{"collection":"chr","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/chr/ecf/105/1050577.htm","path":"chr/ecf/105/1050577.htm","source_url":"https://sacred-texts.com/chr/ecf/105/1050577.htm","text":"Chapter 12 [XI.]\u2014Marriage Does Not Cancel a Mutual Vow of Continence; There Was True Wedlock Between Mary and Joseph; In What Way Joseph Was the Father of Christ.\nBut God forbid that the nuptial bond should be regarded as broken between those who have by mutual consent agreed to observe a perpetual abstinence from the use of carnal concupiscence. Nay, it will be only a firmer one, whereby they have exchanged pledges together, which will have to be kept by an especial endearment and concord,\u2014not by the voluptuous links of bodies, but by the voluntary affections of souls. For it was not deceitfully that the angel said to Joseph: \u201cFear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife.\u201d 2095 She is called his wife because of her first troth of betrothal, although he had had no carnal knowledge of her, nor was destined to have. The designation of wife was neither destroyed nor made untrue, where there never had been, nor was meant to be, any carnal connection. That virgin wife was rather a holier and more wonderful joy to her husband because of her very pregnancy without man, with disparity as to the child that was born, without disparity in the faith they cherished. And because of this conjugal fidelity they are both deservedly called \u201cparents\u201d 2096 of Christ (not only she as His mother, but he as His father, as being her husband), both having been such in mind and purpose, though not in the flesh. But while the one was His father in purpose only, and the other His mother in the flesh also, they were both of them, for all that, only the parents of His humility, not of His sublimity; of His weakness, not of His divinity. p. 269 For the Gospel does not lie, in which one reads, \u201cBoth His father and His mother marvelled at those things which were spoken about Him;\u201d 2097 and in another passage, \u201cNow His parents went to Jerusalem every year;\u201d 2098 and again a little afterwards, \u201cHis mother said unto Him, Son, why hast Thou thus dealt with us? Behold, Thy father and I have sought Thee sorrowing.\u201d 2099 In order, however, that He might show them that He had a Father besides them, who begat Him without a mother, He said to them in answer: \u201cHow is it that ye sought me? Wist ye not that I must be about my Father\u2019s business?\u201d 2100 Furthermore, lest He should be thought to have repudiated them as His parents by what He had just said, the evangelist at once added: \u201cAnd they understood not the saying which He spake unto them; and He went down with them, and came to Nazareth, and was subject unto them.\u201d 2101 Subject to whom but His parents? And who was the subject but Jesus Christ, \u201cwho, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God\u201d? 2102 And wherefore subject to them,who were far beneath the form of God, except that \u201cHe emptied Himself, and took upon Him the form of a servant,\u201d 2103 \u2014the form in which His parents lived? Now, since she bore Him without his engendering, they could not surely have both been His parents, of that form of a servant, if they had not been conjugally united, though without carnal connection. Accordingly the genealogical series (although both parents of Christ are mentioned together in the succession) 2104 had to be extended, as it is in fact, 2105 down rather to Joseph\u2019s name, that no wrong might be done, in the case of this marriage, to the male, and indeed the stronger sex, while at the same time there was nothing detrimental to truth, since Joseph, no less than Mary, was of the seed of David, 2106 of whom it was foretold that Christ should come.\nLuke ii. 33. So the Vulgate as well as the best Greek texts, instead of the \u201cAnd Joseph and His mother marvelled,\u201d etc., of the common text.\n269:2098 269:2099 269:2100 269:2101 269:2102 269:2103 269:2104 269:2105\nCompare Luke 3:23, Matt. 1:16.\n269:2106","title":"Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Vol. V: On Marriage and C...","type":"page"}