Hunter’s Marriage, Celibacy, and Heresy in Ancient Christianity.

9 See my discussion of Graef’s reading of Origen below.

18 she would assume in the coming centuries.10 (Next to Jesus himself, there are at least a handful of other characters who figure more prominently than his mother in the narratives of the New Testament, including Paul, Peter, and even John the Baptist.) Of the gospel accounts, Matthew and Luke both present Mary as a virgin at the time of her conception of Jesus. In the beginning of Matthew’s narrative, Mary was betrothed to Joseph, but

“before they came together, she was found to be pregnant by the Holy Spirit.”11 Similarly in Luke’s record, the angel Gabriel comes to the virgin Mary (πρὸς παρθένον) announcing that she will conceive and give birth to Israel’s long-awaited Messiah. Taken aback, Mary asks, “How will this be, since I do not know a man?”12 In both renderings, the authors leave little doubt over the nature of Jesus’s divine parentage. Interestingly, neither Mark nor John go out of their way to record the peculiar birth story told in the other two gospels; apparently their focus lay elsewhere. After the time of Jesus’s birth,

Mary does indeed appear episodically throughout all four of the gospels, but nothing else is said concerning her virginal status.

10 Yet in some corners of more recent scholarship, one finds a tendency to magnify Mary’s importance to the first few centuries of Christianity. On one hand, this comes as a counterreaction to biased, often Protestant, critical scholarship that has at times sought to cut the historical legs out from under the Roman Catholic idealizations of the Virgin. To that end, some have attempted to trace out bolder lines of continuity between the Marys of the New Testament, the apocrypha, the church fathers, and the middle ages. For example, one of the most prominent scholars of the Christian apocrypha, J. K. Elliott, asserts that Luke’s Annunciation scene “both reflects and itself encouraged Mariology and Mariolatry.” J. K. Elliott, ed., The Apocryphal Jesus: Legends of the Early Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 31. Given the rather prominent absence of Mariological themes in the New Testament as a whole, I find that to be an exaggeration, and I offer a fuller discussion of this problem in the thesis’s Conlusions.

11 Matthew 1.18. All translations of the New Testament are my own, taken from Aland et al. eds., The Greek New Testament, 3rd ed, (Stuttgart: Biblia-Druck GmbH Stuttgart, 1998.)

12 See Luke 2.34.

Despite his own uniquely developed theology and at times effusive Christology, the apostle Paul’s writings have even less to say about Jesus’s birth or Mary’s chastity than the gospels. In his chastising missive to the Christian community in Galatia, Paul throws out what may be an oblique reference to Mary as he seeks to distinguish the life of Torah from the life of faith: “But when the fullness of time came, God sent his son, born from a woman (γενόμενον ἐκ γυναικός), born under the Law, so that he might ransom those under the Law, so that we might receive the adoption.”13 Yet whatever Paul may have thought about Jesus’s allegedly unique conception, Mary, or her virginity, he does not elaborate further.

Beyond this handful of passages, the canonical Christian Scriptures seem to say nothing else about Mary’s sexual integrity. The New Testament’s apparent silence on these matters would not especially trouble later theologians, however. More problematic by far were positive statements in the sacred writings that appeared on their face to call into question the plausibility of the perpetual virginity tradition. Three passages in particular come up repeatedly for comment in the pro-perpetual virginity patristic discourses. The first of these appears in Matthew 1.25: “And he [Joseph] did not know her until she gave birth to a son. And he gave him the name “Jesus.” In so far as it pertains to the question of Mary’s virginity, this verse turns on the on the meaning of

“until” (ἓως οὗ). If “until” indicates change thereafter that point in time, then it seems

13 Galatians 4.4. Some modern commentators have observed that the phrase “born of a woman” itself merely reflects a well-established Jewish epithet that emphasizes a person’s humanity. See Raymond E. Brown et al., eds., Mary in the New Testament: A Collaborative Assessment by Protestant and Roman Catholic Scholars (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978), 42.

Mary ceased to remain a virgin sometime after the birth of Jesus. Some of the church fathers were at pains to show that “until” could be conceivably understood as meaning

“up to” the definite point of Jesus’s birth, but not indicating a necessary change thereafter. To support this, they showed that elsewhere the Bible seems to have this more poetic meaning of “until,” such as in 1 Corinthians 15.25: “And it must be that he [Christ] reigns until (ἄχρι οὗ) he places all his enemies under his feet,” where the logical implication is that Christ will not cease to reign even when he has subjugated his foes.14

With an eye toward later patristic commentary, however, the other loci are more important, since they appear to pose a far stickier problem than the philological turns in

Matthew 1.25. In several passages, the New Testament authors refer to Jesus’s brothers and sisters, the two best known instances being Matthew 13.5515 and Galatians 1.19. In

Matthew 13, Jesus returns to his hometown of Nazareth and teaches in its synagogue— only to find his fellow Nazarenes less than receptive. Offended by his posture of authority, the Nazarenes pose a snide rhetorical question: “Isn’t this man the craftsman’s son? Isn’t his mother called Mary, and his brothers Jacob, Joseph, Simon, and Judah?

And aren’t all of his sisters here with us?”16 It goes without saying that this mention of

Jesus’s ἀδελφοί and ἀδελφαί—whatever those words might mean—was at least an

14 Yet one wonders why Matthew did not simply say “Joseph never knew her,” rather than using the far more ambiguous construction that he does. At the very least, it would seem to indicate that, even if some Christians of the first century believed Mary always maintained her purity, Matthew either did not know about it himself or it was not a fact noteworthy enough to be included in his narrative of Jesus’s life.

15 Parallel passages occur in Mark 6 and Luke 4, but Matthew’s retelling appears to receive the most attention from the church fathers.

16 Matthew 13.55-6. Note that most translators render the “Jacob” mentioned here and in Galatians 1.19 as “James,” and henceforth I refer to him as such.

21 uncomfortable and ongoing snag for later proponents of the perpetual virginity. True,

Matthew does not appear to have recorded this comment for the purpose of elucidating the details of Jesus’s family life. Nevertheless, an untortured reading of this text would seem to indicate that Jesus had siblings—and quite a few, at that.

Paul produces a similar exegetical thistle in Galatians 1.19, where he notes that, besides Peter, on visiting Jerusalem after his conversion he “did not see any other of the apostles except Jacob, the brother of the Lord.” When paired with Matthew 13.55, at first appearance, Paul here appears to corroborate that there were siblings of Jesus well-known to the first century Christian community. In any case, it seems probable that the “Jacob” or “James” mentioned in both passages is the same person.17 Taken as a whole then, with no a priori theological commitments, a straightforward historical reading of the New

Testament would seem to suggest that Mary did not, in fact, remain a virgin for her entire life. In the coming centuries, any comment or analysis of these problematic passages naturally begged an explanatory defense of that tradition from its adherents.

Mary in the Protevangelium of James

Arguably, the perpetual virginity tradition has its beginning in the Christian apocryphal writings, the earliest, best known, and most influential example being the so- called Protevangelium of James.18 Probably written in Syria sometime during the later

17 The identities of the various Jameses of the New Testament clearly bothered Jerome, and it led to one of his densest and most difficult lines of argument in the polemic against Helvidius, who employed several of these verses as proof against the permanence of Mary’s virginity. See Chapter Two.

18 For lengthier discussion of the Protevangelium, see especially Shoemaker, 47-63 and J. K. Elliott, “Christian Apocrypha and the Developing Role of Mary,” in The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Apocrypha (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 270–88. For a critical reconstruction of the Greek 22 half of the second century, the Protevangelium takes a marked departure from the themes and emphases of the New Testament vis-à-vis Mary.19 While the last third of its narrative retells the conception and birth stories found in Matthew and Luke, the bulk of the story, in fact, focuses almost exclusively upon Mary and the span of her life before the point where the gospels pick up.

To a noticeable degree, the theological weight of this apocryphon seems to rest upon Mary’s sexual purity and perpetual virginity. In the words of David Hunter,

Whereas the christological element is still dominant in the Odes of Solomon and the Ascension of Isaiah, the Protevangelium is preoccupied entirely with Mary and with her consecration to a life of perpetual virginity. Furthermore, within the focus on Mary, the concern is entirely with her sexual purity. No other virtue is mentioned: not her faith at the annunciation, nor her devotion to Jesus at the crucifixion. Mary's sole merit, according to the Protevangelium, is her sexual chastity, and the sole purpose of the narrative is to express and defend sexual purity.20

A few points of the Protevangelium narrative are of special interest to us here. The first is that of her perpetual virginity. Throughout the story, the author leaves no question about

Mary’s sexual integrity. Like the gospel accounts, Mary is presented here as a virgin prior to the conception. While Joseph does take her in “marriage,” in reality, his role is more of a consecrated guardian, an office which he obtained unwillingly after Mary was assigned to him by the casting of lots. When Mary gives birth, a midwife named Salome refuses to

text, see Emile Strycker, ed., La Forme La plus Ancienne du Protevangile de Jacques, Subsidia Hagiographica 33 (Bruxelles: Societe des Bollandistes, 1961).

19 The precise Christian community that produced the Protevangelium remains unclear, though scholarly consensus leans toward Syrian proto-Encratites whose theology was likely heterodox (at best) in respect to contemporary patristic authors.

20 Hunter, Marriage, Celibacy, and Ancient Christianity, 178.

23 accept the miraculous conception and birth. In language allusively parallel to that of

Thomas in John 20.25, she insists that unless Mary passes a manual gynecological exam, she will not accept “that the virgin gave birth.”21 Needless to say, Mary does indeed pass the intrusive test—and Salome’s offending hand is afflicted by divine fire. This anecdote establishes the basis for later belief in her virginity in partu.22

More importantly, the Protevangelium subtly clears the critical Scriptural hurdle to Mary’s perpetual virginity that comes in the form of Jesus’s supposed brothers and sisters. For the Protevangelium presents Joseph as an elder widower who already has his own children. In this rendering, Joseph only agrees to take Mary into his care reluctantly, referring to her as a child. Indeed, according to the text, he does not know how to register

Mary for the census in Bethlehem. “I shall register my sons,” he says, “but what am I going to do about this child? How will I register her? As my wife? That idea brings me shame (ἐπαισχύνομαι). Rather as a daughter? The sons of Israel know that she is not my daughter.”23 Joseph apparently blushes at the mere thought of calling Mary his wife. For the Protevangelium, then, the “marriage” of Joseph and Mary in Scripture was a purely platonic one that would be better described as a guardianship. The apocryphal story depicts a Mary who permanently retained her virginal status.

21 De Strycker notes this linguistic resonance. Compare John 20.25 (Ἐὰν μὴ . . . βάλω τὸν δάκτυλόν μου εἰς τὸν τύπον τῶν ἥλων καὶ βάλω μου τὴν χεῖρα εἰς τὴν πλευρὰν αὐτοῦ, οὐ μὴ πιστεύσω) with chapter 39 and 40a of De Strycker’s text, 156-58: ἐὰν μὴ βάλω τόν δάκτυλόν μου καὶ ἐραυνήσω τὴν φύσιν αὐτῆς, οὐ μὴ πιστεύσω ὅτι ἡ παρθένος ἐγέννησεν.

22 Ibid.

23 Protevangelium of James 35, De Strycker, 142.

Despite its departure from the themes and narratives of the New Testament, the

Protevangelium of James went on to have a wide following in the early church. As we shall see in the next section, prior to Jerome, when patristic theologians discussed or sought to defend Mary’s perpetual virginity, they often were dealing explicitly with the

Protevangelium itself or with traditions that have their ultimate origins in this apocryphal text.

Pre-Nicene Fathers: Tertullian and Origen

Tracking later reception of the Protevangelium of James and its ideas concerning

Mary has proven difficult for patristic scholars. Often only hints and scraps of the early church fathers’ thinking on this matter survive, and what extant writings we do have do not always paint a clear theological portrait. Within the context of our broader discussion, it is important to note some of the pre-Nicene patristic views concerning Mary. On one hand, the early fathers clearly gave careful thought to the role of Mary in their theology and their understanding of Scripture. As Shoemaker observes,

The notion of Mary’s virginity would receive further theological development during the course of the second century, first at the hands of Justin Martyr (ca. 100-165) and later by Irenaeus of Lyons (d. 202), both of whom wove from this doctrine a portrait of Mary as New Eve, whose chastity and obedience undid the original Eve’s primordial immorality and disobedience.24

In the early patristic literature, then, Mary takes on an important theological typology as the inversion of Eve. While the early fathers are quick to defend the doctrine of Jesus’s virginal conception by Mary, rather unlike the contemporary author of the

24 Shoemaker, 44. 25

Protevangelium, they remain silent on what became of her virginity in partu and post partum.

Firmer data begins to appear around the turn of the third century. While he exhibits no direct knowledge of the Protevangelium or its traditions, the North African apologist Tertullian (c.160-c.225) does offer interesting perspectives on Mary, her virginity, and Jesus’s siblings.25 In the context of combatting Marcion’s docetic understanding of Jesus’s corporality, Tertullian discussed a contested scriptural proof-text that mentions Jesus’s family. The story in question appears at multiple points in the gospels (Matthew 12.46-50, Mark 3.31, and Luke 8.19-21). In this episode, Jesus’s mother and brothers are trying to speak with him but cannot because of the crowd which

Jesus is teaching. When he is informed that his family is waiting to see him, Jesus responds, “He who does the will of my father in heaven, this one is my brother and sister and mother.”26 Apparently, Tertullian’s opponents were turning this passage to their advantage: Christ’s denial of family shows that he was not truly human. Tertullian, however, responds critically to their interpretation:

Non tam abnegavit quam abdicavit. Atque adeo cum praemisisset, Quae mihi mater, et qui mihi fratres? subiungens, nisi qui audiunt verba mea, et faciunt ea? Transtulit sanguinis nomina in alios, quos magis proximos pro fide iudicaret. Nemo autem transfert quid, nisi ab eo qui habet id quod transfert. Si ergo matrem et fratres eos fecit qui non erant, quomodo negavit eos qui erant? Meritorum scilicet conditione, non ex primorum negatione.27

25 I owe Graef’s extensive footnotes for bringing a number of the relevant passages to my attention, though the analysis and translations are my own.

26 Matthew 12.50.

27 In Marcionem 4.19, PL 2:404.

He didn’t deny them, so much as he disavowed them. And as far as when he had said, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” substituting in, “except those who hear my words and do them,” he transferred the title of blood-relation upon others, whom he was judging nearer according to faith. But no one transfers something, unless he transfers that from the one who has it. So, if he made them “mothers and brothers” who were not, then how did he deny those who were? Clearly through the status of the deserving, not through a denial of the former.

In Tertullian’s argument, the logic of the passage forces the family of Jesus to be real rather than illusory. The story itself makes little sense unless Jesus’s biological family truly had the status of blood-relation (sanguinis nomina) in the first place. With a similar line of thinking in De Monogamia, Tertullian refers to Mary with the words nuptura post partum (“she who would be married after the birth”) and univiram (“the wife of one man”).28 While Tertullian is certainly not challenging the question of Mary’s perpetual post partum virginity directly,29 the arguments he espouses are incongruent with the

Protevangelium traditions and destabilize the claims that Mary remained a virgin for the entirety of her life.30 His exegetical premises contradict the claims that the “brothers” were step-brothers and that Mary was not in a full marriage with Joseph, views supported by the Protevangelium and endorsed by the proponents of the perpetual virginity prior to

Jerome.

28 De Monogamia 8, PL 2:939.

29 Whereas in De Carne Christi, Tertullian does seem to reject any suggestion that Mary remained a virgin in the act of giving birth: Et virgo, quantum a viro; non virgo, quantum a partu (PL 2:790). Cf. Hunter, Marriage, Celibacy, and Heresy in Ancient Christianity, 181-4.

30 Much later, Jerome himself will all but admit the fact that Tertullian did not believe in the perpetual virginity, as Helvidius apparently had invoked Tertullian’s authority to support his own arguments. See Contra Helvidium 19.

Some of the earliest direct mentions of the Epiphanian view of Jesus’s brethren and the Protevangelium of James itself appear in Tertullian’s eastern contemporary, the

Alexandrian theologian Origen (d. 254). It is widely believed that Origen was the first patristic author to endorse aspects of the perpetual virginity. Hunter, for instance, claims,

“Origen was the first Christian author outside the Protevangelium to teach explicitly that

Mary might have remained perpetually a virgin after the birth of Jesus.”31 Thus, Origen represents an important point in the history of this tradition. Yet, even if he was the first theologian to clearly discuss the matter, Origen still appears less than enthusiastic on the question compared to many of the fourth and fifth century sources. In fact, some of his thoughts convey a palpable ambivalence toward the issue.

Probably his most important discussion of Mary’s virginity comes in Origen’s own commentary on the oft-disputed verse in Matthew 13.55, where he takes up the

Nazarenes’ claim about Jesus’s siblings:

Ὤιοντο οὖν αὐτὸν εἶναι Ἰωσὴφ καὶ Μαρίας υἱόν. Τὸυς δὲ ἀδελφοὺς Ἰησοῦ φασί τινες εἶναι, ἐκ παραδόσεως ὁρμώμενοι τοῦ ἐπιγεγραμμένου κατὰ Πέτρον εὐγγελίου ἢ τῆς βίβλου Ἰακώβου, υἱοὺς Ἰωσὴφ ἐκ προτέρας γυναικὸς συνωκεκυίας αὐτῷ πρὸ τῆς Μαρίας. Οἱ δὲ ταῦτα λέγοντες τὸ ἀξίομα τῆς Μαρίας ἐν παρθενίᾳ τηρεῖν μέχρι τέλους βούλονται, ἵνα μὴ τὸ κριθὲν ἐκεῖνο σῶμα διακονήσασθαι τῷ ἐπόντι λόγω· "Πνεῦμα ἅγιον ἐπελεύσεται ἐπί σε καὶ δύναμις ὑψίστου επισκιάσει σοι", γνῷ κοίτην ἀνδρὸς μετὰ τὸ ἐπελθεῖν ἐν αὐτῇ πνεῦμα ἅγιον καὶ τὴν ἐπεσκιακυῖαν αὐτῇ δύναμιν ἐξ ὕψους. Καὶ οἶμαι λόγον ἔχειν ἀνδρῶν μὲν καθαρότητος τῆς ἐν ἀγνείᾳ ἀπαρχὴν γεγονέναι τὸν Ἰησοῦν, γυναικῶν δὲ τὴν Μαρίαν· οὐ γὰρ εὔφημον ἄλλῃ παρ᾿ ἐκείνην τὴν ἀπαρχὴν τῆς παρθενίας ἐπιγράψασθαι. 32

31 Hunter, Marriage, Celibacy, and Heresy in Ancient Christianity, 184. In fact, there is some question as to whether Origen’s older, fellow Alexandrian, Clement, deserves some credit as the first extant theologian to posit Mary’s perpetual virginity post partum. For our purposes here, I shall defer to Hunter’s judgement, since Origen’s views are just as descriptive of this period.

32 Commentarius in Matthaeum, SC 162, 216.

They were, therefore, thinking that he was Joseph and Mary’s son. Compelled by the tradition that comes from the Gospel written according to Peter or from the book of James, some people say they [the alleged brethren] are the brothers of Jesus, sons of Joseph of a former wife who lived with him prior to Mary. Those saying these things want to guard the honor of Mary in her virginity to the end, so that that body—distinguished to be served33 by the word that said, “the Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you”—might not know a man’s bed after the Holy Spirit came upon her and the power from on high overshadowed her. And I think that the word has Jesus to be the first of men pure in cleanness’s chastity, and Mary to be the first of women. For it is not reverent (εὔφημον) to write in any other manner that there is a first- fruits of virginity besides her.

A convoluted passage to be sure, some have taken this to mean that Origen clearly favored the perpetual virginity post partum. Offering a bolder translation, Graef renders the difficult last clause “for it would not be pious to attribute the first-fruits of virginity to anyone but her.”34

Two points deserve consideration on this importat text, however. First, it is debatable whether this position—that Origen manifestly favored aspects of the perpetual virginity here—fully grapples with the ambiguity of Origen’s Greek. What does it mean, for instance, that Mary was the “beginning” or “first-fruits” of virginity? Does it mean she was the beginning of ascetic virginity? Or might he be giving a view closer to

Tertullian here, who saw Mary as an important exemplum for virgin and married alike

33 The syntax of this clause is odd, even if the general sense remains fairly straightforward given the context. The broader meaning seems to demand a passive infinitive (as I have rendered it), but instead Origen uses what is clearly a middle aorist infinitive in its morphology. An alternate reading could have the infinitive take the dative object τῷ εἰπόντι λόγῳ with a coloring in the middle voice: “. . . distinguished to attend to the spoken word,” though it remains unclear to me why Origen would not simply use the active voice if that is the intended meaning. For his own work, Hunter simply translates this infinitive this way with an active sense. See Marriage, Celibacy, and Heresy in Ancient Christianity, 185.

34 Graef, 35.

29 since she had lived faithfully to God in both positions?35 Origen does not elucidate here.

Second and more importantly, we must not miss the rhetorical nuance at play in what

Origen writes here, as he clearly remains unwilling to endorse the Protevangelium traditions unreservedly. Notably, he opens the excerpt above by saying “some people say they are the brothers of Jesus, sons of Joseph of a former wife who lived with him prior to Mary.” He explicitly upholds neither the apocryphal stories nor the beliefs of those who invoke the apocrypha. Rather, this introductory caveat intentionally and pointedly places rhetorical distance between those “some people” and the author himself. Given especially his abrupt conclusion in the passage above, Origen appears to be taking a middle ground that neither contradicts nor embraces the apocryphal traditions.36 Thus,

35 De Monogamia 8, PL 2:939.

36 This is one of the more problematic places in the current scholarship. In short, Origen’s views on Mary and the perpetual virginity have proved hard to pin down. An unfortunately small amount of Origen’s writing on Mary survives in the original Greek. Some of his other alleged writings concerning the gospels of John and Luke each present a somewhat stronger claim about the brothers of Jesus and would suggest that that he firmly believed in Mary’s permanent celibacy. The authenticity of Origen’s authorship for these works, however, remains in doubt. Fragment 31 on John’s gospel explicitly claims Jesus’s sibllings were from Joseph’s prior marriage, but there are serious questions about this and other fragments on John. See Ronald E. Heine, “Can the Catena Fragments of Origen’s Commentary on John Be Trusted?,” Vigiliae Christianae 40, no. 2 (1986): 118–34. Similarly, a Latin translation of his Lucan commentary survives, where we also find stronger and clearer statements in favor of the perpetual virginity post partum, but there is a question as to whether later Latin translators (e.g. Jerome) put this view into Origen’s mouth to make him more palatable to a contemporary audience. (See Jerome’s interesting translation of Origen’s Commentary on Luke, SC 87, 158.) In addition to previously cited Hunter, Marriage, Celibacy, and Heresy in Ancient Christianity, 185-6 and Graef, 35, see also Shoemaker, 66-68. For what it is worth, the overwhelming scholarly consensus is that Origen believed Mary remained a virgin post partum and that any brethren of Jesus were from Joseph’s prior marriage, more or less in accord with the Protevangelium of James. Given the difficult and ambiguous nature of his writings (e.g. the passage discussed above), however, I persuaded that a closer examination of Origen and the historiography is warranted. In short, it may be that Origen is in fact more compatible with Tertullian than originally supposed. Unfortunately, a full treatment of that question would take us too far afield.

