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Praying to Mary

Commentary:

I read the article "On Praying to Mary" by Dr. Alexander Roman from your website but I still do not understand why we should pray to Mary.

The article was supposed to answer the question: 'Where in the bible does it say we should pray to Mary?'

Instead, the article provided no biblical evidence to answer this question, but rather jumped to conclusions that are not directly supported by the bible.

Only God has the power to answer our prayers. Although Mary was certainly blessed among women (Luke 1:42) for being chosen by God to give birth to Jesus, God did not give Mary powers to answer our prayers nor should we pray to her.

The only trustworthy account about Mary is to be found in the Scriptures, where information is presented by those who knew her personally and, more importantly, whose writings were under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

In them we discover Mary as a wonderfully humble servant of the Lord who rejoices in Him as her Savior (Luke 1:47 - "And my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior"). Obviously her heart was not immaculate nor was she conceived without sin because her Son, her Savior, came not for the sinless but "to seek and to save that which was lost" (Luke 19:10). Therefore, Mary can be described as someone who was in need of a savior - just like you and I.

Mary's ministry was simply the birth and nurturing of the child Jesus. Once He reached adulthood, she played no influential part in His earthly service.


It's at the wedding feast of Cana, which began the public ministry of Jesus, that her last words are recorded in the Bible. Fittingly, she tells the servants, "Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it" (John 2:5). There is no doubt that she is exemplary among biblical saints as a model of obedience and submission to the will of God, especially in the appointment to which she was called. In keeping with the words of John the Baptist, "He must increase, but I must decrease" (John 3:30), Mary faded into the background.

Search the Scriptures and you will find no leadership role for Mary among the Apostles.

She taught no doctrine.

We never hear of the Apostles seeking her out for counsel. Other than the gospels, Mary is mentioned only once in the New Testament, where the Book of Acts tells us of her simple participation in a prayer meeting along with her sons.

The teaching that Mary was a perpetual virgin is also contradicted by many other verses such as:

* Matthew 12:46 - While He was still talking to the multitudes, behold, His mother and brothers stood outside, seeking to speak with Him.
* Matthew 13:55-56 - "Is this not the carpenter's son? Is not His mother called Mary? And His brothers James, Joses, Simon, and Judas? And His sisters, are they not all with us? Where then did this Man get all these things?"
* Mark 6:3 - "Is this not the carpenter, the Son of Mary, and brother of James, Joses, Judas, and Simon? And are not His sisters here with us?" So they were offended at Him.
* John 7:3-5 - His brothers therefore said to Him, "Depart from here and go into Judea, that Your disciples also may see the works that You are doing. For no one does anything in secret while he himself seeks to be known openly. If You do these things, show Yourself to the world." For even His brothers did not believe in Him.
* 1 Corinthians 9:5 - "Do we have no right to take along a believing wife, as do also the other apostles, the brothers of the Lord, and Cephas?"

* Galatians 1:19 - "But I saw none of the other apostles except James, the Lord's brother".
* John 2:12 - After this He went down to Capernaum, He, His mother, His brothers, and His disciples; and they did not stay there many days.


The above verses in the Bible are evidence that Mary did not remain a virgin after the birth of Jesus, but had sons and daughters through her husband, Joseph.


Not one of these verses suggests that the brothers and sisters of Jesus are anyone other than the sons and daughters of Mary and Joseph.


If it was important for us to think of Mary as the "ever-virgin Mary" then at least one of the Apostles would have mentioned it in the Bible; however, only evidence to the contrary is found.

Furthermore, Jesus, tells us what is really important in the following passages:


* Mark 3:31-35 - Then His brothers and His mother came, and standing outside they sent to Him, calling Him. And a multitude was sitting around Him; and they said to Him, "Look, Your mother and Your brothers are outside seeking You." But He answered them, saying, "Whois My mother, or My brothers?" And He looked around in a circle at those who sat about Him, and said, "Here are My mother and My brothers! For whoever does the will of God is My brother and My sister and mother.
* Luke 8:19-21 - Then His mother and brothers came to Him, and could not approach Him because of the crowd. And it was told Him by some, who said, "Your mother and Your brothers are standing outside, desiring to see You." But He answered and said to them, "My mother and My brothers are these who hear the word of God and do it."

Jesus' reply in the above verses emphasizes the importance of doing the will of God as a higher priority than membership in our human families. This is reiterated by Jesus' reply in the following verse:
Luke 11:27-28 "And it happened, as He spoke these things, that a certain woman from the crowd raised her voice and said to Him, "Blessed is the womb that bore You, and the breasts which nursed You!" But He said, "More than that, blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it!"

