In a religious context, a dogma is something you must believe; a requirement for admittance to a church or group. Essentially, if you didn’t believe what the group taught, why join? In this case, these dogmas are what the Catholic and Orthodox churches teach about the Virgin Mary, Jesus’s mother. If you are Catholic or Orthodox (and wish to remain so), you can’t deny these 4 doctrines.

Immaculate Conception

“We declare, pronounce and define that the doctrine which asserts that the Blessed Virgin Mary, from the first moment of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege of almighty God, and in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, Saviour of the human race, was preserved free from every stain of original sin is a doctrine revealed by God and, for this reason, must be firmly and constantly believed by all the faithful,” said Blessed Pope Pius IX, a major player in the first Vatican Council. This statement is, according to itself, binding on all the Catholic faithful. Though it’s not just Catholics that are held to this belief. Even Lutherans are meant to hold to this dogma.

“God has formed the soul and body of the Virgin Mary full of the Holy Spirit, so that she is without all sins, for she has conceived and borne the Lord Jesus,” declared Martin Luther, the chief protestant theologian of the sixteenth century. Luther, who himself was not Catholic or Orthodox, ascribes sinlessness to Mary from her conception, thus making her conception “immaculate.” She was, according to Luther, free from the stain of original sin, the first bite of the forbidden fruit that Adam has imparted on us.

While that’s all well and good, just because Martin Luther said something doesn’t mean you should believe it. So why should you believe it?

In Luke 1:28, the Angel Gabriel says to Mary, “Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee!” The passage is also often translated as “Hail, highly favored one! The Lord is with you.” The Greek word used for “full of grace” is kecharitomene, which is rather difficult to translate. The root word, cheritoo, means “to endow with grace.” However, the word is in a tense unique to Greek, the “perfect” tense. According to New Testament Greek for Beginners (pg. 187), “the Greek perfect tense denotes the present state resultant upon a past action.” In the passage, therefore, the Angel is not saying that Mary is now full of grace, but is already full of grace before the Angel came to Mary.

That answer leaves three more questions. Who endowed the grace? What does the grace do? When was she endowed with grace?

St. Peter calls God “the God of all grace.” If Mary was endowed with grace, and God is the God of all grace, then the grace Mary possessed was endowed from God.

And God’s grace is provided to allow us to avoid sin. “For sin shall no longer be your master, because you are not under the law, but under grace!” This passage shows us that it is by God’s grace if we do not sin, not of ourselves. This has been the typical Christian conception since St. Augustine, the famous philosopher-Saint, who is venerated in all Christian denominations who venerate Saints.

Augustine argues that no good deed that you did was really your own. Since God is goodness and morality, you are, by grace and through God, performing a good deed. It is not your own.

The only remaining question is when was Mary endowed with this grace? It was obviously before the arrival of the angel Gabriel, but when exactly?

This is difficult to know for sure. All we have to go on is the most fitting answer, not necessarily something set in stone like the other evidence.

But, as per usual, the answer to the question lies in the identity of Jesus.

If Jesus is the new covenant (as he tells us consistently), then Mary must be his ark. The previous ark of the covenant was glorious. Covered in gold and cherubim, it was “God’s footstool,” so to speak.

God’s new covenant is perfect, more so than the first. This covenant is everlasting, because Jesus’s blood is “the blood of the eternal covenant.” (Hebrews 13:20).

If the new covenant is perfect, then so must the ark be to house its glory. If the first ark were so glorious, how much more glorious would the second be?

Ask yourself; what would suit God’s new and perfect covenant better? Would not the stain of original sin lessen its glory?

So in summary, Mary was full of God’s grace, the grace that leads people away from sin. This grace was present before the arrival of the angel Gabriel, and it is only fitting that Mary be sinless from conception, free from the apple from which Eve ate.

Mother of God

Mary is called “The Mother of God” because she bore Jesus, “[our] Lord and [our] God” (John 20:28). If she was the mother of Jesus, and Jesus is God, Mary is, therefore, the mother of God.

To say that Mary is the “Mother of God” is to affirm Christ’s dual nature and divinity. “Truly God and truly Man, [and] co-essential with the Father according to the Godhead, the Self-same co-essential with us according to the Manhood,” as is affirmed by the council of Chalcedon, a fifth-century A.D. ecumenical decision-making body.

One may object to the usage, saying that Mary only gave birth to the human nature of Christ, and not his divinity. This however is contradicted by two notions; Christ’s oneness in natures (fully God, fully Man) and the definition of birth itself.