30 while he certainly appears more open to the idea than Tertullian, no one should mistake

Origen for an unabashed supporter of the apocryphal theory.

Despite their ambiguity (or perhaps hostility and hesitation as the case may be)

Tertullian and Origen do show that the questions of Mary’s virginity, Jesus’s brothers, and the apocrypha were now appearing more frequently in the discussions of influential

Christian leaders and thinkers. Whereas in the earliest patristic authors, Mary most significantly served as a typological reflection of Eve, she now becomes contingent to matters of Christology and asceticism in more mainstream Christianity; what one believes about her and virginity might now touch upon other important doctrinal issues.

Indeed, early Christian ascetism was arguably becoming much more mainstream by this time, reflecting what Hunter calls a “moderate encratism.”37 Yet despite an increasing amount of interest in sexual asceticism and renunciation among pre-Nicene Christians—

Tertullian and Origen could both be plausibly labeled as moderately ascetic in their attitudes—no clear orthodox position existed by the mid-third century on Mary’s virginity. In point of fact, there remained serious doubt and caution (and also ignorance, one suspects) concerning the perpetual virginity traditions found in the Protevangelium of

James, with respect to Mary’s in partu and post partum virginity alike.

The Post-Nicene West: Hilary of Poitiers

The final author in this historical prologue is the Latin author and bishop, Hilary of Poitiers. Active about a century after Origen, but still a generation or two before the great Latin Doctors, Hilary (d. 367) lived through the beginning of the institutionalized,

37 Hunter, Marriage, Celibacy, and Heresy in Ancient Christianity, 106 n. 57.

31 post-Nicene Christianity—and its struggles. In his time, Hilary was a respected Scriptural exegete and a well-known defender of Nicene orthodoxy against Arianism.38 Like

Origen, he wrote a systematic treatment of Matthew’s gospel. This meant that he had to address the same loci difficiles in Matthew 1.25 and 13.55.

In expositing Matthew 1, Hilary (without quoting directly) comments upon verse

25, opting to address the separate problem of the siblings in Matthew 13 at the same time:

Verum homines pravissimi hinc praesumunt opinionis suae auctoritatem, quod plures Dominum nostrum fratres habuisse sit traditum. Qui sit Mariae filii fuissent, et non potius Ioseph ex priore coniugio suscepti; numquam in tempore passionis Ioanni apostolo transcripta esset in matrem, Domino ad utrumque dicente: Mulier, ecce filius tuus; et Ioanni: Ecce mater tua nisi quod ad desolatae solatium, charitatem filii in discipulo relinquebat.

In truth, exceedingly crooked people here presume the auctoritas of their own position, that it was handed down that our Lord had many brothers. How is it that there had been sons of Mary, and not rather that they were received by Joseph from a prior marriage? She would never have been handed over to the apostle John for his mother in the moment of suffering, with the Lord saying to each, “Woman, behold your son,” and to John, “Behold your mother,” except that he was leaving a son’s love with a disciple for the relief of the deserted woman.39

Hilary here cites a prooftext commonly used to prove the perpetual virginity, John 19, where Jesus appears to entrust the care of Mary to the apostle John. According to Hilary and other defenders of the perpetual virginity, the implication is that Mary had no other sons who would care for her after Jesus. He suggests that the brothers of Jesus must have

38 In a longer study, I might also have included Hilary’s Eastern contemporary and fellow Nicene Athanasius.

39 Hilary of Poitiers, Commentary on Matthew, (SC 254, 96). In his own translation and commentary, D. H. Williams posits that Hilary has a particular group in mind that was claiming Jesus had many brothers. Hilary of Poitiers. Commentary on Matthew, ed., trans., D. H. Williams, The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation, v. 125. (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2013), 45 n.

32 been children of Joseph from a previous marriage, an idea with roots in the

Protevangelium. Beyond this, Hilary simply slurs those pravissimi who would use

Matthew 1.25 to disprove the permanence of Mary’s celibacy.

Both rhetorically and logically, Hilary’s argument strikes a mild tone compared to what Jerome and others would later write. While Hilary does disparage critics of the perpetual virginity, his rejoinder seems minimalistic. If volume is any indication, he appears more interested by far in the portions of Matthew 1 devoted to the genealogy of

Jesus. Moreover, though Hilary does hold up John 19 as evidence for Mary’s celibacy, he provides no further reasoning or proofs beyond the assertion that any “brothers of Jesus” must be the children of Joseph by another marriage. In all, we could characterize his argument here as little more than a summary dismissal of his anonymous theological opponents. In a different work, the treatise De Trinitate, Hilary makes several oblique references to the Virgin Mary as he attempts to explain the Incarnation.40 Once again,

Hilary does not strike the reader as especially zealous for defending the perpetual virginity. Though he does insist upon Jesus’s virginal conception, only once does he make what may be a passing reference to the preservation of Mary’s virginity in partu.41

In all, Hilary of Poitiers clearly believed that Mary remained a virgin forever. Yet in none of the works examined above does Hilary appear overly concerned with proving this tradition. At most, he ever so briefly rebukes those who oppose this tradition and

40 In De Trinitate, Hilary appears primarily concerned with refuting the claims of Arianism.

41 See Hilary of Poitiers, De Trinitate, ed. P. Smulders, CCSL 62. (Turnhout: Brepols, 1979), 3.19. The meaning of a few of the key Latin words is somewhat ambiguous. For my part, I found that some of the available translations did not reflect this ambiguity and simply presumed that Hilary was discussing Mary’s virginity in partu, translating as such.

33 offers one (rather shallow) prooftext to support his position. He does not bother to take up the issue again, even when the Scriptural material seems to beg for a more thorough and robust explanation. Hilary’s attitude to this issue, particularly compared to assertions of

Mary’s permanent sexual integrity that would appear in the later fourth and early fifth centuries, is rather relaxed. Evidently, the fortification of this tradition did not occupy his highest theological and exegetical concerns.

On the other hand, Hilary still presents an important contrast with the earlier theological and exegetical writings of Tertullian and Origen. While perhaps not the most loquacious or persuasive defense, Hilary’s arguments contradict Tertullian’s exegetical presumptions and break with Origen’s ostensible ambivalence. Whereas Origen seems far more eager to hold an indistinct middle ground on the issue, Hilary now dismissively casts ad hominem darts and draws support from elsewhere in the Bible. We should not find this surprising given the important developments in the church and in Christian asceticism during the century between them. Despite these changes, Hilary also testifies to an important point of continuity between the third and mid-fourth centuries. Namely, in order to get around the Scriptural obstacle of Jesus’s alleged siblings, defenders of

Mary’s permanent integrity still appeal to the “step-brothers” tradition first found in the

Protevangelium. No other explanation is considered. Within several decades, however,

Jerome would radically alter the discussion of this issue.

Christianity’s first three centuries saw a relatively swift development in the discussion of Mary, not least concerning her virginity. In the New Testament, Mary plays an important though brief role in those parts of Jesus’s life that the gospel writers found 34 significant enough to include in their accounts. In the first century, it appears that no one knew or cared enough about Mary’s permanent sexual integrity for it to be included among the earliest Christian writings. In fact, the narratives of the New Testament seem to suggest that Mary did not always remain a virgin—most keenly in the various mentions of Christ’s siblings. By the later second century, we have evidence that the situation had begun to change in some Christian communities. The apocryphal

Protevangelium of James laid the foundation of the Marian perpetual virginity tradition, asserting and implying that Mary remained a virgin physically in giving birth to Jesus and that hers was not a true marriage to Joseph. Nevertheless, into the third century, this tradition was not yet established as the unquestioned position of Christian orthodoxy.

Two important (and relatively ascetic) figures from that period, Tertullian and Origen, prove through their writings that there was a spectrum of permissible views in this period concerning Mary: Some clearly advocated the positions of the Protevangelium, some thought Mary had a normal marriage that produced children, and some were somewhere in the middle. In the following century, as Christian asceticism came into its own, the tradition of perpetual virginity concomitantly grew into the favored position. Here Hilary of Poitiers marks an important point on the timeline. He does not show any of the doubts or hesitations of his third century predecessors. Instead, drawing upon the apocryphal traditions (without naming them), his language presumes that the perpetual virginity is the orthodox position; after all, only crooked men suggest otherwise. (One does wonder if he read much of Tertullian.) Enter now the Marian and ascetic controversies that erupted 35 in the late fourth century, when a new set of expectations and pressures once again shifted the theological landscape. 36

CHAPTER TWO: EPIPHANIUS AND JEROME

The apocryphal Protevangelium of James launched traditions concerning Mary and Jesus’s siblings that would loom large in Christian theology and Scriptural exegesis well into the late fourth century. Indeed, the Protevangelium traditions were still favored by the proponents of the perpetual virginity in Jerome’s day. As we shall see, Jerome’s own friend and ally in the Origenist controversy, Epiphanius of Salamis, confidently espoused the basic Mariological features of the Protevangelium.42 At the same time, by the last few decades of the 400s, the church still found itself hotly disputing some of the major philosophical and doctrinal assumptions closely related to the issue of Mary’s virginity. Two important controversies mark a turning point in Western asceticism and

Mariology: the so-called Helvidian and Jovinian controversies. The first, sparked by

Helvidius, revolved around the matter of Mary’s virginity post partum, while the second, spawned by Jovinian, partly concerned her virginity in partu. Chiefly, both called into question the superiority of sexual renunciation, and both drew fierce responses from

Jerome and other Christian elites who favored asceticism. In part, the outcome of these fights was the establishment of a new doctrinal consensus in favor of asceticism and its version of Mary. Indeed, one of the overarching themes in David Hunter’s work is that the doctrinal points of Christian asceticism and Mary’s virginity were never truly settled

42 For more information on the connection between Jerome and Epiphanius, I refer the reader to the in- depth treatment that appears in Clark’s monograph: Elizabeth A. Clark, The Origenist Controversy: The Cultural Construction of an Early Christian Debate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), esp. 98- 9.

37 issues for the church until well past the polemical battles involving Helvidius and

Jovinian, and that the result of those fights was the entrenchment of a new “orthodoxy.”43

These theological affrays would give Jerome—equally at home in nasty polemical exchanges as he was in the study of the Bible—a platform to enunciate his own nuanced views and defense of Mary’s perpetual virginity. In his own way reflective of the larger tensions and trends of late antiquity, Jerome would pose a point of continuity but also a simultaneous and rather remarkable break with prior centuries. For while he would largely endorse Mary’s perpetual virginity in accord with the apocrypha, he would simultaneously reject the apocryphal work-around for the problem of the Lord’s

“brethren,” substituting his own novel interpretations of the New Testament. So doing,

Jerome would break the well-published views of at least one of his major allies,

Epiphanius of Salamis, who had explicitly endorsed the apocryphal narratives.

Epiphanius of Salamis and the “Antidicomarianites”

Epiphanius of Salamis in Cyprus (sedit 367-403) has been described as the “most zealous” advocate of the apocryphla tradition of Christ’s brethren (i.e. the “step-brothers” theory) in the late fourth century.44 This bishop from Cyprus had a vibrant career that saw him famously embroiled alongside Jerome in the Origenist controversy, a theological and intellectual brawl that was contemporaneous (and partially connected at a few points) to the altercations over Mary and asceticism. Even if his scholarly skills were perhaps

43 In his own bit of humorous understatement, Lightfoot remarks that the question regarding the “brethren of the Lord” was “so warmly discussed towards the close of the fourth century.” Lightfoot, 88.

44 Lightfoot, 90.

38 inferior, Epiphanius’s tone and combative attitude matched Jerome’s own quite well.45

Ever the avid hunter of what he considered bad doctrine, Epiphanius’s best known work, the Panarion (“the medicine chest”), catalogued, analyzed, and otherwise debunked dozens of different heresies. Completed and circulated c. 375, the Panarion was no small undertaking. For us, his most important views appear in Panarion 78, where he discusses the so-called Antidicomarianites, literally “those who speak against Mary.” According to

Epiphanius, as one of their chief heretical tenets, these Antidicomarianites said that Mary did not always remain a virgin, but rather had marital relations with Joseph. The bulk of this heresiological entry in the Panarion comes in the form of a lengthy cut-and-paste epistle Epiphanius had formerly addressed to the Christian community in Arabia, where this Antidicomarianism was appearing. In combatting this doctrine, Epiphanius puts his own Mariology on full display.

No one will mistake Panarion 78 for a short text. In fact, Epiphanius wrote quite a lot more in this letter than Jerome did in his polemics against Helvidius and Jovinian.

(Indeed, the Panarion in its entirety is a veritable tome.) This, however, offers us an advantage since Epiphanius does more here than simply break out the well-worn bullet points of Marian apologetics. Instead, he develops a much fuller defense and elaboration of his Mariology. As such, before getting to the actual question of Mary’s virginity, he blasts both Antitrinitarians and Jews at some length.46 When he does finally arrive at the

45 For both modern and ancient assessments of Epiphanius and his personality, see Hunter, Marriage, Celibacy, and Heresy in Ancient Christianity, 147-8. See also Andrew Jacobs’s Introduction to his biography of Epiphanius. Andrew S. Jacobs, Epiphanius of Cyprus: A Cultural Biography of Late Antiquity (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2016).

46 This may suggest that Antitrinitarianism, Judaism, and suspect Mariology were all closely related in Epiphanius’s mind. 39 main topic, Epiphanius leaves no doubt as to his own beliefs on the subject of the perpetual virginity. In the crux of his letter against the Antidicomarianites, he writes:

Ἤκουσα γὰρ παρά τινος, ὥς τινες τολμῶσι περὶ ταύτης λέγειν, ὅτι μετὰ τὸ γεγεννηκέναι τὸν σωτῆρα συνήφθη ἀνδρί. καὶ οὐ θαυμάζω. ἄεὶ γὰρ ἡ ἄγνοια τῶν μὴ τὰ ἀκριβῆ ἐγνωκότων τῶν θείων γραφῶν μηδὲ ἱστορίαις προσεγγισάντων, ἀφ' ἑτέρων εἰς ἕτερα τρέπει, καὶ περισπᾷ τὸν ἀπ' ἰδίου νοὸς βουλόμενόν τι περὶ τῆς ἀληθείας ἰχνηλατεῖν. πρῶτον γὰρ ὅτε ἡ παρθένος παρεδίδοτο τῷ Ἰωσήφ, κλήρων εἰς τοῦτο ἀναγκασάντων αὐτὴν ἥκειν, οὐ παρεδόθη αὐτῷ εἰς συνάφειαν, εἰ δεῖ τὰ ἀληθῆ λέγειν, ἐπειδὴ χῆρος ἦν. ἀλλὰ διὰ τὸν νόμον μὲν ἀνὴρ κέκληται τῆς αὐτῆς· κατὰ δὲ τὴν ἀκολουθίαν ἐκ τῆς τῶν Ἰουδαίων παραδόσεως δείκνυται ὡς οὐχ ἕνεκεν τοῦ ζευχθῆναι αὐτῷ παρεδίδοτο αὐτῷ ἡ παρθένος, ἀλλ' ὅπως διαφυλαχθείη εἰς μαρτύριον τῶν ἐσομένων ὅτι οὐ νόθος ἡ τῆς ἐνσάρκου παρουσίας οἰκονομία ἐπεδήμησεν, ἀλλὰ μεμαρτυρημένη ἐν ἀληθείᾳ, ἐκτὸς μὲν σπέρματος ἀνδρός, ἐν πνεύματι δὲ ἁγίῳ οἰκονομηθεῖσα ἐν ἀληθείᾳ. πῶς γὰρ ἠδύνατο ὁ τοσοῦτος γέρων παρθένον ἕξειν γυναῖκα, ὢν ἀπὸ πρώτης γυναικὸς χῆρος τοσαῦτα ἔτη;47

For I heard from someone that some people are so bold to say about this one [Mary] that after the parturition of the Savior, she was united with a husband. I’m not even surprised. For the ignorance of those people, who have neither known the boundary lines of the divine writings nor looked into historical accounts, turns from one thing to the other, and it distracts the one who wants to track down something concerning the truth from his own mind. For in the first place, when the Virgin was given to Joseph, with the lots having forced her into this, she wasn’t given over to him for union—if it is necessary to speak the truth—since he was a widower. Yet because of the law, he has been called her “husband”: and in following with the Jews’ tradition, it is shown that the Virgin was not given over to him for marriage with him, but that she might be thoroughly guarded for the witness of future things, that no bastardized48 dispensation of the enfleshed Presence was present, but she witnessed to the truth, without the seed of a husband, and rather by the Holy Spirit, she was stewarded in truth. For how was this old man to have this Virgin, being bereft of his first wife for so many years?

47 PG 42:708.

48 Epiphanius’s choice of the word, νόθος, is a particularly loaded term, as it often denotes illegitimate offspring.

The Protevangelium of James and its apocryphal offshoots loom large here, as

Epiphanius is almost certainly alluding to these texts when he claims that the

Antidicomarianites have consulted neither the Bible nor the pertinent “historical accounts” (ἱστορίαις), a curiously opaque term. Even had Epiphanius not referenced these historical accounts, the content of his argument betrays the influence of the apocrypha.

The references to Joseph’s old age and first wife, the casting of lots that put Mary under

Joseph’s care, and the “tradition of the Jews” are all obvious allusions to the apocryphal narratives we find in the Protevangelium. A little further on, Epiphanius asserts that

Joseph in his previous marriage had four sons and two daughters.49 Therefore, the siblings of Jesus that appear in the New Testament are his step-siblings in reality, a fact which would leave Mary untainted.

As an additional argument against the Antidicomarianites, Epiphanius also appeals to the current practice of consecrated virginity: “For if even at present, male virgins strive to persevere, and to be pure, and to exercise self-control, how much more faithful was Joseph, and Mary herself?”50 In that same line of argument, in language reminiscent of Origen, Epiphanius calls Mary the “originator of virginity” (ἀρχηγόν τῆς

παρθενίας).51 The reasoning here stands as a testament to the importance of religious exempla in ancient Christianity, and it may reveal one of the underlying anxieties motivating the protection of Mary’s status as ever-virgin in the fourth century: If the

49 PG 42:709.

50 PG 42:711. Εἰ γὰρ καὶ νῦν εἰς ὄνομα αὐτοῦ παρθένοι διατελεῖν ἀγωνίζονται, καὶ ἁγνεύειν, καὶ ἐγκρατεύεσθαι· πῶς μᾶλλον οὐκ ἦν πιστότερος Ἰωσηφ, καὶ ἀυτὴ ἡ Μαρία . . .

51 PG 42:713.

Bible’s most famous figure associated with virginal status did not retain her virginity, then perhaps living celibately is not so important after all.

As it pertains to sexual renunciation as an institution in his present day, other fascinating and colorful kernels of Epiphanius’s thought appear in this letter, particularly in his use of Scripture. For instance, highlighting the traditions concerning James especially, Epiphanius posits that Joseph’s children were virgins and Nazirites, specially consecrated individuals like Samson and Samuel of the Old Testament.52 Citing the example of Moses, he follows this claim with another assertion: prophets and high priests abstain from marital sex “for a greater service”—an odd proposition, given the number of obvious counterexamples in the Old Testament.53 Toward the conclusion of his letter,

Epiphanius turns somewhat from arguing the specifics concerning Mary and her personal virginity, to defending his understanding of sexuality as a whole. This leads him to contend—against those whom he says are given over to lust—that sex and marriage are for procreation alone.54 Epiphanius then closes his letter with another appeal to his readers to maintain good Trinitarian theology.

One historian has taken this section on Mary in the Panarion as a reflection of

Epiphanius’s status as a veritable ecclesiastical celebrity, a bishop more than willing to

52 PG 42:721. What the significance of their alleged Nazirite status does for Epiphanius’s argument remains unclear. In Numbers 6, Yahweh does not list sexual renunciation as one of the explicit qualifications for the Nazirite vow. Judging also from the examples of Samson and Samuel, abstinence from sex does not appear to be a feature of their consecration. For example, in 1 Samuel 8, we are told that Samuel has sons.

53 PG 42:724-5. Consider Samuel or Hosea. Cf. Hosea 1, where Yahweh explicitly commands the prophet to take a promiscuous woman as his wife.

54 PG 42:733. 42 inject himself into theological controversies far beyond his episcopal seat in Cyprus.55

While occasionally quarrelsome and perhaps something of an ecclesiastical busy-body,

Epiphanius’s acclaimed position also suggests that his theology could not have been too far removed from the doctrinal mainstream in the Greek-speaking part of the empire. The ideas he submits in Panarion 78 orient us with respect to what many of his contemporaries believed about Mary’s virginity. First and most obviously, it reflects that the perpetual virginity post partum had moved from theological adiaphora to becoming a compulsory point of dogma; Origen’s hazy, laconic declarations have been dropped in favor of a full-throated, lengthy endorsement in the Panarion. Second, it shows that the central proof of this belief—and by extension the main apologetic understanding of

Jesus’s siblings—still ultimately had its roots in the apocryphal traditions that portrayed them as step-siblings. According to Epiphanius, not only Scripture but also (unspecified)

“historical accounts” proved this fact to be true. Finally, Panarion 78 illuminates

Epiphanius’s systematic theology to some degree, since the issue of Mary’s virginity does not appear divorced from other points of doctrinal or polemic concern, especially

Trinitarianism and Christology. For Epiphanius, these ideas connect to one another, however tenuous the links may appear. This is a recurring issue with the Mariology of this period, and one to which we shall return. Yet even more telling is his assertion of sex’s only-for-procreation purpose, an idea very much at home in the ascetic ethic of late antiquity, which he places alongside a wider treatment of Marian virginity. If nothing

55 Jacobs, 40-1. 43 else, this should give us some idea of how the values of the asceticism had become linked to Mary and her own celibacy.

Jerome and Helvidius

Epiphanius was not alone in his efforts to silence the heresy of those who challenged the perpetual virginity. Just several years after the publication of the

Panarion, his younger friend Jerome would throw himself into a dispute with a certain

Helvidius over the same basic issues. We know unfortunately little of this Helvidius.56

Almost all the historical information in our possession concerning him and his beliefs comes down to the present through the polemical pen of his fiercest critic, Jerome himself. It goes without saying that the nature and limitations of this biased evidence poses certain methodological challenges. Nonetheless, some scholars have done an admirable job of reconstructing Helvidius, and we have a fairly good idea of what he was arguing.57

Circa 383 in Rome, Helvidius explicitly challenged a few of the prevalent doctrinal and exegetical claims that were in the air concerning Mary and consecrated celibacy. By this point—and as Panarion 78 shows—Mary had become closely linked to consecrated celibacy as its chief exemplum: she herself was the first and most important consecrated virgin. In his broader critique of the elevation of ascetic sexual renunciation,

Helvidius directly disputed the claim that Mary remained a virgin for her whole life

56 For all references to Helvidius’s arguments, see Contra Helvidium, PL 23.

57 Probably the best secondary source on Helvidius is Hunter’s, “Helvidius, Jovinian, and the Virginity of Mary in Late Fourth-Century Rome,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 1, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 47–71.

