Why not? Was Jesus not carried in the womb for 9 months as all other babies? Why do you feel the need to remove coitus and male semen in order to call him God? I am
Not understanding your logic.
Vinnie
So a man born from another man can be God? I dont understand your logic. Moses,David etc etc were born from another man. Yet the one is prophet the other a king. I dont recall anyone worshiping them as God
Also what prophecy concerning the messiah tells he will be born from a man?
Correct. An actual virgin birth is not essential to Christianity and the actual infancy narratives fall under a clear convention of assigning wondrous births to your deity. They are analogous to creation myths and early Genesis. And this is without even the astronomical and historical problems in the accounts, the conflicting details between them, that they appear late in the record (towards the end of the first century) and that no other streams of NT thought show any knowledge of this (even the demons in Mark know Jesus comes from Nazareth).
Why? He was carried in a womb for 9 months. Why the fixation on removing male semen from the picture? Everything else about his birth appears biologically natural.
No it was not his characters understanding. Not according to the Church that won anyways. But from my perspective Jesus emptied himself and became like us in every way. I see no reason to assume that if God chose to incarnate himself in some way he must have been born of a virgin. That simply does not follow and I think that reasoning is as primitive and unnecessary as that which gave rise to the hundreds if not thousands of other alleged divine birth stories.
I accept its possible for Jesus. If you want to accept it as part of a package you are free to do so. But Ralphie stated the Biblical infancy narratives are credible unlike all the other divine birth stories. I am just asking for why these accounts are credible, as was stated. From my perspective they are not, they are late, they fall in line with convention, and they are riddled with problems if taken literally.
Now you can affirm a virgin birth and deny many of the details found in the two infancy narratives. Raymond Brown does that (see his seminal work The Birth of the Messiah).
It seems there is no real evidence aside from âJesus is my savior so he must have had a miraculous birth.â The possibility Iâm not denying, but the faulty reasoning I am not buying.
Are you going to next tell me original sin was passed down genetically through males so Jesus couldnât be sinless without a virgin birth?
Vinnie
This is just playing a game. I can do that. How can Jesus be also fully man without a full human birth? Your arguments donât follow. We have no idea how God incarnated himself nor can we fully understand it. Whether he had to have a supernatural or a normal birth is beyond our understanding.
As far as prophecy goes, is there any actual explicit prophecy about the Messiah being born of a virgin birth? Doesnât Isaiah 7:14 properly read young woman? And did God destroy Ahazâs enemies before Jesus knew right from wrong? Aside from Matthewâs eisegesis, what does Isaiah 7 have to do with Jesus? Was Ephraim and Syria destroyed after Jesusâ birth? Isaiah 7 is not a proper prophecy about Jesus.
Jesus was not only God but fully human like us. He was carried in a womb for 9 months by Mary. Unless I have reason to suppose otherwise, I will assume he was born the same way I assume you, me and 100 billion other people were born.
Your question is like asking how can God have a heart, eyes, brain and so forth like all other men. I donât know how God incarnated himself and neither do you.
Vinnie
Well God cant have a father. I dont really understand how does that correlate. If Jesus was born from a man then that means Arius is correct. But if the trinity is correct or as the early christians believed about Father and Son ,then the Son can only have one Father. Remember the phrase âonly begotten Sonâ .
Why canât an emptied and fully human Jesus have a biological father? You are just asserting this is heresy but not logically explaining why. I am not interested in Arius, but your reasoning why a fully human Jesus could not have a biological father. Jesus pre-existed both Mary and Jesus, but empties himself and became born as a human being. Why is having a biological male father ruled out here? How can God have a mother? Why can God have a mother but not a father? How is this anything other than patriarchal ideology and misogynistic thought?
Vinnie
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Is this serious thoughts right now? Like are you for real? Explain to me how can a human born from 2 parents with 46 chromosomes and fully man-looking and behavioral acting can be God as well? Either he is spitting bs or something miraculous might have happened
Also accusing me of mysogynist and patriarchial though(as if patriarchy is the devil in our society and hurts people) wont achieve nothing in your argument. Rather it makes you sound stupid making such assumptions
You seem to be arguing against the dual nature of Christ. I agree. The doctrine sounds awfully stupid in human terms. But if you believe it then the fully human aspect of Jesus means exactly that, he can be fully human and fully divine. Trying to split the difference with his parents in no way resolves this dilemma. A fully human Jesus can be fully human, being born of coitus. The God end of the dual nature none of us can understand. Itâs a âdivine ineffable mysteryâ and you simply are claiming to possess more knowledge about what God could and could not do than you can logically possess.
