Explaination please

[Marty]

Thanks Eric and aquinas.

[QuisUtDeus]

And why LumenGentleman should swing by more often.  Scripture is his forte.

[remnant]

according to the law, the firstborn males were to  be consecrated to God; Sanctify unto me, saith the Lord, every  firstborn that openeth the womb among the children of Israel, etc. Ex.  13. 2.

 
  Warning, thread drift!
  I have always thought that this was because the Isrealites somehow had  to repay God for the killing of the firstborn among the Egyptians, in  the last plague that freed them from bondage.
  It is an old Hebrew legend, that God Himself cried over the drowning of  Pharaoh's warriors in the Red Sea.  It may have been necessary,  but they were God's children too.
 
 

[Marty]

This is a prime demonstration of why one should always read scripture with a commentary.

...I checked out that passage again last night, and yeah, I have commentary on the bottom of the page explaining what is meant in this passage...
Me bad -

[batteddy]

I'd probably translate it "Even until" or something more precise.

It's like saying, "he didnt know english even until the day he died"...that doesnt mean he did suddenly know english on the day he died. "Until" in the sense used there in the greek does not imply it ever happened.

[lumengentleman]

And why LumenGentleman should swing by more often.  Scripture is his forte.

Bah ... the answers already given in this thread are more than adequate.  :-)

My 2 cents: St. Matthew most certainly meant "knew" as in "intimate marital knowledge"; and his whole point in saying that St. Joseph did not "know" Our Lady "until" she had given birth to Our Lord was to emphasize that the conception/birth was indeed miraculous, not the result of any normal human marital relations.

He was definitely not sharing this tid-bit of information in order to let his readers know that St. Joseph and Our Lady embarked upon normal marital relations after the birth of Christ.  As mentioned above in other posts, "until" can simply mean "up to this point" or "while", without implying that the situation changed afterwards.  For example, the great Messianic Psalm (110, or 109 if you read the Douay) says of Our Lord, "Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool" - does this mean that when all things are subjected to the rule of Our Lord, God the Father will ask Him to stop sitting at His right hand?

You get the idea.