44 following the birth of Jesus. In his argument, Mary had lived in a normal marital relationship with Joseph.

To support his contentions, Helvidius seems to have drawn upon several of the

Scriptural references already discussed that appear to cast doubt on the perpetual virginity on first reading, like Matthew 1.25, Matthew 13.55, and parallel passages.58 Apparently,

Helvidius also claimed that two older authorities, Tertullian and Victorinus of Pettau, endorsed his position—which as we have seen, was probably spot on in the case of

Tertullian.59 More generally, Helvidius seems to have been challenging the ongoing elevation and idealization of sexual renunciation in the Christian community, which was of course one of Jerome’s own projects. Helvidius’s theses were put to paper and circulated widely enough in Rome that Jerome was asked to write a rejoinder.

This Jerome did, and the resulting tract, Contra Helvidium, lacked none of his characteristic enthusiasm. Curious readers who approach the life and writings of St.

Jerome for the first time may be surprised by the acridity that colored much of his intellectual life. A consummate quarreler, well-trained in the rhetorical arts of antiquity,

Jerome was not above biting ad hominem attacks if it scored points in his many polemical contests. Toward that same end, he also seems guilty at times of disingenuous intellectual

58 Contra Helvidium 3 and 11.

59 Contra Helvidium 17. It is much more difficult to know whether Victorinus’s theology also aligned with Helvidius’s, since we have little of Victorinus’s material. Whereas Jerome nonchalantly dismissed Tertullian’s authority (which mightily suggests Jerome knew that Tertullian agreed with Helvidius), he did dispute Helvidius’s claim to Victorinus.

45 and theological posturing.60 Contra Helvidium reflects those same qualities, as Jerome indulges in an array of rhetorical maneuvers. Throughout he consistently heaps abuse upon Helvidius, ridiculing his diction and style, berating him as a blasphemer, and sometimes dodging his arguments.

Nonetheless, Jerome does makes several points of substance in his reply to

Helvidius that put his abilities as a biblical scholar to use. By far his most important argument, Jerome tackles the question of Jesus’s brethren head-on. On one hand, Contra

Helvidium agrees with prior defenders of the perpetual virginity: Mary did not have relations with Joseph after the birth of Jesus, and so she remained a virgin forever.

Therefore, the brothers and sisters mentioned in the Bible cannot be true blood relations.

In this, Jerome’s claims are unremarkable, in lockstep with the existing perpetual virginity tradition from the Protevangelium of James up through his friend Epiphanius.

But Jerome’s argument also contains a new turn, as he actually attacks the apocrypha that hitherto had lent credence to the perpetual virginity. In rebutting

Helvidius’s reading of Matthew 1.25 (“and he did not know her until. . .”), Jerome states:

60 Regarding the infamous and bitter Origenist controversy in which he played a leading role, Jerome was at best inconsistent in his excoriation of Origen’s writings—all the while vigorously hammering his contemporaries for Origenist heresy. As Elizbeth Clark observes in one anecdote, “Jerome’s nonchalance in suggesting that Paulinus read the Peri Archon at the very moment when tempers were aflame and friendships breached raises an unsettling doubt about the centrality of theology in Jerome’s attack on Origenism.” That is to say, despite his rhetoric, there was more at stake in Jerome’s disputes than the preservation of orthodoxy, which may tell us something about his personality and motivation. See Clark, 35. Though the modern reader might find this kind of rhetoric particularly unsavory in Christian intellectual figures like Jerome and Epiphanius, it bears remembering that it aligns fairly well with the expectations of classical argumentation and rhetoric—if perhaps less neatly with the ethos of the New Testament.

Nulla ibi obstetrix: nulla muliercularum sedulitas intercessit. Ipsa pannis involvit infantem, ipsa et mater et obstetrix fuit. Et collocavit eum, inquit, in praesepio, quia non erat ei locus in diversorio. Quae sententia et apocryphorum deliramenta convincit, dum Maria ipsa pannis involvit infantem; et Helvidii expleri non patitur voluptatem, dum in diversorio locus non fuit nuptiarum.61

There was no midwife there: No womanly officiousness intervened. [Mary] herself wrapped the infant in clothes. She herself was both mother and midwife. And she placed him, it says, in a manger, because there was no room for him in the inn. That sentence both refutes the apocryphorum deliramenta, since Mary herself wrapped the infant in clothes, and also it does not allow for Helvidius’s desire to be fulfilled, since there was no place in the inn for nuptials.

This, of course, is a veiled reference to the Protevangelium of James and the various apocryphal spin-offs it produced, as it recalls the episode of the midwife Salome, who manually put the virginity of Mary to the test. Here among other places, we may bemoan the loss of Helvidius’s original pamphlet, as it would have been helpful to know whether he had said anything regarding the apocrypha that prompted this response from Jerome. If

Helvidius had indeed brought up the apocryphal traditions, it presumably was to criticize them. Note also that Jerome’s line about there being no room in the inn for “nuptials” is part of a larger, rather grotesque reductio ad absurdum directed against Helvidius’s apparent interpretation of the word “until” in Matthew 1.25. Jerome mockingly suggests that if we take “until” in a strict literal sense, then we may as well go all the way and understand that Joseph and Mary had relations in the moments following Jesus’s birth.

More paramount, however, is the fact that Jerome himself apparently rejects the apocryphal accounts while still agreeing with their basic conclusion. That is to say, the

61 PL 23:191-2.

47 apocryphal stories had aimed to prove the permanence of Mary’s celibacy, or that was at least the main theological purpose to which they had been put in prior centuries.

Essentially, in calling the apocryphal narratives “nonsense” (deliramenta), Jerome was here rejecting the main support for the perpetual virginity, cutting the original legs out from under it. After all, the apocrypha had overcome the problem of Jesus’s siblings rather tactfully, suggesting that Joseph had begotten a number of children with a different woman before his faux-marriage to Mary. Recall that Epiphanius had himself appealed to these stories as “historical accounts” that proved the perpetual virginity.

Yet Jerome goes on to build an entirely new interpretation of Christ’s “brethren” that would preserve Mary’s virginity but also diverge radically from the standard apocryphal explanation. Taking Helvidius’s challenge directly, Jerome himself recalls a smattering of passages from the New Testament that reference siblings of Jesus, including Matthew 13.55, where the Nazarenes mention Jesus’s many brothers and sisters. The series of arguments that follows occupies the bulk of Contra Helvidium, and little of the direct text bears repeating here, as Jerome explains his larger contention in an extremely convoluted fashion. In short, Jerome attempts to surmount the mention of siblings by suggesting that the Bible frequently uses the word “brother” in a loose sense that does not always mean blood-sibling. Indeed, between the Old and New Testaments,

“brother” denotes a brother in a spiritual, ecclesiastical sense, or to signify a countryman, or even to refer to non-nuclear family relations.62 Suffice it to say that he directs much of

62 Technically, Jerome is not incorrect that Scripture, when taken as a unified whole, does frequently use the word “brother” in a broad sense. The chief problem with this approach, however, is that the Bible includes a wide variety of literary genres, languages, and individual authors with disparate vocabularies and 48 his focus to the named “brothers” of Jesus attempting to connect them to other, similarly named figures in the New Testament.63 To wit, the identity of the New Testament’s various “Jameses” receives special treatment in Contra Helvidium, as a certain James is repeatedly called Christ’s brother.

In a complex set of exegetical maneuvers, Jerome posits that this James was in fact Jesus’s cousin, not a blood-brother or step-brother. Reduced to bullet-point premises, his argument looks like this: A) There are only two Jameses in the New Testament:

Zebedee’s son and Mary Clophas’s son; B) James “the brother of the Lord” mentioned by

Paul in Galatians cannot be a third because Paul explicitly calls him an apostle, meaning he must be one of the two Jameses listed in Acts 1:13 and one of the original Twelve;64

C) “James of Alphaeus” and “James of Mary Clopas” must be the same person, because they clearly are not James son of Zebedee; D) Mary Clopas, one of the women present at

Christ’s death, must be the sister of Jesus’s mother Mary, making this James the cousin or “brother” of Jesus.65 This complicated reasoning allows Jerome to surmount the

styles. For instance, does the sense of “brother” as it appears in the Hebraic Pentateuch (which Jerome cites), correspond to the linguistics of Matthew or Paul writing in Greek during the first century? Given that the New Testament (and Greek generally) has distinct words for kinsmen, cousins, and siblings, the answer seems to be no. See Luke 14.12 for example: “And he was saying to the one who had invited him, ‘Whenever you make a feast or a dinner, don’t call your friends, nor your brothers (ἀδελφούς), nor your relatives (συγγενεῖς), nor your rich neighbors . . .” What is more, I suspect that a biblical scholar of Jerome’s caliber probably knew better.

63 While Contra Helvidium is not an especially long text, it took me several hours with an English translation to make out even the basic flow of the arguments.

64 But see what immediately follows in Act 1.14, which distinguishes the original disciples from Jesus’s brothers.

65 Interestingly, the claim that there were two sisters both named Mary—Mary of Clopas and the Virgin Mary—probably presumes Roman naming practices where it was standard to have two sisters with the same name. I am aware of no similar situations in the New Testament. The famous two sisters of Lazarus, 49 prooftexts of Helvidius: Jesus’s alleged brothers and sisters were family, but cousins, not siblings. Thus, contra Helvidius, Mary never had other children besides Jesus, and she always remained a virgin.

Jerome’s arguments here seem to have carried the day. That we know, Helvidius never offered a response to the polemic directed at him. However, while Helvidius himself may have left the historical stage after Jerome’s sharp rebuke, the main thrust of his argument—a critique of the reigning Mariology and ascetic theology of the late fourth century—remained firmly in the theological spotlight. The anti-ascetic critique found a new voice in the monk Jovinian. Much like Helvidius’s, Jovinian’s ideas did not go unnoticed by Jerome or his theological allies, and his thesis drew a no less fiery response.

Indeed, between Helvidius and Jovinian, the latter caused far more commotion in ecclesiastical circles, so much so that Augustine would reference Jovinian in his own disputes with the Pelagians decades later.66 Like Helvidius, Jovinian would ultimately lose this fight, being officially condemned by a Roman synod in 393, around the same time Jerome was formulating his own response.

Though certainly parallel to Helvidius in his denunciation of virginity qua elevated institution, Jovinian seems not to have raised the matter of the perpetual virginity post partum itself, which had served as one of Helvidius’s main contentions. In fact, the issue of Mary and her significance to the ascetic movement appears to have been

Mary and Martha, are obviously given distinct appellations. For another scholar’s more detailed attempt to lay out Jerome’s argument, see Lightfoot, 91-4.

66 Contra Iulianum 1.2.4.

50 more of a sidebar to Jovinian’s thought. (As discussed in the Introduction, David Hunter has treated Jovinian, his opponents, and his context at great length in his excellent monograph Marriage, Celibacy, and Heresy in Early Christianity, the full findings of which we need not review in detail here.) Nonetheless, Jovinian likely did oppose

Ambrose’s own pointedly enthusiastic endorsement of Mary’s virginity in partu, a view which itself was increasingly becoming entrenched as orthodox alongside her virginity post partum. For Jovinian, then, the issue at stake was not whether Mary had relations and offspring with Joseph, but whether Mary’s body had retained the features one would expect of a virgin despite giving birth. To suggest (as the Protevangelium of James had) that Mary’s body was miraculously unchanged by the act of giving birth apparently struck Jovinian as docetic and ultimately Manichaean, since such a belief raises a cloud of doubt as to Jesus’s full corporality. Unfortunately, we do not know what Jovinian thought about Jesus’s siblings or Mary’s virginity after the point of Jesus’s birth. As it was not a primary feature of Jovinian’s thought, Jerome does not attack his Mariology as such.

The Hieronymian Rupture

A comparison of Epiphanius, Jerome, and their respective treatments of the perpetual virginity brings us to a fascinating conclusion. Namely, Jerome was upholding the conclusion of the perpetual virginity tradition while simultaneously throwing out that same tradition’s best and (and hitherto) only defense against the critique to which was most vulnerable. Going back to the second century apocrypha that had first posited the perpetual virginity, the apologetic strategy—if one knew and followed that tradition—to 51 explain Jesus’s apparent siblings had always been to understand them as step-siblings from Joseph’s first marriage.

Indeed, this was still the commonplace defense up until just a few years before

Jerome wrote against Helvidius. Moreover, those who appealed to this defense cannot be dismissed as lesser-known Christian intellectuals whose opinion Jerome did not know or simply ignored. Rather, one of the most vociferous and fully developed deployments of the “step-siblings” defense came from Jerome’s own friend and ally Epiphanius. This bishop of Salamis, a well-known ascetic figure and heresy-hunter, directly appealed to

“historical accounts”—the apocrypha—to support his construal of Jesus’s family. In other words, Epiphanius extensively employed the same apocryphal stories that Jerome would later disdain as deliramenta.

In place of the “step-siblings” or “Epiphanian” defense, Jerome constructed an entirely new interpretation of the New Testament passages in question. In his mind, one must not read these as Mary’s other children, but neither were they Joseph’s from a previous marriage. Rather, the “brothers and sisters” were actually cousins on Mary’s side of the family. This novel apologetic depended on a couple points of reasoning. The first was an essentially philological maneuver that took “brother” in a broad, non-literal sense as it sometimes appears in other parts of the Bible. Based on that assumption,

Jerome endeavored to show, especially through the case study of “James, the brother of the Lord,” that such a hermeneutic could actually make sense of the information the New

Testament provided about various individuals in Christ’s inner circle. 52

In effect, Jerome was scrapping two centuries worth of exegesis and tradition. For an issue that many in the fourth century obviously considered of paramount importance,

Jerome displayed his characteristic boldness. To be sure, he maintained the same ultimate conclusion that Mary remained sexually intacta, but he had invented an entirely new reasoning to preserve that conclusion. This rupture between the Epiphanian and

Hieronymian interpretations of Jesus’s brothers and sisters is not a new insight for scholars of early Christianity, though it may be a largely overlooked or indeed forgotten one. The observation of this shift in Marian apologetics produced by Jerome appears in modern scholarship as early as 1870, in Lightfoot’s excursus on the perpetual virginity within his larger commentary on Galatians. Yet for all its apparent significance to the history of Marian doctrine, no recent scholars have bothered to reflect upon this important moment in any meaningful way.67

The relative lack of attention paid to the development of the Hieronymian thesis in existing scholarship leaves us with a set of interesting problems. Why did Jerome develop this theory in the first place given that the perpetual virginity had such a well- established, traditional explanation already—one that at least one of his closest friends very publicly espoused? When his close contemporaries discuss Mary’s virginity, do they show any signs of discomfort with this new theory since it so obviously breaks with tradition? Who adopted his theory and why? Given its unusual, one might say

67 I should qualify this to “no scholars I have read.” There may could be some more thorough acknowledgement of this in some non-English sources that have not appeared in the bibliographies I have encountered, though I remain skeptical. Graef, does mention the novelty of the Hieronymian thesis, but gives it only the barest consideration (about half a page), noting that it dominated in the West while the Epiphanian interpretation continued to reign in the East. Graef, 70-1. 53 antitraditional origins, how did this theory become the dominant interpretation of “the

Lord’s brethren” in the West while failing in the East? And finally, what might all of this say about ancient Christianity more broadly? With these issues in mind, we now turn to

Jerome’s contemporaries for elucidation. 54

CHAPTER THREE: JEROME’S MOTIVES AND THE CONTEMPORARY WESTERN REACTION

To this point, we have simply retraced the principal contours in the development of the perpetual virginity tradition, from its initial appearance in the apocryphal

Protevangelium of James up through the late fourth century in the writings of Epiphanius and Jerome. Prior to Jerome, defenders of the tradition accepted the apocryphal narrative as it was, including its construal of Joseph and the “brothers of the Lord.” Jerome, however, swam against this current of thought to reach the same basic conclusion about

Mary. This of course poses some important questions. First of all, why would Jerome go to such lengths with (seemingly) so little to gain doctrinally, all the while breaking himself off from the dominant tradition and potentially alienating himself from friends like Epiphanius? Secondly, what does the historical record say about the immediate reaction of his Latin contemporaries to this new idea? Did they share Jerome’s concerns?

This chapter takes up these questions, which so far have received little attention from historians of early Christianity.68

68 Lightfoot gives these issues some analysis, and in this chapter, I am particularly indebted to his discussion of Ambrose and Augustine. I have here expanded upon some of his initial findings, bringing in several new authors and texts to the discussion. Further, I have devoted much more attention to establishing Jerome’s mindset and the particular problem the apocrypha posed for some of the fathers. On the whole, however, I find that Lightfoot’s basic analysis does bear out in the sources. In his own words, the effect Contra Helvidium had on the contemporary discussion of Mary “is visible at once” after its publication in 383. Lightfoot, 124.

Contra Deliramenta Apocryphorum? The Exigency of Jerome’s Exegesis

Curiously, though his tract against Helvidius laid out an otherwise detailed and complex (and indeed somewhat bewildering) exegetical approach to the “brethren of the

Lord” problem, Jerome seems not to have acknowledged that he was breaking with the well-established tradition. Similarly, he did not explicitly say why he had developed this new interpretation. Fortunately, a few of his remarks leave us with enough information to reconstruct his motives.

Perhaps one partial—if unsatisfying—explanation for Jerome’s novel exegesis lies in his idiosyncrasies as an intellectual. As previously discussed, Jerome had a colorful personality, one that did not shy away from blasting invective against enemies and even former friends, like Rufinus; he did not hesitate to pick fights. In addition to being one of its most vociferous polemicists, Jerome was probably also the foremost biblical scholar of his era, as his production of the Vulgate attests, let alone his many commentaries. Cast in this light, his bold break with the mainstream seems somewhat less surprising. Whereas some of the other, more diplomatic Christian intellectuals of late antiquity might have declined to posit such a novel exegesis that so obviously contradicted established traditions, the Monk of Bethlehem did not. (Though interestingly, his later works of exegesis that address the perpetual virginity could be read as purposefully toning down some of the initial brashness expressed in Contra

Helvidium.)

Personality aside, Jerome’s intrepid refashioning of Jesus’s “brethren” as cousins also allowed him to recast Joseph as a Biblical figure more in-line with the growing 56 ascetic ideology in Christian circles. In Contra Helvidium, rebutting Helvidius’s apparent appeal to the example of the married saints of the Old Testament, Jerome insists that

Joseph himself remained a virgin:

Possumus enim hac aestimatione possibilitatis contendere, plures quoque uxores habuisse Ioseph, quia plures habuerit Abraham, plures habuerit Iacob; et de his esse uxoribus fratres domini, quod plerique non tam pia quam audaci temeritate confingunt. Tu dicis Mariam uirginem non permansisse: ego mihi plus uindico, etiam ipsum Ioseph uirginem fuisse per mariam, ut ex uirginali coniugio uirgo filius nasceretur.69

For we are able to contend with this guess, which is just a possibility: that Joseph too had many wives, because Abraham had many and Jacob had many. And from these wives come the “brothers” of the Lord, which very many dream with a not so much pious as reckless indiscretion. You say that Mary did not remain a virgin. I lay claim to even more, that Joseph himself was a virgin through70 Mary, so that a virgin son would be born from a virginal union.

Accusing those who dream up such nonsense of recklessness rather than piety, Jerome dismisses the apocryphal stories that depicted Jesus’s “brethren” as children of Joseph from a prior marriage.71 Instead, he doubles-down on his ascetic values. For now Joseph himself can be understood as a lifelong virgin. (Recall that the Protevangelium portrays

Joseph as an octogenarian with six children by the time he takes Mary into his home: not exactly the virginal ideal espoused by Jerome.) If, however, “brethren” means cousins, then Joseph himself can be understood as a lifelong celibate alongside Mary. This is fitting, says Jerome, because it would make the entire Holy Family virginal, better

69 PL 23:203.

70 Per Mariam is somewhat ambiguous. Note also the delightfully oxymoronic phrase ex uirginali coniugio.

71 Again, this is a significant charge given that some of his friends held to this view rather strongly.

57 aligning with the ideals of the ascetic movement. Thus, Jerome’s new exegesis makes for tidier, more interlocking doctrine.

Yet the most important motive for Jerome’s new exegesis begins to appear when comparing Contra Helvidium to some of his other writings. As it happens, his sneering reference to the deliramenta apocryphorum in that tract represents more than a simple off-hand remark. Rather, those words express a consistent idea constantly re-appearing in

Jerome’s writing: an intense and persistently-voiced dislike of the non-canonical sources he deemed “apocryphal.”

Dating back quite early in the history of Christianity, the concept of “apocrypha” has had a colorful and checkered career. Indeed, the question of what constitutes the

“apocrypha” continues to be a point of some debate among scholars even today.72

Without delving into the subtle nuances of this ongoing discussion, for our purposes, what matters most here is how Jerome and his immediate contemporaries would have defined and understood the apocryphal writings. Approximately, Jerome uses the term

“apocrypha” to refer to texts he considers outside the accepted biblical canon.73 In his view, such writings have suspect authority and historicity (and in some cases, theology) yet their subject material closely mimics the topics, narratives, and persons of both the

Old and New Testament. Thus, many of the apocrypha purport to tell stories about or

72 See especially Annette Yoshiko Reed, “The Afterlives of New Testament Apocrypha,” Journal of Biblical Literature 134, no. 2 (2015): 401–25. For another useful volume, cf. Lee Martin McDonald and James H. Charlesworth, eds., “Non-Canonical” Religious Texts in Early Judaism and Early Christianity, Jewish and Christian Texts in Contexts and Related Studies Series 14 (London: T & T Clark, 2012).

73 Of course, this immediately raises the question of just what exactly constitutes the “canon,” as different Christian communities and traditions had drawn the precise boundaries differently.

58 even to be written by figures discussed in the canonical scriptures (e.g. Jesus, Mary, and

Joseph in the Protevangelium allegedly written by one of the apostles named James). In

Book 15 of the City of God, Augustine discusses the problem which such writings posed:

Omittamus igitur earum scripturarum fabulas, quae apocryphae nuncupantur, eo quod earum occulta origo non claruit patribus, a quibus usque ad nos auctoritas ueracium scripturarum certissima et notissima successione peruenit. In his autem apocryphis etsi inuenitur aliqua ueritas, tamen propter multa falsa nulla est canonica auctoritas. . . . Unde illa, quae sub eius nomine proferuntur et continent istas de gigantibus fabulas, quod non habuerint homines patres, recte a prudentibus iudicantur non ipsius esse credenda; sicut multa sub nominibus et aliorum prophetarum et recentiora sub nominibus apostolorum ab haereticis proferuntur, quae omnia nomine apocryphorum ab auctoritate canonica diligenti examinatione remota sunt.74

Therefore, let us leave out the fables of those writings, which are named “apocrypha,” because their secret origin was not clear to the fathers, from whom the authority of the real Scriptures has come through right down to us in a very certain and well-known succession. But even if some truth is found among these “apocrypha,” still there is so much falsehood, it is not canonical authority. . . . From there come those [writings] that are put forward under [Enoch’s] name and contain those fables about giants, because they did not have human fathers, it is rightly judged by the prudent that these are not to be believed to be from that same man [Enoch]. In the same way, many writings are put forward by heretics both under the names of other prophets, and more recently under the names of the apostles, which all go by the name “apocrypha,” separated from canonical authority by a thorough examination.

