The Diversity Of Views Of The Perpetual Virginity Of Mary In The Late Medieval And Reformation Eras (Part 2)

People have taken a lot of different positions on the perpetual virginity of Mary. A wide variety of views is found in the historical record during the timeframes I'm addressing. You could believe that Mary didn't have sexual intercourse, but reject her virginity in partu. You could believe in her perpetual virginity, yet not think that rejecting it makes somebody a non-Christian. You could affirm her perpetual virginity or oppose it to different degrees. You could be agnostic on the subject. And so on.

This post will discuss some examples of individuals who opposed the perpetual virginity of Mary. The next post will address sources who took other positions that are significant in one way or another.

Epiphanius' Ignorance Of An Assumption Of Mary

Cameron Bertuzzi recently hosted a three-hour video about the Assumption of Mary, with Ethan Muse, Suan Sonna, and William Albrecht as guests. And Suan posted a thirteen-minute clip from the program on his own YouTube channel, a clip criticizing Gavin Ortlund's work on the Assumption. My focus here will be on some material in the church father Epiphanius, which received a lot of attention in the original video and is the main topic of the clip Suan highlighted. I'll briefly comment on some other topics as well, but I'll mostly be discussing Epiphanius.

More About The Arguments For Pauline And Petrine Papacies

The Other Paul and Geoff Robinson just produced a good response to the video by Trent Horn and Suan Sonna on a Pauline papacy.

Since Luke 22, John 21, and Jesus' singling out of Peter in the Garden of Gethsemane have been getting a lot of attention, I want to point out how unusually weak Peter is in the gospel accounts leading up to Jesus' death. While all of the disciples are referred to as being unfaithful to Jesus in that context, and Judas is obviously the worst of them, the degree to which Peter falters is often underestimated. As I said in my initial response to the video by Trent and Suan, Peter boasted louder and fell harder. Before we even get to his triple denial of Christ:

Apostolic Primacies

Trent Horn and Suan Sonna recently produced a video responding to a parody of Catholic arguments for the papacy that I posted about a decade ago. The list within that post originated about a decade earlier. It's a little over twenty years old now. As I explain in the introduction to the 2012 post linked above, I don't think any of the items on my list or any combination of them suggests that Paul was a Pope. And, to address an issue Suan raises near the beginning of the video, yes, some of the items on the list weren't intended to be the best arguments that could be made for a Pauline papacy. The introduction to my 2012 article mentions the example of citing Acts 19:11-12 to parallel a Catholic appeal to Acts 5:15. I wouldn't include that Acts 19 passage if I were just trying to produce the best arguments for a Pauline papacy. Even the points I made that I considered more significant weren't presented in the best potential form they could take. I was paralleling a list at a Catholic web site, which was similarly brief. That list included 50 items, so I included 51 in mine, as a parody of the shallowness of the arguments that are often put forward for a papacy (51 being better than 50).