No Hymen Required: Reconstructing Origen's View on Mary's Virginity
Origen of Alexandria's works contain a seeming contradiction concerning Mary's virginity. He affirms multiple times that Mary remained a virgin after Christ's birth and throughout life, yet one of his homilies on the Gospel of Luke declares that Christ "opened the womb" of h...
Κύριος συγγραφέας: | |
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Τύπος μέσου: | Ηλεκτρονική πηγή Άρθρο |
Γλώσσα: | Αγγλικά |
Έλεγχος διαθεσιμότητας: | HBZ Gateway |
Journals Online & Print: | |
Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
Έκδοση: |
Cambridge Univ. Press
2020
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Στο/Στη: |
Church history
Έτος: 2020, Τόμος: 89, Τεύχος: 2, Σελίδες: 249-267 |
Άλλες λέξεις-κλειδιά: | B
Mariology
B Jerome B Origen B Virginity B Virgin Mary |
Διαθέσιμο Online: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
Σύνοψη: | Origen of Alexandria's works contain a seeming contradiction concerning Mary's virginity. He affirms multiple times that Mary remained a virgin after Christ's birth and throughout life, yet one of his homilies on the Gospel of Luke declares that Christ "opened the womb" of his mother - an action many readers equate with destruction of virginity. How can Origen claim that Mary remained virginal if her hymen tissue was no longer intact? Scholars commonly solve the problem by characterizing his thought as self-contradictory or by concluding that he prioritizes Mary's lack of sexual experience over her loss of physical intactness. This essay resolves the contradiction more fully through attention to divergent models for female genital anatomy that circulated in antiquity. Origen, like most thinkers during and before his time, probably did not believe that female virgins have hymens. For him, the terminology of "closed" and "opened" wombs refers not to virginity but to fertility. Scholarly readers have been misled by certain other authors' uses of this vocabulary and by Jerome's Latin translation of the homily, which draws on a different anatomical model. For Origen, Mary is a virginal mother not in spite of a broken hymen, but without possessing a hymen in the first place. |
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ISSN: | 1755-2613 |
Περιλαμβάνει: | Enthalten in: Church history
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Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1017/S0009640720000657 |