Despite the apparent clarity with which Augustine approaches this issue, there appears to have been no uniform consensus in the first few centuries of Christianity as to what exactly to make of the various texts that manifestly lacked the credentials of the better

74 PL 41:470-1. In his other works disputing Manichaeism, Augustine repeats the same basic critique. Cf. Contra Faustum, wherein he challenges the reliability of the apocryphal narratives that purport to give additional information about Mary’s background (i.e. the Protevangelium traditions). If Faustus wants to find authoritative evidence, says Augustine, he must go to the universally received Scriptures. Any other texts “have no weight of authority pertaining to these matters.” PL 42:471.

59 established canonical sources. Some of these non-canonical sources clearly achieved varying degrees of acceptance in different Christian communities. So even if, for example, the Protevangelium did not have the historical pedigree and wide-spread acceptance of Luke’s Gospel, some in the wider Christian community were still inclined to read and accept the apocryphal content, which, as we previously noted, Origen observed in the early third century.

Nonetheless, other Christians of the patristic age viewed such texts with strong suspicion and distrust.75 Jerome himself once claimed that so many were distrustful of apocryphal writings that some were commonly rejecting an established canonical source of the New Testament, Jude, because it seemed to quote the apocryphal book of Enoch

(to which Augustine refers above): “Jude, brother of James, left a small letter which is from among the seven catholic letters, and since it takes evidence from the book of Enoch

(which is apocryphal), this letter is rejected by very many [a plerisque]. Yet it has now earned authority by virtue of its antiquity and by its use, and it is counted among the

Scriptures.”76 If Jerome is not hyperbolizing, then this comment is doubly helpful, as it suggests both the criteria used by the early church to mark out its canonical sources from

75 Besides Jerome and Augustine, other notable fathers known to have strongly repudiated the use of apocryphal writings include Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Athanasius.

76 Iudas, frater Iacobi, paruam quae de septem catholicis est epistulam reliquit, et quia de libro Enoch, qui apocryphus est, in ea adsumit testimonium, a plerisque reicitur; tamen auctoritatem uetustate iam et usu meruit, et inter sanctas scripturas conputatur. De Viris Illustribus, PL 23:639. Coincidentally, this is the same James and Judah that are called Jesus’s brothers.

60 the non-canonical (i.e. antiquity and widespread use), and more importantly, it marks the zeal that motivated not a few to keep apocryphal texts and their ideas out of doctrine.77

If indeed there was a widespread skepticism regarding the apocrypha in the patristic age, then Jerome himself was a skeptic second to none.78 Indeed, the contemptuous phrase used in Contra Helvidium, deliramenta apocryphorum, shows up repeatedly in his writings. Distinguishing the canonical Old Testament book of Isaiah from apocryphal works like the Ascension of Isaiah, Jerome writes:

Paraphrasim huius testimonii, quasi hebraeus ex hebraeis, assumit apostolus Paulus de authenticis libris in epistola quam scribit ad Corinthios, non uerbum ex uerbo reddens, quod facere omnino contemnit, sed sensuum exprimens ueritatem, quibus utitur ad id quod uoluerit roborandum. Unde apocryphorum deliramenta conticeant, quae ex occasione huius testimonii ingeruntur ecclesiis Christi. De quibus uere dici potest, quod sedeat diabolus in insidiis cum diuitibus in apocryphis, ut interficiat innocentem. Et iterum: insidiatur in apocrypho quasi leo in spelunca sua; insidiatur, ut rapiat pauperem. ascensio enim Esaiae et apocalypsis Eliae hoc habent testimonium. 79

77 Cf. Augustine’s similar sentiments in the City of God. Additionally, the sixth century text of the so- called Gelasian Decretal famously draws hard lines between the canonical and rejected texts. The list probably includes the Protevangelium of James itself under the name Evangelium nominee Jacabi Minoris. Interestingly, it also rejects a text labeled Liber de Nativitate Salvatoris et de Maria et obstetrice, which sounds as if it could be a related apocryphon. Though from a later period, the Gelasian Decretal still serves as useful hint as to how the late antique Latin church classified canon and apocrypha. PL 59:162.

78 Indeed, a quick word search through Brepols digitalized Latin library, suggests that in the West, only two of the patristic sources analyzed in this chapter used the term “apocrypha”: Jerome and Augustine. Between these two, Jerome used the word far more often.

79 Commentarii in Isaiam. PL 24:646.

In a letter he wrote to the Corinthians, the Apostle Paul used a paraphrase of this testimony, as a Hebrew from among the Hebrews, as it [the Book of Isaiah] was from among the authentic books, not rendering it word-for- word, which he completely disliked doing, but expressing the true sense, which he uses to strengthen that which he wanted to strengthen. So let the delusions of the apocrypha be silent, which are inflicted upon Christ’s churches through the opportunity provided by this testimony. Concerning these matters, it is truly able to be said that, in the apocrypha, the devil awaits with riches in snares, so that he may destroy the innocent. And again: He lies waiting in apocrypho80 like a lion in his own cave; he lies waiting so that he might seize a poor man. For the Ascension of Isaiah and the Apocalypse of Elijah have this testimony.

In a different commentary on the book of Ezekiel, but in much the same spirit, Jerome derides the claims—he probably has the Manichees chiefly in mind—that Christ left behind secret writings: “So too, the Savior left no special book of his own teaching, which the delusions of the apocrypha most commonly feign, but daily he speaks in the hearts of believers by the Spirit of his Father and himself.”81 Then again in the preface to his commentary on Matthew, he repeats the same sentiment: “By all this, it is manifestly shown that only four gospels should be received, and that all the apocrypha sing the funeral dirges of dead heretics rather than the living in the church.”82 Later in that same text, alluding to the arguments he had previously made against Helvidius, he expresses

80 Note the wordplay with in apocrypho, as it denotes both the category of the texts Jerome has in mind but also reflects the manner in which the devil awaits his victims: “in secret,” “hidden.” Compare Jerome’s language to Psalm 10.8-9.

81 Commentarii in Ezechielem. Unde et saluator nullum uolumen doctrinae suae proprium dereliquit, quod in plerisque apocryphorum deliramenta confingunt, sed patris et suo spiritu cotidie loquitur in corde credentium. Commentarii in Ezechielem. PL 25:443.

82 Commentarii in Euangelium Matthaei. Quibus cunctis perspicue ostenditur quattuor tantum debere euangelia suscipi et omnes apocriphorum nenias mortuis magis hereticis quam ecclesiasticis uiuis canendas. PL 26:20.

62 further contempt for the apocryphal traditions concerning Mary and the “brothers of the

Lord”:

Quidam fratres Domini de alia uxore Ioseph filios suspicantur sequentes deliramenta apocryphorum et quandam Escham mulierculam confingentes. Nos autem, sicut in libro quem contra Heluidium scripsimus continetur, fratres domini non filios Ioseph sed consobrinos saluatoris Mariae liberos intellegimus materterae domini, quae esse dicatur mater Iacobi Minoris et Iosetis et Iudae quos in alio euangelii loco fratres Domini legimus appellatos.83

Certain “brothers of the Lord” are suspected to be sons of Joseph from another wife, following the delusions of the apocrypha and dreaming up some little woman “Escha.” But we, just as is contained within the book we wrote against Helvidius, understand the “brothers of the Lord” not as sons of Joseph but as cousins of the Savior, children of the Lord’s maternal aunt Mary, who is said to be the mother of James the Lesser and Joseth and Judah, whom we read are called “brothers of the Lord” in a different passage of the Gospel.

The particular apocryphal delusions Jerome highlights here ultimately go back to the

Protevangelium. While he left more than a few other remarks of the same nature as those quoted above, they all reflect the same underlying concern: a fervent distaste for the non-canonical writings and their apparent deliramenta. This explicitly included but was not limited to the Protevangelium traditions.

Does Jerome’s vigorous rejection of the apocrypha explain the novel interpretation he introduced in Contra Helvidium? Arguably, it does. While some of his contemporaries—and even some of his friends—might have looked to the apocryphal traditions in order to ward off any possible concerns posed by the Bible with Mary’s permanent abstinence, Jerome was not content with an explanation that was grounded on a shaky foundation. No, Mary’s virginity—and by extension, the Christian practice of

83 PL 26:84-5. 63 sexual renunciation—was simply too important by far. If Jerome and Augustine are at all as representative as they themselves suggest of a broader (Western?) Christian consensus largely suspicious or even hostile to the apocrypha, it provides a perfectly reasonable rational for the retooling of the perpetual virginity. Léonie Hayne has argued for a very similar phenomenon in the same period regarding the cult and remembrance of Thecla, where the patristic figures wrestled with the authenticity of her story. Comparing the matter to Marian perpetual virginity in fact, Hayne concludes: “The church fathers of the fourth century were not averse to accepting popular ideology while retaining grave doubts about the apocryphal base (the perpetual virginity of Mary is an obvious example). It took until the twentieth century for the western church to decide Thecla really needed better accreditation.”84 Of course, when it comes to the “obvious” example of the perpetual virginity, Hayne mainly has Jerome in mind.

Jerome, then, had rational motives for wanting to replace the traditional understanding of the “brethren of the Lord” with a more doctrinally-sound interpretation of Scripture. As we have seen, he first proposed his new interpretation of the “brethren of the Lord” fairly early in his career, around the year 383. Examining how his Latin contemporaries—we will come to the reaction in the Greek-speaking world—were writing about the perpetual virginity in the ensuing years gives us some idea of the initial reception his new ideas received, including how widely they spread. A cursory overview of these sources suggests that Jerome’s novel exegesis generated some angst and

84 Léonie Hayne, “Thecla and the Church Fathers,” Vigiliae Christianae 48, no. 3 (1994): 215. While Hayne may have thought the perpetual virginity was an “obvious” parallel example, I have found no concentrated discussions elsewhere in the scholarship that have taken up the issue as I have done here. 64 reluctance among his contemporaries who found themselves in an awkward place, stuck between two centuries of apocryphal tradition and the respected, volatile Jerome. Some of these figures like Ambrose and Augustine stand alongside Jerome among the best- known church fathers. Others like Chromatius and Rufinus were important in their day but their names are now not as immediately recognizable to non-specialists. While these authors may not have produced an overwhelming amount of commentary on Mary and her perpetual virginity, they left enough to give some idea as to how Jerome altered discourse on the perpetual virginity in the Latin church.

Ambrosiaster

The anonymous author now labeled “Ambrosiaster” (“would-be Ambrose”) has become an important source for historians of fourth century Christianity. Scholars like

Peter Brown and David Hunter have portrayed him as an ideological and professional rival of Jerome who would have more closely aligned with Helvidius and Jovinian in his view of asceticism, but otherwise our information concerning him is limited.85 There is reasonable evidence that Ambrosiaster was actively writing in the 380s and 390s—he may have been working in Rome during Jerome’s own time in the old imperial capital, about 382-384—but the exact dating of his commentaries remains conjecture. In any case, like Jerome, Ambrosiaster discusses James the “brother of the Lord” when he comes to Galatians 1.19 in his extensive commentary on the Pauline epistles. There, as most commentators of this era are wont, he defends the perpetual virginity tradition:

85 Brown, 377-8. Hunter, Marriage, Celibacy, and Heresy in Early Christianity, 161.

Iacobum vidit Hierosolyma, quia illic erat constitutus ab apostolis episcopus, qui et ipse prius fuerat incredulus, sicut dicit evangelista: quia nec fratres eius, inquit, adhuc credebant in eum. hic Iacobus filius fuit Iosef, qui ideo frater domini appellatus est, quia et Iosef pater eius etiam domini pater nuncupatus est. sic enim dicit Maria ad Iesum in Lucae evangelio: quid fecisti nobis, fili? etenim et ego et pater tuus maesti et tristes quaerebamus te. et in evangelio Iohannis dicit Filippus ad Nathanahel: quem scripsit Moyses in lege et profetae invenimus Iesum a Nazareth, filium Iosef. hoc ergo modo dictus est dominus frater Iacobi et ceterorum, quo et filius nuncupabatur Iosef. quidam enim ducti insania hos veros domini fratres de Maria natos inpia adsertione contendunt, cum Iosef non verum patrem eius dicant appellatum. si enim hi veri erunt fratres eius, Iosef erit verus pater, quia qui dixit patrem eius Iosef, idem dixit et fratres eius Iacobum et ceteros.86

Jerusalem saw James, because he was established there by the apostles as a bishop, he who himself had formerly been incredulous, just as the Evangelist says, because neither were his brothers believing in him up to that point. This James was the son of Joseph, he is therefore called the “brother of the Lord” because Joseph his father was also called the “father of the Lord.” For as Mary so says to Jesus in Luke’s Gospel: “Why have you done this to us, son? For both I and your father were gloomy and distraught looking for you!” And in John’s Gospel, Philip says to Nathaniel, “We have found the one whom Moses wrote about in the Law and the Prophets, Jesus from Nazareth, Joseph’s son.” For some led by insanity contend with an impious assertion that these true brothers of the Lord were born of Mary, although they say that Joseph was not truly his father despite the appellation. For if these truly were his brothers, Joseph will be his true father, because he who called Joseph his father, in the same way he also called James and others his brothers.

Ambrosiaster’s apologetic largely marches to the apocryphal beat, though he does not explicitly invoke those writings. Like many of the early defenses of Mary’s perpetual virginity, this one exhibits some strained logic, mainly in the last phrase that links

Joseph’s reputed status as Jesus’s father to the relationship between Jesus and his reputed

86 Commentaria in Epistulam ad Galatas, PL 17:344. 66 brothers.87 In any case, Jerome’s ideas are totally absent here. Whether that is because

Ambrosiaster wrote prior to Contra Helvidium or because he found Jerome’s reasoning insufficient, one cannot say for certain.88

The Vacillation of Ambrose

When it comes to Mariology, probably the single most important source to compare to Jerome is the real Ambrose of Milan, a contemporary Latin author who was both familiar with Jerome himself and broadly amenable to his theology. Like Jerome,

Ambrose voiced sharp criticism of Jovinian in order to protect the superior prestige of consecrated virginity and abstinence. Indeed, some of our most important texts on virginity qua ecclesiastical institution in this period come from Ambrose.

It must first be noted that Ambrose was of a different mind regarding the apocrypha than Jerome and Augustine. In 377, well before Jerome wrote Contra

Helvidium, Ambrose produced De Virginibus, a treatise designed to extol the virtues of virginity and inspire his audience to look more favorably on that calling. In it, he makes an interesting remark:

Sed considerate cuius illa speciem tunc gerebat. Nonne ecclesiae, quae religiosos populi coetus, qui carmina diuina concinerent, immaculato uirgo spiritu copulauit? Nam etiam templo Hierosolymis fuisse legimus uirgines deputatas. Sed quid

87 Ambrosiaster’s argument here is actually most similar to Hilary Poitiers. Perhaps it should be no surprise that Augustine thought that Ambrosiaster’s works were in fact authored by Hilary. It seems plausible that Hilary was an important author for shaping Ambrosiaster’s own thought. Hunter, 159.

88 Based on the apparent influence and broad readership of Jerome’s ideas among those Latin authors we know wrote after Contra Helvidium, I would conjecture that this excerpt from Ambrosiaster predates 383. Even—or maybe especially—as a rival who differed with Jerome on a number of issues, it would have been difficult not to account for Jerome’s new exegesis at the very least.

67 apostolus dicit? Haec autem in figura contingebant illis, ut essent indicia futurorum.89

But think about whose image [Moses’s sister Miriam] was bearing at that time. Isn’t it the church’s? A virgin who united with the religious assemblies of the people, who were singing divine songs, with an immaculate spirit? For we read that in the Temple in Jerusalem there were specially designated virgins. But what does the apostle say? “These things, however, were compromised in a figure for them, so that there would markers of future things.”

Here in this short excerpt, Ambrose has smuggled in a small allusion to the apocrypha and its Marian traditions. A thorough reading of the canonical Scriptures would have given neither him nor his audience any indication whatsoever that the Jerusalem Temple had a group of consecrated virgins attached to it.90

Rather, this idea came directly from the Protevangelium tradition, which claimed that Mary had been a consecrated virgin living in the Temple before she reached puberty

(which, virginity aside, is very much in the mold of the prophet Samuel). The oblique nature of Ambrose’s reference is especially conspicuous in hindsight, as he does say not what text or author he is using, nor does he provide any other details that might orient the reader to his source. Arguably, this reflects a certain embarrassment consonant with the

89 PL 16:192. Notice the sexually-suggestive terms, coetus and copulavit, which Ambrose employs here in a non-sexual context. Note also Miriam’s name in Latin is the same as Mary’s: Maria.

90 Megan Nutzman has valiantly endeavored to show—contra the prevailing scholarly attitude to the Protevangelium—that certain categories of women would have had more access to the Temple cult during the Second Temple period than previously imagined by most scholars. Megan Nutzman, “Mary in the Protevangelium of James: A Jewish Woman in the Temple?,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 53, no. 3 (July 16, 2013): 551–78. But even if Nutzman is correct that women had more access to the Temple in Jerusalem than previously imagined, the main concept posited by the Protevangelium of institutional cult virginity still seems a remarkably far-fetched anachronism. In point of fact, such an idea is arguably far more at home in paganism than in Judaism. Indeed, in De Virginibus, Ambrose is at pains to distinguish institutional Christian virginity from other forms of virginity with which his audience would have had greater familiarity, like Rome’s Vestals.

68 broader current of distrust running against the apocryphal writings that we find in Jerome and Augustine. Still, this brief reference does confirm that Ambrose—and perhaps some of his intended audience—were fairly familiar with the Protevangelium tradition. In contrast to Jerome and similar to Epiphanius, then, Ambrose appears to hold a more accommodating attitude toward the stories and claims of the apocrypha.91

In his similarly-titled, similarly-themed De Institutione Virginis, Ambrose takes up the question of Mary’s virginity directly. Unlike De Virginibus, however, De

Institutione Virginis (392) appeared after the publication of Jerome’s arguments against

Helvidius in 383.92 As Lightfoot observed, the marks of Jerome’s influence are obvious in the way Ambrose approaches the topic:93

Maluit enim dominus aliquos de sua generatione, quam de matris pudore dubitare. Fratres autem gentis et generis, populi quoque consortium nuncupari docet dominus ipse, qui dicit: Narrabo nomen tuum fratribus meis; in medio ecclesiae laudabo te. Paulus quoque ait: Optabam ego ipse anathema esse pro fratribus meis. Potuerunt autem et fratres esse ex Ioseph, non ex Maria. Quod quidem si quis diligentius prosequatur, inueniet. Nos ea prosequenda non putauimus, quoniam fraternum nomen liquet pluribus esse commune.94

91 More to this point, Ambrose is also distinct from Jerome and Augustine inasmuch as the word “apocrypha” appears nowhere in his writings (that I have been able to find), again indicating that he was not as concerned with the non-canonical writings as the other two great Latin Doctors who discuss the topic frequently.

92 For the dating of Ambrose’s texts, I have deferred to Ariel Bybee Laughton’s dissertation on these virginity treatises. Ariel Bybee Laughton, “Virginity Discourse and Ascetic Politics in the Writings of Ambrose of Milan” (Duke University, 2010).

93 Lightfoot, 124.

94 PL 16:316-7. In the preceding chapter of De Institutione, Ambrose says he has been forced to take up this argument in defense of Mary’s perpetual virginity because an otherwise anonymous bishop had been challenging the idea, which is one of our indicators that there was an ongoing dispute in Christian circles over the meaning of asceticism and Mary’s virginity itself. PL 16:314.

For the Lord preferred that others question his own paternity rather than doubt the honor of his mother. “Brothers,” however, can be of nation and of race, as the Lord himself teaches that the community of a people can be called this. He says: “I shall declare your name to my brothers; I shall praise you in the midst of the assembly.” Paul also says: “I myself was wishing to be anathema on my brothers’ behalf.” The [“brothers” in question], however, could have been from Joseph, not from Mary. Of course, if anybody wants to follow that up more assiduously, let him look into it. We have thought that those matters do not need further investigation, since the title of “brother” is evidently common in many cases.

One might describe Ambrose’s interpretation of the “brethren” issue as an enthusiastic exegetical punt. The important thing to remember with Jesus’s siblings, he says, is that

Mary always remained a virgin. Either Jerome’s new “cousins” reading or the traditional

“step-brothers” interpretation found in the apocrypha will do just fine since they arrive at the same place. Significantly, unlike his mention of the Temple virgins of the

Protevangelium, he does not allude to any (i.e. “we read that . . .”) text when he suggests the apocryphal explanation. Instead, he merely says Jesus’s brothers “could have been”

Joseph’s sons without any further information or backing. When contextualized among the other fourth and fifth century authors, Ambrose’s defense of Mary’s perpetual virginity hedges between the old and new exegeses, and it comes comes off as a calculated act of politicking. With nothing to gain by alienating either side, Ambrose seems to lean somewhat toward Jerome’s explanation, but still leaves the door open for the apocryphal tradition: If anyone wants to search these things out for themselves, they are welcome to do so, but the bishop has said everything that needs said—or at least as much as he feels comfortable to say. 70

Based on his passing reference to the Protevangelium in De Virginibus, Ambrose certainly appears more comfortable with the apocrypha than some of his contemporaries, even while he remains sensitive to the discomfort some felt with the non-canonical texts.

We do not know for certain what he would have said about Jesus’s “brethren” before

Contra Helvidium. If De Virginibus offers any indication, he likely would have asserted the traditional apocryphal narrative, even if he might not have acknowledged whence his information came. Yet, by the time Jerome’s ideas concerning the apocrypha and the

Lord’s “brethren” had become well known, Ambrose opted to acknowledge both intepretational options, albeit it not too explicitly.

The Aqueleians’ Awkward Silence: Chromatius and Rufinus

Two other contemporary northern Italian intellectuals also wrote about the perpetual virginity: Chromatius and Rufinus, who both made their home in Aquileia. Like

Ambrose, Chromatius (d. 407), friend of both Ambrose and Jerome, would no doubt have been aware of the recent disputes spawned over Mary’s virginity. In a commentary on

Matthew written well after Contra Helvidium and likely after Jerome’s own Matthean commentary, Chromatius discusses the sticky passages in Matthew 1 and 13 that

Helvidius had used against the pro-asceticism camp. Fortunately, Chromatius does not remain totally silent on the particular question of Mary’s lifelong virginal integrity.

