Reality Check: What Must Be the Case if Christianity is True?
14) That although there were many false virgin birth claims about famous people (like Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, Plato) mythical heroes (like Mithra, Hercules) and savior gods (like Krishna, Osiris, Dionysus) in the ancient world, Jesus was really born of a virgin.
13 comments:
I love this series.
Its funny how christians really believe and expect others to really believe that such a thing actually happened.
There is absolutely no logical, rational, sound reason we should accept such a claim for 3 good reasons I can think of.
1- It is a biological impossibility for a mammal to give birth to offspring without both the male and female reproductive elements (sperm/egg).
This goes agianst all our scientific/biological understanding and research.
2- What evidence is there to support such a miraculous claim?
All we have to back up such an impossibility is the (apparent) hearsay testamonies of some unknown people, and it was recorded roughly 2000 years ago!
By the way.....how did anyone witness Marry's virgen conception???????
3- The virgen birth recorded in Matthew was to fulfill the prophecy in Isaiah 7:14.
Yet, According to Paul Carlson, he says, "This verse is part of a prophecy that Isaiah relates to King Ahaz regarding the fate of the two kings threatening Judah at the time and the fate of Judah itself.
In the original Hebrew, the verse says that a "young women" will give birth, not a "virgen" which is an entirely different Hebrew word. The young woman became a virgen only when the Hebrew word was mistranslated into Greek". This passage obviously has nothing to do with Jesus.
Most bibles even if they use the word "virgen" will explain below the page that the correct word is just "women".
Here is another note from Paul Carlson.
-"Of all the writers of the New Testament, onyl Matthew and Luke mention the virgen birth. Had something as miraculous as the virgen birth occurred, one would expect that Mark and John would have at least mentioned it in their efforts to convince the world that Jesus was who they were claiming Him to be".
"The apostle Paul never mentiones the virgen birth, even though it would have strengthened his arguments in several places. Instead, where Paul does refer to Jesus' birth, he says that Jesus "was born of the seed of David", and was "born of a woman", not a virgen".
There's this bit from Buddhism too:
"One of the legends which arose as Buddhism degenerated from its original lofty idealism was to the effect that the Buddha Gautama was given birth to by Maya, an immaculate virgin who conceived him through a divine influence.
Gautama, the Buddha, was the son of a Hindu rajah named Suddhodana, and was born, in the ordinary course of nature, in 563 B.C. He never claimed to be a god, neither did either he himself or his disciples claim that his birth was miraculous.
But in after years a myth arose among Buddhists to the effect that his mother Maya, having been divinely chosen to give birth to the Buddha, was borne away by spirits to the Himalayas, where she underwent ceremonial purifications at the hands of four queens. The Bodhisattva then appeared to her, and walked round her three times. At the moment when he completed his peregrinations the Buddha (the incarnate Bodhisattva) entered her womb, and great wonders took place in heaven, on earth, and in hell."
The Buddha was also said to have performed all sorts of miracles such as healing the sick. It seems it is human nature to deify our heros beyond merely human. While this sometimes takes place while the person lives, it becomes even more pronounced after they die. All sorts of myths and legends then spring up.
There is a story told in the Chan tradition about two monks approaching a river. One of the monks simply walks across the river without breaking stride. He then beckons to his companion (Huang Po) to cross too. Huang Po, instead of crossing said: "If I'd known he was that kind of fellow I would have broken his legs before he reached the water."
Miracles are looked down upon in zen. I guess it's fortunate that Huang Po wasn't around when Jesus did his water walking trick.
All religions have their miracles, prophecis and wu wu. People usually discount miracles in other religions as being myth or fake while believing their own.
And then there's Annakin Skywalker (Darth Vader) who was also born of a virgin. This myth is so appealing it just keeps coming back.
Here's another objection from biology:
any mammal that has only one female parent cannot be male. There's no "Y" chromosome.
Unless you postulate holy ghost jizz...
They weren't "virgin births". (You probably meant "demi-gods", not "virgin births"...)
Lvka.
Actually I think your right on at least Hercules, he was suppossed to be the son of Zeus and some mortal women, but nontheless (half man half God).
Julius Caesar I believe was claimed to have a virgen birth!
How and why did the idea that a virgin birth was necessary for the production of a Christian god-man originate?
