HistoricalChristian.Faith

Do “till she brought forth” (Matt 1:25) and “firstborn son” (Luke 2:7) imply Mary bore other children?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: weak — both phrases are consistent with the Helvidian reading but do not imply it: “till” (heōs hou) denies a prior union without asserting a later one, and “firstborn” (prōtotokos) is a consecration term for the child that “openeth the womb,” used whether or not others follow. The infancy language settles only the virginal conception; on later children it is silent, lending the reading no positive weight · advanced by Helvidius

Related arguments: the later-children question — see also Were the brethren Mary’s own children? — the natural (Helvidian) reading · Does the two-word Greek “until” (heōs hou) of Matthew 1:25 imply Mary bore other children? · Does Psalm 69:8’s “my mother’s children” prove Mary bore other children? · Does Jesus entrusting Mary to John (John 19:26–27) show she had no other sons?

The claim

From this he endeavours to show that the term first-born is inapplicable except to a person who has brothers, just as he is called only begotten who is the only son of his parents.

— the argument as Jerome states it, Against Helvidius §10.¹ The Helvidian reading of the “brethren of the Lord” — that they were true sons of Joseph and Mary, born after Jesus — rests in part on two phrases from the infancy narratives. Matthew says Joseph “knew her not till she had brought forth” her son (Matthew 1:25); Luke calls Jesus Mary’s firstborn son (Luke 2:7). Helvidius pressed both: a man who “knew her not until” a point in time must have known her afterward, and a “firstborn” presupposes later-born children, as “only-begotten” presupposes none. The question weighed here is not who the brethren were, but whether the infancy language implies that Mary bore them.

Who advances it

Helvidius put the argument into circulation at Rome about 383; his treatise is lost, and the two proof-texts survive only where Jerome quotes them to refute them, so his own words come at second hand (marked ⚠ unverified on his page).² He rested the reading chiefly on Matthew 1:18 (“before they came together”), 1:25 (“knew her not till…”), and the “firstborn” of Luke 2:7. The same two phrases have been the stock Helvidian proof-texts ever since — they are what most modern readers still reach for — which is why they are worth weighing on their own. At the popular level they remain the first texts reached for against the perpetual virginity: the widely-used apologetics site GotQuestions.org argues from Matthew 1:25 that “Joseph and Mary did not have sexual relations until after Jesus was born,” and hence that “Jesus had half-siblings… who were the children of Joseph and Mary,” and the Bible teacher Mike Winger presses the same plain-“until” reading. Both take the word as if it settled the question — an overreach weighed and answered below.³

The evidence for

Taken in their ordinary force, both phrases do read naturally the Helvidian way. “He knew her not till she had brought forth a son” is, in everyday speech, exactly the kind of sentence one uses when the state described does change afterward: to say “he did not eat until she arrived” ordinarily implies that he ate once she came. Helvidius pressed the parallel point from Matthew 1:18 — “the Evangelist would not have said before they came together if they were not to come together, for no one would use the phrase ‘before he dined’ of a man who was not going to dine.”⁴ And “firstborn” in ordinary usage is a relative term: a first child is “first” with respect to later ones, so calling Jesus Mary’s firstborn rather than her only son is, on its face, the natural word to choose if she went on to bear others. The Evangelists picked these words; the burden, the Helvidian urges, lies on the reading that must explain them away. So stated, the argument is not frivolous: the plain sense of the phrases is at least congenial to the Helvidian view, and this is the strongest form of the case.

Adversarial assessment

What holds. Neither phrase excludes the Helvidian reading. “Till” and “firstborn” are both perfectly compatible with Mary having borne later children; nothing in the infancy narratives rules that out, and no argument for perpetual virginity can be built from these verses. Even Jerome’s replies establish only that the phrases need not mean what Helvidius took them to mean, not that they cannot. To that extent the Helvidian is right that the passages do not contradict him.