Concerning the problematic verse 1.25 (“he did not know her until . . . ”), Chromatius writes:

Sed in hoc ait: Et non cognovit eam donec peperit filium, plerumque solet scriptura divina quasi finem his quae finem non habent designare, et his quasi certum tempus ascribere quae tempore cludentur. Sed de multis vel pauca ponamus. Per Esaiam ad populum Deus ita loquitur: Ego sum qui sum quoadusque senescatis ego sum, quasi certum tempus sibi videtur ascribere, sed non ideo temporalis Deus intellegendus est, qui aeternus est confitendus. Alio quoque loco per eumdem prophetam Dominus exprobans Iudaeis peccata eorum inter cetera ito loquitur: Vivo ergo, dicit Dominus, quia non remittetur vobis peccatum hoc quoadusque moriamini, cum iniqui permanentes in peccatis plus magis post mortem obnoxii teneantur ad poenam. . . . Cum ergo dicitur in praesenti loco non cognovit eam donec peperit filium, per parvi temporis significationem omne tempus significatum debes advertere.

But in this passage, it says: “And he did not know her until she brought forth a son,” and divine Scripture is fully accustomed to ostensibly designate boundaries to things that do not have boundaries, and to ostensibly assign a definite time to things that are cut off from time. But let us propose just a few instances out of many. God speaks thusly to the people through Isaiah, “I am who I am, as far back as of old, I am,” as if he appears to assign a definite time to himself, but God is not therefore to be understood as temporal; he who is eternal is not to be boxed-in. . . . Therefore, when it says in this present passage “he did not know her until she brought forth a son,” you ought to note that the entirety of the time is expressed through the meaning of the shorter time.95

Here Chromatius offers a very quiet defense of Mary’s perpetual virginity, giving a catalogue of biblical passages where words indicating fixed time cannot be taken literally. Since Scripture sometimes uses words in this manner, Chromatius argues that in

Matthew 1.25, donec need not be taken as “until” in the sense that thereafter came a change in Mary’s virginal state. Rather, the verse is only a positive affirmation of Mary’s virginity up through the birth of her son and nothing else. The reader must simply understand (advertere) that her original status remained unchanged thenceforth.

Interestingly, Chromatius’s defense of the perpetual virginity mirrors some of Jerome’s

95 Chromatius of Aquileia, Chromatii Aquileiensis Opera. CCSL 9A, 3.2. Emphasis here is my own.

72 own philological arguments in Contra Helvidium, such as his reframing of the meaning of the word “until.”96

Yet when it comes to the particular question of Jesus’s siblings in Matthew— arguably the more difficult and uncomfortable issue that Helvidius had raised back in

383—Chromatius simply avoids the issue when Jesus’s siblings come up in Matthew

13.53-5. To be sure, he does not completely ignore the passage. In a rather blunt, circumambulatory maneuver, he writes:

Unde huic sapientia et virtutes? Nonne est filius Ioseph fabri? Nonne mater eius dicitur Maria? et cetera. Sed si apertos oculos cordis ac fidei habuissent, numquam in eum ex forma humani corporis scandalum passi fuissent, quem Deum and Dei Filium ex divinis virtutibus, si voluissent, cognoscere potuissent.

“Whence this man’s wisdom and power? Isn’t he the son of Joseph the craftsman? Isn’t his mother called Mary?” Et cetera. But if they had opened the eyes of the heart and of faith, they never would have suffered scandal because of the form of his human body, he who was God and God’s Son by divine powers. If they had been willing, they would have been able to understand.97

A few sections later, he comments again on verse 55:

Unde huic sapientia et virtutes? Nonne est filius Ioseph fabri? Nonne mater eius dicitur Maria? et cetera. Quanta ignorantia, immo potius quanta perfidia Iudaeorum, de Domino et Salvatore nostro fuit, ut dicerent: Unde huic sapientia et virtutes? Qui virtus et sapientia erat!

“Whence this man’s wisdom and power? Isn’t he the son of Joseph the craftsman? Isn’t his mother called Mary?” Et cetera. How great the ignorance, or rather, how great the unfaithfulness there was on part of the Jews concerning our Lord and Savior, so that they were saying: “Whence this man’s wisdom and power?” He himself was power and wisdom!98

96 See again PL 23:191-2.

97 Spicilegium Ad Chromatii Aquileiensis Opera, CCSL, 9A Supplementum, 624.

98 Ibid., 626.

Note that in quoting the passage from Matthew 13, Chromatius twice and quite intentionally elides with “et cetera” the following portions that draw attention to Jesus’s brothers and sisters.99 He has plenty to say about this broader passage and its theological significance, but none of it relates to the issue of Jesus’s siblings. Apparently, he would rather not discuss the matter. For Chromatius, it was enough to defend the Marian virginity with the vague, casuistic philology he submitted in his material on Matthew 1.

Altogether, while Chromatius’s remarks on Matthew 1 do reflect an apologetic stance regarding the tradition of Mary’s perpetual virginity, the defenses that he offers are mild. He neither identifies nor alludes to any group or individuals who would challenge the belief. What evidence he does put forward is highly-generalized. Compared even to

Hilary of Poitiers from a generation before, Chromatius’s apologetics (or lack thereof) are tame, to say the least. When we recall that Chromatius participated in the same intellectual and theological milieu that produced the Helvidian and Jovinian controversies that hotly contested the issue of perpetual virginity, his relative silence on the disputed

“brethren” question appears even more striking, particularly considering how awkwardly he dodges the topic. This maneuver raises an intriguing question: In a biblical commentary written for the purpose of elucidating the Scriptures, why avoid one of the main verses that had recently caused so much debate?

Jerome’s former-friend-turned-enemy in the Origenist controversy, Rufinus (also) of Aquileia (d. 410), briefly mentions Mary’s virginity in his commentary on the Creed of

99 It should be noted that in commenting on an earlier passage that also mentions Jesus’s brothers in Matthew 12, Chromatius does not obscure the reference to Jesus’s siblings, but he says nothing pertaining to Mary’s virginity either. 74

Aquileia. Under the creedal point “. . . who was born from the Holy Spirit of the Virgin

Mary . . .” Rufinus elaborates on the theology of Christ’s conception. Concerning Mary’s role, he writes:

Et sicut in sanctificatione Sancti Spiritus nulla sentienda est fragilitas, ita et in partu vir Viginis nulla intelligenda est corruptio. Novus enim huic saeculo datus est hic partus, nec immerito. Qui enim incaelis unicus Filius est, consequenter et in terra unicus est, et unice nascitur. Nota sunt omnibus et in Evangeliis decantata de hoc scripta prophetarum, quae dicunt, quod Virgo concipiet, et pariet filium. Sed et partus ipsius mirabilem modum Ezechiel Propheta ante formaverat, Mariam figuraliter portam Domini nominans, per quam scilicet Dominus ingressus est mundum. Dicit ergo hoc modo: Porta autem quae respicit ad Orientem clausa erit, et non aperietur, et nemo transibit per eam: quoniam Dominus Deus Israel transibit per eam, et clausa erit Quid tam evidens deconservatione Virginis dici poterat? Clausa fuit ea virginitatis porta: per ipsam intravit Dominus Deus Israel, per ipsam in hunc mundum de utero Virginis processit, et in aeternum porta Virginis clausa, servata virginitate, permansit.100

And just as weakness must not be perceived in the sanctification of the Holy Spirit, so too in the Virgin’s pregnancy no corruption must be understood. For to this age this novel pregnancy is given, and not undeservedly. For he who is the unique Son in heaven is suitably unique on earth, and he is uniquely born. The signals are even in all the Gospels, and the prophets’ writings concerning this one are recited, which say that the Virgin will conceive and will bring forth a son. But the marvelous manner of the pregnancy itself the prophet Ezekiel had depicted before, figuratively calling Mary the “gate of the Lord,” through which, of course, the Lord entered the world. Thus, he speaks in this way: “The gate, however, which looks to the East will be shut, and it will not be opened, no one will come through it: because the Lord God of Israel will come through it, it will even be shut.” What was so clearly able to be said about the preservation of the Virgin? That gate of virginity was closed. Through her the Lord God of Israel entered, through her he proceeded into this world from the womb of the Virgin, and the gate of the Virgin remained closed forever, with her virginity preserved.

100 Commentarius in Symbolum Apostolorum. PL 21:349.

Rufinus here employs an allegorical reading of Ezekiel 44 ubiquitous in patristic sources theologizing on Mary. In this reading, she is the gate through which God alone passes—a virgin. In terms of tone and substance, Rufinus does not appear to differ significantly from Chromatius. He affirms the tradition of perpetual virginity, but only mildly and with no acknowledgement of the real arguments that critics like Helvidius had frequently lobbed against that doctrine. In other words, Rufinus’s treatment of the perpetual virginity most certainly does not address the live issues of the day. At the time he was writing, the pressing question of the debate was not whether certain obscure passages of the Bible could be turned allegorically to defend the ascetic vision of Mary. That had been done many times before. Rather, the question was what to do about Scripture that appeared to inherently undermine that vision. Rufinus, then, stayed at a safe distance from the real issues of contemporary Mariology,101 as his discussion of the topic did not even approach the “brethren” issue that his erstwhile friend Jerome had completely reframed in order to do away with the apocryphal taint. Just as in Chromatius, there appears to be a certain reticence in Rufinus when the issue of Mary’s virginity arises.

Augustine Follows Jerome’s Lead

As previously mentioned, regarding the apocrypha, Augustine was of a more rigorist position akin to Jerome. In fact, it is likely that Jerome’s own ideas on the subject influenced Augustine, as we know from their correspondences that the bishop of Hippo took an interest in Jerome’s biblical scholarship and translation projects. Given the

101 Another possible factor is that Rufinus was simply not writing the kind of booklet suited for heavy apologetics in this systematic discussion of the creed.

76 congruence in their thought on the apocrypha, did Augustine also follow Jerome’s exegesis of the “Lord’s brethren” to maintain the perpetual virginity? Or, like some of

Jerome’s other Latin contemporaries, did Augustine hedge between the traditional apocryphal interpretation and Jerome’s new thesis?

When his catalog of patristic Mariology comes to Augustine, Brian Reynolds reads an alternative attitude to Mary’s virginity distinguished from the major fathers preceding him. According to Reynolds, “He shows less interest in the sort of arguments that delighted Jerome, centered on technical interpretations of Scripture, and does not indulge in diatribes against the married state, although he does consider virginity the higher vocation.”102 While Augustine may differ tonally from Jerome, the actual arguments he makes concerning Marian virginity utilize essentially the same building blocks as those carved out in Contra Helvidium. Commenting upon John 2.12—another

Scriptural reference to Jesus’s siblings103—Augustine retreads Jerome’s philological reasoning to defend Mary’s virginity:

102 Reynolds, 97.

103 “After this, he went down to Capernaum, and also his mother and brothers and disciples, and they did not stay there many days.”

Descendit, ut dicit euangelista in capharnaum, ipse et mater eius, et fratres eius, et discipuli eius, et ibi manserunt non multis diebus. Ecce habet matrem, habet fratres, habet et discipulos; inde fratres, unde matrem. Fratres enim scriptura nostra, non eos solos appellare consueuit, qui nascuntur ex eodem uiro et femina, aut ex eodem utero, aut ex eodem patre, quamuis diuersis matribus, aut certe ex eodem gradu, uelut compatrueles aut consobrinos; non solum hos fratres nouit dicere scriptura nostra. Quomodo loquitur, sic intellegenda est. Habet linguam suam; quicumque hanc linguam nescit, turbatur, et dicit: unde fratres domino? Num enim maria iterum peperit? Absit. Inde coepit dignitas uirginum. illa femina mater esse potuit, mulier esse non potuit.104

He went down, as the Evangelist says, into Capernaum, and his mother, and his brothers, and his disciples, and they remained there not many days. Look, he has a mother, he has brothers, and he has disciples. Thence brothers, whence a mother.105 For our Scriptures are accustomed to call “brothers” not only those who are born from the same man and woman, or from the same womb, or from the same father with however many mothers, or certainly from the same station, like cousins on either the father’s or the mother’s side. Our Scriptures know not to speak of these alone as “brothers.” In the manner it speaks, so it must be understood. It has its own language; whoever does not know this language is confused, and says: “From where did the Lord acquire these brothers?” For surely Mary did not give birth again? Perish the thought. From that point, dignitas of virgins began. That woman was able to be a mother. She was not able to be a house-wife.

In essence, Augustine’s reasoning follows Jerome’s blueprint. Not being pinned down to one narrow meaning, Scripture customarily has a wide range of relationships in mind when it uses the word “brother”; if anyone is confused, they have an incomplete grasp of the Bible’s philological turns. Without retracing Jerome’s every painstaking subpoint

(like the identity of James “the Lord’s brother”), Augustine echoes the heart of the case made in Contra Helvidium. Thus, while Reynolds may justifiably see a distinct

104 In Iohannis Evangelium Tractatus, PL 35:1467.

105 A literal translation of the quasi-poetic phrase inde fratres, unde matrem is tricky. The sense given in a looser translation seems to be something like: “Well, there are his brothers, who must have come from his mother.”

Mariology in Augustine’s thought overall, Augustine still seems to have been following

Jerome in terms of the pressing Mariological questions of the day, including both the trustworthiness of the apocryphal writings and the exegesis of the “Lord’s brethren.”

Conclusion

Read alongside his other writings, Jerome’s novel “cousins” interpretation of the

“Lord’ brethren” was certainly not a disconnected or peripheral element of his scholarship and doctrine. In point of fact, Jerome had a long-standing dislike and distrust of the apocryphal writings. Though evidence abounds that some texts in this category did become accepted in different Christian communities from time to time, Jerome manifestly despised them. Evidently, he saw an uncomfortable and potentially destabilizing element in the Mariological discourse of his day. Namely, the perpetual virginity—an increasingly meaningful and weighty idea for the ascetic movement in which he vociferously participated—had come to rely on what were essentially apocryphal stories to counter the prima facie reading of several biblical passages. Indeed,

Jerome may have seen that as the empire’s Christian communities justifiably moved toward greater institutionalization and standardization including but not limited to the realm of sacred texts (i.e. a set canon), the perpetual virginity might be left in the cold, defenseless against the straightforward readings plied by the likes of Helvidius and the

Antidicomarianites. Plainly, the passages concerning Jesus’s alleged siblings needed a better reading, and he of all people had the skills and reputation to effect the necessary shift in thinking. 79

In the end, Jerome achieved that goal, as his new hermeneutic did not go unnoticed by his Latin contemporaries. In the unlikely event that Ambrosiaster was in fact writing after 383, it is remarkable that no Latin source (contemporary or later) openly critiques Jerome’s exegesis or posits the old apocryphal interpretation on its own. To be sure, the new exegetical strategy seems to have put some of them in an uncomfortable position. Ambrose, formerly an inconspicuous invocator of the Protevangelium, tries to carve out an awkward middle ground between the old interpretation and the new one that openly dismissed the apocrypha. Even more inelegantly, Jerome’s friend Chromatius dodged the issue altogether in his own commentary. His noticeable and repeated elision of the problem-passages in Matthew were no coincidences in the editing process, but an outright avoidance of a topic that had repeatedly troubled and divided the pro-asceticism camp. With the copious amounts of ink and vitriol expended on the issue, Chromatius declined to touch “brethren” question. Rufinus similarly if somewhat less obviously avoided discussing that subject. In contrast, Augustine, in the one place he directly takes up the question, unambiguously endorsed the heart of Jerome’s argument.106

Significantly, Augustine shared Jerome’s overarching concerns with the apocryphal literature. For Augustine, the Hieronymian interpretation dispensed with the liability that apocrypha naturally brought along as baggage while keeping the ascetic view of Mary quite literally intacta. Yet here the story becomes more complicated, as in the course of

106 I should again add the caveat that this is the one locus that my research has turned up. Given the breadth of the secondary sources as well as the variations of word searches investigated, I am fairly confident that Augustine’s Johannine commentary contains the only thorough discussion of the brethren of the Lord. 80 the longue durée, the Hieronymian thesis would go on to have a remarkably different career in the world of Greek Christianity than it would in the Latin. 81

CHAPTER FOUR: THE DIVERGENCE OF EAST AND WEST

Despite its marked break with the established Marian discourse, Jerome’s new exegesis went essentially unchallenged by his immediate Latin contemporaries. While none of them save Augustine unreservedly endorsed his position—in fact their writings often signal reluctance to engage the issue—the Hieronymian position would ultimately carry the day in the future generations of the Latin church. Historically, this has a certain logic given the immense influence Jerome and Augustine came to exert upon late antique and medieval Christianity; if they were not already esteemed as such by their deaths, those two were to become giants. As Peter Brown has remarked, “the attitudes to sexuality and society of Ambrose, Jerome, and, above all, of Augustine still appear, for good or ill, to run in the bloodstream of Western Europeans.”107 That tendency holds true here as well, as Jerome’s reconfiguration of Marian tradition came to dominate in the protracted arc of history—at least in the West. In the Greek-speaking East, however,

Jerome’s ideas did not achieve the ascendency that they did in the West: a striking divergence, and one not resulting from Eastern ignorance of Jerome. In this final chapter, we trace the long-term trajectories of Jerome’s exegesis in these two communities. As it turns out, this bit of biblical interpretation functions like a radioactive marker in the bloodstream of late antique Christianity, mapping out the larger ideological framework and cultural currents that are less visible on the surface.

Because it became the dominant perspective in the Christian West, it is impossible in a piece of this length to catalogue every instance of reception of Jerome’s

107 Brown, 338.

82 thesis that appears in Latin sources from the mid-fifth century up through the middle ages—nor would it be especially interesting. Besides, some have already made valiant attempts to construct such exhaustive catalogues.108 Here, we instead highlight a few representative Western data points that mark out the longer curve with a fair degree of accuracy. By necessity, this involves some rather large chronological leaps, starting with the fiery homilies of St. Peter Chrysologus (just a few decades after Jerome) and concluding with the eccentricities of high medieval legend. We will then compare the

Western sources with the Eastern.

Peter Chrysologus of Ravenna

Taking up the episcopal seat sometime around 426, Peter Chrysologus could be considered a late contemporary of Jerome, who died just six years prior. Still,

Chrysologus came to prominence only after Jerome had left the intellectual scene (at least in the flesh), so in a sense we might better understand him as one of the earliest points of reception for Jerome’s Mariological apologetics. Having produced a large collection of sermons reflecting the social, political, and theological atmosphere of his day,

Chrysologus to us comes mainly through his homiletics, a slightly different vehicle than the polemical tracts and exegetical commentaries examined so far in this study. Two of these, Sermons 48 and 49, address the matter of the perpetual virginity in stark terms with a strikingly polemical tone. At least one scholar has suggested that these sermons reflect a concern with Helvidius and Jovinian, the two most vocal critics of the “orthodox”

108 In my bibliography, these are mainly Graef and Reynolds. Many of the Latin primary sources discussed in this chapter I initially found referenced in Reynolds work.

83 perpetual virginity tradition.109 This explanation is problematic for a few reasons, not least because Helvidius and Jovinian had already been condemned for several decades by the time Chrysologus achieved prominence. In fact, when we consider a broader spectrum of evidence, it becomes clear that Chrysologus’s aggressive apologetic was exceptional, and it suggests ongoing objections to the ascetic movement and its idealized

Mary. While Chrysologus mentions the perpetual virginity in several of his sermons, by far the most striking instances occur in Sermons 48 and 49, both homiletic commentaries upon Matthew 13.53-58.110 In Sermon 48, Chrysologus says regarding the Nazarenes’ resentment toward Jesus:

109 William Palardy has suggested that these sermons reflect a concern with Helvidius and Jovinian, the two most vocal critics of the “orthodox” perpetual virginity tradition as it came to be cemented by the end of the 300s. Peter Chrysologus, St. Peter Chrysologus: Selected Sermons, trans. William B. Palardy, The Fathers of the Church, a New Translation, v. 109-110, (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2004), 186 n. On its own, this explanation is problematic for a few reasons, not least because Helvidius and Jovinian had been thoroughly silenced and condemned at least thirty-five years (and perhaps quite a bit longer) before Chrysologus gave this sermon. When we consider the broader context of the early-mid fifth century and the fact that he was working in a genre not exclusively formulated for other Christian intellectuals or leaders, it seems Chrysologus likely had far more contemporary concerns in mind. Potential targets of his polemical outrage include lingering Pelagianism, the Nestorians, and the Jews—the latter two not being known for their high Mariology.

110 For a brief overview of Chrysologus’s references to the perpetual virginity, see Bogusław Kochaniewicz, “La Vergine Maria nei sermoni di San Pietro Crisologo,” (Pontificia Facultas Theologica “Marianum” in Roma, 1998), 111-114. Unfortunately, we do not have precise dates for these two sermons (that I have found). We know that these sermons were given during his time as bishop (c. 426-450). 84

Nonne hic est fabri filius? Nonne mater eius dicitur Maria? Iterum, Iudaee, matris nomen clamas, occultas Patris; patrem dicis, nomen non dicis; fabrum dicis, opus non dicis. Iudaee, decipiunt te ista non decipiunt credituros. Nonne mater eius dicitur Maria, et fratres eius Iacobus et Ioseph, et Simon, et Iudas; et sorores eius nonne omnes apud nos sunt? Simater, si fratres, si sorores apud vos sunt, pater ubi est? vobiscum non est, quia Deus odit fictos, invidos deserit, declinat ingratos, sibi non sinit crudeles et impios commorari. Et fratres eius et sorores eius, nonne omnes apud nos sunt? Callide fratres ingeris, ostentas sorores, ut numeroso partu sanctae matris virginitas lateat, obscuretur integritas, et sentiatur de filio totum quod humanum est, nihil divinum. Iudaee, quos dicis fratres et sorores Christi, Cleophae sororis Mariae filii sunt, non Mariae; et fratrum et sororum filios fratres nuncupat et divina lex et humana cognatio. Ergo Christi fratres fecit non matris virginitas, quae permansit virgo post partum, sed materterae eius: fecit propinquitatis assertio. Beata Maria, si alios filios habuisset a Christo mater in ipso crucis tempore, in articulo ipso mortis non discipulo traderetur, non commendaretur extraneo.

