Why is it even used as a remedy when suggested when one sins? ( And while we are at it, where did the rosary come from, anyway?)
The Rosary is a prayer rule for praying the Lord’s Prayer together with the Hail Mary, and dates from the High Middle Ages, just before the Renaissance, and originated with the Order of Preachers, a Roman Catholic religious order, and is specific to Roman Catholicism.
The constituent prayers are many centuries older: the Lord’s Prayer however is of divine origin, which is to say, Christ our God gave it to us, as recorded in the Gospels of St. Matthew the Apostle and St. Luke the Evangelist. The Hail Mary originated in the Early Church, probably in the fifth century AD in response to the heresy of Nestorianism, but possibly in the century before it. It is not just used by Catholics, but by many Protestants, especially Lutherans and Anglicans, and also by the ancient Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox churches.
The popularity of the Hail Mary is based on a desire to venerate, but not worship, the blessed Virgin Mary (indeed, the Lutheran version, which my Lutheran friend
@MarkRohfrietsch can attest, does not ask her for her prayers). The Virgin Mary is the most venerable member of the Church Triumphant, because she had the most physically intimate relationship with God, by virtue of giving birth to God the Son, Jesus Christ, who is the only begotten Son and Word of God, fully God and fully Man. This is why she is often correctly called the Mother of God, because she did give birth to, and act as a mother for, God, when the second person of the Holy Trinity deigned to put on our human nature so as to restore it; He took his humanity from Mary who was miraculously impregnated by the Holy Spirit, and His love for her and her love for Him is evident at many points throughout the Gospels, for example, in the canticle the Magnficat in Luke 1 (Behold, all generations shall call me blessed…) sung by St. Mary when she visits her cousin St. Elizabeth pregnant with St. John the Baptist, the Forerunner. And we see this again when our Lord turned water into wine at the Wedding Feast in Cana in the Gospel of John at her request, and she directs those present to follow his instructions; this is appropriate behavior of a son towards his mother. And while on the cross in the same Gospel, our Lord makes the youngest of the Twelve, St. John the Beloved Disciple, her adoptive son, so that they would be able to care for each other, as St. John matured and St. Mary became elderly. It is also part of the history recorded in the traditions of the Early Church that St. Luke the Evangelist was a physician, and that the Blessed Virgin was among his patients.
Regarding why she is called the Virgin Mary, her perpetual virginity is recognized as being proper given the holiness of the one who she bore, having been impregnated by the Holy Spirit; our Lord had half brothers and cousins (it is generally agreed by traditional Protestants, Orthodox and Catholics alike that St. Joseph had been married before, and furthermore the word used in the Gospels to refer to his brothers is a word that literally translates as “brethren” in the sense of “relatives” or “kinsmen”, and furthermore the construction of the phrase that the Blessed Virgin did not have relations with St. Joseph while pregnant with the Theotokos is semantically structured so that in the original Greek, it lacks the implication that they did have relations at a later date, and this is also the case of the KJV and other early English translations if one properly understands the grammar and syntax of Elizabethan English, which is different from that of contemporary English as anyone who has read or heard the plays of Shakespeare can attest.
But don’t take my word for it: Martin Luther, John Calvin, Thomas Cranmer (the founder of Anglicanism, which is the largest Protestant denomination, with Lutheranism being the second largest, and Calvinist Reformed and Presbyterian churches being the third, and the Pentecostals the fourth, although they are growing), and John Wesley, together with his brother Charles, who wrote many famous hymns, the founder of Methodism, the largest mainline Protestant denomination in the United States, all expressed a belief in the perpetual virginity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, also known as the Theotokos, or Birth Giver of God in Eastern Orthodoxy. John Wesley declared his belief that the Theotokos was “a puré and unspotted virgin” throughout her life.
Matt6:7" And when you pray, do not use vain repetitions as the heathen do. For they think that they will be heard for their many words."
The keyword here is vain. We know from the Psalms themselves and the Jewish prayers and the earliest Christian prayers that are recorded, such as the Stasbourg Papyrus, a second century document which contains the oldest attestation of a complete Holy Communion service, that used in the Church of Alexandria and still used by the Coptic Orthodox routinely to this day, that there were and are repetitive prayers in Christianity.
What sets them apart from the vain repetitions of Paganism is that the Pagans tended to pronounce mantras and sequences of syllables and vowels which meant nothing, based on a belief in the magical power of these sequences of vocalizations, and we have evidence of this in surviving Pagan and Gnostic liturgical material, and also in Hinduism and in witchcraft and the occult even today. By repeating mindlessly certain syllables which mean nothing one can fall into a trance, which is the objective of these occult heathen religions.