To say that Mary only gave birth to the human nature of Christ denies the hypostatic union; the complete unity of his dual natures, committing the heresy of Nestorianism. If Mary can give birth to Jesus, but only to his human nature, there can be no union, as they would’ve had to have been separate at some point during His incarnation. Furthermore, it would be silly to deny that Mary did not give birth to both natures. We humans, after all, are born with a spirit that neither of our parents created. Are our mothers and fathers not truly our parents? And along this strain of reason lies an even sillier and graver heresy, that God is not Jesus’s Father. He only, after all, gave Christ his divinity. Is he therefore not Jesus’s Father?

Jesus was the God-Man from conception by the Holy Spirit and was the God-Man after his birth. He did not, suddenly and momentarily, stop being the God-Man as he passed from Mary. But to be a mother does not mean just to give birth, but to nurture and to love. If we were to deny that Mary gave birth to Jesus in both his natures, she still nurtured and loved him in both his natures, therefore making her the Mother of God.

John Calvin objected to the term, saying, “I cannot conceal that that title being commonly attributed to the Virgin in sermons is disapproved, and, for my own part I cannot think such language either right, or becoming, or suitable… to call the Virgin Mary the mother of God, can only serve to confirm the ignorant in their superstitions.” By this, he means that the ignorant in the church, who take the phrase to mean that Mary is herself some form of deity, are emboldened by the usage. Though he does not deny the fact that she is the Mother of God, but only the usage of the term. To truly deny that the Virgin Mary is the Mother of God, as aforementioned, you would have to deny several universally accepted notions of Christ and say some very silly things. And no one wants to do that, do they?

Perpetual Virginity

“Christ, our Savior, was the real and natural fruit of Mary’s virginal womb… This was without the cooperation of a man, and she remained a virgin after that… Christ was the only Son of Mary, and the Virgin Mary bore no children besides Him… I am inclined to agree with those who declare that ‘brothers’ really mean ‘cousins’ here, for Holy Writ and the Jews always call cousins brothers,” writes Martin Luther, the foremost protestant reformer.

Today, however, most protestants would disagree.

“Prejudice apart, would not any person of plain common sense suppose, from this account, that these were the children of Joseph and Mary, and the brothers and sisters of our Lord, according to the flesh?” objects Adam Clarke, nineteenth-century English Biblical scholar.

Here he refers to Matthew 13:55, where the people listening to Jesus say, “Is not this the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother called Mary? And are not his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and Judas? And are not all his sisters with us?” Luther responded to this above, remarking that Jews always refer to non-parental relatives as “brothers.” Also, let’s note that these people also believe that Joseph is the real father of Jesus, so they probably aren’t great authorities on Jesus’s family tree.

But the New Testament was written in Greek, not Hebrew. Unlike Hebrew and Aramaic, Greek has a word for cousin. If Matthew the evangelist was really trying to convey that these men were His cousins, he could’ve used the greek word. But he didn’t.

However, there are a number of possible reasons he did this, that don’t include him conceding that Jesus had biological brothers.

Firstly, he could’ve been translating the Hebrew (Aramaic) into the corresponding Greek word exactly. This is done very often throughout the Septuagint, an ancient Greek translation of the Bible from its original Hebrew. For example, Lot is called the brother of Abraham in the book of Genesis, despite being his biological nephew. The apostle Paul also calls all Christians “brothers.” (i.e. Romans 10:1). In this way, it parallels our word brother. People who are completely unrelated very often call each other “bro” and “brother.”

Secondly, these could be the stepbrothers of Jesus, the sons of a possible earlier marriage of Joseph (more on that later).

Thirdly, “brother” could simply mean close friend, as seen above with St. Paul.

It can still refer to biological brothers, though. So are these brothers biological or not?

In order to understand that Mary could not have had more children, we must understand her special role in salvation and how Christ describes the future resurrection.

“For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven,” said Jesus when questioned by the Sadducees. Instead of being married to each other, we will be “married” to Jesus.

Mary was, in a sense, married to the Holy Spirit, to God, just as we will be “married” to Jesus in the resurrection. For Mary to have children other than Jesus would require her to betray that marriage to the Holy Spirit; to adulter God himself! If we take for granted that Mary was sinless as Luther himself agrees, and as previously asserted, this is impossible.

But wasn’t the Blessed Mother still married to Joseph? Would this not still betray her “marriage” to the Holy Spirit? And if it doesn’t betray, why could we not take it a step further to say that she bore additional children, those of Joseph?

Her marriage to Joseph, however, is a different kind of marriage than we are accustomed to.