“Is this not the carpenter’s son? Isn’t his mother called Mary?” Again, Jew, you cry out the name of his mother, you conceal his Father. You mention his father. You don’t mention his name. You mention the Craftsman. You don’t mention his work. Jew, such things deceive you. They don’t deceive those who will believe. “Isn’t his mother called Mary? Aren’t his brothers Jacob, and Joseph, Simon, and Judah? And aren’t his sisters here among us?” If his mother, if his brothers, if his sisters are with you, where is his Father? He is not with you, because God hates those who are disingenuous, he leaves the envious, he turns away from the unthankful, he does not allow the hard and impious to abide with him. Cunningly, you bring up his brothers, you display his sisters, so that by numerous offspring the virginity of his holy mother is concealed, so that her integrity is obscured, so that, regarding her son, the totality of what is human is discerned, and nothing divine. Jew, those whom you call Christ’s brothers and sisters, they are the children of Mary’s sister Cleopha, not Mary’s. Both divine law and human kindred refer to nieces and nephews as “brothers.” Therefore, his mother’s (she who remained a virgin after birth) virginity did not make them Christ’s “brothers,” but his aunt: The declaration of family relation made them his “brothers.” Blessed Mary, if she as a mother had had other sons apart from Christ at the very time of the cross, at the very moment of his death, she would not have been handed over to a disciple, she would not have been entrusted to a stranger.111

111 Sermones, PL 52:335-6.

The rhetoric of this sermon alone has several noteworthy idiosyncrasies. The reader—or listener, as the case may be—might first mark the free use of apostrophe here in the form of the vocative Iudaee. One also observes that Chrysologus injects a dose of anti-Judaism whereas most of the other likeminded authors do not.112 This lends a heightened emotional coloring to the argument, as Chrysologus figuratively addresses the Jews of

Nazareth. The snappier paratactic style of the Latin also gives the prose a more aggressive tenor alongside the anaphoric constructions and use of the second person (e.g. patrem dicis, nomen non dicis; fabrum dicis, opus non dicis).113

While this sermon certainly lacks no rhetorical flair, it is the substance of his argument and exegesis that are of greater interest. Chrysologus throws up a dense, tightly-focused series of points to defend the tradition. In fact, in terms of both tone and content together, he may be the closest match to Jerome in Contra Helvidium. To begin, he asserts that the Nazarenes were trying to besmudge Jesus’s divine status and identity through their rhetorical questions about his parents—yet their insinuations concerning his father were ironically prophetic. From there, Chrysologus claims that they were craftily attempting to undermine Mary’s virginity (and thereby further obscure Christ’s numinous origins) by mentioning Jesus’s siblings. As we have seen in similar texts, the implication is straightforward: Mary cannot be a virgin if Jesus has brothers and sisters. To rebut this

112 There may also be some of this anti-Judaism in Jerome’s polemic against Helvidius, but if so, it is far more muted. See Contra Helvidium 16.

113 It could be objected that the rhetoric of a sermon cannot be fairly compared to that found in written works of Scriptural exegesis or theological exposition. This is valid, but Chrysologus’s emotive language here deserves attention on its own terms.

86 embarrassing conclusion, Chrysologus makes three points that draw heavily on Jerome: i) these “brothers and sisters” are not Mary’s children, but her sister Cleopha’s children; ii) as further proof of this, the term “brothers” is often another way of saying “cousin”; iii) the fact that Jesus later entrusts Mary to the apostle John proves that he had no other siblings to take on that duty.114

In Sermon 49, Chrysologus takes up the same basic subject matter and repeats many of the same points. He does, however, include one further addendum. After he again argues that Jesus’s entrustment of Mary to John in John 19 proves that he had no other siblings to look after his mother, Chrysologus adds: At Iacobus unius feminae et matris habere non potuit curam, qui inter primordia, et in illo Iudaico tunc furore

Hierosolymitanam singulariter rexit ecclesiam (“But moreover, James, who on his own ruled the Jerusalem church from its beginnings and then at the time of that Jewish fury, was not able to take care of this one woman and mother.”)115 Of course, this is a reference to James “the brother of the Lord” who supposedly led the church in Jerusalem.

What remains unclear is what this brief remark achieves for Chrysologus’s argument about Mary. If anything, bringing James into the discussion seems to undermine his own prior point about John taking charge of Mary: Perhaps Jesus’s mother did have other children, but they, like James, were too busy with other things to become her caretaker?

114 There is an interesting logical inconsistency in these arguments, however. If the Nazarenes of the text were trying to undermine Mary’s virginity by alluding to “brothers and sisters,” their insinuation would make no sense if everyone already knew they were Cleopha’s children and/or everyone knew the term “brother” commonly meant “cousin.” Oddly, Chrysologus overlooks this issue in an otherwise focused argument, and it may reflect that he has one eye on the text and another on contemporary arguments against the perpetual virginity.

115 PL 52:338. 87

Whatever its role in his greater argument, this parenthetical comment about John 19 reemphasizes the compact, bullet-point style of reasoning Chrysologus uses to defend

Mary’s celibacy.

What then can we say about the content of Chrysologus’s Sermons 48 and 49 as far as it concerns the tradition of the perpetual virginity? In light of other sources from the fourth and fifth centuries that address the topic, Chrysologus stands apart in his apparent zeal to defend the tradition. Whereas other authors had shown a minimalist or even evasive approach to getting around the sticky portions of the Scripture, Chrysologus meets the issue directly. Not only is his rhetorical tenor elevated in these passages, but he seems to throw up whatever arguments he can to guard his position, even when those arguments are contradictory or unclear. In all, we find an urgency in these sermons

(lacking in other works exegesis or theological exposition) that befits polemic.116 Indeed, his tone seems closest to the polemics of Jerome in the heat of the Helvidian-Jovinian debates from several decades before. In sum, compared to his predecessors and contemporaries, Chrysologus’s apologetic for Mary’s perpetual virginity seems historically notable and unique. More importantly for us, Chrysologus walks in lockstep with Jerome’s own ideas. After all, there is no suggestion of these “brothers” being children of Joseph’s first marriage per the apocrypha, nor is there the hesitance that

116 Lacking greater familiarity with the Chrysologian corpus (particularly in Latin), I cannot definitively say how much of this tone is simply an idiosyncrasy that typifies Chrysologus’s style in general. In the introduction to his own translations, William B. Palardy notes that Chrysologus’s “sermons are highly rhetorical” and frequently employ “strings of synonyms, sonance, antithesis, and the prefix per to intensify a word’s meaning.” See William B. Palardy, introduction to St. Peter Chrysologus: Selected Sermons, v. 109-110: The Fathers of the Church, (Washington, D.C: Catholic University of America Press, 2004), 28- 29. My sense, however, is that just within the broader context of Sermons 48 and 49, Chrysologus’s style shifts when he moves into these passages dealing with Mary. 88 appears in some of Jerome’s immediate contemporaries to embrace the new theory.

Rather, Chrysologus’s treatment is copy-pasted from Jerome, suggesting that the

Hieronymian thesis had squeezed out the old apocryphal tradition within just a few decades of Jerome’s death.

Theologians of Visigothic Spain

Two of Visigothic Spain’s most important intellectuals and ecclesiastical figures bear marks of Jerome’s influence: Isidore of Seville—bishop, staunch supporter of the

Visigothic monarchy, and one of the preeminent minds of late antiquity—and the perhaps less well-known but still respected Ildephonsus of Toledo. Writing during the early seventh century in the Visigothic kingdom of Iberia recently converted from Arianism,

Isidore produced his famous Etymologies, an encyclopedia that catalogued knowledge of many different subjects, including—not surprisingly—theology and Scripture. In one of the entries dealing with the histories of the various apostles and named disciples of Jesus,

Isidore retraces the main points of Jerome’s tedious treatment of the New Testament’s different Jameses:

Iacobus Zebedaei a patre cognominatur, quem relinquens cum Iohanne uerum patrem secuti sunt. Hi sunt filii tonitrui, qui etiam Boanerges ex firmitate et magnitudine fidei nominati sunt. Hic est Iacobus filius Zebedaei, frater Iohannis, qui post ascensionem Domini ab Herode manifestatur occisus. Iacobus Alphaei ob distinctionem prioris cognominatus, qui dicitur filius Zebedaei, sicut iste filius Alphaei. Cognomentum igitur ambo a patre sumpserunt. Iste est Iacobus minor, qui in Euangelio frater Domini nominatur, quia Maria uxor Alphaei soror fuit matris Domini, quam Mariam Cleophae Iohannes euangelista cognominat, a patre, siue a gentilitate familiae, aut quacumque alia causa ei nomen inponens. Alphaeus autem Hebraeo sermone in Latino exprimitur millesimus, siue doctus.117

117 Etymologies 20.7.9, PL 82:288.

James of Zebedee is titled for his father, whom he and John left as they followed their true Father. These are the “sons of thunder,” who also were known as “Boanerges” from the fortitude and magnitude of their faith. This is James the son of Zebedee, John’s brother, who is shown to have been killed by Herod after the Lord’s ascension. James of Alphaeus is titled in distinction with the former James, who is called the son of Zebedee, just as that one is called the son of Alphaeus. Thus, both took their epithet from their respective father. That one [James of Alphaeus] is James the Lesser, who in the Gospel is called the brother of the Lord, because the sister to the Lord’s mother was Mary the wife of Alphaeus, whom John the Evangelist titles Mary of Cleophas from her father or from kindred of the family, or stamping her with that name for some other reason. “Alphaeus” in Hebrew speech, however, is expressed in Latin as “thousandth” or “learned.”

Again, the points explicated here may be difficult to follow, but they remain relevant insofar as they reflect Jerome’s arguments in Contra Helvidium. As one of the cornerstones of his rejoinder to Helvidius’s objections to the perpetual virginity, Jerome had tried to settle the identities of the New Testament’s Jameses as a kind of case study, doing away with any suggestion that one of them might be Jesus’s biological sibling and showing that “brothers” in fact meant “kinsmen” or “cousins.” Isidore more or less copies that treatment. Of course, in the Isidorean context, this has almost nothing to do with Marian virginity. Nevertheless, it still conveys the penetration of Jerome’s thesis had achieved into later Latin intellectual culture. Additionally, here in Isidore we find no suggestion that any of these Jameses are Joseph’s children, as the apocrypha claimed.

Belonging to the generation after Isidore, Ildephonsus the bishop of Toledo authored a decidedly rhetorical treatise on the perpetual virginity of Mary. Based on his material, Ildephonsus was clearly reading both Ambrose and Jerome. This is evidenced mainly by his apostrophic invocations of both Jovinian and Helvidius. In all, Ildephonsus effusively asserts the truth of the perpetual virginity. Against both of the long-dead 90

“heretics,” he proclaims Mary’s enduring virginity in partu and post partum. The highly- stylized, declamatory nature of his writing, however, leaves out the finer points of

Mariology one finds in the Latin of Jerome or Chrysologus.118 As such, he offers no treatment of the “brethren” question and the accompanying problematic Scriptural loci.

Yet of course, he would have been wholly familiar with Jerome’s arguments, as his invocations of Helvidius suggests affinity for Jerome’s thought, although it does not incontrovertibly prove acceptance of Jerome’s ideas:

Audi ergo et tu, Heluidi, ad me adtende, impuderate, me absculta, impudice, me intuere, inhoneste, me conspice, inuerecunde: Quid impudicitia commoueris? Quid inuerecundus adsistis? Quid inhonestus accedis? Quid sine reuerentia occurris? Quid sine pudore uexaris? Quare uirginis nostrae principia corruptionis fine coartas? Quamobrem initia pudoris exitu actae procreationis infamas? Cur integritatem diuinitate sacram humana conuentione deturpas?119

And so, listen up, Helvidius, pay attention to me! Impudent, hear me; shameless, consider me; dishonorable, look upon me, irreverent one: Why are you moved by shamelessness? Why do you stand by irreverently? Why do you approach dishonorably? Why do you attack without respect? Why have you disturbed without modesty? Why do you constrain the principia of our Virgin with the boundary of corruption? For what reason do you defame the initia of respect with the exit of actual procreation? Why do you befoul sacred integrity in divinity with a human covenant120?

The elevated rhetorical style is manifest in the Latin and English alike. In fact, the stylistic nature of the piece crowds out a more focused analysis of the biblical material that one finds in the patristic era or, for that matter, Isidore. Little of the particulars from

118 By “declamatory,” I mean the classical art of declamation: a speech given more for the sake of rhetorical form than the particular content.

119 De Virginitate Perpetua Beatae Mariae, PL 96:61.

120 The conventio or “covenant” in question probably refers to marriage (i.e. a fully conjugal marriage between Mary and Joseph).

Contra Helvidium survive in Ildephonsus. We find, for instance, no discussion of the brethren question or apocryphal narratives. That said, this panegyric to Marian virginity shows an unmistakable familiarity with the disputes of the fourth century. Put another way, Ildephonsus was almost certainly reading Jerome and Ambrose. The effect of

Jerome’s thought would become even more apparent in the coming authors of the early middle ages.

Further into the Early Middle Ages: Bede and Hrabanus Maurus

The Hieronymian thesis left a prominent imprint upon the writings of the famed

Northumbrian monk and scholar, Bede (d. 735), and the later Carolingian bishop of

Mainz, Hrabanus Maurus (d. 856), which comes across more directly than their predecessors in Spain. In fact, Bede’s interest in the brethren issue is almost peculiar, as he mentions it more than any of the patristic author.121 His most striking comment attacks both the Epiphanian interpretation based in the apocrypha as well as the Helvidian approach:

121 Some of this could also be the coincidence of history in that we probably have more extant works from medieval authors than late antique writers. On the other hand, a broad, surface-level reading of the various discussions of the perpetual virginity and the Lord’s brethren seems to suggest that medieval sources were more likely to repeat themselves in different works. Compare this to Jerome himself, who will refer back to prior writings rather than completely rehashing all of his points.

Sed solet mouere quosdam quod in exordio lectionis huius euangelicae dictum est quia descendente Capharnaum Domino non solum mater et discipuli sed et fratres eius secuti sunt eum. Nec defuere heretici qui Ioseph uirum beatae uirginis Mariae putarent ex alia uxore genuisse eos quos fratres Domini scriptura appellat. Alii maiore perfidia hos eum ex ipsa Maria post natum dominum generasse putarunt. Sed nos, fratres carissimi, absque ullius scrupulo quaestionis scire et confiteri oportet non tantum beatam Dei Genetricem sed et beatissimum castitatis eius testem atque custodem Ioseph ab omni prorsus actione coniugali mansisse semper inmunem nec natos sed cognatos eorum more scripturae usitato fratres sororesue Saluatoris uocari.122

But it customarily moves certain men such that in the beginning of this Gospel reading it is said that, with the Lord going down into Capernaum, not only his mother and disciples but also his brothers followed him. And the heretics have not been lacking who were thinking that Joseph, husband of the blessed Virgin Mary, begot from another wife these whom Scripture calls “brothers of the Lord.” Others in a greater perfidy were thinking these came from Mary herself after the Lord’s birth. But it is proper for us, dearest brothers, to know and confess without the doubt of any question not only that blessed Bearer of God123 but also the most blessed witness and guardian of her chastity, Joseph, remained entirely free always from every conjugal deed, and that their relatives, not their children, are by the common custom of Scripture called brothers and sisters.

In this homiletic excerpt, Bede fully endorses the Hieronymian position, as he calls the apocryphal “step-brothers” interpretation the belief of heretics, which would have been an extreme claim in the fourth century even for Jerome, despite all his vociferous complaints against apocryphal texts. This is probably the starkest discourse proffered by

Bede on the brethren issue, but it was just one of many. In all, the Bedean corpus contains at least nine distinct, sometimes lengthy discussions of the “Lord’s brothers” in four different texts, far more than any other author analyzed in this study up to this point,

122 In S. Iohannis Evangelium Expositio, PL 92:662.

123 Translating genetrix as “mother” obscures the more technical sense of the word.

93 including Jerome himself: a curious feature to say the least.124 In any case, Bede’s disapproval of the apocryphal narratives and concomitant dependence upon Jerome comes across clearly in these various passages.

Like Bede, the Carolingian bishop of Mainz, Hrabanus Maurus, clearly followed to the Hieronymian stream of exegesis, and though he devotes less space to the subject,

Hrabanus’s writings address the brethren question multiple times, all of which echo

Jerome.125 A careful comparison shows that Maurus quotes directly from Jerome’s commentary on Matthew (without citing him and eliding some of his words) in his own

Expositio in Matthaeum:

Quidam fratres Domini de alia uxore Ioseph filios suspicantur, sequentes deliramenta apochryforum et quandam Escam mulierculam confingentes. Nos autem fratres Domini non filios Ioseph, sed consobrinos Saluatoris liberos Mariae intelligimus, materterae Domini, quae esse dicitur mater Iacobi minoris et Ioseph et Iudae, quos in alio euangelii loco fratres Domini legimus appellatos. Fratres autem consobrinos dici omnis Scriptura demonstrat. 126

124 Note that not every instance appears in a larger defense of perpetual virginity, but they do all reflect the arguments contained in Contra Helvidium. Unfortunately, there is not space here to fully discuss the interesting implications of Bede’s disproportionate interest in this topic. I hypothesize that, as with Chrysologus, there may have been something in Bede’s contemporary context that provoked his repeating of these arguments. For one, the overwhelming majority of Eastern Christianity would have still held to the apocryphal traditions in the seventh and eighth centuries, though it is hard to say what Bede would have known about those on the opposite end of the Christian world. Another, more intriguing option might look to the traditions and doctrines of British Christianity itself. Might Jerome’s thesis have failed to penetrate Briton Christianity before the Romans withdrew fairly soon after Contra Helvidium? If so, might Celtic Christianity have never fully come to terms with the turn away from the apocryphal traditions that happened everywhere else in the West, thereby incurring Bede’s censure? (For instance, despite its condemnation in Western Christian intellectuals, we do have copies of the Protevangelium in Irish.) Unfortunately, Bede does not mention any specific contemporaries in these discussions, so without a much fuller study of Celtic traditions in Dark Age Britain, this remains rank speculation. Nonetheless, such a study of apocryphal traditions in the British Isles from 400-700 could prove interesting as a corollary to the themes explored in this chapter.

125 I have counted two separate texts of Maurus with four distinct references in Jerome.

126 Hrabanus Maurus, Expositio in Matthaeum, ed. Bengt Löfstedt, CCCM 174; 174A (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), 373. Cf. Jerome’s words in PL 26:84-5, translated in the previous chapter.

Certain brothers of the Lord are suspected to be sons of Joseph from another wife, following the delusions of the apocrypha and dreaming up some little woman “Escha.” But we understand the “brothers of the Lord” not as sons of Joseph but as kinsmen of the Savior, children of the Lord’s maternal aunt, who is said to be the mother of James the lesser and Joseth and Judah, whom we read are called “brothers of the Lord” in a different passage of the Gospel. Yet all Scripture demonstrates that kinsmen are called “brothers.”

Evidently, Jerome’s ideas had become the canonical, authoritative word on what to make of Jesus’s siblings. Whereas earlier authors would have at least put Jerome’s material into their own words, Hrabanus does not bother: Jerome’s thoughts on the subject stand on their own without need of further amplification.

Thomas Aquinas

Jerome’s sway did not diminish in the coming medieval centuries, at least if

Thomas Aquinas offers any indication. In her own study of the apocrypha in the middle ages, Mary Dzon focuses particularly on Aquinas since he was “the most well-known and accomplished scholar of the age of scholasticism, he represents the uppermost echelons of the medieval intellectual world.”127 In other words, Aquinas’s views are a particularly useful data point. Addressing the perpetual virginity and the brethren of the Lord in a compilation of the theological authorities (i.e. a “catena”), Aquinas directly cites (unlike

Maurus) Jerome while expanding upon his arguments:

127 Mary Dzon, The Quest for the Christ Child in the Later Middle Ages, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017): 111-2.

Hieronymus Contra Helvidium. Maria ista, quae in Marco et Matthaeo, Iacobi et Ioseph mater dicitur, fuit uxor Alphaei, et soror Mariae matris domini quam Mariam Cleophae nunc Ioannes cognominat, a patre, sive a gentilitate familiae, aut quacumque alia causa ei nomen imponens. Si autem inde tibi alia atque alia videtur, quod alibi dicatur Maria Iacobi minoris mater, et hic Maria Cleophae, disce Scripturae consuetudinem, eumdem hominem diversis nominibus appellari.128

Jerome against Helvidius: That Mary who is called the mother of James and Joseph in Mark and Matthew, was the wife of Alphaeus, and sister of Mary the Lord’s mother, the Mary whom John titles “of Cleophas,” from her father or from kindred of the family, or stamping her with that name for some other reason. But if something or other seems the case to you, that elsewhere it said that Mary the mother of James the Lesser, and here Mary of Cleophas, learn the custom of Scripture to call the same person by different names.

Examining the same issue in his Summa, Aquinas offers an even fuller discussion, but one that makes much the same points indebted to Jerome:

Ad quintum dicendum quod quidam, sicut dicit Hieronymus, super matth., de alia uxore Ioseph fratres Domini suspicantur. Nos autem fratres Domini, non filios Ioseph, sed consobrinos salvatoris, Mariae materterae filios intelligimus. Quatuor enim modis in Scriptura fratres dicuntur, scilicet natura, gente, cognatione et affectu. Unde fratres Domini dicti sunt, non secundum naturam, quasi ab eadem matre nati, sed secundum cognationem, quasi consanguinei eius existentes. Ioseph autem, sicut Hieronymus dicit, contra Helvidium, magis credendus est virgo permansisse, quia aliam uxorem habuisse non scribitur, et fornicatio in sanctum virum non cadit. Ad sextum dicendum quod Maria quae dicitur Iacobi et Ioseph mater, non intelligitur esse mater Domini, quae in Evangelio non consuevit nominari nisi cum cognominatione huius dignitatis, quod sit mater Iesu. Haec autem Maria intelligitur esse uxor Alphaei, cuius filius est Iacobus minor, qui dictus est frater domini.129

128 Catena Aurea in Quatuor Evangelia, ed. Angelico Guarienti, (Rome: Marietti, 1953), 572.

129 Summae Theologiae Tertia Pars: a Quaestiona I ad Questionem LIX, (Rome: Romae Typographia Polyglotta, 1903), 367. 96

To the fifth point, that, just as Jerome says about Matt., certain “brothers of the Lord” are suspected from another wife of Joseph: “But we understand the ‘brothers of the Lord’ not as sons of Joseph but as cousins of the Savior, children of the Lord’s maternal aunt Mary.” For there are four types of brothers spoken of in Scripture: brothers by nature (of course), by tribe, by kinship, and by affect. Whereby they are called “brothers” of the Lord, not in accord with nature, as born from the same mother, but in accord with kinship, as coming from the same kin. But Joseph, just as Jerome says against Helvidius, should rather be believed to have remained a virgin, because it is not written that he had had another wife, and fornicatio does not fall upon a holy man. To the sixth point, that Mary who is said to be the mother of James and Joseph, is not understood to be the mother of the Lord, who in the Gospel not accustomed to be named except by the family name of this one’s dignitas, that is the mother of Jesus. But this Mary is understood to be the wife of Alphaeus, whose son is James the Lesser, who is called the Lord’s “brother.”

As we have seen ad nauseam with this point, Aquinas retraces the basic features of

Jerome’s Contra Helvidium. He discards the apocryphal explanation for the appearance of Jesus’s siblings in the New Testament, recasting them as cousins. He discusses the most important of these siblings, James and his alleged mother, Mary, ostensibly the sister of the Virgin Mary: not particularly original ideas. Yet Aquinas does include one new wrinkle, calling the apocryphal suggestion of Joseph’s former marriage

“fornicatio”—a rather stark term that gives some indication of just how deeply embedded the asceticism of the patristic age was in medieval Christianity.

The purpose of this overview is to measure the penetration of Jerome’s construal of the perpetual virginity and Jesus’s brethren in the Latin Christianity of the coming centuries. In the theological texts, Jerome’s influence is apparent and dominant. No Latin sources dispute his construal of the Lord’s brethren as presented in Contra Helvidium. In fact, some like Bede and Aquinas display a harsher attitude toward the apocryphal tradition found in ancient, “orthodox” sources like Epiphanius. This fact alone is worth 97 momentarily pondering. Namely, the mainstream, “orthodox,” or consensus position of one era in Christianity can be excoriated as heresy by the “orthodox” of a later period.