It is not the objective when saying the Hail Mary, or praying the Psalms, the Jesus Prayer, the Lord’s Prayer, the prayer of St. Ephraim the Sinner (which asks God to deliver us from various sinful passions) or any other prayer, multiple times, as one is supposed to remain alert and focused on the prayer. Rather it is about emphasizing the prayer and engaging in true devotion.
Jesus told us we could go boldly to the throne of grace.
Heb 4:16 "Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need."
And there is only one Mediator:
1 Tim 2:5 5 For there is one God and one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus,
We don't need to ask anyone else.
I just don't get it. Why throw up so many things you have to do when you can come to the Father through Jesus?
It is routine for Christians to ask other Christians to pray for them. Thus, it is perfectly reasonable to ask for the holiest of Christians, such as the St. Mary the Theotokos, St. John the Baptist, the Holy Prophet Elijah, the Holy Apostles such as St. John, St. Peter and St. Paul, and the martyrs who gave their life for Christ suffering great tortures under the Roman Empire, the early Islamic regimes, the Ottoman Empire, especially the genocide in 1915 against the Armenian, Syriac, Assyrian and Pontic Greek Christians, basically, all the Christians who lived in what is now Turkey in large numbers, and then the Communists, who enjoyed killing Christians, especially Stalin (who had been a seminarian before he turned to evil), Enver Hoxha, the Albanian dictator who sought to ban all religions and killed most Christian clergy in Albania, and Mao Zedong, who managed to kill more people than Hitler and Stalin as a result of the Cultural Revolution, during which Christians were targeted for extermination, and the severe famines his incompetent agricultural policy inflicted on the Chinese, and more recently, the martyrs of Islamism in the Middle East under ISIS, Al Qaeda and Islamic dictatorships, and also increasingly, violence by Hindus and Buddhists against Christians in India and Southeast Asia. I want my friends and relatives of the church militant to pray for me, and I also want prayers from those members of the church triumphant in Heaven, who we call saints because we know they made it to Heaven without apostasy on account of the miracles they worked in life and continue to work at present.
This does not change the fact that Christ our God is our sole mediator, redeemer, and also the one who will judge us after the General Resurrection.
What do you need a priest for?
". For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are sanctified” (
Heb. 10:12,
14). “Unlike the other high priests, he has no need to offer sacrifices day after day, first for his own sins, and then for those of the people; this he did once for all when he offered himself” (
Heb. 7:27).
The word priest is used in a somewhat inconsistent manner in English bibles. If we look at the Greek bible, the word Anglicized as Priest is Presbyter, which means elder, which is translated as elder in Bibles like the KJV, rather than as Priest, which was how it was initially rendered in English. Then, confusingly, the leaders of Judaism and of Pagan religions, the Jewish Kohanim, such as the High Priest, the Kohen Gadol, and their pagan counterparts, referred to in Greek as Hierus or Sacerdos, are translated as “priest.”
However, there should be no mistake: Christian priests are in fact presbyters, and not sacerdos, for all Christians are a royal sacerdotal priesthood, but not all Christians are Presbyters (Elders), or Deacons (Servants) or Bishops (Episcopi - Superintendents). The priesthood of all believers means that we can all directly pray to God without an intermediary, and perform a role of sanctification in our lives similar to that of the Jewish Kohanim. It does not mean that we are all qualified to preach or celebrate Holy Communion or weddings or funerals or other worship services, or to manage a church, which is the role of Presbyters. In recent years, some theologians have translated Presbyter as President based on the function of the Presbyter in worship, which is true, but it is also true that they are Preachers. In Anglicanism, Priests are called Priests, like in Orthodoxy and Catholicism, whereas Methodism, which is an offshoot of Anglicanism, at John Wesley’s assistance, initially referred to its Bishops as Superintendents and its Presbyters as Elders.
It is also worth noting that Presbyterian churches are called so because they don’t have bishops, but rather presbyteries where the elders of different churches meet and decide policy. In Congregational churches, and Baptist churches which have a Congregational polity, the Pastor, Elder or Presbyter is in charge of that church, which might be a member of an association of like minded churches, such as the Southern Baptist Convention or the United Church of Christ, or the Stone-Campbell movement (the Churches of Christ and the Christian Church/Disciples of Christ), but are free to determine their own policies and to leave the association and join another in the event of a doctrinal dispute.
God bless you!