What is overstated. But the argument claims more than compatibility — it claims that the language implies siblings, and there it fails, because both idioms are demonstrably neutral. (1) “Till” (Greek heōs hou) regularly denies a prior state without asserting its reversal. Scripture says Michal “had no child unto the day of her death” (2 Samuel 6:23) — she plainly bore none afterward; the raven Noah loosed “went forth to and fro, until the waters were dried up” (Genesis 8:7) — it did not then return; and the risen Christ promises, “I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world” (Matthew 28:20) — without ceasing to be present after. Jerome marshalled exactly these parallels against Helvidius.¹ The same parallels answer a sharper, pragmatic form of the objection — the argument from Matthew’s choice of words: that had he meant Mary stayed a virgin he “would have just said ‘he never knew her,’” so that writing instead that Joseph knew her not till she brought forth her son must itself signal that he knew her afterward.³ But this reads a conversational implicature into the phrasing that the biblical idiom does not carry: 2 Samuel could have said Michal “never” bore a child and instead wrote that she had none “unto the day of her death,” yet she bore none after — the bounded phrasing is chosen to fix a terminus (there her death, here the birth that secures the virginal conception of Matthew 1:23), not to hint at what lies beyond it. The word-choice inference thus rests on the very assumption the parallels overturn. (A modern refinement, Eric Svendsen’s, fairly notes that Matthew 1:25 uses the two-word phrase heōs hou, whereas these three parallels render the one-word heōs; but the neutrality survives the distinction, for the two-word phrase too is used with no change of state in contemporary Koine — Septuagint Psalm 72:7, so read on this very verse by Chrysostom — and inside the New Testament at Matthew 18:34. That sub-debate is weighed at “Does the two-word Greek ‘until’ (heōs hou) of Matthew 1:25 imply Mary bore other children?” — assessment: weak.) Matthew’s point is that Jesus was not naturally begotten — the phrase secures the virginal conception (Matthew 1:23) and says nothing about what followed. (2) “Firstborn” (prōtotokos) is not primarily a birth-order comparison but a legal and cultic status: “Every male that openeth the womb shall be called holy to the Lord” (Luke 2:23, citing Exodus 13:2, 12), the child consecrated to God and requiring redemption by sacrifice “whether or not other children followed.” Luke uses the word precisely to set up the presentation in the Temple (Luke 2:22–24), not to number Mary’s offspring; the firstborn was firstborn from the moment of birth, before any question of siblings could arise. That the term carried no implication of later children is shown outside Scripture too: a Jewish grave inscription commemorates a woman who died giving birth to her prōtotokos child — her first was necessarily her last.⁵ Jerome put the grammar tersely: “every only begotten son is a first-born son, but not every first-born is an only begotten.”² A further wrinkle weakens the Matthean leg specifically: “firstborn” in Matthew 1:25 is absent from the earliest manuscripts (it is read in Luke 2:7, whence copyists imported it), so on the critical text Matthew says only “knew her not till she brought forth a son.”⁶

The net. Richard Bauckham — who does not himself hold the Helvidian view — states the upshot from the side least friendly to it: Matthew’s words “cannot be pressed to imply that Joseph and Mary had sexual relations after the birth of Jesus, but even if they could it need not follow that they had children,” and firstborn “in Jewish usage need not” imply later children.⁵ J. B. Lightfoot — the scholar who classified the whole debate and himself favoured the Epiphanian reading — weighs the same two expressions to the same effect: “till she brought forth,” “as appears from the context, is intended simply to show that Jesus was not begotten in the course of nature; and thus, while it denies any previous intercourse with her husband, it neither asserts nor implies any subsequent intercourse,” while the “firstborn” of Luke conveys “not the birth of other children, but the special consecration of this one” — so that “‘firstborn’ does not necessarily suggest ‘later-born,’ any more than ‘son’ suggests ‘daughter.’”⁷ The infancy language is genuinely two-edged: it neither proves the Helvidian reading nor refutes it. Whatever weight the Helvidian view carries must therefore come from elsewhere — above all the plain, unqualified “brethren” of the Gospels — not from “till” and “firstborn.”

Assessment

Weak. As a positive argument that the infancy language implies Mary bore other children, the case does not hold. Both phrases are neutral on the question they are asked to settle: “till” establishes only that there was no union before the birth (the standard force of heōs hou, as Michal, the raven, and “lo, I am with you… till the end” all show), and “firstborn” is a consecration term fixed at birth, applicable to an only child no less than to the eldest of many. The strongest form of the Helvidian reading concedes this and rests instead on the ordinary meaning of “brethren”; the reading is not thereby refuted, but it gains nothing from the infancy proof-texts, which are equally at home in the Epiphanian and Hieronymian accounts. Helvidius’ overreach — treating “before they came together” and “firstborn” as if they demonstrated later children — is flagged on his page; the same overreach recurs in the modern popular case (GotQuestions.org, Mike Winger), which leans on the bare “until” as though it were decisive.³ The phrases are consistent with the Helvidian view; they do not carry it.

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