While other aspects of this walk through the late antique and medieval sources may seem pedantic and repetitive, it sets the point of reference for the far more intriguing examination of the Greek authors, who proved far more resistant to the Hieronymian thesis on the whole than their Latin counterparts.130

Jerome and John Chrysostom

For centuries in Greek East and Latin West alike, defenders of Mary’s perpetual virginity universally looked to the apocryphal narratives originally found in the

Protevangelium of James for support. Up until late in the fourth century, Greek and Latin authors like Origen, Hilary, and Epiphanius were fairly agreed on the nature of the brotherhood between Jesus and his “brothers” intended by the New Testament authors: step-siblings, Joseph’s children from a prior marriage. As we have seen, Jerome radically altered the framework of this discussion for the many Latin exegetes that came after him.

The situation in Greek exegesis is rather different, as Jerome’s thesis, ever-so persuasive to Latin world, failed to capture the theological discourse in the same way in the East.

Whatever the particular cause of this failure, ignorance of Jerome and his ideas can be ruled out definitively. For his part, Jerome seemed equally at home carrying out his various political and theological agendas in the Greek and Latin contexts alike. At the time, he represented something of an intellectual hinge between the semi-distinct spheres

130 Throughout her book, Mary Dzon highlights the fact that elements of the ancient apocryphal narratives about Jesus, Mary, and Joseph survived into the later middle ages, but these legends were often criticized by Christian intellectuals like Aquinas. 98 of Greek and Latin Christianity. Indeed, his presence did not go unnoticed by his Greek contemporaries, nor was it always innocuous. One of the more colorful examples comes in Jerome’s relationship to John Chrysostom, perhaps the greatest of the church fathers in the Greek tradition. While we are perhaps more accustomed to see the points of harmony and consensus between the great patristic figures and saints, Jerome’s hostility toward

Chrysostom reminds us that some of these larger-than-life Christian figures could sometimes be found at each other’s throats. J. N. D. Kelly recounts this particular case in a lengthy but interesting excerpt:

There was no love lost between [Jerome] and John, whom he must have known (even if he did not meet him) during his sojourn in Antioch as a devoted disciple of Meletius, the bishop he regarded as heretic and usurper, and who had been ordained in 386 by Meletius’ successor, Flavian. Although he must have been aware of his distinction as a preacher, he had dismissed him with a disparagingly curt entry in Famous Men. He rejoiced, we may be sure, at John’s downfall, in spite of the fact that his trusted friend Chromatius came out strongly in his support and wrote to the western emperor, Honorius, on his behalf. He must have been appalled when the new pope, Innocent I (402-17), in autumn 404 recognised the justice of John’s cause, and finally broke off relations with Theophilus and the rest of the persecutors. Even so, staunch Roman though he professed to be, he continued to back the Egyptian Pharaoh [Theophilus of Alexandria] blindly. Late in 404, made all the more implacable by the pope’s support of John, Theophilus composed an invective of hysterical violence, denouncing the exiled patriarch as a foul murderer, an enemy of the human race, a godless priest who made sacrilegious offerings, a blasphemer of Christ who would share the fate of Judas. There was much more abuse of this kind in ‘the monstrous document’ by which, as its horrified sixth-century preserver noted, Theophilus hoped to show the western world exactly what kind of man John was; and it was Jerome who made this possible by putting it into Latin. Even the death of the tragic patriarch in exile (407) did not still Jerome’s rancour, for years later (in 413) he was to characterise him as one who had been led astray by Origenism as Barnabas had by the 99

Judaisers in the apostolic Church, and who had been guilty of murder, not in deed, but in intention.131

In other words, we have every reason to believe that Chrysostom was quite familiar with

Jerome. More pertinently, a perusal through Chrysostom’s material on Mary’s virginity betrays a distinct acquaintance with the Hieronymian thesis.

In his reading, Lightfoot presumed that Chrysostom had at one point held the

Epiphanian view of the brethren. Certainly, Chrysostom’s belief in the perpetual virginity is obvious in any case from a cursory reading of his texts that speak to Mary’s virginity.132 What comes across less clearly—at least from the texts invoked by

Lightfoot—is Chrysostom’s devotion to the old Epiphanian tradition. The main instance

Lightfoot exhibits comes in one of Chrysostom’s homilies on Matthew, where he addresses Matthew 1.25, one of the traditional prooftexts used against the perpetual virginity:

Εἰ γὰρ ἔγνω αὐτὴν, καὶ ἐν τάξει γυναικὸς εἶχε, πῶς ὡς ἀπροστάτευτον αὐτὴν καὶ οὐδένα ἔχουσαν τῷ μαθητῇ παρατίθεται, καὶ κελεύει αὐτῷ εἰς τὰ ἴδια αὐτὴν λαβεῖν; Πῶς οὖν, φησὶν, ἀδελφοὶ αὐτοῦ χρηματίζουσιν οἱ περὶ Ἰάκωβον; Ὥσπερ καὶ αὐτὸς ἐνομίζετο ἀνὴρ τῆς Μαρίας. Πολλὰ γὰρ ἐγένετο τὰ παραπετάσματα, ὥστε συσκιασθῆναι τέως τὸν τοιοῦτον τόκον. Διὸ καὶ Ἰωάννης οὕτως αὐτοὺς ἐκάλει λέγων· Οὐδὲ γὰρ οἱ ἀδελφοὶ αὐτοῦ ἐπίστευον εἰς αὐτόν.133

131 J. N. D. Kelly, Jerome: His Life, Writings, and Controversies, (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2000), 262-3.

132 Lightfoot, 125-6.

133 Homiliae in Matthaeum, PG 57:58. 100

For if [Joseph] knew her, and was having her in the station of a wife, how does [Christ] entrust her as one leaderless and having nothing to his disciple, and command him to take her into his care? How then, one says, do those like James employ the appellation of his “brothers”? In just the same way as [Joseph] was accustomed to be called the husband of Mary. For there were many curtains so that this offspring might be concealed in the meantime. So John also was referring to them in the same way, saying, “For his brothers were not believing in him.”

Chrysostom here utilizes an old line of patristic thought that had often been used to explain why Mary ostensibly had a husband while she was yet dedicated to a life of virginity: a seemingly self-contradictory lifestyle. God had needed Joseph, so the argument went, to appear to be Jesus’s father so that the devil would not suspect Jesus’s divine identity before the appropriate time. Joseph, as the apparent husband and father, served as cloak to conceal God’s real purposes. In the same way, so too did Jesus have brothers: in appearance but not reality. Lightfoot took this to indicate that Chrysostom believed in the apocryphal tradition, though the other identifying marks of that tradition are missing here, as Chrysostom remains vague about what these ostensive “brothers” truly were in relation to Jesus—stepbrothers? Cousins? Given the overwhelming evidence that Jerome did in fact invent the “cousins” theory, Lightfoot probably came to the right conclusion, despite the fact that Chrysostom’s fuller understanding of the brother’s true identity is obscured.134

A more detailed view appears in Chrysostom’s commentary on Galatians, where he takes up a different reference to James, the brother of the Lord. Expounding upon

134 In a sermon on Mary spuriously attributed to Chrysostom, the apocryphal view is manifest. There James is said to be οὐχ ὡς ἐκ τῆς παρθένου Μαρίας, ἀλλ’ ἐκ τοῦ Ἰωσὴφ γεννηθέντα: “not born from the Virgin Mary but from Joseph.” In Annuntiationem Beatae Virginis, PG 50:793.

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Paul’s decision to call James by the honorary epithet, brother of Lord, Chrysostom writes:

Ἕτερον δὲ τῶν ἀποστόλων οὐκ εἶδον, φησὶν, εἰ µὴ Ἰάκωβον. Εἶδον, οὐκ ἐδιδάχθην, φησὶ, παρ' αὐτοῦ οὐδέν. Ἀλλ' ὅρα καὶ τοῦτον µεθ' ὅσης τιµῆς ὠνόµασεν. Οὐ γὰρ εἶπεν ἁπλῶς, Ἰάκωβον, ἀλλὰ καὶ τὸ σεµνολόγηµα προσέθηκεν, Τὸν ἀδελφὸν τοῦ Κυρίου· οὕτω βασκανίας ἁπάσης ἀπηλλαγµένος ἦν. Εἰ γὰρ σηµῆναι ὃν ἔλεγεν ἤθελεν, ἐνῆν καὶ ἐξ ἑτέρου γνωρίσµατος τοῦτο ποιῆσαι δῆλον, καὶ εἰπεῖν τὸν τοῦ Κλωπᾶ, ὅπερ καὶ ὁ εὐαγγελιστὴς ἔλεγεν. Ἀλλ' οὐκ εἶπεν οὕτως, ἀλλ' ἐπειδὴ τὰ τῶν ἀποστόλων σεµνολογήµατα ἴδια εἶναι ἐνόµιζεν, ὡς ἑαυτὸν ἐπαίρων, οὕτω σεµνύνει κἀκεῖνον. Οὐ γὰρ ἐκάλεσεν αὐτὸν οὕτως, ὡς εἶπον, ἀλλὰ πῶς; Τὸν ἀδελφὸν τοῦ Κυρίου. Καίτοι γε οὐδὲ κατὰ σάρκα ἀδελφὸς ἦν τοῦ Κυρίου, ἀλλ' οὕτως ἐνοµίζετο· ἀλλ' ὅµως οὐδὲ οὕτως ἀπεστράφη τὸ ἀξίωµα θεῖναι τοῦ ἀνδρός. Καὶ πολλαχόθεν ἄλλοθεν δείκνυται, ὅτι διέκειτο πρὸς τοὺς ἀποστόλους πάντας οὕτω γνησίως, ὡς αὐτῷ πρέπον ἦν.135

And I did not see any other of the apostles, he says, except James. “I saw,” he says, not “I was taught by him.” But see how he named this one with such honor. For he did not just say “James,” but placed upon him the solemnity, “the brother of the Lord”: In this way, he was wishing to be free of all slander. For if he wanted to point out whom he was talking about, it was also possible to make this clear by another token, and to call him the son of Clopas, which even the evangelist was calling. But he did not speak in this way, but since he was acknowledging that there are distinct solemnities of the apostles, as he was establishing himself, so does he also exalt that one. For he did not refer to him suchwise, as I said, but how? The brother of the Lord. And indeed, he was not the Lord’s brother according to the flesh, but he was esteemed in this way. But still, [Paul] was not in this way dissuaded to place honors upon the man.136 And in many other places he shows that he was genuinely so disposed to all the apostles, as was fitting for him.

The signs of Jerome’s influence are manifest. As we have seen, the conception of James the brother of the Lord as the son of Clopas/Cleopas originates in Jerome’s test case of

135 Commentarius in Epistolam ad Galatas, PG 61:632.

136 Chrysostom’s phrase τὸ ἀξίωµα θεῖναι τοῦ ἀνδρός is an unusual construction with the genitive. As I take his meaning, a dative or prepositional phrase would be standard. At least one translation I found punted on τοῦ ἀνδρός by leaving it out entirely. In any case, the sense is clear enough. 102 the cousins interpretation found in Contra Helvidium. While not explicitly mentioned,

Mary’s virginity still affects Chrysostom’s words here, as he directly says that James was not Jesus’s brother “according to the flesh”—lest any doubt remain. Of course,

Chrysostom does not expound upon the specific identity of Clopas, nor does he overtly claim that James was Jesus’s kin.

Nonetheless, Chrysostom had clearly either read Jerome himself or had encountered this view elsewhere second-hand, and while Jerome was still alive no less.

More than that, Jerome’s arguments apparently persuaded him. This deserves consideration on two points. First, it shows that the language barrier between the Greek and Latin wings of Christianity was not especially impermeable—at least for its intellectual elite. The original text in which Jerome had voiced these ideas, Contra

Helvidium, was of course a Latin text with a very particular set of concerns directed to a very particular community in Italy. Still, some of the polemic’s finer points apparently found their way East, being put to use in quite a different context than they were originally penned. This illustrates the interconnectivity of fourth and early fifth century

Christian intellectuals.

In all, Chrysostom’s remarks on Jesus’s brethren bespeak the same indeterminacy one finds in Ambrose: a hesitant, muted turn from the older apocryphal tradition to the novel exegesis proffered by arguably the best biblical scholar of the day. Though they end up in the same camp, on this issue, Chrysostom’s thoughts are more cautious by far than, say, Augustine. That is to say, even in his Galatian commentary where his views necessarily align him with Jerome’s theory, Chrysostom remains fairly quiet. Unlike 103

Augustine’s teaching, which lectured down to those who did not understand that

“brother” could have many different meanings in the Bible, the only clue that definitively tips Chrysostom’s theological hand comes from his association of James the Lord’s brother with James the son of Clopas. The ancillary pieces of Jerome’s larger argument found in similar Latin exegetical sources are conspicuously absent (much as in Ambrose): no proof-texts showing the variation in the meaning of the term “brother,” no detailed discussion that identifies and links the different New Testament Jameses, and certainly no explicit reprobation of the apocrypha.137

Mid-Fifth Century Greek Authors: Cyril of Alexandria and Theodoret

Unlike in the Latin tradition, the Greek authors who came after Jerome lacked a clear consensus as to what to make of Jerome’s exegesis. In the decades immediately following his death, we find support for both the apocryphal thesis and the newer

Hieronymian thesis in Greek sources.

While perhaps not as well known for his thoughts on the perpetual virginity itself,

Cyril of Alexandria was one of the major players in the Nestorian controversy, an ecclesiastical and theological dispute that had Mariology at its center. As the bishop of

Alexandria, Cyril stood among the most prestigious and prominent churchmen in the

137 Another fourth to fifth century Eastern contemporary of Jerome and Chrysostom, Theodore of Mopsuestia, a bishop in southeastern Asia Minor (sedit 392-428), left a systematic commentary on Galatians. When he comes to “James the brother of the Lord” in Galatians 1.19, however, he curiously makes no comment at all about the meaning of James’s relation to Jesus. This approach—simply ignoring the question—is somewhat unusual. This evidence is complicated by the fact that this commentary mainly survives in Latin, probably translated by someone who may have been sympathetic to Jerome’s arguments, so it is not out of the question that the Latin translator could omitted something in Theodore that he found distasteful. See Greer’s introductory remarks. Theodore of Mopsuestia, The Commentaries on the Minor Epistles of Paul, ed. and trans. Rowan A. Greer, Society of Biblical Literature Writings from the Greco- Roman World, v. 26 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2010), xi-xii.

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Christian world, rivaled only by the bishop of Constantinople—like Nestorius, whom he helped depose—in the East. His views, then, were not at the fringes of Eastern

Christianity, and unlike Chrysostom, we find in Cyril’s pertinent writings not Jerome’s theory, but the old apocryphal tradition concerning the brethren:

Καὶ τίς άν νοοίτο πάλιν ἡ διαφορά τῶν αἰνούντων ἀδελφῶν, καὶ τῶν τοῦ πατρός υἱῶν, οἵ τοῖς προσκυνοῦσι συντετάξονται; Πῶς οὐκ ἀναγκαῖον εἰπεῖν; Ἐπεγράφετο τοίνυν εἰς πατέρα τῶ Χριστῶ καίτοι πατήρ κατά αλὴθειαν οὐκ ὤν ὁ μακάριος Ἰωσήφ. Ἦσαν δέ αὐτῷ υἱοί καὶ θυγατέρες ἐκ πρώτων γάμων.138

And what distinction should be made between the brothers doing the praising and the sons of his father, who will have been arrayed before those prostrating? How is it not necessary to speak? Accordingly, the Blessed Joseph was written to be father to Christ and indeed not being a father in truth. And there were for him sons and daughters from prior nuptials.

Little needs to be said here: Cyril clearly holds to the older view and seems not to account for Jerome’s innovative hermeneutics: a win for the traditional position.139

Yet not all of Cyril’s Greek contemporaries would have agreed. One of Cyril’s opponents in the Nestorian conflict was Theodoret, bishop of Cyrus. Perhaps best known for his ecclesiastical history, Theodoret was a theologian of the Antiochene tradition.

Like Chrysostom before him, his exegesis follows Jerome on the brethren question when the question is raised in Galatians:

138 Glaphyra in Pentateuchum, PG 69:352.

139 Closely connected to the Church of Alexandria, Isidore of Pelusium’s letter on Mary’s virginity (1.18) expounds his Mariology while exhibiting some of the same anti-Jewish rhetoric found in Chrysologus’s own Marian apologetic. He says nothing that indicates his view on the brothers’ identity, in accord with either the apocrypha or Jerome. His addressee seems to have been concerned more with Matthew 1.25 and the meaning of “until,” a passage which need not concern the brothers. PG 78:192-3.

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Ἕτερον δὲ τῶν ἀποστόλων οὐκ εἶδον, εἰ μὴ Ἰάκωβον τὸν ἀδελφὸν τοῦ Κυρίου. Ἀδελφὸς τοῦ Κυρίου ἐκαλεῖτο μὲν, οὐκ ἦν δὲ φύσει. Οὔτε μὴν, ὥς τινες ὑπειλήφασι, τοῦ Ἰωσὴφ υἱὸς ἐτύγχανεν ὢν, ἐκ προτέρων γάμων γενόμενος, ἀλλὰ τοῦ Κλωπᾶ μὲν ἦν υἱὸς, τοῦ δὲ Κυρίου ἀνεψιός· μητέρα γὰρ εἶχε τὴν ἀδελφὴν τῆς τοῦ Κυρίου μητέρος.140

And I did not see any other of the apostles, except James the brother of the Lord. While he was called “brother of the Lord,” he was not by nature. Nor indeed, as some have presumed, was he the son of Joseph born of prior nuptials, but he was the son of Clopas, the Lord’s cousin: For he had as a mother the sister of the Lord’s mother.

So while Theodoret does follow Chrysostom here, his remarks are actually more interesting insofar as they explicitly discount—without mentioning the apocrypha—the older tradition held by contemporaries like Cyril. Further, this excerpt demonstrates that the Hieronymian theory lasted beyond the lives the of Chrysostom and Jerome among

Greek Christians, even if it was not universally accepted in the East.

The Cleaving of East and West

After Theodoret, Lightfoot argues that Jerome’s exegesis essentially drops out of the record in the East, and he claims that apocryphal traditions ultimately became the assumed narratives concerning the brothers: “the Eastern churches continued to distinguish between James the Lord's brother and James the son of Alphaeus. The Greek,

Syrian, and Coptic Calendars assign a separate day to each.”141 A survey of the extant

Greek sources has turned up no evidence that would explicitly contradict Lightfoot. By the same token, however, one also finds little discussion of James or the other brethren as far as their true relation to Jesus is concerned. Thus, Lightfoot may indeed be correct that

140 Commentarius in Omnes Sancti Pauli Epistolas, PG 82:468.

141 Lightfoot, 127.

106 the Hieronymian exegesis never caught on in the East as it did in the West, but even more than that, there appears to be comparatively little interest in the identity of Jesus’s alleged siblings whatsoever. Whereas medieval Latin authors like Bede or Aquinas repeatedly addressed this exegetical puzzle with Jerome’s solution, the Greek authorities seem not to have concerned themselves with the issue in the first place, with a few possible exceptions.142 Moreover, the Western sources displayed a rather toughened attitude toward the apocryphal traditions, and the medieval authors even attributed those traditions to heretics or found the content of those traditions suggestive of fornicatio on

Joseph’s part.143 Of course, this tune has quite a different key from the calculated and ambiguous answer Ambrose gave in the fourth century

It is worth considering that in terms of the main doctrinal points of the theology itself, this distinction between the Epiphanian and Hieronymian traditions makes fairly little difference. From the perspective of the fourth century—had Helvidius, Jerome, or

Epiphanius been able to see into Christianity’s theological trajectory in the coming millennium—they would have mostly noted that the perpetual virginity tradition (and the larger ascetic movement it bolstered) won out in both the Greek and Latin Christianity alike. (Even among some of the chief Protestant Reformers like Luther and Calvin,

142 The ninth century author, Georgios Monachos, entitles James ἀδελφοθέος: “brother of God.” See his Chronicon Breve, PG 110. So too Alexander, author of the Greek text De Inventione Crucis (sixth century?). This epitaph for James itself has precedents in Chrysostom (De Paenitentia, PG 49:343) and Cyril of Alexandria (Expositio in Psalmos, PG 69:173). The intent of this title by the Greek authors remains unclear to me, as it could be read several different ways. In any case, it does seem connected with James’s reputation as the brother of Jesus.

143 Compare the evidence of the fifth century Gelasian Decretal—a Western, systematic condemnation of apocryphal writings—to the situation in the East, where some apocryphal Marian texts played a role in liturgical customs. For a discussion of the Marian apocrypha’s liturgical role, see Shoemaker, “The Marian Apocrypha of Early Christianity,” 499. 107

Mary’s lifelong virginity went essentially unchallenged.) That said, the evidence from the fourth and fifth century also reveals that, while East and West yet agreed in their

Mariology on paper, the theological threads that bound them together were wearing increasingly thin. In the final chapter, we shall more fully consider this and the other deeper implications that emerge from this historical study as a whole. What does it contribute to our knowledge of early Christianity and how does it relate to current discussions that invoke this history? 108

CONCLUSIONS

The careful observer will note that the questions taken up in this study are both timely and timeless in their nature. Consider a recent article from the journal First

Things, a publication devoted to the discussion of “religion and public life.” Though perhaps not especially well-known outside conservative or Catholic circles, First Things publishes some excellent pieces by leading scholars. Having nothing directly to do with

Mary, asceticism, or the brethren of Jesus, this article instead instead addressed the current, increasingly polemical arguments that have broken out in the contemporary

Roman Catholic Church over what to make of Pope Francis and his agenda. To the dismay and sometimes outright anger of many conservative or traditionalist Catholics,

Francis has quite intentionally been moving the Church away from the more rigid theological and disciplinary positions that were protected by the last few pontiffs.

Consequently, a chorus of conservative critics—and not a few First Things contributors—has been heard singing invective upon the papacy in the last few years. So too this particular piece, which challenged recent Vatican rhetoric over the validity of

“paradigm shifts” in Catholic teaching. Indeed, this unabashedly Catholic author balked at the notion that the Church could experience a doctrinal “paradigm shift,” as in his mind it struck at the heart of the central Catholic claim to orthodoxy, continuity, and by extension, authority:

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These are matters of divine revelation, however, and as the Church has long believed and taught, revelation ended with the death of the last apostle. So the evolution of the Church’s understanding of the gospel over the centuries is not a matter of “paradigm shifts,” or ruptures, or radical breaks and new beginnings; it’s a question of what theologians call the development of doctrine. And as Blessed John Henry Newman taught us, authentic doctrinal development is organic and in continuity with “the faith once . . . delivered to the saints” (Jude 1:3). The Catholic Church doesn’t do rupture: that was tried 500 years ago, with catastrophic results for Christian unity and the cause of Christ.144

Obviously, this article showed more than a little rhetorical flare and was not trying to make a particularly precise or measured argument about the history of Christianity.

Nonetheless, I still found that the author was dealing with ideas inherently related to some of the main issues we have examined here: How does religious ideology develop? What is the line between continuity and rupture? Who gets to decide and what criteria must they use? What happens when religious consensus breaks down? If the current controversies swirling in the Roman Catholic Church offer any indication, these questions are just as poignant for religious conflict today as they were in late antiquity.

