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No Hymen Required: Reconstructing Origen's View on Mary's Virginity
| Content Provider | Scilit |
|---|---|
| Author | Lillis, Julia Kelto |
| Copyright Year | 2020 |
| Description | 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. |
| Related Links | https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/49D8FBD12908582206A09A2C5A64CB13/S0009640720000657a.pdf/div-class-title-no-hymen-required-reconstructing-origen-s-view-on-mary-s-virginity-div.pdf |
| Ending Page | 267 |
| Page Count | 19 |
| Starting Page | 249 |
| ISSN | 00096407 |
| e-ISSN | 17552613 |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0009640720000657 |
| Journal | Church history |
| Issue Number | 2 |
| Volume Number | 89 |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) |
| Publisher Date | 2020-06-01 |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Subject Keyword | Church history Virgin Mary |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
| Subject | Religious Studies History Cultural Studies |
