BluePhantom
Educator (of liberals)
- Thread starter
- #21
Well that created yet other schools of thought and other branches of Christianity in the early church. Some argued that Jesus was conceived through sexual intercourse between Mary and Joseph. Some argued that Mary conceived Jesus through the Holy Spirit, gave birth to Him and remained a virgin. Some said that after the birth of Jesus she had sex with Joseph. Others said that Mary was never pregnant at all. A light shown from her womb and from that light Jesus was created. There were tons of stories about it and each were embraced by different sects
I would think that it was the "immaculate conception" and since she was known as the "virgin Mary," then I think that tells us that Jesus was conceived through God's powers but not intercourse.
Of course like you said, nobody knows, and I'm just sharing my opinion.
No no. The immaculate conception was the conception of Mary, not Jesus. According to that dogma, Mary was conceived through sexual intercourse but the "sin nature" did not pass to her. Thus she was born sinless and worthy to give birth to God. You said you learned about this from a Catholic. This is huge Catholic stuff here.
The conception of Jesus was the "virgin conception", not the immaculate conception
Right. That means she was not "tainted" so to speak, which would probably mean she was a virgin. Correct?
Well again it would depend on who you asked in antiquity. That's actually a very interesting topic because it appears that the authors of Mark and Matthew were reading from the Septuagint (the first Greek version of the Hebrew Bible) and there is confusion between the Hebrew word used and the Greek word used. They don't quite mean the same thing. The Hebrew word "almah" could mean "virgin", "young woman" or "woman who had not gone through the final phase of marriage" (there were like 13 or 14 of them and the man had sexual rights to his betrothed after the first one although she would be considered an "almah" until the completion of the last one).
Trying to translate that to Greek was a bit of a pain because they didn't have a word that meant the same thing so they used the word "parthenos" which means "virgin". So when the authors of Matthew and Luke read it in Greek they saw "parthenos" and took it for what parthenos meant. A virgin. But that's not quite what it means in Hebrew.
In the early Christian church all these different points of view were in competition for converts and they all had different beliefs. Many of them radically different. According to research by Walter Bauer, which is mostly accepted by scholarship although not completely, it was the view of the church at Rome that won out and the rest were banished by pain of death. So that's what comes to us today. The Christianity we see today is not necessarily the original version, nor the version that was the majority opinion in antiquity. It was the view that won the war and got adopted by Constantine and Theodosius.
So to answer your question, she was not tainted, but that is only according to the proto-orthodox view of early Christianity and we take it for granted because it's the view that survived into the Middle Ages and destroyed all the other views.
Does any of that make sense?
Yes, you are saying that it all depends upon the translation of the texts and different words, but I still think the theory that Mary was a virgin and was impregnated by God through supernatural means and not actually through sex and that Jesus is God's son, who God sacrificed for mankind makes most sense. This is what they teach in the Catholic church that my mother went to.
Well yes and no. The Catholics embrace the Trinity. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all different aspects to the same to the same divine entity. So while God was God, Jesus was Jesus, and the Holy Spirit was the Holy Spirit, they are all the same as well. So God is God, but God is also the Holy Spirit and God is also Jesus. It can be quite confusing.