Welcome back to James Popery. I'm Joe Heschmark, and I hope that today's rebuttal will stand as a shining

example that the books of the Bible are written for us, but they're not written to us. And that one of the

most common ways people misunderstand the Bible is by assuming that they understand passages that they

actually lack the context to understand. We're going to see that, I think, very clearly from

Ryan from needgod.net. He made a response to my recent video looking at Mary's perpetual virginity in Scripture.

Now, you can watch that video for yourself in the description below,

but to give a very quick recap, I showed in John 19 that Jesus hands his mother over to John, a non-relative.

But if Jesus had brothers or sisters, they would have been morally obligated

to care for Mary. I showed how Mary's response to Gabriel really makes sense only if she's

taken some kind of oath of virginity, because when Gabriel tells her she's going to bear a son,

she's already married. And yet she seems surprised at the idea that she could have relations

with a man or become pregnant. And I looked at the fact that

the last chapters of Ezekiel foretell both the incarnation and Mary's perpetual virginity.

Now, Ryan's response to these arguments shows why so many Protestants don't believe in the

perpetual virginity of Mary, even though all the oldest sects of Christianity, Catholics, Orthodox, Coptics,

even many of the Protestant reformers did believe she was a perpetual virgin.

Modern evangelicals like Ryan, to put it very bluntly, don't know how to read the Bible.

Now, by the way, I should say at the outset here, special thanks to Jonathan H. over in Patreon

for tipping me off to Ryan's response to my video. Now, if you want to join that amazing community, you can find us over at shamelessjo.com, where for as little as $5 a month, you get access to a community of God-fearing Christians who help each other in the path to sanctity. You get access to Q&A live streams and more. It really does mean the world to us and to me personally. And over the last two

months, we've been blown away by your response and your support. So to all of our current patrons,

huge thank you. To all of our future patrons, welcome. All right, so let's get into it. Mary was

legally married under Jewish law at the time that the angel Gabriel appeared to her and told her

...