Response to Jerome's Response to Helvidius – Part 10

Jerome wrote a response to Helvidius regarding the virginity of Mary. This post is the tenth in a series of responses to what Jerome wrote.

Jerome wrote:

If you are so contentious, your own thoughts shall now prove your master. You must not allow any time to intervene between delivery and intercourse. You must not say, “If a woman conceive seed and bear a man child, then she shall be unclean seven days; as in the days of the separation of her sickness shall she be unclean. And in the eighth day the flesh of his foreskin shall be circumcised. And she shall continue in the blood of her purifying three and thirty days. She shall touch no hallowed thing,” and so forth. On your showing, Joseph must at once approach, her, and be subject to Jeremiah’s reproof, “They were as mad horses in respect of women: every one neighed after his neighbour’s wife.” Otherwise, how can the words stand good, “he knew her not, till she had brought forth a son,” if he waits after the time of another purifying has expired, if his lust must brook another long delay of forty days? The mother must go unpurged from her child-bed taint, and the wailing infant be attended to by the midwives, while the husband clasps his exhausted wife. Thus for sooth must their married life begin so that the Evangelist may not be convicted of falsehood. But God forbid that we should think thus of the Saviour’s mother and of a just man. No midwife assisted at His birth; no women’s officiousness intervened. With her own hands she wrapped Him in the swaddling clothes, herself both mother and midwife, “and laid Him,” we are told, “in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn”; a statement which, on the one hand, refutes the ravings of the apocryphal accounts, for Mary herself wrapped Him in the swaddling clothes, and on the other makes the voluptuous notion of Helvidius impossible, since there was no place suitable for married intercourse in the inn.

As mentioned in my previous post, we ought to assume that Joseph knew his wife after Jesus’ birth. That does not imply that with mathematical precision, Joseph began making love the same moment that the placenta of Christ left Mary. On the contrary, I think it is better to say that such knowledge began either in Egypt or upon their return to Nazareth, in either case after the days of Mary’s purification were complete.

I think Jerome makes a good point about the absence of a midwife. This point, incidentally, rebukes the fantastical account in the heretical forgery, known as the Protoevangelium of James. It’s hard to say how it relates to Helvidius, since Jerome does not provide Helvidius’ argument here. Presumably, Jerome is suggesting that someone else would have needed to watch Jesus while Joseph and Mary made love, and that there was no one else, not even a midwife.

As noted above, it’s sufficient to say that they may have made Jesus’ brethren and sisters upon their return to Nazareth, or perhaps even in Egypt.

Nevertheless, it’s not hard to tell that Jerome is out of familiar water when he comes to speculating on places where married people can become one flesh, or the contexts in which that can happen. I doubt Mary was in any mood for it, and God’s law regarding seems to forbid it, but to say it is “impossible” is to demonstrate one’s lack of experiential familiarity with human heterosexual activity. To put it differently, this is not a comment one would expect from Augustine.

-TurretinFan