Unless you offer a logical argument then I canât proceed further. You keep asserting that God must have been born of a virgin. I just keep asking why. You keep stating it as if the belief is self-evident and there are no logically possible alternatives. I am asking why you cut the line off at male semen? You are okay with Jesus going through every other biological development in the womb. Whatâs so important about Joseph not inseminating Mary? Must she have been pure and proper to birth our Lord? If God chose to be born of a virgin then he was. If God chose to be conceived normally then he was. You have most certainly locked God into a patriarchal and misogynistic box.
Vinnie
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See you still accuse me of things but because again your accusations sound stupid and irrational ill turn the other cheek.
I think youve probably missed one sentence i wrote above which made my whole point
There you are. Theres my argument. Is there something miracullous about a man having a sexual affair with a woman and voualla a child beign born? Not that i know of.
Or are you these types of people that do not know the defition of âmiracullousâ and attributes a miracle to whatever they want to?
It gets sticky when you think about it. If you look at it from the reproductive knowledge they had 2000 years ago, children were born solely as the reproductive product of the man, and the woman was just the vessel, the womb the soil for receiving the seed from the male. If God was the father and Jesus the Son of God, there could be no other physical father (though the woman need not be a virgin, something that I think is a fuzzy point in translation as whether the word used means virgin or just young maiden).
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Also i dont understand . You discredit the virgin birth fair enough and yet you dont discredit the ressurection. I mean either reject the whole reality of Christ alltogether or dont at all. I dont like this style of choosing whats possible or whats not. If we are talking about credibility then nothing its credible
The resurrection is essential to Christianity and genuine belief in its historical reality is the only explanation for why Christianity ever came to be. This belief is datable to within a few years after his actual death under Pontius Pilate solely on historical grounds with contemporary primary data. The infancy narratives are late, possible almost a full century after the events they purport to narrate, contradictory in many details, historically (census, maybe slaughtering of the innocents and Maryâs purification rituals) and scientifically problematic (the behavior of the star) in others, Matthewâs is clearly patterning Jesus after the Exodus (out of Egypt I called my son and many other details match) and by modern standards, abusing the Old Testament. Not to mention they fall in line with a common convention of ascribing a wondrous birth to your deity. They are not essential to Christian faith to me.
I also did not deny the Virgin birth. If I accepted it then it would be solely based on faith and the magisterial teachings of the Church. I only sought justification for a statement that the Biblical infancy narratives are credible as history. None has been provided. We all desire absolutely intellectual certainty in our beliefs but while some profess to have that, the rest of us are stuck with faith and personal experience, which isnât so bad. You can believe the virgin birth. Most Christians do but the claim that the Biblical birth stories are credible whereas the rest are not is incorrect.
The Gospels are not modern historical biographies anymore than Genesis 1 is a science text book. Judging them as such is a mistake to me.
Vinnie
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Which provides a compelling reason for theological creativity 60 years after Jesus had died and 90-100 after he was born. Not that this was needed as this was a common practice in antiquity. Even if we push the virginal conception back based on Matthew and Luke independently relating this tradition, this puts us no earlier than ca. 70CE for it and other streams of thought donât seem aware of it.
Vinnie
Iâm not in to faulty reasoning. And itâs got nothing to do with sex. Itâs to do with the fully divine fully human. For a mere human to become fully divine between conception and puberty requires a different story. Please make one up, that was tracelessly obliterated by Matthew and Luke within 80 years. What their agenda could have been I have no idea. The Resurrection wasnât credible enough? Itâs not that He HAD to be born of a virgin, He was. The fact that that is a universal human trope invalidates it how? The fact that they are all primitive fantasies means His parthenogenesis was too? It created problems for Him and His family and is problematic in many ways. Not the least of which is hierarchies of angels. It also works whereas none of the others do.
This is laughable argument really. So Christianity came to be because Christ ressurected? Right
A lot of atheists scholars will eat you for dinner with a weak claim like that
In what historical data? Werent you the one arguing a few months ago on my thread about Pontious Pilate that the conversation or that Pilate never had an encounter with a man like Jesus before?
I said because it was believed by his earliest followers he was resurrected. Atheists have no need to dispute my claim. They can just assume the disciples were mistaken, had strong religious experiences and maybe some lied. I never said there is solid historical evidence the resurrection occurred. Iâm not Lee Strobel, Gary Habermas or Josh McDowell. I accept it on faith based upon experiencing Gods love and forgiveness while reading the wordâs of Christ.
My religious beliefs are not falsifiable by materialism and I cannot prove them by logic to anyone. The Gospel is capable of converting people without little old me providing intellectual proof its power.
