It's common for Roman Catholics and other critics of Protestantism to bring up support among the earliest Protestants for various Marian beliefs that are often rejected by Protestants today, like the perpetual virginity of Mary. Individuals like Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli will be cited in support of her perpetual virginity and other such beliefs about her. While it's true that the earliest Protestants were closer to groups like Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy on Marian issues than modern Protestants are, even the earliest Protestants substantially disagreed with those groups on some Marian issues. See the examples discussed here. And the early Protestants who accepted Mary's perpetual virginity sometimes disagreed with Catholics and other modern advocates of the perpetual virginity of Mary on some issues related to the doctrine, like whether she took a vow of virginity. In the coming days, I'm going to be discussing some late medieval and Reformation sources who were more distant from a traditional Catholic view on the perpetual virginity of Mary. What I want to do in this post is discuss some background issues that I think are helpful in framing the discussion.
People will sometimes say or suggest that nobody before the Reformation denied the perpetual virginity of Mary, that only Helvidius did, that only Tertullian and Helvidius did, or something else of a similar nature. Even among those who argue for some opposition to her perpetual virginity in the patristic era, there's typically nothing said about medieval opposition or opposition during the time of the Reformation. I've written a lot about the Biblical and patristic evidence and have briefly addressed some medieval opposition to her perpetual virginity. You can find an archive of many of our posts discussing the perpetual virginity of Mary here. Keep clicking Older Posts in the lower right of the screen to see more. The Biblical evidence against her perpetual virginity doesn't just include a large number and variety of terms the New Testament authors use, but also a variety of activities the relevant sources are involved in. See this post, for example. I've discussed the evidence that some early extrabiblical sources didn't think Mary was a perpetual virgin, like this post on Hegesippus, this one on Irenaeus, and this one on Tertullian, among other relevant posts. On late patristic and early medieval sources, see here. The evidence suggests that the view that Mary had other children after Jesus was the sole or dominant view during the earliest generations of church history, even though belief in Mary's perpetual virginity apparently became the majority perspective from the fourth century onward.
So, when I discuss late medieval and Reformation sources in the coming days, that isn't the only or primary evidence I'm relying on for my conclusions about the perpetual virginity of Mary. Rather, I'm supplementing the much more important earlier sources with information about later sources who are less significant.
Objecting that my view of the earlier sources is just my interpretation, just my opinion, and so forth isn't an adequate response. An interpretation or opinion can be accompanied by arguments and evidence. And I have provided a large amount of supporting arguments and evidence. It's erroneous to suggest, as Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and other advocates of Mary's perpetual virginity often do, that only something like an infallible church or later church tradition can resolve a disagreement over how to interpret the earliest sources. The interpretations of the earliest sources don't exist in isolation. Rather, they exist alongside arguments and evidence supporting those interpretations. You need to interact with those arguments and interact with that evidence. You can't argue for something like an infallible church or a later tradition we should trust without putting forward arguments and evidence for your interpretation of early sources who allegedly support your conclusions about an infallible church and later tradition. And your interpretations of a supposedly infallible church and later tradition are just that, your interpretations. You can't avoid an appeal to your own interpretations supported by arguments and evidence.
Furthermore, it won't do to object that the earliest Christians supposedly aren't clear enough about Mary's perpetual virginity, didn't comment on the subject enough for us to conclude anything significant, or some such thing. The earliest Christians were in a good position to know what relationship Jesus' brothers and sisters had with him. Even where they didn't say as much as we'd like, they did say some things, and it's very unlikely upfront that everything they said would just happen to be ambiguous, balanced on a knife's edge across the board. In all likelihood, at least some of what they said would lean in one direction or another. As my posts above argue, and as many Catholic and other non-Protestant scholars have acknowledged, the evidence from the New Testament, Josephus, and other relevant early sources favors the conclusion that Mary gave birth to more children after Jesus' birth.
A lot of the arguments against Mary's perpetual virginity are of an implicit nature, and people sometimes object to that fact. They'd prefer explicit arguments, especially arguments of the most explicit type. But preferences aren't necessities. Any probability will do. We all rely on implicit arguments in our everyday lives. We couldn't function without doing so. And advocates of the perpetual virginity of Mary often appeal to implicit argumentation themselves (on her perpetual virginity and on other subjects). It's not as though Mary's perpetual virginity is explicit in Ezekiel 44, but that hasn't kept advocates of her perpetual virginity from appealing to the passage. It's not as though a vow of perpetual virginity is explicit in Luke 1, yet we frequently see advocates of Mary's perpetual virginity appealing to that passage to argue for such a vow. And so on.