I understand the theology that sin comes down via Adam and through the male line but it took the RC church to realise that such a hypothesis was insupportable in the real world and so it got around the problem by asserting the immaculate conception of Mary, a dogma which only became such as recently as 1854. There was a great deal of dispute over the problem in the early church, the scriptures as usual supporting all sides, and the problem has never been satisfactorily resolved throughout Christianity.
Could it be that ancient peoples - especially the Hebrews - thought that the woman was just an incubator for her husband’s seed and that she contributed no genetic material in the form of a human egg to the production of the foetus? In other words, were they unaware that women came ready equipped with eggs waiting to be fertilised and that it wasn’t just sperm which developed into a being?
Otherwise, I can see no logic in the necessity for a miraculous virgin birth. Jesus could have been born free of original sin and “full of grace” simply by God declaring it to be so as indeed the modern RC church believes is the case with Mary’s birth. And, what’s more, after Gabriel’s date with Mary, none of the Gospel characters including Jesus, his brother or even his own mother seemed aware of it. So, if not by ignorance of human fertility, for what reason did the concept arise?
Any suggestions?
How and why did the idea that a virgin birth was necessary for the production of a Christian god-man originate?
It came from the Greek (mis-)translation of the Immanuel passage in Isaiah 7, where the Hebrew for "nubile young woman" not necessarily a virgin, was rendered as "parthenos," "virgin."
The production of the gospels was largely an exercise in mining the Jewish scriptures for proof-texts about the messiah. So if Isaiah said, in the greek translation anyway, that the savior would be born of a virgin, then born of a virgin shall he be.
CJO said "It came from the Greek (mis-)translation of the Immanuel passage in Isaiah 7, where the Hebrew for "nubile young woman" not necessarily a virgin, was rendered as "parthenos," "virgin.""
No, that's not it. The verse is only OT justification for the idea but the idea itself must have come from some misunderstanding of human physiology.
Do we (not me, obviously, or I wouldn't be asking) know what the ancients knew of human reproduction and, in particular, were they aware that to make another human being the female carried an egg which required fertilisation or did they believe that it was just the sperm which matured in the female womb?
the idea itself must have come from some misunderstanding of human physiology.
More like a complete lack of any such understanding and a complete failure to appreciate the relevance of that to the question. We're talking about a premodern worldview in which the empirico-rationalist approach to such questions simply wasn't available. Magic trumps physiology in such a belief system.
Do we know what the ancients knew of human reproduction...?
Among the educated in the Hellenistic world, there were two main schools of thought. The Aristotelian model held that semen provided all the spirit needed to make a human, and the woman's body was brute matter, like a field in which you would plant the pneuma(spirit)-bearing seed. The Hippocratics, and Galen after, held that both men and women produced seed, and that both contributed pneuma to the offspring. But none of this speculation constituted "knowing." They were blind guesses based on logic and first principles.
Thanks CJO,
I suppose the best we can say is that the Gospel writers were uninspired when it came to inventing their own virgin birth tradition not realising that the idea did not overcome the problem that with God as his father 50% of jesus was human and therefore up to 50% sinful. Hence, the later and necessary RC invention of the immaculate conception to get around the problem. This is what Wikipedia has to say about it.
"The Immaculate Conception was solemnly defined as a dogma by Pope Pius IX in his constitution Ineffabilis Deus on 8 December 1854. The Catholic Church teaches that the dogma is supported by Scripture (e.g., Mary's being greeted by the Angel Gabriel as "full of grace") "
Where in the bible does Gabriel say any such thing? The only time the phrase appears in the KJV is in John and relates to Jesus, not Mary.
To their credit the RCs tried to solve the problem (but failed) whereas the Proddies just ignore it.
@Samphire:
I think the reference may be to:
- Luke 1:28, which says "The angel went to her and said, "Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.""
- Luke 1:30b, which says "Do not be afraid, Mary, you have found favor with God."
- Luke 1:42a, which says "In a loud voice she exclaimed: "Blessed are you among women""
Ha! Just googled it and found this SITE which, ironically, is a non-Catholic site analyzing the Catholic derivation of 'full of grace' when most (or all?) other translations have some form of being 'favored.'
The site concludes "we must not elevate [Mary] to a level beyond that which is prescribed in Scripture. To do so is to be in error, the very error that is taught in the Roman Catholic Church."
They even bust out some analysis of the actual Greek and conclude that 'full of grace' is an over statement.
Got to love it.
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