The genes of Jesus

My catechism is beyond rusty, so please feel free to correct me and/or enlighten on differing opinions (as I'm sure such will exist).

Jesus was born of a woman, but IS a son of god (the only son of god, and don't even ask about daughters).

In his time on Earth Jesus had a body, he walked, ate, drank, suffered pain, bled, died.

The body Jesus grew and started growing in his mother's womb was presumably of the same constitution--in anatomy, cell biology, biochemistry etc. as that of another human being.

The development and workings of that body were then, presumably, dependent on a genetic programme, just as any other human being's.

So, whose genes did Jesus have? His mother's would make up half of his chromosomal complement. Who provided the other half--the half with the sex-determining Y chromosome?

One of the possible real-life based answers, and the kindest regarding Mary, would be her husband, Joseph.

But if Jesus is Joseph's son, how does one claim parenthood for god?

Adoption?

Interesting question. I doubt that any church of reasonable size and theological depth has an official answer to the question.

For Christians who wish to preserve Mary's initial virginity, the necessary parameters are:

1. Joseph did not have sex with Mary.
2. Jesus was fully human.

The latter needs some explaining. Jesus was also fully divine. That is, Christians do not believe Jesus was a demigod.

I think that requires that Jesus have a full set of DNA of a normal, physical and recognizably human type. It stands to reason that Mary contributed a portion of his genetic material. She could have contributed MORE than half, but not 100%, without some really bizarre and miraculous chromosomal shenanigans. I'd favor half as being the most normal.

The other half could come from nowhere--be a new but truly human creation—from some random person, or from some religiously appropriate person (i.e., "Adam"). The latter would work in a novel, perhaps, jibing with the talk of Jesus as a second Adam, and bringing things around full-circle. I'd argue Joseph's DNA could also be used, so long as #1 is maintained; that would avoid Jesus being a red-headed stepchild, but looking like part of the family. But I suspect many would say that went against the spirit of the thing.

In any case, we don't know.

Adoption?

Adoption was a live option in the first centuries. The argument was that Jesus was adopted his baptism. This view may have echoes in Mark, Paul and/or the author of Hebrews. The broad rejection of adoptionism was confirmed at Nicaea. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adoptionism .

You can't ask questions like that here Lola! It requires rational thought and scientific knowledge; the enemies of religion.

Really—a semicolon? You might want to take extra care to punctuate appropriately when issuing blanket denunciations of others' intellectual skills. As it is, this is reminding me of the famous put-down backfire:

It's really not that simple:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/17/science/dna-double-take.html?_r=0

Right. I considered chromosomal abnormality combined with chimerism, and reduced it to "some really bizarre and miraculous chromosomal shenanigans." I'd be interested in whether "miraculous" is absolutely required. That said, some sort of minority chromosomal weirdness coexisting with chromosomal normality strikes me as not really Mary, but weirdness created at her conception and therefore her parents' genetic material. Meh.

Let's just say half of jesus's chromosomes came from the Easter Bunny and half came from Santa, declare it all a mystery and leave it at that.

Next question: Did Adam and Eve have navels?

After that: Where did Cain get his wife?

Then: were Adam and Eve contemporaneous with dinosaurs?

And: If the earth was created on the first "day" and the sun and the moon were created on the fourth "day", then how could there be a three days - interlarded by three nights - without a sun?

And: If the witch of Endor could conjure up the ghost/spirit/soul of Samuel upon request then witches are real -with real witch powers - so the burnings of all those tens of thousands of witches by christians were all justified? Or not?

And: When jesus cursed the fig tree for not producing out of season, was that right? Or stupid?

And: What exactly is effing up with Ezekiel Ch. 23? Wouldn't just simply saying a woman is a prostitute or that she lusts after men be sufficient to get the point across? Why go into graphic detail that would make the authoress of '50 Shades of Grey" blush? I expect that sort of filth from Larry Flynt or the late Al Goldstein, but.....god?