My posts in the coming days will be about lesser figures than individuals like Luther and Zwingli. The sources I'll be discussing varied in their prominence in the culture of their day, but they're not equivalents of somebody like Martin Luther or John Calvin. I've cited more prominent figures, including some more prominent than Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin, in my posts about the evidence from earlier eras, linked above. But my upcoming posts on the late medieval and Reformation sources will be about lesser figures.
Since critics of Protestantism often complain about the citation of lesser figures, I want to make some comments on that subject. If you're going to claim that nobody held a particular view during a certain timeframe or in some other context, nobody means nobody. It doesn't take an equivalent of Luther or Zwingli to refute your claim. If you want to move the goalposts partway through the discussion, that's not my problem, and I'm under no obligation to accommodate you. Groups like Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy are swimming in an ocean of forgeries, apocryphal documents, anonymous sources, and the like (the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals, the Donation of Constantine, the Pseudo-Dionysian corpus, appeals to catacomb inscriptions from unknown sources, appeals to manuscript fragments from unknown sources, etc.). Advocates of Mary's perpetual virginity frequently appeal to the Protevangelium Of James, an anonymous and pseudonymous apocryphal document that's highly inaccurate about historical matters. If they're going to complain about the citation of anonymous sources, sources who didn't have much prominence in their day, etc., they need to get the sequoia out of their eye before they object to the speck in a Protestant's eye.
I spend more time studying the Biblical and patristic sources than I do studying sources of the late medieval and Reformation eras. I'm not claiming that the sources I'll be citing are the only ones that could be brought up. If somebody who spends as little time in the late medieval and Reformation sources as I do has come across as many examples of sources like these as I have, I suspect the full number is much larger.
Returning to the issue of citing minor historical figures, anonymous sources in the historical record, and such, let's keep in mind what role such individuals have in the Biblical record (and elsewhere, though I'll focus on the Bible here). Things like God's working through a younger sibling rather than an older one and working through a remnant are big themes in scripture. Think of the accounts of Joseph in Genesis, the individuals God worked through in the book of Judges, Nehemiah, etc. Idolatry was often a problem during the Old Testament era, sometimes involving some majority of the culture, including occasionally a majority of the Israelites. (For other examples of errors on the part of a majority, see 2 Kings 22:8-13 and Nehemiah 8:13-17.) When Elijah said that he was the only one left who was faithful to God (1 Kings 19:14), God responded, "Yet I will leave 7,000 in Israel, all the knees that have not bowed to Baal and every mouth that has not kissed him." (19:18) The fact that Elijah didn't know about those other individuals, and instead referred to himself as the only one left, suggests they weren't prominent individuals. It would have been ridiculous for Elijah to have responded to God by objecting that the 7000 were just a small minority, that they weren't prominent, or that he didn't know their names. God responded to Elijah on his own terms rather than anticipating some further qualified objection Elijah could raise later on, and God thought that it was sufficient to appeal to a small minority of the population, anonymous people who lacked prominence.
Also keep in mind that we're addressing the late medieval and Reformation periods, not some equivalent of modern America. During the timeframe in question, there had been centuries of societal tendencies to develop higher and higher views of Mary, popular ascetic movements, and other relevant cultural factors, often backed by governmental power and threats of punishment up to and including execution, often in forms as bad as being burned at the stake. Even after the Reformation arrived and Protestants had more governmental influence in some areas, a reexamination of the perpetual virginity of Mary wasn't a high priority. The doctrine has some significance in and of itself, such as telling us some significant things about what sort of household environment Jesus grew up in, but there's nothing inherently anti-Protestant about Mary's being a perpetual virgin. The idea takes on more significance when it's associated with larger concepts, like the reliability of certain types of extrabiblical tradition and church infallibility. So, it's not much of a problem from a Protestant standpoint if we find only a smaller rather than larger number of people who were skeptical of the perpetual virginity of Mary or significantly open to questioning it in timeframes like the late medieval era and the years of the Reformation.
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