The Definitive Guide for Solving Biblical Questions About Mary: Mary Among the Evangelists (Book Review)

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Title: The Definitive Guide for Solving Biblical Questions About Mary: Mary Among the Evangelists
Author: Rev. Dr. Christiaan Kappes, William Albrecht
Copyright Date: October 8, 2020
Narrated by: Virtual Voice
Pages: 171
Audio length: 6 hours, 24 minutes

SUMMARY:

via Audible

Some books hope to persuade the reader by reasoned arguments that might stand up to scrutiny. Conversely, this work simply reveals the meaning of Scripture to its lover and provides every Christian with a straightforward and irrefutable key to understand Mary’s role and dignity in salvation history according to the Evangelists in their Gospels. After seeing the evidence organized in an easy-to-read way, arcane arguments, long dividing Christians, simply become irrelevant as the reader experiences the Scriptures revealing themselves in their fullness. Who are Jesus’s brothers and sisters? Who are his family members who opposed his ministry? Does Scripture teach Mary’s perpetual virginity? What is Joseph’s family tree? Why do Jesus and Mary sometimes appear to be at odds in the New Testament? Each and every question does not require a torturously reasoned argument to some purportedly probable conclusion. Rather, each question is plainly answered by reading the Scriptures through their own dependence on prior Scripture as key to their meaning and interpretation.

My Review:

The Mother of Jesus is a topic of disagreement among Christians, particularly in the West. While the vast majority of Protestants acknowledge the virgin birth of Jesus Christ, many split with Catholics and Orthodox Christians on the topic of her perpetual virginity and upon her immaculate conception. Anecdotally, when I have spoken with Protestants about their disagreements with the Roman Catholic Church, Mary is usually at or near the very top of the list. What many Protestants are perhaps unaware of is the fact that their own positions regarding Mary are at odds even with prominent leaders of the Protestant Reformation:

Christ, our Savior, was the real and natural fruit of Mary’s virginal womb . . . This was without the cooperation of a man, and she remained a virgin after that.

{Luther’s Works, eds. Jaroslav Pelikan (vols. 1-30) & Helmut T. Lehmann (vols. 31-55), St. Louis: Concordia Pub. House (vols. 1-30); Philadelphia: Fortress Press (vols. 31-55), 1955, v.22:23 / Sermons on John, chaps. 1-4 (1539)}

A new lie about me is being circulated. I am supposed to have preached and written that Mary, the mother of God, was not a virgin either before or after the birth of Christ . . .

{Pelikan, ibid.,v.45:199 / That Jesus Christ was Born a Jew (1523)}

“. . . she is full of grace, proclaimed to be entirely without sin. . . . God’s grace fills her with everything good and makes her devoid of all evil. . . . God is with her, meaning that all she did or left undone is divine and the action of God in her. Moreover, God guarded and protected her from all that might be hurtful to her.”

(Luther’s Works, American edition, vol. 43, p. 40, ed. H. Lehmann, Fortress, 1968)

“Elizabeth called Mary Mother of the Lord, because the unity of the person in the two natures of Christ was such that she could have said that the mortal man engendered in the womb of Mary was at the same time the eternal God.”

John Calvin, Calvini Opera [Braunshweig-Berlin, 1863-1900], Volume 45, 35.

“Helvidius has shown himself too ignorant, in saying that Mary had several sons, because mention is made in some passages of the brothers of Christ.” Calvin translated “brothers” in this context to mean cousins or relatives.

Bernard Leeming, “Protestants and Our Lady”, Marian Library Studies, January 1967, p.9.

“It cannot be denied that God in choosing and destining Mary to be the Mother of his Son, granted her the highest honor.”

John Calvin, Calvini Opera [Braunshweig-Berlin, 1863-1900], Volume 45, 348.

“To this day we cannot enjoy the blessing brought to us in Christ without thinking at the same time of that which God gave as adornment and honour to Mary, in willing her to be the mother of his only-begotten Son.”

John Calvin, A Harmony of Matthew, Mark and Luke (St. Andrew’s Press, Edinburgh, 1972), p.32.

With the foregoing in mind, I picked up this book wanting to learn about the Scriptural basis for the Roman Catholic and Orthodox beliefs regarding Mother Mary. If a case for Marian Doctrine can be successfully made, sola scriptura, then a better case can be made for Christian unity around the world. It seems as though the Protestant view on the issue is both a small minority view within the global Church today (home to far more Catholics and Orthodox than Protestants), but also a small minority view historically. However, minority view or not, it is also the dominant view in the countries that are geopolitically the most powerful on earth now and over the last few centuries. Public policy and wars are sometimes fought on this basis. The rift is not inconsequential. It’s deeply important.

When I picked up the book, I started with the following question, hoping that it would provide answers: If Church Tradition argues for Marian Doctrine, how can it be that Scripture argued against Tradition for so long and without being heard? The answer that I must consider is that it did not.