There is no biblical record of anyone ever praying to Mary or of her interceding with Christ for anyone's salvation. Making statutes or images of Mary and praying to them is wrong, it is not supported by the biblical text and is against the second commandment: Exodus 20:4-5 "You shall not make for yourself a carved image-any likeness of ANYTHING that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them nor serve them. For I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God.".

I believe the root of the problem as to why the Orthodox and Catholic religions pray to Mary is based on the fact that both religions pay little attention to the Old and New Testament scriptures for teaching, but instead follow man-made doctrine. This is made clear by Dr. Alexander Roman in the article: On Praying to Mary, when he states: "What we are to believe is not only set down in the Bible, but also in Tradition and the teaching of the Church in the Seven Universal Councils." Therefore, with the Apostles (eye witnesses to Jesus) no longer around to rebuke false doctrine as they did in the New Testament Scriptures, the Orthodox church can proclaim doctrine to be anything it wants.

The 27 books of the New Testament (our present canon) were written and received by the churches by the end of the first century. These books were accepted as canon by the early Church long before they were ratified by the Council of Hippo (A.D. 393) and the Council of Carthage (A.D. 397). Similarly, a council that met in Jamnia in A.D. 95 ratified the books of the Old Testament. Yet the Hebrew Old Testament, whose content is identical to our Old Testament had already been accepted by the Jews five centuries early. Furthermore it was endorsed and accepted by Jesus before the council of Jamnia.

The apostle Paul warned the early church not to follow, man-made gospels, that were not given by God. Refer to Galations 1:6-12 - I marvel that you are turning away so soon from Him who called you in the grace of Christ, to a different gospel, which is not another; but there are some who trouble you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ. But even if we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel to you than what we have preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again, if anyone preaches any other gospel to you than what you have received, let him be accursed. For do I now persuade men, or God? Or do I seek to please men? For if I still pleased men, I would not be a bondservant of Christ. But I make known to you, brethren, that the gospel which was preached by me is not according to man. For I neither received it from man, nor was I taught it, but it came through the revelation of Jesus Christ.

There are other religions that follow man-made doctrine in addition to the bible. Take for example the Mormons who claim to believe in the bible but also follow the writings of Joseph Smith in the Book of Mormon. The Mormons interpretation of biblical teachings is clearly perverted because they follow man-made doctrine instead of sticking to Old and New Testament scripture. How is the Catholic and Orthodox religions any different is this regard?

Jesus rebuke the Pharisees and teachers of the law for there traditions and following man-made doctrine as recorded in Mark 7:6-9: He answered and said to them, "Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written:

' This people honors Me with their lips,
But their heart is far from Me.
And in vain they worship Me,
Teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.'

For laying aside the commandment of God, you hold the tradition of men-the washing of pitchers and cups, and many other such things you do." He said to them, "All too well you reject the commandment of God, that you may keep your tradition.

In conclusion, praying to Mary is wrong. One finds no leadership role for Mary among the Apostles. She taught no doctrine and we never hear of the Apostles seeking her out for counsel. So why will the Orthodox church not reject man-made doctrine and teach only from Gods word - the Old and New Testament Scriptures?





Answer: let me explain why you are Wrong and deceived..

because i m "Smarter " than Uuuuu..!





Dr. Alexander Roman alex.roman@unicorne.org

You raise a number of important issues that I would like to comment on.

With respect to the issue of praying to Mary, Orthodox and Catholics and other Christians, simply honour her and the saints, asking for her prayers and that is all. To invoke Mary and the Saints is to ask them to pray for us as we are all part of the Communion of Saints, the Body of Christ. We are all alive in Christ and we are enjoined in a number of places in Scripture itself to pray for one another and, as the Epistle of James shows, the prayer of the righteous is most powerful with God.

In the early part of Luke, we see an Archangel praising Mary and calling her "Blessed among women." Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist, calls her "blessed" as well.

Mary herself, in response to Elizabeth, affirms that all nations will call her "blessed" for what God has done for her. And the term "blessed" is not simply a title, but is based on the actual Greek workd, "makarizo" which means "to bless" and also "to glorify."

She is blessed because she is the medium by which the Incarnation of God the Word was achieved by the Will of the Father. I don't understand your point about her not having a position of authority in the early Church. If she did, would that justify our venerating her any more? She already has the most exalted position of being the Mother of God the Word Incarnate. She, along with all the Saints and Angels, intercedes for us. Just as she brought forth and nourished the Body of Christ in her lifetime as the true Ark of the New Covenant (who is the Lord Jesus) on earth, so too she continues to nourish the Body of Christ which is the Church by her intercession with God.

