The objection is quick and confident: Matthew 1:25 says Joseph “knew her not until she had borne a son.” So — the argument runs — after Jesus was born, he did. “Until” implies the situation changed afterward. Doesn’t it?

In English, usually yes. But this sentence wasn’t written in English.

What “until” does in Greek.

The word is heōs (in Matthew 1:25, heōs hou). It fixes attention on the time leading up to a point. It makes no claim at all about what happens after — that simply falls outside the job the word is doing. Our English “until” often smuggles in an extra implication (“I didn’t eat until noon” → so I ate at noon). Biblical Greek heōs carries no such freight, and neither did the Hebrew idiom standing behind it.

The clearest way to see this is to watch the same Bible use the word in places where “…and then it changed” is flatly impossible.

The same author. The same word.

Matthew closes his Gospel with the risen Christ promising:

“I am with you always, to the close of the age.” (Matthew 28:20)

That is the very same word, heōs, but translated here as to the close of instead of until the close of. Does Christ stop being with his Church the moment the age closes? Of course not — that is when he is with us most fully. The word marks the horizon of history, not a limit on his presence.

And the plainest example of all.

“And Michal the daughter of Saul had no child to the day of her death.” (2 Samuel 6:23)

The Hebrew is ʿad — “until.” Did Michal begin bearing children after she died? The sentence obviously implies nothing of the kind. It simply says: no children, all the way to the end. One more, from Saint Paul:

“For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet.” (1 Corinthians 15:25)

Christ does not abdicate the instant the last enemy falls — “of his kingdom there will be no end.” The word tells you what holds up to the point in view, and leaves the rest unsaid.

So why did Matthew write it at all?

Because he is answering the more relevant question — the one his whole chapter is built around, the one we now take for granted: who is this child’s father? The point of verse 25 is that Joseph had nothing to do with Jesus’s conception — the child is conceived of the Holy Spirit, of a virgin. The line is a statement about the miracle before the birth, not a hint about the marriage after it. Even the Catholic edition of the RSV — like other Catholic translations, such as the New American Bible — pauses on the word to note that it means only that Joseph had no part in the conception, and “implies nothing as to what happened afterward.”

Read the word the way its own language uses it, and the objection quietly dissolves — this verse is no proof that Joseph and Mary ever did.

Scripture. As the apostolic Church read it.