Jesus was crucified under the tenure of the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate. I only said the prisoner release was most likely not historical and the account shows the âJewsâ essential chose the wrong type of Messiah as it occurred after the Temple was sacked and rival Jewish groups in Jerusalem were also fighting one another. Every timeline we have for the birth of Christ establishes the general timeframe of his life and a Crucified messiah is not something Jewish people would have made up. It was an embarrassment in the early church, a stumbling block. Even the unadulterated form of the Testimonium Flavianum and Tacitus both agree with crucifixion under Pilate. This, apparently was common knowledge.
The contemporary-primary data is supplied by Paul who lists appearances of the risen Jesus to people he knew, met, spent time with and were very much still alive in many cases, some as pillars of the church. We even see some evidence of earlier creeds in Paulâs letters.
Christianity doesnât ends on the Cross unless Jesusâ followers thought he rose from the dead and it probably looks nothing like it does unless he also appeared to a man on the road to Damascus.
Vinnie
The concept of fully divine and fully human is a divine ineffable mystery. I am not sure where you are even coming from on this. If Jesus chose to enter Maryâs womb as a fertilized egg or somehow jumped into Jospehâs sperm that fertilized the egg, what difference does it make? And none of this even really makes sense to us of a pre-existent being jumping into a human womb or male seed. We just believe it happened. Why you insist on defining the parameters of something, the inner workings of which we donât remotely understand, so precisely is beyond my understanding. Why is one so problematic to you when the rest of Jesusâ fetal development occurs via biology? Somehow Jesus, presumably a divine and pre-existent and immaterial being had to enter our reality as a human. I am not sure why if it was in Maryâs womb, Josephsâs semen or at conception matters to you? Itâs a non-issue to me. Itâs a miracle either way and therefore inexplicable to us.
Matthewâs agenda is quite clear with his infancy narrative. Read the exodus narrative again and then Matthewâs infancy story. The parallels are obvious. For Mark, Jesus was born in Nazareth and died on the cross for us. Mark had no issue with that. John doesnât either. But John has the most grandiose infancy narrative of all. Forget the virgin birth, that is small fry stuff. Jesus was co-existent with the Father and made everything with him.
Nick disagrees with you. He thinks it was a necessity but he canât justify that claim. Many others do as well based on original sin. He may very well have been though. Iâve never suggested he wasnât. I am in no position to disprove it. I do find your certainty of it curious but itâs something I cannot accept based on faith and the magisterial teachings of the Church and nothing more. Iâm not sure if you have any actual reasons for it aside from asserting it as a brute fact?
Itâs not my job to invalidate it. Itâs the job of a person who believes in something to explain why. That it is a universal human trope and common convention could put the infancy narratives in line with Genesis even under any model of Biblical inspiration. That is my point. Why must I take it historically when this convention was extremely common in antiquity? It doesnât help that the accounts are riddled with problems. I just asked for positive evidence.
You are also forgetting that the only thing I have EVER asked for was justification for the statement that the Biblical birth narratives are credible while all the other ones are not. You are addressing a completely different issue. I do maintain the position that the Biblical birth narratives are not credible in the least as literal history but establishing that has not been my goal and I did not attempt to. I only asked for evidence which no one has supplied. Maybe I should steel man it and actually provide it myself. Father Brownâs commentary is a great place to start.
Belief in the virgin birth is the product of faith alone, not credible historical testimony and reporting. If it was the result of the latter I probably wouldnât have spent 10,000 words repeatedly asking for evidence justifying a belief and get nothing in response.
Vinnie
I already addressed the greater credibility and closed with it last time. Gabriel asked Maryâs permission. Not Josephâs. The parallels with Exodus are nothing to do with parthenogenesis which are not part of Jewish culture. What other âparallelsâ are there with Jesusâ infancy apart from one strained literary allusion? Or two. And what Catholics including Orthodox argue about Mary is neither here nor there.
In Catherine Hezserâs Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine (she argues that the rates of literacy at the time in Palestine were probably not a lot more than 3%; that is, only 3% or slightly more of the population could read. And that this 3-4% were wealthy urban elites â not rural fishermen).
Some of those fishermen devoted themselves to âthe wordâ in order to minister. What âwordâ did they dedicate themselves to in Acts Ch 6 vs 4?
When Iâm asked a question, I try to answer it sooner rather than later. I get side tracked a bit at times. I am still preparing a response regarding the accuracy of the depictions of Christâs birth. I havenât forgotten you.
Would you elaborate on the abundance of divine birth narratives you referred to?
They go hand in hand. He always was GOD. He was begotten as a human being. Nothing was made that didnât go through him. I donât think grandiose expresses the idea. He was stating fact that Jesus was an incredible historical and divine person because everything in the universe was made by him, for him and with him. I agree that the virgin birth was in a sense small potatoes for GOD, yet still a profound mystery. Human reproduction with GOD as the creator of everything material, is just as profound. That we our here in bodies with the ability to think and to create lifeâit is all astounding.
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