DID JESUS COME INTO WORLD MIRACULOUSLY?

The New Testament never says if Mary said she had a virgin conception.  If it imposes that idea on her that is misogyny.  If it worked out that she was a virgin from the Old Testament "prophecies" then why her?  The prophecies don't even specify that they mean the Messiah's mother.  What else were they mining the Old Testament for?  Who knows?

Don't mistake the teaching of Matthew that Mary conceived by the Holy Spirit as being clear.  Eve despite Adam fathering her baby talks as if God fathered it. She says she has begotten a man with the Lord. Other places in the Bible speak of God opening the womb. See Genesis 18:9-14/21:1-2/I Samuel 1:19,20/Psalm 17:14/Isaiah 44:2,24 for some examples. 

We read in the Old Testament how angels got women pregnant. See Genesis 6.  The Bible also says that occasionally God himself comes as an angel.  Is that why Paul wanted women to cover their heads in church because of the angels?  Conceived by the Holy Spirit could be cover for sex with an angel.  As it is not natural sex Mary could still be classed as a woman who is a virgin in the sense that she never had sex with a man.  Sarah the wife of Abraham got pregnant in her very very old age which may imply a virgin conception in the sense that her husband was too old to have sex with her.  There is no case for arguing that the story of Jesus' birth as understood by Christians is probably true for there are no parallels.  There is enough out there and who says we need exact parallels?

Jewish law banned illegitimate children from full membership in the Jewish religion until the tenth generation - Deuteronomy 23:2.  If Jesus was illegitimate or if he was assumed to be by his people (because he was conceived by the Holy Spirit and they would not have believed that) it is hard to account for the gospel data which shows he experienced no discrimination and even ministered as a Rabbi.  He got into the temple to preach as well.

We know that the Christian doctrine, “I believe in Jesus Christ his only son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary”, as the ancient apostles’ creed puts it is unbiblical for it means that the Spirit took the place of sperm and the Virgin was a real virgin. Under the influence of paganism, most Christians have imagined that they see it in their superstitious scripture.

Scholars sometimes argue that the virginal conception of Jesus must really have happened for it is unique. In pagan stories there is divine lust involved and the god comes down and has sex with the girl who later has his child. But the Bible said that God made Adam without a woman so it was easy for the Christians to say Jesus was made without a man. Uniqueness only proves a good imagination not that the story is true.

The magic conception and birth are not in the New Testament and so they must have been concocted later.

The main reason they were made up seems to have been the fact that the Septuagint, the translation of the Old Testament into Greek, rendered Isaiah 7:14 as: “The virgin shall conceive and have a son and his name will be Emmanuel”. The word translated virgin is almah in the original Hebrew which simply means young woman and does not mean virgin for the Hebrew has words like betoula, betouli and tahor. So the translation is a bad one. The verse looks like a prophecy of a virginal conception and birth but it is not. You can point to a virgin and say, “That virgin will be a mother”. You mean that the girl who is a virgin now will have at least one child the normal way. Moreover, we know that parthenos, the word for virgin might not mean a literal virgin. Though the text is not a proof that virgins can have babies by God without a man there is enough in it to make a person think of the doctrine and misunderstand it in the way Christians have done.
 
When you read the prophecy in context, you see that the prediction was made to King Ahaz in about 734 BC. He was told that he should trust in God in his political troubles not the Assyrians. Ahaz didn't listen so Isaiah uttered a prophecy of doom and said that the young woman will have a son called Emmanuel, meaning God is with us, and before he grows up the destruction of Ahaz's kingdom will be seen. Emmanuel then is not God with us as in God is our friend but is God is with us as judge. This paragraph is based on the analysis of John Dominic Crossan in Jesus, A Revolutionary Biography, John Dominic Crossan, HarperCollins, San Francisco, 1994, page 18.

It is foolish to say that the verse did not suggest the magic conception because Luke did not use the verse to defend the doctrines he put forward. There were lots of scripture passages that Luke could have put in his book as if they were predictions about Jesus but didn’t. It was in his translation of the Old Testament and that was enough for Luke. And besides, Luke would have looked at you as if you were nuts if you told him he wrote that Jesus had no father and was born of a virgin.

Many argue: “Mary and her family thought that Jesus was mad according to Mark 3. They would not had he been conceived and born miraculously and virginally.”

It seems to some that Mark does not actually say that Mary thought this. He says that Jesus’ family set off to get him and called him mad and that when they arrived Mary was with them. She might have joined them later on so she might not have been one of those who believed him to be nuts. But Mark would have clearly excluded her and he said the family came to get Jesus and she was family. If she did, Mary could have been beside herself with shame, anger and confusion so she might have thought that Jesus was mental even if he had been miraculously born of her until she had time to think and calm down. She could even have done this without sin. But Mary would have been used to Jesus’ bizarre behaviour by then and would not have been so carried away.

The indications are that this was an ordinary man and how had lost his mind and his family could see it.  Usually the family are the first to notice mental illness today and the psychiatrist takes their experience into account.  They in a sense give him the diagnosis that he confirms after checking.  Do not let Christianity fool you about the significance of Jesus' family, in a crazy age too where prophets were everywhere, being willing to call him a mental case in public. 

When you read Mark 3 you see the family of Jesus came first saying he was insane and then the teachers of the law are mentioned as saying he was possessed.  You can be sure that both groupings were ganging up on him.