According to the Protoevengelium of James, “the priest said to Joseph, ‘You have been chosen by lot to take into your keeping [protection] the virgin of the Lord.’” You can see how “protection of the virgin” is not the description of most husbands.

This source, however, is evidently non-historical; a mythic story. Why would we not just toss it out and recognize it as purely fictitious?

Firstly, this source is written about 120 years after Jesus’s death and resurrection, well within the period of reliable oral history.

But the purpose of the writing is not to convey historical truth, but to defend the virgin birth of Jesus and the perpetual virginity thenceforth. I know, I know. That sounds like cherry-picking. “You’re just choosing the verses you like and tossing the ones you don’t.” But were the early fathers of the church just “cherry-picking” also? They recognized that this book was clearly not scripture, yet they also say that Mary was ever-virgin.

“You say that Mary did not continue a virgin: I claim still more that Joseph himself, on account of Mary was a virgin, so that from a virgin wedlock a virgin son was born,” says St. Jerome, fourth-century translator and biblical scholar.

St. Jerome played a large role in the apocryphal work quoted previously being condemned by Pope Innocent I in 405, but he too agrees that the P.J. is right about her perpetual virginity.

Imagine that! The man responsible for the book’s omission from the Bible agrees that it contains the truth about Mary.

The Assumption

The assumption of Mary, to many, may be the most absurd (and scary) doctrine of the Marian dogmas. “Mary never died?” some may ask, or others will proclaim, “that’s not in the bible!” Though both these statements are wrong, it is nonetheless a stumbling block for many protestants.

Firstly, the earliest traditions claim that Mary did, indeed, die (hence there being a tomb for her in Jerusalem). But after this, she was taken by God, her body and soul brought up to be with her Son, whom she most loves.

And to the protestant circles that say there is no evidence of the event, they need only to look at the scriptures.

“A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars; and she was pregnant and she cried out, being in labor and in pain to give birth… She gave birth to a Son, a male, who is going to rule all the nations with a rod of iron; and her Child was caught up to God and to His throne.” wrote John, the “beloved disciple” of Jesus.

This passage contains what is known as polyvalent symbolism, or a coagulation of different meanings all in one vessel. Not all the symbols apply to just one person or thing, however, but multiple (e.x. the seven heads of the beast are said to be both seven mountains (Rev. 17:9) and seven kings (17:10).

So who does the verse refer to?

It is traditionally understood that the “woman clothed with the sun,” who appeared to John as a sign in heaven was simultaneously Israel, The Church, Eve, and Mary the mother of Jesus. Not Israel, nor The Church, nor Eve (well I mean you can say she did in a way, but it’s rather round-a-bout), gave birth to Christ, but Mary alone did this. So it is not difficult to go from this woman, Mary, being in heaven at least spiritually as the passage shows, to being in heaven physically. The evidence for this lies in the strange, early traditions of the Christian church.

The early Christian church had an obsession with the bones of the deceased saints. The bones of St. Peter were collectively venerated in his tomb, under the earth underneath Vatican hill. The site is chalked full of Christian graffiti dating to the early years of the faith.

The same practice occurred with St. Polycarp. According to a second-century letter from the church in Smyrna, “We took up the bones [of St. Polycarp], which are more valuable than precious stones and finer than refined gold, and laid them in a suitable place, where the Lord will permit us to gather ourselves together as we are able, in gladness and joy, and celebrate the birthday of his martyrdom.”

Would the early Christians not be absolutely ecstatic about collecting and venerating the bones of the Virgin Mary? She had the same flesh and blood of the Lord and was the person on earth with the greatest resemblance to him.

But the peculiar thing is that none, throughout the entire Christian tradition, have seriously claimed to possess a relic of her body. Really! No one. If she had died and remained bodily on earth, why has not a soul collected an artifact from her?

The truth remains that the early church remained consistent on this. Everyone who had something to say said just this. That she did not remain on earth but was assumed into heaven.

Take for example the writings of St. Epiphanius, when he says that “[Mary] is like Elijah, who was virgin from his mother’s womb, always remained so, and was taken up, but has not seen death.”

But why was Mary taken up by God? On the surface, it seems unnecessary. Could she not have just been taken spiritually into heaven?

This (and all the dogmas following the immaculate conception) can be answered by the immaculate conception. Mary, after all,

was sinless. And if bodily death is for sinners and by sinners, then Mary need not have remained dead bodily.

Many if not all of these issues could be settled if we learned that not every truth about Jesus, or life, or car insurance, is contained in the Bible. John, “the beloved disciple,” says so himself in The Gospel of John.

“There are also many other things that Jesus said and did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written down.”