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Which church teachings and Bible scholars have you referred to? Certainly not the Church Fathers. All you've been doing is objecting and criticizing. Anyway, bible scholars have no divine authority or charismatic aility to define Church doctrines.
I leave the interpretation of Scripture to the Magisterium of the Catholic Church in matters of faith and morals. That's how it's always been for faithful Christians since NT time.
The entirety of Christian experience? You're off by at least 1500 years, I'm afraid. My Church has told me from the beginning that Mary was without sin. I've provided plenty of excerpts from the Church Fathers and ample biblical support. I've even provided a list of Protestant scholars and linguists who accept the Catholic interpretation of Luke 1:28 and Jerome's translation of it from the Greek. Mary wasn't simply favoured by God to bear His Son. That's not what Luke meant to write.
Who, by the way, founded my "denomination" if it wasn't Christ?
These so-called educated members deny and reject much that was passed on to us by the Church Fathers because their teachings don't square with their preconceived beliefs and practices derived from studying the Bible divorced from Tradition and historical Christianity, i.e., sola fide., etc. Catholic doctrines aren't predetermined in a vacuum, but have developed over time harmoniously not unlike a living organism. For the first 1000 years there was a broad consensus among the Church Fathers (Greek and Latin) that Mary was without sin. It was just a matter of fully grasping what was meant by that proposition, just as it was in understanding the divine mystery of the hypostatic union of two natures in Christ which took centuries to resolve in Christendom.
And I would like to add this to my series of quotes from a man who highly revered Mary:
"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."
Martin Luther
PAX
Everything that I've read above might as well have been you reading your RCIA notes back to me.
I am interested having in an exchange of ideas, but that requires the other person to bring something worthwhile to the table.
I can get memorized punch lines, dubious claims, and boasts from any number of websites online. For that matter, I can get more than enough of that on the Unorthodox Theological Discussion forum here.
New Advent does present speculative items. There is no conclusive evidence whatsoever that Jerome's translation was marred by a copyist error. There are many more conservative Catholic scholars like Cornelius A Lapide who believe that Jerome chose the female pronoun, which can be found in some Jewish texts. It's a matter of interpretation and putting things into theological perspective.
PAX
There were two Hebrew codices in the Vatican library that read "she" ( Kennicott numbers 227 and 239) and another in the Bernard de Rossi library. Also in the same library was an Onkelosi Codex [ a translation from the Hebrew into Aramaic] which read "she", according to Lapide in the 17th century. This is from the Haydock Catholic Commentary on the Old Testament, Genesis 3:15: "The Hebrew text, as Bellarmine observes, is ambiguous: He mentions one copy which had ipsa (she) instead of ipsum (it); and so it is even printed in the Hebrew interlineary edition, 1572, by Plantin, under the inspection of Boderianus." These Hebrew texts weren't translated by Roman Catholics.
Which church would that be? I've lost count.
PAX
There were two Hebrew codices in the Vatican library that read "she" ( Kennicott numbers 227 and 239) and another in the Bernard de Rossi library. Also in the same library was an Onkelosi Codex [ a translation from the Hebrew into Aramaic] which read "she", according to Lapide in the 17th century. This is from the Haydock Catholic Commentary on the Old Testament, Genesis 3:15: "The Hebrew text, as Bellarmine observes, is ambiguous: He mentions one copy which had ipsa (she) instead of ipsum (it); and so it is even printed in the Hebrew interlineary edition, 1572, by Plantin, under the inspection of Boderianus." These Hebrew texts weren't translated by Roman Catholics.
Which church would that be? I've lost count.
PAX