In those days madness was linked with demonic influence.  Lost his mind was a short-cut way of saying "Insane and demonised."  Jesus in Mark 3 had done nothing to invite his family coming to take charge of him.  How could they arrest or take away a grown man with a crowd of supporters around him?  There were no asylums.  To get him out of the way they would have to get him stoned to death as a trafficker with demons and incurably possessed and insane or get him exiled.  Why didn't they do something?  It is a very strange story.

Jesus after all that says that his real mother and brothers etc are those who hear God's word and keep it.  The other gospels carefully revised what Mark wrote.  They show they were embarrassed by it.

The doctrine of a miracle virginal conception and delivery first appeared in the writings of St Ignatius of Antioch at the beginning of the second century. But Ignatius was a fanatic, a murderous man who died horribly in the hope that others would bring a brutal death on themselves because of his example, who cannot be taken seriously. What value is there in what he reported when he said it a century after it happened. People were lucky if they made it to fifty in those days. Ignatius eventually became completely deranged and committed suicide for his religious beliefs in a way too horrible to mention.

There are invalid objections to the miraculous virgin conception.

 “In conception the female must supply twenty three chromosomes and the male the same. If Jesus was made by miraculously created male chromosomes then he was not truly human.”

This is nonsense. Chromosomes are chromosomes wherever they come from. What about Adam? The objection commits the fallacy that a person has to be made the natural way to be a human person. God can make genes and chromosomes out of thin air. It is the kind of body and cells you have that determine that. It is dreadful how some people would argue that a cloned human being is some sort of humanoid animal.

If man and woman did not always exist and reproduce then there must have been something that became them that had no father or mother. If the objection were correct then none of us would be human.

“Jesus would have been female if he had no human father and was made from his mother’s egg alone. The Y chromosomes required to make a child male can only come from a man. He would have been a clone if her cell was all that was used.”

Jesus in the Bible referred to as anthropos (human) and aner – the word for individual male.  Quote from http://www.bible-researcher.com/aner.html All in all, the evidence for another sense of aner is quite weak, and must be used with great caution. In fact, it seems likely that aner has stronger and more exclusive associations with maleness than does the English word "man." End of quote.

God could do magic to turn the female foetus into a male one though it was genetically female. Or he could turn the female genes into male ones.  But that would mean drastic changing and fixing and sounds totally undignified.  It would be no better than making a Jesus without a woman or man from scratch.  No that would make more sense!

Your virgin born Jesus would have to be biologically female for he took his body only from his mother.  Nobody is telling us that as Christ allegedly took his body from his mother without a father that this means he was female in a male looking body. A transgender messiah then!  Or better still!  He was a male impersonator!

The objection that Jesus would have been a girl proves that there was no Virgin Birth in reality but it does not prove that the Christian can drop the doctrine.  The inventors of the absurd doctrine did not think it through.

What about the ancient world thinking that women were men who did not develop correctly?  That effectively says that women are not women - they are just transgender men.  The ancients did not know about the ovum and thought pregnancy had something to do with male seed.  The virginal conception of Jesus is really, in context, about Mary having sperm that she probably made herself.  The sperm did not come from a man but from her.  The maleness imagery for the Holy Spirit would support that!

Here is a nonsensical argument for the magic conception: “Original sin, the state of being born an enemy of God, is passed on by father and mother. Jesus had to be conceived without a father to be conceived without this sin. If Jesus had original sin then he was not the Son of God.”

This argument is dying today though it is so hilarious that it never should have been ever voiced. God made the law that original sin had to be transmitted this way so God can change it. He could have preserved Jesus from it instead of making him without a father to do it. The argument questions the competence of God.

The doctrine of the miraculous conception of Jesus is blasphemous for it has God doing miracles that he has no need of when he could be saving the world from suffering. So whether there is a God or not, the doctrine is untrue.

The New Testament says miracles are given as signs and evidences.  A miracle virgin birth would mean that she had to be subject to a terrible body violation.  How was Mary’s virginity verified?  Did Joseph check her privates?  Did he put some kind of chastity belt on her?  Such an examination would definitely be vile.  Remember, no illegitimate can be considered to have royal blood.  The gospels say he was of royal descent and the valid king of Israel.  What kind of examination would she need to rule out a man?

The Bible does not really know what conception means.  It just knows that pregnancy has a start.  So conceived by the Holy Spirit as in sperm and egg is not to be read into those texts.

Girls today as young as ten are dedicated to Hindus divinities,  They are given over to celibacy.  The exception is when the deity supposedly approves the child being raped by a priested man.  In the past any child resulting was seen as in some sense the child of the god.  Pagan doctrine crept into Jewish communities during Roman occupation. This story makes me wonder about Jesus' mother. Conceived by a spirit or god in paganism means the entity uses a man.

Putting Away Childish Things, Uta Ranke-Heinmann, HarperSanFrancisco, 1992
The Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus, Raymond E Brown, Paulist Press, New York, 1973
The Womb and the Tomb, Hugh Montifiore, Fount – HarperCollins, London, 1992
Son of Joseph, The Parentage of Jesus, Geoffrey Parrinder, T & T Clark, Edinburgh, 1992
Papal Sin, Structures of Deceit, Garry Wills, Darton Longman and Todd, London, 2000
The Jesus Dynasty, James D Tabor, Element Books, London, 2006

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