In this concluding chapter, I suggest several ways in which this study contributes to our understanding of early Christian history, questioning certain ideas that have been proposed by recent as well as older scholarship, and driving some existing arguments a bit further than they have been taken before. As a whole, I do not think I take any especially novel, bold, or otherwise groundbreaking positions that fly in the face of existing trends, causing us to radically rethink the relevant topics or

144 George Weigel, “The Catholic Church Doesn’t Do ‘Paradigm Shifts,’” First Things, January 31, 2018, https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2018/01/the-catholic-church-doesnt-do-paradigm-shifts. 110 current historiographical fashions. That said, in light of the prior chapters, I would like to offer four modest reflections on the story told by the data. These include: i) an argument about the historicity of the perpetual virginity tradition and ancillary traditions concerning Jesus’s siblings, ii) a discussion of the mechanisms of theological dialectic in late antiquity, iii) an explanation for the apparent divergence of

Latin and Greek Christianity on these topics, and iv) a final word about history and the development of doctrine.

The Historicity of Mariological Traditions

In some corners of the standing scholarship, there exists a subtle push to refashion our understanding of Mary, the earliest Mariological traditions, and their place in Christian history. This idea is not especially new. In the nineteenth century, the Anglican bishop and scholar Joseph Lightfoot concluded that the Epiphanian interpretation of the Lord’s brethren took the best account of the historical evidence.

Even on the part of scholars with no apparent confessional allegiance, there seems to be an effort to maximize Mary’s role in the story of early Christianity and its origins.

For example, I would argue that Shoemaker—despite an otherwise fair and thorough treatment of the material overall—occasionally reaches in his efforts to trace the roots of Marian devotion to the first century itself. Particularly in the first few chapters of his monograph, he interprets the gospel material (of Luke and John especially) as laying the “foundation for early Christian devotion to the Virgin Mary” and indicating

“Mary’s active involvement not only in her son’s public ministry but also the larger 111 economy of salvation . . . accomplished through his life and death.”145 In Shoemaker’s retelling, then, early Christian Mariology mainly tells a story of continuity from

Christianity’s origins up through the centuries into the late middle ages.146

To a similar end, some scholars who are pointedly devoted to rehabilitating a historical appreciation of the Christian apocrypha have suggested continuity between

Christianity’s origins in the first century to the later apocryphal traditions, particularly those concerning Mary. In their book on the history of apocryphal-inspired art, David

R. Cartlidge and J. K. Elliott float the idea that contents of the Protevangelium and similar texts are coeval with the earliest beliefs in Christianity:

The many narratives in the apocryphal gospels about the Virgin Mary, in both rhetorical and iconic images, are not simply late additions to the glimpses we gain of her in the New Testament. It cannot have been long after the narratives about Jesus began to form in oral and then written tradition in the church that the church began to extend the history of redemption back into the story of the mother of the Redeemer. The stories which came to make up the Protevangelium and its companion gospels seem to have been part of the life of the church during the first generations.147

145 Shoemaker, Mary in Early Christian Faith and Devotion, 32. Here he also notes that most New Testament scholarship “has tended to discount” that position.

146 Ibid., 22.

147 David R. Cartlidge and J. K. Elliott, Art and the Christian Apocrypha (London; New York: Routledge, 2001), 21, 23.

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They further posit that the author of the Protevangelium may have had sources used by

Matthew and Luke themselves.148 In a similar vein, Shoemaker declares the

Protevangelium “stalwartly orthodox.”149

Contrast such statements with Hunter’s own assessment: “Whatever the precise origins of the Protevangelium are, its doctrine was a novelty and an oddity in second-century.”150 Not to disregard scholars like Elliott or Shoemaker, I would cautiously push back against some of the enthusiasm one finds for connecting the historical dots from the first century to the late second and subsequent centuries. At the same time, I would like to take some of Hunter’s own ideas on this subject a bit further.

In the light of the evidence we have encountered, the case for the sort of continuity suggested above faces a few significant speed-bumps. The first, and in my opinion the most difficult, is that of the New Testament itself. As seen in chapter one, not only were the New Testament authors fairly silent compared to later centuries on the subject of Mary generally (and her perpetual virginity particularly), they handed down several passages that could only be squared with later Mariology in torturous fashion. In fact, it often seems that New Testament authors were writing their accounts

148 Ibid.

149 Shoemaker, Mary in Early Christian Faith and Devotion, 24.

150 Hunter, Marriage, Celibacy, and Heresy in Ancient Christianity, 179. In fairness, Shoemaker elsewhere acknowledges that the Protevangelium was in many regards the sole example of its Mariology from the second and third centuries, and that the Marian cult itself may very well have arisen from heterodox circles distinct from the stream of “proto-orthodoxy.” Still, regardless of whether we can pin the Protevangelium’s theology to that of some “Gnostic” sub-group, the label of “stalwartly orthodox” is too strong for the Protevangelium, in my opinion. See Shoemaker, Mary in Early Christian Faith and Devotion, 22-25. 113 wholly ignorant of, if not directly contrary to, the claims in the Protevangelium and its related traditions that supposedly were percolating at the same time or very soon after the works of the New Testament were written. Put differently, had Matthew, Luke,

John, and their first century contemporaries held to the perpetual virginity as they apparently did to Jesus’s resurrection or his virginal conception by Mary, why did they leave such ambiguous and question-raising statements like those found in Matthew

1.25, Matthew 13.55, John 2.12, or Galatians 1.19, which we have encountered again and again in the patristic writings? One potential answer is that the tradition was already so well know that the New Testament writers simply assumed their immediate audience would be not be confused. That, however, would not explain why they intentionally leave no such ambiguity with other issues, like the virginal conception.

As generations of pro-perpetual virginity exegetes found in antiquity, the historical evidence gleaned from the New Testament is altogether inconducive to placing this tradition near Christianity’s point of origin.

As another argument in a similar direction, I would advance a case Hunter has made repeatedly. Namely, he insists that one in fact finds competing traditions on the table before the time the ascetic vision of Mary became the established, “orthodox” doctrine in the late fourth and early fifth centuries. This study, I think, adds to that thesis. Formulated slightly differently, the present examination illustrates the sheer indeterminacy and lack of consensus surrounding the Marian traditions. Even though

Jerome did not change any prominent bullet points of Christian doctrine with his theory about Jesus’s brethren, the degree to which this new perspective received a 114 decidedly mixed reception should signal to us that many of these traditions had not penetrated the Christian mind as deeply as some have supposed. The cement was still fairly wet, as it were. Couple this with the fact that there were in the first four centuries many Christians who opposed the ascetic idealizations of Mary. It is telling, I think, that a patristic figure as prominent and early as Tertullian maintained the blood relationship of Jesus to his “brethren.” Likewise, Origen quietly and only with the greatest hesitation admits some of the claims of the Protevangelium while distancing himself from the apocryphal text itself and rejecting some of the more docetic ideas found in it (e.g. Mary’s virginity in partu). If the apocryphal traditions of Mary, her virginity, and Jesus’s siblings were truly as early and central to Christian theology as some scholars have suggested, then the hesitance, ignorance, and contradiction of those traditions we find in early patristic sources needs much explaining. I argue that in reality this patristic testimony firmly suggests that a clean line of continuity cannot be traced from the New Testament to the devotion and piety that appears in the middle ages (more to say on the concept of continuity below). If one examines the data of

Marian discourse from the first century to the fifth century (as we have), the lack of consensus is apparent, and it may require us to rethink some of the historical narratives concerning apocryphal traditions.

Arguably, a superior aetiological narrative would take greater account of the simultaneous rise in the tide of Christian asceticism. That is to say, even if these views had been bubbling—maybe even becoming the most popular positions—in different corners of the Christian world for a few centuries, they only became part of a firmly 115 entrenched, mainstream consensus once the new religious culture had need of them. It is not coincidence, then, that the idealization of Mary and her virginity surged at the same moment as the ascetic ideologies well-documented by Peter Brown in The Body and Society.

The Theological Dialectic of Social Circles and Awkward Scriptures

The historical material surrounding this “Hieronymian shift” in the late fourth- early fifth century also reflects some of the features of ecclesiastical culture from this period. Most obviously, it shows the vibrant interconnectivity of the tightly-wound social circles, a factor in the theological and intellectual discourse from this era that has received thorough consideration in work of scholars like David Hunter and

Elizabeth Clark. This particular set of texts highlights the long reach but also the limits of their influence. It also says a great deal about Jerome’s personal status in these social circles.

Consider especially the primary sources from chapters two and three, which contextualized Jerome and shed light upon the immediate reaction to his novel exegesis. We note that none of his contemporaries openly contradicted his idea, despite the uncomfortable fact that it manifestly broke with the reigning Marian tradition. In fact, some of the targets of his criticism like Ambrose and Chrysostom gave voice to Jerome’s interpretation, despite the apparent openness to apocryphal traditions one finds in some of their other works. As both a respected scholar and a scathing adversary, Jerome possessed an undeniable sway even across the cultural- lingual barrier of Greek and Latin. On the other hand, his willingness to break with the 116 established traditions attached to Marian idealization demonstrates the force of his personality and the limited influence of these social circles upon him. So for instance, despite the friend and ally he had in Epiphanius of Salamis, Jerome did not hesitate to openly contradict—and belittle with accusations of deliramenta—a perspective adopted and invoked quite publicly by Epiphanius.

We can interpret this historical picture a number of different ways. On the one hand, it all may simply re-confirm what a very superficial reading would accurately conclude. Namely, Jerome could be a bit of a bully if it suited his agenda. Sainted though he may have been, the Monk of Bethlehem did not hesitate to play the attack- dog if the issue mattered enough to him. If that entailed the excoriation of his allies’ pet traditions, so be it. Again, it is notable that no one—not even his apparent enemies—ever played the same card on Jerome in turn. In this reading, the main point is that Jerome was a unique historical actor possessed of a singular skillset and determined personality.151

A more nuanced appraisal would situate Jerome within the bounds of these social networks. To be sure, Jerome was an exceptional individual actor, but his influence can only be fully appreciated in context. In this framework, the social circles take on a kind of inherent hierarchy. As we have seen, Jerome wielded appreciable influence by virtue of his prestige as a scholar (and no doubt out of a healthy respect for his polemical pen). While his own views trickled down to other elite Christian

151 In her monograph, Megan Hale Williams highlights the unique mixture of paradoxical elements in Jerome’s personality and status. See for instance Williams, 261.

117 intellectuals and leaders, he did not shrink from swiping at the doctrine of those lower down the food-chain. At the same time, there were limits on what Jerome could write.

Unlike later Western authors, Jerome did not explicitly charge the apocryphal accounts and their supporters with heresy or bad morals (a mercy not afforded to Helvidius or

Jovinian, interestingly). Such a charge would have shaken the social connections too much and destabilized his own influence and prestige by moving too aggressively and personally. Fascinatingly, there is evidence that Jerome did not always walk this line successfully, as his words deriding marriage in the tract against Jovinian struck some of his social connections as outrageous and excessive, and they demanded explanation and recantation.152 Thus, despite his ability to manipulate the theological landscape,

Jerome certainly could not dictate or push too hard and directly against the mean point of doctrinal consensus.

Furthermore, our examination of these sources opens another window into late antique doctrine and didactics. Specifically, it presents a case study of what the patristic authorities did when their thorough study of the Bible backfired on their own theological presuppositions: What does a Christian teacher do when Scripture itself becomes the problem? Addressing a similar question in a more narrow context, Lisa

Kaaran Bailey remarks in her study of the Eusebius Gallicanus sermon collection out of late antique Gaul that when preachers of this period broached similarly uncomfortable topics in Scripture and theology, typically they evaded the heart of the

152 Hunter, Marriage, Celibacy, and Heresy in Ancient Christianity, 245-6.

118 issue by appealing either to what she calls the “circle of faith” or to the “rhetoric of paradox.”153 In other words, the preachers would tell the audience, "You just need to have faith.” Or they could remark upon God’s apparent delight in paradoxes that might challenge belief. Jesus is both God and man; Mary was a Virgin and yet gave birth; the

Trinity is three and yet one, etc. In effect, this approach said, “A God who could reconcile these paradoxes must be a glorious and marvelous indeed, so let us not press the matter any further.”

In our sources, however, the apparent contradiction between Scripture and the dominant doctrine evoked rather different rhetorical and logical strategies. Though I have hitherto largely cast Jerome in an unfavorable light, on this point I think he comes off better. While he may have brought his own theological presuppositions to the table, Jerome at least sought better, more doctrinally-coherent justifications for them than were presently available. He said what contemporaries like Ambrose knew but would not acknowledge: The traditional defense of the perpetual virginity rested on an unsound foundation in the apocrypha. So as to shore up the image of the ascetic

Mary, Jerome went back to the Bible itself as he tried to harmonize the perpetual virginity with the greater warp and weft of the canonical texts. While one might question the clarity and persuasiveness of his resulting argument about Christ’s brethren, ad hominem attacks notwithstanding, he put forth a more valiant intellectual effort than what Bailey finds in the Eusebius Gallicanus sermons.

153 Lisa Kaaren Bailey, Christianity’s Quiet Success: The Eusebius Gallicanus Sermon Collection and the Power of the Church in Late Antique Gaul, (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 64, 70-75.

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That said, the avenues of escape mentioned by Bailey may simply not have been available to the champions of the asceticized Mary. The sheer amount of intramural opposition one detects in the likes of Helvidius, Jovinian, and the

Antidicomarianites likely made such punting appeals to faith or aesthetic paradox impossible. Moreover, the challenge faced by Jerome and others was posed by the apparent claims of the Bible itself against their own dogma: It is one thing to appeal to faith when the Bible records incredible miracle stories, poses lofty theological paradoxes, or seemingly contradicts itself on narrative details. It is entirely different when its own accounts challenge your abstracted idea, which it seems not to uphold elsewhere.

The Latin West Parts Ways with the Greek East

Sparked by Jerome, the interesting rupture of the Eastern and Western Marian traditions begs further comment. That they split has been shown easily enough, but why the split happened at all is a more intriguing issue. At root, the cause seems to be the maturing differences in their respective ecclesiastical cultures in the post-Nicaean world. By the late fourth century, a dissimilar set of impulses animated the way in which the Greek East and Latin West remembered Mary and the role she played in their respective theologies.

Not the least significant factor, asceticism itself had taken on a somewhat different meaning for East and West. As Peter Brown puts it,

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By the end of the fourth century, for the first time in the history of the Early Church, the distant, Latin-speaking provinces of the West— Africa, Italy, and Gaul—came into their own. It was the age of Ambrose, of Jerome, and, a little later, of the great Augustine. Turning to the West we will find a very different world. . . . In Milan, Rome, and Carthage, the relation of the Catholic church to the society around it was notably different from that which had prevailed in Egypt, Cappadocia, Antioch, and Syria. The structures of Western society forced very different social problems on the leaders of the Catholic church. . . . Two astonishingly creative generations in the Christianity of the Latin West ensure that the preoccupations of the Desert Fathers, of Gregory of Nyssa, of Chrysostom, and of Ephraim the Syrian always seem to speak to us from across a great gulf. . . 154

For Brown, the Eastern church’s ascetic ethic represented an almost eschatological critique and rejection of entrenched social and communal conventions linked to marriage, childbirth, death, family, and the polis. The perceived work of Christ and his kingdom freed the Christian from the otherwise adamantine grip of these conventions.

In the Latin world, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, and their heirs played the ascetic game toward rather different teloi: preservation of ecclesiastical hierarchy, ceremonial purity, the enforcement of cultural frontiers, and the war against concupiscence. 155

This is all to say that the ascetic impulse took the West in its own direction, and I would argue that we see this manifested in the discussions of Mary. Recall that Jerome explicitly claimed that his rendition of Joseph as a virgin was a more fitting one compared to that of the apocrypha. That assertion echoes some of the same notes of cultural and theological dissonance heard in the ways East and West embraced asceticism itself. The apocryphal Joseph, an aged father of several children already by

154 Brown, 337-8.

155 Cf. The last three chapters in The Body and Society. 121 the time he meets Mary, posed no real threat to the Eastern conception of asceticism and its purpose. That particular image of Jesus’s adopted father, however, fit in far less comfortably amid the ideals of Western asceticism, which put more of a premium on virginity in and of itself.

Another explanation for the parting of ways lies in historical accident. Namely, most of the apocryphal traditions emerged from (and then were occasionally embraced in) the East rather than the West. For example, it is probably not a coincidence that

Origen had already heard of the Protevangelium of James and its claims about Mary whereas his Western near-contemporary Tertullian shows no clear awareness of that program whatsoever in his writings. After all, the stories of the Protevangelium and similar texts were known mainly in Greek. The communities that produced the

Protevangelium and related texts were predominantly Eastern. In contrast, the Latin world was more distant from the apocryphal point of origin and had not yet, as Brown says above, come into its own. As a result, the apocryphal Marian stories may simply not have had the same opportunity to shape Western thought by the late fourth century.

From yet another angle, the divergence of East and West on this subject owes something to the form taken by Western Latin ecclesiastical culture. To paint in admittedly broad brush-strokes, there had always existed deep-seated discrepancies between Greek and Latin intellectual culture going back well into the classical era. To some extent, those distinctions are visible in the languages themselves as well as their respective literatures. Despite their apparent similarities in syntax and grammatical categories, classical Greek is by far the more fluid of the two where classical Latin has 122 a much more rigid sense of grammatical construction. One could also compare Plato’s highly colorful and imaginative Republic to Cicero’s far more pragmatic—a very

Roman value—work of the same title. Vergil depicts Aeneas as man very much bound by a sense of divine calling and pietas (his quintessential quality) utterly foreign to the far more mercenary heroes of Homer. Et cetera.

I would argue that some of these same cultural idiosyncrasies still colored East and West in the fourth century, and by extension, their respective versions of

Christianity. As Christianity became entrenched as the empire’s dominant religion in the wake of Constantine, it naturally evoked a greater need for standardization and regularization in the theological realm.156 (Again, I think it is not an accident that the canon of Scripture became formalized and cemented in this era.) While not wholly absent in the East, that struggle for standardization seems to have more often characterized the Latin fathers—thus the vigor with which Jerome and Augustine prosecuted non-canonical texts. For them, in a world where the doctrinal categories were necessarily becoming more rigid, reasonable Christians could no longer permit the apocrypha to have a place in the discussion.

This difference in theological temperament also shows up in the long-term trajectories of the Greek and Latin churches. It is curious that the medieval Latin sources continuously took up the contentious issue of the Lord’s brethren for centuries after Jerome effectively settled the matter in that tradition, while the Greek authorities

156 Caroline Humfress, for instance, argues that the categorization of orthodoxy and heresy underwent significant formation once Christianity became more integrated into the empire as ecclesiastical figures applied legal techniques to theological problems. Caroline Humfress, Orthodoxy and the Courts in Late Antiquity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 123 displayed no comparable concern with the issue—despite the fact that both East and

West had ultimately settled on the same place concerning Mary’s virginity itself.

Arguably, this difference in concern and emphasis reflects the distinct theological and intellectual cultures that developed. Generally, the Latin tradition seems to have had a litigious urgency in its more painstakingly precise and systematic approach to theology, whereas the Greek tradition more easily tolerated mystery, ambiguity, and irregularity. In other words, Western Christianity felt that the devil was quite literally in the details (like the evidence for Mary’s perpetual virginity), its Eastern counterpart had a more relaxed outlook. To some degree, these differences in theological and intellectual attitudes still appear in the gaps between Western Catholic-Protestant theology and that of Eastern Orthodoxy. The dissimilar approaches specifically regarding the Lord’s brethren—a topic which I earlier likened to a radioactive marker in the bloodstream—trace out developing, increasingly-distinct structures in Christian thought and culture in late antiquity. At the hazard of offering a grossly teleological reading, one finds it difficult to read these sources and not at least be reminded of the formal schism that took place between these traditions in the eleventh century. While that outcome was certainly not inevitable, some of the same structural forces that led to the schism may have already been at work as early as the fourth century.

A Final Thought on the Development of Doctrine

To close, I submit a final reflection, spurred by the claims found in the First

Things article that opened this concluding section. Recall that the author there denied the presence of paradigm shifts in the development of Christian doctrine. Citing the 124 thought of the famous scholar and cardinal, John Henry Newman, who pioneered this reading of ecclesiastical history, the article argued that the authentic Christian tradition only develops organically, in natural continuity with the past, and without rupture. If one reads the history of any institution or ideology through its widest possible lens—in this case, the broad arc of two thousand years—it is quite easy and perhaps even reasonable to emphasize continuity; zoom out far enough and the graph becomes a smooth curve or even a straight line, to use a mathematical illustration. If we look more closely, however, examining maybe just a few centuries, then the graph changes.

Squiggles and jagged edges appear. The intractable smoothness vanishes. Here the development is much more like what biologists call punctuated equilibrium in evolution: rapid bursts of change in a relatively short period. In theology, we might justifiably call these paradigm shifts.

Even if he had arrived at the same conclusion, Jerome completely altered some of the underlying logic and exegesis used to defend the perpetual virginity. Yes, the theological truck still drove and otherwise looked the same on the outside, but it contained a completely refitted engine, running on a new kind of fuel with radically different mechanical principles. After all, it now needed to carry much heavier ideological freight than before. This fourth century change in Mariology wrought by

Jerome was nothing if not a rupture with an established stream of thought (even if, as I said before, that stream of thought was only just becoming entrenched as orthodoxy).

“Rupture” seems to be how his ideas struck relatively like-minded contemporaries, given how awkwardly some of them danced around the issue. Their hesitation should 125 not surprise us. For two centuries, if one believed in the perpetual virginity, one concomitantly endorsed the tale told in the apocrypha about Jesus’s siblings having come from a different mother. Indeed, the latter was only a matter of interest because of the former. When Jerome fired off his novel exegesis, he was essentially scrapping two centuries of tradition.

This is all to say that, especially in the classically agonistic culture of the ancient world, the development of doctrine would not have felt like smooth, osmotic transition or evolution. In both the case of asceticism generally and the idealized Mary specifically, there were conservatives and traditionalists who found the new, ascendant ideas somewhere on the spectrum of awkward at best and heretically unpalatable at worst. This dynamic, I argue, repeats itself frequently not only in religious history but in other long-lived ideologies and cultural totems as well. When inspected more closely, all sorts of traditions, trends, consensuses, fashions, philosophies, and ideas rarely exhibit seamless and uncontested change through time, since this dialectic of development is usually hostage to the cruder forces and pressures of the moment. This,

I suppose, holds true in our time just as much as Jerome’s. And while perhaps a less aesthetically-pleasing view of the world, it certainly makes for a far more interesting story. 126

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Aland, Kurt, Barbara Aland, Matthew Black, Carlo M. Martini, Bruce M. Metzger, and Allen Wikgren, eds. The Greek New Testament. 3rd ed. Stuttgart: Biblia-Druck GmbH Stuttgart, 1998.

Alexander Monachus. De Inventione Crucis. PG 87/3:4015-4094.

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