Perhaps the issues you raise is with intercession as a whole. You agree, I trust, that we must pray for one another. But that is just the point. Christ is the One Mediator with God the Father and yet we are enjoined, by Paul the Apostle for one, to pray for one another. St Paul exhorts his readers to be imitators of him, just as he is of Christ.

To affirm that Christ is the one Mediator would, logically, preclude our asking one another to pray for us. We should, in that event, simply go to Christ. Of what use then, is our prayer for one another? So how can it be that we are called upon to pray for one another?

Simply put, when we put on Christ and become members of His Body that is the Church (and just as the Spirit rests on Christ, so too does the Spirit rest on His Body that is the Church), we too are called to become a "royal priesthood" and "priests, prophets and kings" as Scripture affirms in more than one place. We too participate in the one Priesthood of Christ and are called to intercede for the Church and the world in one Spirit, through Christ to the glory of God the Father.

You say that Mary was not conceived without sin. The Orthodox Church does not accept the Augustinian view of Original Sin as being an inherited form of the actual sin of Adam's disobedience, something that is shared by the Western Roman Catholic and Protestant traditions. Mary was in need of a Saviour, but that doesn't mean that the Holy Spirit could not sanctify her to prepare her for the work of becoming the Mother of God the Word Incarnate. How would it have been possible for the Archangel, himself sinless and holy, to ascribe such praise to Mary at the time of the Annunciation if Mary was not sanctified by Him? And her holiness has nothing to do with her person but with her role in Salvation history. Salvation is through the Man Jesus Christ or the Humanity of God the Word Incarnate Who mediates salvation to us through that Humanity. That Humanity is what God took from the body of the Virgin Mary. And the Church, from the earliest times until now has always seen Mary as the Ark of the New Covenant and as a Spirit-bearing person as a consequence. The early Protestant Reformers, including Martin Luther, did not disagree with this either.

You also say that Mary played no influential part in Christ's earthly ministry and service. That is simply not true, sir! She was not a preacher, as were the Apostles, but she not only nourished Christ and supported Him until He began His ministry, she continued to support Him and the early Church with her prayers. She constantly meditated on His words and actions in her heart and soul, beginning with the presentation of Christ in the Temple. At the Wedding at Cana in Galilee, there is a strong indication of her ongoing role in Christ's ministry on earth when she tells the servants with the wine jars "Do whatever He tells you to." Her role is that of the Mother and not only to Christ, but to His followers and we believe that she not only became a Mother to John at the foot of the Cross, but also to all baptized Christians. She does not stand in between Christ and ourselves, but she is there pushing us forward and toward Christ with her prayers and intercessions. At Cana, she clearly interrupts Christ's schedule for the beginning of his public ministry of miracles and teaching. There is no record that Christ hesitated to fulfill what His mother asked Him to do for those who had "no more wine." For me, this is also a Eucharistic theme since she is the Mother of God the Word Incarnate through whom Christ took His Body and Blood that He later counsels us to partake of for life eternal. Her "last words" at Cana are eternal, "Do whatever He tells you to" and they are addressed to us today as well.

She is also the one who stands at the foot of the Cross when all but one of Christ's disciples have fled in fear. She is also with the Apostles at Pentecost and there is no reason to doubt that she is with the early Church with her prayer, meditation and example of humble, trusting obedience to God every step of the way. One of the earliest prayers/invocations to her, from the third century reads, "We fly to your patronage, O Theotokos Virgin etc." There are plenty of references from the early Church Fathers about her to leave no doubt that the entire Church affirmed her intercession in Heaven and that of all the Saints and especially the Martyrs who were dying for Christ at the time. The invocation and imitation of the Martyrs were especially important to the early Church.

As for your quotes to indicate that Mary did not remain a virgin, let us be clear on that. The quotes prove nothing in that regard! As someone of Slavic background, you yourself should know there is no word for "cousin" in the ancient Slavic tongues. Still less for "half-brother" and the like. If you were going to be serious about your use of those quotes, then, to be consistent, you would also have to admit that Jesus' father was not the Heavenly Father, but St Joseph and that St Joseph was the natural father of Jesus - "Is this not the carpenter's son?"

