- 15 - • In Mary, therefore, there was incarnated, not one of the spirits that had forsaken God, but one that had remained loyal to Him. She did not bear the sin of apostasy, which weighs upon all other terrestrial beings. That is the ‘original sin’ from which she was free. The Catholic doctrine, however, that Mary as a mortal was devoid of all sin, even the most venial, is utterly false. • There is no mortal who has no human failings, as you call them, but these have nothing in common with that sin from which Christ was to redeem the world, namely, the sin of having rebelled against God. That is the real sin. All others are human frailties, from which not even Mary was free. Nevertheless, she remained faithful to God, as did Moses, that high spirit from heaven, in spite of the fact that as a man he transgressed on more than one occasion, for which he was punished by not being allowed to enter the Promised Land. The Catholic Church is also wrong when it maintains that Mary remained a virgin even after the conception and the birth of Christ. She was, thereafter, no more a virgin than any woman who has conceived and given birth to a child. Only before Christ’s conception was she a virgin; it was not intended that the Redeemer should be born of a mother who had conceived and borne other children before him. That is the meaning of the words of Matthew: ‘Behold, the “virgin” shall conceive and bear a son.’ (Matthew 1:23) It is furthermore contrary to the truth when the Catholic Church maintains that no more children were born to Mary after the birth of Christ. On what grounds do you assume that after the birth of their first-born, she was willing to waive her right to be a mother, or that Joseph was ready to waive his rights as a husband and a father? The fact that Christ had brothers and sisters who were born after him in no way detracts from his person, or from his life, his teachings and his work. When the original texts of the New Testament speak in various places of the brothers and sisters of Jesus, they are referring to his own flesh and blood brothers and sisters, and not ‘kinsfolk’ as the Catholics desperately try to prove. Had they been ‘kinsfolk’, they would have been called such, and not ‘brothers and sisters’, or do you suppose that the language of those days had no word to express the concept ‘kinsfolk’? You cannot maintain this seriously, for in the story of the twelve-year-old Jesus in the temple, it is related that his parents looked for him ‘among their “kinsfolk” and acquaintances’, from which you see that where ‘kinsfolk’ is meant, the Evangelist uses the word for ‘kinsfolk’. When the same Evangelist later writes: ‘His mother and his brothers came to him.’ (Luke 8: 19), he is surely not trying to convey the meaning that these were merely kinsmen who came with his mother. Also, the people who reported the arrival of his mother and brothers said to him: ‘Your mother and your “brothers” are outside and want to speak to you.’ Matthew and Mark likewise relate that Christ’s ‘mother’ and his ‘brothers’ had come to see him. Do you believe that all three Evangelists used the word ‘brothers’ when they meant ‘kinsfolk’, in which case that was the word they could and should have used? Any such assumption is foolish. Furthermore, in telling of the appearance of Jesus in his native village of Nazareth, Matthew reports: ‘When he came to his native village Nazareth, he preached in the synagogue there and his words impressed his hearers so deeply that they asked of one another:
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