James and John, not full biological brothers?

The late Roman Catholic scholar John Meier made a good point about the perpetual virginity of Mary that should be brought up more often. What's our initial impression when the terminology that's applied to Jesus is applied to other individuals? When the New Testament refers to James and John, the sons of Zebedee, as brothers, what's our initial impression about their relationship? That they're full biological siblings. Most likely, we retain that initial impression for the rest of our lives, unless we encounter overriding evidence. Terminology is sometimes applied in unusual ways. The term "son" can refer to an adoptive rather than biological relationship, for example, but that doesn't prevent us from recognizing that the biological meaning is more common. The New Testament qualifies Jesus' familial relationships with the virgin birth, but it never qualifies those relationships with something involving perpetual virginity on Mary's part. The absence of any effort to provide such a qualifier by so many authors across so many contexts is significant. My main point here, though, is that advocates of the perpetual virginity of Mary need to provide an overriding justification for interpreting the terminology the way they do. The way we interpret the relationship between James and John is an illustration of that.

What You Really Get Excited About

"I know that some of you are not the least interested in these [religious] things. You have no emotional resonance with what I am saying at all. What you really get excited about is a new CD. Or a new outfit. Or losing five pounds. Or watching a ballgame. Or adding a room to your house. Or getting a new car or computer. To you – children, teenagers, adults – I plead, along with the apostle Paul, 'Wake up, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light' (Ephesians 5:14). Don't be like the person who goes to the Grand Canyon with a little garden shovel in his hand, and on the precipice of that majesty turns his back to the Canyon, kneels down, and digs a little trough with his shovel and shouts, 'Hey, look at this! Look at my trough!'" (John Piper)

How common was opposition to the perpetual virginity of Mary in the late patristic and early medieval eras?

I've said a lot over the years about early evidence against the perpetual virginity of Mary, in the New Testament and in early extrabiblical sources. See my recent post on Irenaeus, for example. What I want to do in this post is say more about the later sources. Helvidius will often be mentioned without much or any discussion of others, but he was far from an isolated individual on the subject in his day or in the centuries that followed.