But it was only thought that Jesus was Joseph's son, as I know you agree. So who were the brothers of Jesus noted? They were, in fact, the children of Joseph by his first marriage. As the book, that is perfectly orthodox but outside the canon of Scripture, called "The History of Joseph the Carpenter" indicates, Joseph had four sons and two daughters by a previous wife. He was quite old when he took the Virgin Mary under his guardianship. Indeed, the Eastern Churches call Joseph "Joseph the Betrothed" and his role was that of being a guardian of mother and Child. James, the bishop of Jerusalem is honoured in the East as the "Brother of God." There is no evidence to the contrary to be found and there is not evidence to suggest that Christians ever thought otherwise throughout the centuries. Please show me where Martin Luther ever agreed to what you are saying as well! The tendency to want to have Mary become a "normal woman" after the Virgin Birth is a modern one and this tendency has also led others to want to see Jesus as having led a "normal life" with . . . Mary Magdalene. Both tendencies are wrong, not substantiated by Scripture or the long-held tradition of the early and later Church and are, in fact, simply offensive! And the bible never says "Mary had children by Joseph afterwards etc." That is still a deduction by Evangelical Christians today that does not hold water when the proper historical/theological context of the New Testament is studied.

The quote about doing the Will of God - do you seriously believe Jesus was saying that His mother was someone who did NOT do the Will of God? He was simply reiterating that Mary's holiness was precisely rooted in her humble obedience to God's Will "Behold the handmaiden of the Lord" that augments and is part and parcel of her role as Mother of God the Word Incarnate.

As for any biblical record of invoking Mary or the saints - the New Testament is replete with texts of people asking for and praying for others. We are all one living Body in Christ and death has no hold on us. How is that a contradiction of asking for the intercession of Mary, the Saints, Martyrs, Prophets and Angels?

When St Paul extols the use of Scripture - which Scripture is he talking about? The New Testament? There was no New Testament canon at the time he wrote, just the Old Testament. To be a scriptural literalist would mean one would have to accept that ONLY the Old Testament, according to Paul, was valid Scripture!

But you yourself admit that it was the CHURCH that ratified the books of the New Testament. That is an important point. The 27 books of the NT are accepted by us because . . . the Church approved and canonised them as such. For every book the Church received for the New Testament canon, it rejected two or three others. Some of those were overtly heretical. Others, such as the Gospel of Nicodemus and the First Letter of Clement and also the Shepherd of Hermas were not heretical and continued to be read by the Church as deuterocanonical Scripture. Other Churches continued to have their own Canons of the NT. The Assyrians, to this day, have 22 books of the NT. The Ethiopian Church has 35 NT books (and two more OT books), including the eight Constitutions of the Apostles (where it is maintained that the two letters of Clement are inspired Scripture). The Celtic Church read the Didache and the Shepherd of Hermas as part of their local scriptural canon. And Martin Luther rejected the "deuterocanonical books" of the NT, including the Epistle of James which he termed an "epistle of straw" for rejected justification by faith alone. (In fact, the only place where "faith alone" is mentioned in the New Testament is in the Epistle of James where it is denied).

The Church is the only interpreter of Scripture and Tradition. The Church wrote the NT under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit for her members, the students of the Apostles. The Protestant view is that every believer may read Scripture and interpret it etc. If that were so, there would only be one interpretation of Scripture and one Protestant Church, would there not? There would be no need to even publish scriptural commentaries by Evangelical churches - they would simply only need to distribute Bibles.

And St Paul says if we or an angel preach any other gospel to you than what WE have preached to you, let him be accursed. There was no written text of the Gospel at the time, but only the teaching of the Apostles. The writing came later and, in fact, written documents at that time, unlike ours 2000 years later, were not trusted as much as the spoken word. St Paul also mentions the Gospel that is communicated in both written and unwritten modes. That is what the Church has also considered Scripture and Tradition to be. As for the Church's authority to teach and bind and loose, I think we know what our Lord said about that and that He would be with the Church always, even unto the end of the world. When did the Church lose her authority to teach and bind and loose then? To say that is to simply contradict Christ's words in this respect!

The Mormons in fact are closer to your own version of Church history. You say that the Church began teaching man-made doctrines soon after the Apostles' deaths. So say the Mormons and they say that the "real church" didn't come back until sometime in the early 19th century. That, at least, is consistent with the view that the Church of Christ "got it all wrong" after the Apostles' died.

The only man-made doctrine that is to be rejected here is that Scriptures and the Church are at odds with one another. Without the Church, we would not have the 27 books of the New Testament. Even with the New Testament, the Church had to defend orthodox doctrine about the Trinity and Christ that was attacked by Arians, Nestorians and other heretics in the first 1000 years of the Church's history. The heretics had the 27 books, and yet came to different conclusions about Christ's Divinity et alia. Again, it fell to the Church to affirm and outline clearly what the Scriptures teach about Christ's Divinity, the Holy Trinity and Salvation.

Websites with further discussion of these matters include:
www.geocities.com/trvalentine/orthodox/bible_texts.html?200620
www.scripturecatholic.com/saints.html
www.orthodoxinfo.com/general/veneration_mary.aspx