§ 81. THE WOKSHIP OF MARY. MARIOLOGT. 412
occasion he put her on a level with other female disciples, and made the carnal consanguinity subordinate to the spiritual kinship of the doing of the will of God,' The well-meant and in itself quite innocent benediction of an unknown woman upon His mother He did not indeed censure, but He corrected it with a benediction upon all who hear the word of God aud keep it, and thus forestalled the deification of Mary l)y confining the ascription within the bounds of moderation/
In striking contrast with this healthful and sober represenlaiiuu of Mary in the canonical Gospels are the numerous apocryphal Gospels of the third and fourth centuries, which decorated the life of Mary with fantastic fables and wonders of every kind, and thus furnished a pseudo-historical foundation for an uuscriptural Mariology and Mariolatry.' The Catholic church, it is true, condemned this apocryphal literature so early as the Decrees of Gelasius ; ' yet many of the fabulous elements of it — such as the names of the parents of
sense of His higher wonder-working position, whence He repelled the interference of feminine weakness, which here met Him even in His mother."
' Matt. xii. 46-50.
'^ Luke xi. 27, 28. The nivoilvye is emphatic, utique, but also corrective, ?m.; vera; so here, and Rom. ix. 20; x. 18. Luther inexactly translates simply, ja , the English Bible more correctly, ?/ea rather. Meyer ad loc. : " Jesus does not forbid the congratulation of His mother, but He applies the predicate i.i.aKapios not, aa the woman had done, to ."Mi outward relation, but to an ethical category, in which any one might stand, so that the congratulation of His mother as mother is thereby corrected." Van Oosterzee strikingly remarks in his Commentary on Luke (in Lange's Bibelwerk) : " The congratulating woman is the prototype of all those, who in all times have honored the mother of the Lord above her Sou, and beeu guilty of Mariolatry. If the Lord even here disapproves this honoring of His mother, where it moves in so modest hmits, what judgment would He pass upon the new dogma of Pio Nouo, on which a whole new Mariology is built ? "
^ Here belongs, above all, the Protevangelium Jacobi Minoris, which dates from the third or fourth century ; then the Evangelium de nativitate S. Mariae ; the Historia de nativitate Mariae et de infantia Salvatoris ; the Evangelium infantias Serva. toris ; the Evang. Josephi fabri lignarii. Comp. Thilo's Cod. Apocryphus N. Ti. Lips. 1832, and the convenient digest of this apocryphal history in R. Hofmann'i Leben Jesu nach den Apocryphen. Leipz. 1851, pp. 5-117.
* Decret. de Ubris apocr. Coll. Cone. ap. Harduin, tom. ii. p. .941. Comp. Popfl Innocent I., Ep. ad Exuperium Tolosanum, c. 7, where the Protevang. Jacobi is re j acted and condemned.
414 TiiiitJ) PKRion. A.T). 311-590.
Mary, Joacliim (instead of Eli, as in Luke iii. 23) and Anna,' the birth of Mary in a cave, her education in the temple, and lier mock marriage with the aged Joseph' — passed into the Catholic tradition.
Tlie development of the orthodox Catholic Mariology and Mariolatry originated as early as the second centuiy in an allegorical interpretation of the history of the fall, and in the assumption of an antithetic relation of Eve and Mary, according to which the mother of Christ occupies the same position in the history of redemption as the wife of Adam in the history of sin and death. ^ This idea, so fruitful of many errors, is ingenious, but unscriptural, and an apocryphal substitute for the true Pauline doctrine of an antitypical parallel between the first and second Adam.^ It tends to substitute Mary for Christ. Justin Martyr, Irenseus, and Tertullian, are the first who present Mary as the counterpart of Eve, as a " mother of all living " in the higher, spiritual sense, and teach that she became tlirough her obedience the mediate or instrumental cause of the blessings of redemption to the human race, as Eve by her disobedience was the fountain of sin and death." Irenaius
' Epipliaiiius also, Ilper. 78, no. 17, gives tlie parents of Jesiis these names. To reconcile this with Luke iii. 23, the Roman theologians suppose, tliat Eli, or Heli, is an abbreviation of Heliakim, and that this is tlie same with Joakim, or Joachim.
-According to the apocryphal Historia Joseph! he was already ninety years old ; according to Epiphanius at least eighty ; and was blessed with children by a former marriage. According to Origen, also, and Eusebius, and Gregory of Nyssa, Joseph was an aged widower. Jerome, on the contrary, makes him, like Mary, a pureca'Zefe, and says of him ; " Mariae quam putatus est habuisse, custos potius fuit quam maritus ; " consequently he must " virginem mausisse cum Maria, qui pater Domini meruit adpellari." Contr. Hclvid. c. 19.
"Rom.v.l2ff.; 1 Cor.xv. 22. But Paul ignores here Eve and Mary altogether.
* In later times in the Latin church even the Are with which Gabriel saluted the Virgin, was received as the converse of the name of Eva ; though the Greek xoipe, Luke i. 28, admits no such far-fetched accommodation. In like manner the bruising of the serpent's head. Gen. iii. 15, was applied to Mary instead of Christ, because the Vulgate wrongly translates the Hebrew CS"! ?]B^TD'' K^H, "ipsa conteret caput tuum ; " while the LXX. rightly refers the X^H to yiT asmasc, avros, and likewise all Protestant versions of the Bible.
■"Irenajus: Adv. haer. lib. iii. c. 22, i^ 4: " Consequenter autem et Maria virgo obediensinvenitur, dicens: '■EcMancillfttua, Domine, fiat mihisecundnntrerhuiu iuvm'' (Luke i. 38), Eva vero disobediens: non obedivit enim, quum adhuc esset