I will confess here that I grew up in the American Protestant Church, at various times a Methodist, Southern Baptist, and/or non-denominational. To the extent I ever learned about this topic (rare occurrences), it was largely in a dismissive fashion. This book went a long way toward filling a large void in my own knowledge. There are indeed strong Scripture-based arguments for Roman Catholic and Orthodox dogma and teachings regarding Mary, the Mother of Jesus. This book does an excellent job of laying out those cases.

The authors first make a case for why the Gospel writers did not write about Mary in more explicit terms. Citing the text of the gospels, as well as writing from outside the Bible, they point out that at the time the gospels were composed, there was a conflict over who should lead the early Church, with the Apostles finding themselves opposed by extended members of Jesus’s family who sought authority via their shared bloodline. As a result of this conflict, the gospel writers were forced to keep some textual distance between themselves and Jesus’s family, or else risk elevating Jesus’s unappointed family, indirectly, by elevating Mary. This section of the book is very interesting and the reality of this pops out in the text of Scripture once this familial tension is pointed out in multiple places.

Nevertheless, we do see in Matthew, Mark, and particularly Luke, strong textual arguments for Mary as both a perpetual virgin and as immaculately conceived. The authors make a Scriptural case for Marian Doctrine, in the Gospels, by arguing that Matthew, Mark, and Luke all make use of Old Testament Typology, regarding Mary. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, Typology is similar to foreshadowing in literature. The writer in the New Testament will borrow a word or phrase from the Old Tesatment, to direct his current readers to an Old Testament person. Then the reader will see that the person from the Old Testament bears similarities in some way to a person in the New Testament. Typology is a familiar way of reading and interpreting the Old Testament, as it was inarguably used by the New Testament writers, has been used by Christians since, even Protestants, who adopt the same approach in finding foreshadowing of Jesus within the Old Testament as well. The authors make a case that the Gospels contain Old Testament typology for Mary, including figures such as Sarah, Hannah, and the mother of Samson.

In addition to typology, the authors also describe the Greek language basis for the Roman Catholic interpretation of the Marian descriptor phrase “full of grace” and its meaning, making in addition the compelling point that she was described this way prior to her virgin pregnancy. Several other descriptors of Mary are also examined and combined they make a compelling defense of the two thousand year old Church Tradition regarding Mary’s immaculate conception.

The authors also note that several places in the Gospels appear to linguistically allude to, and link Mary with the Ark of the Covenant. In fact, she is viewed traditionally as the new Ark of the Covenant. The authors are pretty thorough on this point, but I was somewhat surprised they did not spend a lot of time discussing Revelation Chapter 11 and 12 (which in the original writing did not have chapter divides), wherein many interpreters argue that John overtly describes Mary as the Ark of the Covenant. (Perhaps that is for another book?)

The most common objection to Mary’s perpetual virginity, and to her status as immaculately conceived, derives from passages in the Gospels which allude to Jesus having brothers and sisters, and to the apparent rebuke Jesus seems to give Mary at the wedding feast in Cana. As to the first, the authors here make a strong counter-argument, using both textual context and the underlying meaning of the translated Greek, that those mentioned are either cousins or half-brothers and half-sisters. Jesus, while on the cross, sends his mother to live with John. This decision makes much more sense if she has no other direct offspring. As to the apparent rebuke of Mary, by Jesus, the authors argue that the situation alludes to and mirrors a similar moment in the Old Testament, between the Prophet Elijah and a widow with whom he stayed. They argue that the earliest members of the Church would likely have noticed this, and would not have viewed Jesus’s words as a rebuke, even if subsequent Christian apologists did not pick up on this reference in later centuries.

My review here is a summary, and as a summary, it does not do justice to the comprehensive work accomplished by this book. By citing the New Testament text itself, along with the very early writings of Church fathers, the authors challenge Christians wo have doubts about Marian Doctrine to revisit their beliefs, this time with the text in hand. Simultaneously, this book is also a source of affirmation to those who believe these doctrines on the basis of Church Tradition alone.

The audiobook recording was done with Virtual Voice, rather than with a human narrator, and I thought it actually was pleasant to listen to, and easy to follow, with the exception of a few mispronunciations (Job, as job, rather than Jobe, for example.) There’s also a short section of the Virtual Reader reciting a lot of Greek alphabet letters in rapid success. I suspect that portion, at least, would have worked better if read on a page. None of that was distracting though, and I’m grateful as a blind reader to have been given an audio option.

In conclusion, if you’re the type of person who enjoys Christian apologetics, or if you’ve ever wondered about the beliefs which surround Mary, the Mother of Jesus, I strongly encourage you to pick this book up and read it (or give it a listen.) Though the text is dense, it is also relatively short and it is written with laypeople-as-readers in mind. I never felt as though the authors were talking above my head. The scholarship is truly a unique blessing to the Church. I am not sure if any other comprehensive work like this even exists anywhere else in modern times.