Nope. Not what capitalizing does. We capitalize lots of things that are not divine. This is such a ridiculous assertion. Capitalization has to do with the orthographic conventions of a language, not theology. Some people see Word of God as a title for the Bible. Titles are capitalized in English. It has nothing to do with infallibility. I also capitalize the Constitution in a sentence. I don’t think it’s infallible or divine. Please stop telling people what they believe about God, Jesus, and the Bible based on a capital W. You are wrong.
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Protestants, Orthodox, Roman Catholics, and Monophysites believe this.
Please read the nativity stories in Matthew and Luke. Mary’s response to the annunciation was biological. “How can this be?”
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According to who? The ancients knew about blood relatives.
It is interesting that when God first promises a redeemer, in Genesis 3, he refers to the seed of the woman!!!
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According to historical Christianity as I understand it, yes, god most certainly does have a genome. Jesus’ genome. I would say that this follows necessarily from the incarnation, and persists with the ascension. (I wrote a little piece about this back in the day.) Of course @Seeking_Harmony makes a good point, presumably about god the father, but I think that the incarnation requires that Jesus had a standard human genome, replete with copy number variations and a handful of lethal recessive alleles, and an unremarkable Y chromosome. The bodily ascension took that genome to heaven.
But that’s being pedantic. I think the question described earlier as “unsettling” is the nature of that genome and whether it would show evidence of various human lineages. The fantastical suggestion that it was “stitched together” miraculously is even more problematic than it sounds, because a human genome, like a human being, is a product of inheritance and environment. This manufactured genome would still have to be the genome of a 1st-century Palestinian Jew, and that means it would bear markings of selection and variation common in that population. Yes, of course god could make something different to fool phylogeneticists who extracted his DNA from a burial cloth, but he would have a difficult task: tinkering with the genome so as to somehow erase lineage-specific connections while maintaining the genome as normal and human.
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Good points. I was thinking along the lines of Joseph adopting Jesus, yet being the source of his linage from David, God adopting us as his children , and then some of what is in this article ( the writer of which I know nothing about, so take with a grain of salt):
http://www.annomundi.com/bible/virgin_birth.htm
And also a tongue in cheek reference to the genealogical Adam idea.
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I had never thought about that phasing, as it is in contrast to the reproductive conventions of the day. Good observation, foreshadowing Mary!
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You have no real way to establish the truth (or falseness) of this assertion - - because it is based on metaphysical notions of what constitutes humanity.
If God is the one handing out “souls” and/or “spirits”… I don’t think you are in a position to say whether humans made from dust (instead of from sexual congress) are non-humans, or anything else.
A more accurate statement, @Seeking_Harmony, is that the virgin birth is “extrapolated” from the Old Testament using the Pesher methodology commonly employed by independent Jewish sects (the multiple and rival Essene groups).
The Jewish understood that part of the Old Testament to be a fulfillment of prophecy 700+ years prior to the birth of Jesus. Mainstream Judaism at the time of Jesus included no expectation that the same text was forecasting TWO different virgin-birth events, separated by more than half a millenium!
Don’t believe in that nonsense anymore than talking animals, magic fruit and “life force” – no such things. I would buy into Santa Claus, unicorns, fairies, and UFOs before any of that.
My soul doth magnify the Lord,
And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour
Because He hath regarded the humility of his handmaid: for behold from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.
Because He that is mighty hath done great things to me, and holy is His name.
And His mercy is from generation unto generations to them that fear Him.
He hath shewed might in His arm: He hath scattered the proud in the conceit of their heart.
He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble.
He hath filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he hath sent empty away.
He hath received Israel His servant, being mindful of His mercy.
As He spoke to our fathers; to Abraham and his seed forever.
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I wonder why the biblical authors would fabricate such an embarrassing story about Mary. When Joseph first hears about her pregnancy, he wants to quietly put her away.
I certainly believe we have a spirit. There is no doubt about that. I just don’t believe in this nonsense about God handing them out. I believe in a spirit which is a creation of our choices in life. As Paul says in 1 Cor 15,
If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body. 45 Thus it is written, “The first man Adam became a living being”; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. 46 But it is not the spiritual which is first but the physical, and then the spiritual.
I don’t see how. God is outside of time and space; he has to be in order to be the Original Mover. DNA is a product of our space and time. The arguments that I am seeing here seem to be suggesting that Jesus was half God and Half Man not 100% both. Being that God, imo; is NOT made up of the same physical building blocks as we are; this doesn’t make sense to me. Crazy thought here, but is there any reason why he couldn’t have used sperm that had the DNA of Joseph? Even if they didn’t have sex, surely God could have created it or even nabbed one. Perhaps the virgin birth was necessary so that God could do whatever he needed to do to incorporate the God part into the fetus.
Just a thought that sort of popped into my head.
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So a newborn baby doesn’t have a spirit or soul?
I see it as a mystery. No explanation is 100% satisfactory. But it’s not science, so who cares?
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No I don’t believe in golems. That is the whole point. I don’t believe in this nonsense about some ancient necromancer turning dust into Adam or bone into Eve. And no I don’t believe in God handing out souls. The divine breath is inspiration (the etymology of this word) not magic, or life essence, or souls. God spoke to Adam and Eve giving birth to the human mind with a memetic inheritance which made us His children, i.e. human. Jesus is the second Adam because He brings a renewal of that inheritance without the destructive habits introduced by Adam and Eve which lead to the multiplication of evil in the human race. Thus I object to this implication of a genetic discontinuity in Jesus which has no Biblical support.
I certainly believe in the spirit which is nailed down in the Bible in numerous ways. Paul’s explanation of resurrection in 1 Cor 15 and the places such as John 4:24 where it says God is spirit. However the word soul is less clear and has numerous dubious connection with non Judeo-Christian religions such as the belief in a transmigration of the soul. I certainly do not believe in that. I don’t believe in any pre-existence whatsoever. Our spirit is a creation of our own choices and not something given to us by something else. But if you complain that the word “soul” is in the Bible then the problem is that this is translated from words such as napsi in Hebrew also translated as mind, heart, life, wish, and desire, from benepes in Hebrew also translated as body, life, desire, and heart, or from the psyche in Greek also translated as life and mind. But there is no teaching about the soul apart from the body. Instead you are likely to be led to teachings about this from other religions because that is really where this idea came from.
The rest of my post was about the incarnation, which is specifically about god entering time and space. I think the incarnation is bedrock Christian belief. I don’t personally believe it, but it’s a straightforward claim about god.
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