Mary, Eve, And The Ark

I recently had an exchange with a Roman Catholic about the sinlessness of Mary. Here's a portion of the discussion that some of you may find helpful, since it makes some points that aren't often made:

You write:

"Notice it includes by example, and this dogma of which you are an opponent is rooted largely in the typology of Mary as the new Eve and the Ark of the Covenant. I hope you will post what some of the authors you quote have to say about the antiquity of this theology."

You haven't explained how either concept, the New Eve concept or the ark as a type of Mary concept, logically leads one to the conclusion that Mary was sinless. Not only does neither concept logically lead one to your conclusion, but some of the fathers I cited advocate such concepts while referring to Mary as a sinner. Tertullian, for instance, refers to Mary as a New Eve (On The Flesh Of Christ, 17) in the same document in which he refers to her unbelief and other sins (On The Flesh Of Christ, 7).

There's no need for any New Testament figure to be foreshadowed by the ark of the covenant. And even if one were to be foreshadowed, the individual wouldn't have to be sinless. A lot of objects mentioned in the Old Testament are pure or holy in some sense. We don't conclude that there must be some sinless individual in the New Testament era who parallels each one of those objects.

And even if we decided, unreasonably, that we must find such a parallel, why conclude that the New Testament individual involved is Mary? Why not Jesus? Or why not somebody else? Mary can be said to have carried Jesus in her womb, as the ark carried the word of God, but then we would be defining the word of God differently in each case. Why make such a parallel, then? Must there be a parallel in Mary's life for every aspect of the Old Testament ark? Since the ark was stolen by the enemies of God for a while, for example, must the same occur with Mary? How do you know what to parallel and what not to parallel? And Mary wasn't the only entity to carry Jesus in some sense. The cross carried Him. Joseph of Arimathea, or more specifically the men who worked for him, carried Jesus. So did Joseph's tomb. Why can't those objects or individuals be the parallel to the ark? As some of the leading Roman Catholic and Protestant scholars in the world concluded in their study of Mary:

"However, in our judgment there is no convincing evidence that Luke specifically identified Mary with the symbolism of the Daughter of Zion or the Ark of the Covenant." (Raymond Brown, et al., Mary In The New Testament [Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1978], p. 134)

The earliest ark parallels among the church fathers identify Jesus or something else, not Mary, as the parallel to the ark (Irenaeus, Fragments From The Lost Writings Of Irenaeus, 48; Clement of Alexandria, The Stromata, 5:6; Tertullian, The Chaplet, 9; Hippolytus, On Daniel, 2:6; etc.). The earliest patristic interpreter of Revelation 11:19 doesn't refer to Mary as the ark (Victorinus, Commentary On The Apocalypse Of The Blessed John, 11:19).

I would add that passages like John 13:10 and Hebrews 3:1 refer to individuals as "clean", "holy", etc. without suggesting that they're sinless throughout their lives. Even if we were to assume that Mary is to be paralleled to the ark, and were to assume that she's to have some quality such as purity or holiness in that context, it wouldn't follow that she was sinless throughout her life.

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