(I have a couple hundred more of these type questions if anyone is interested.)

You so funny!

As usual, you don't seem to understand that Christianity is not whatever brand of backwards-ass fundamentalism you've experienced in Mississippi. Christians who machinate about dinosaurs, Cain's wife and the rest are a tiny segment of the faith demographically, and a joke to the rest. You don't see me attacking the groups you belong to because some tiny portion of them are idiots.

I have a couple hundred more of these type questions if anyone is interested.

Nobody is interested. It's a dumb technique.

> 3. The broad rejection of adoptionism was confirmed at Nicaea.

That's as may be. Psilanthropism ("mere-manism") views Jesus as a "holy servant of God, caught up in the energy and work of the Spirit, and 'manifested' as the Son of God in this sense, though not being divine in anything other than an exemplarist sense," according to The Encyclopedia of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. The crux of this problem, of course, is that humans do not have an adequate notion of the divine under any circumstances.

>1 LolaWalser:: It's an interesting question to ponder, but not one that can ever be answered with anything other than creative speculation, nor one that needs to be answered to maintain the integrity of the faith. A crucial component of faith is that it not only allows but in fact hinges upon the limitation of human knowledge -- the mystery of the Incarnation is, well, a mystery.*

I think my wife has posed this question to me before, and I never managed even half as a good an answer as Tim offered off the cuff up above; so, lest I embarrass myself by making demonstrably risible scientific claims (I must confess that my wife grimaces at how patchy and impoverished my biological education is -- something she works to remedy on a regular basis at the dinner table and in the car), I'm going to step aside and hope for better minds than mine to enlighten us.

-------------
*I should clarify that the mystery of the Incarnation, and of the ultimate reality of the divinity, is not therefore grounds for rejecting the pursuit of knowledge and intellectual and scientific inquiry. Ironically, I've spent much of my day today translating Hildegard of Bingen's Explanatio Symboli Sancti Athanasii ("Explanation of the Athanasian Creed").

Huh. I thought the core meaning of psilos was "light" or "subtle." Apparently it's "bare."

> 9

No, I am not funny, the bible is. I just report - you decide.

But do you notice - some christians wish we all would just ignore the bible - except when they use it as a convenience to their machinations - but christianity without the bible is like a pull-cart without a horse.

Now, if it is all metaphor, then end of debate. But, apparently some of it is not metaphor. Well, then, which part(s) and why? Christians can't agree among themselves on this. Each group cherry picks in its own indubitable way.

It's crazy, man. And far out. Too much. And I for one can't dig it.

#2

That's a possibility--so just an ordinary bloke who presumably had god talking to him. I'm sure I've heard of a flavour of Christianity like that but I don't think they won.

#3

I'm surprised to hear you think it might not be officially addressed, I didn't bother to google anything precisely because I expected to be deluged by theological explications from a zillion perspectives. Hm. Are all the men in funny hats too busy with stem cell biology and evolution?

#6

I'm not sure what is or isn't simple, as far as reflecting on Jesus' genes goes, or what that article specifically might offer by way illuminating the conundrum of Jesus' genes (a conundrum in the context of his godhood, divinity etc.), please elaborate.

Development IS usually "simple", i.e. it happens in a certain way, and not in one of fifteen or fifteen hundred possible ways. Different people have different genes, but we all look more or less the same--a human baby is pretty much always going to look far more like another human baby than it is going to look like a gecko or a starfish or a fir tree.

Jesus, by the accounts that we have, looked and functioned like an ordinary and physically healthy human being, i.e. there is no reason to suppose he harboured gross chromosomal abnormalities (even tiny chromosomal aberrations tend to have huge effects on phenotype).

Chimerism is utterly irrelevant (for one thing, think germ cells, not organism)--the crucial question is how it would be possible for Jesus to have been conceived by a single parent.

Conception: female generative cell, the ovum, is fertilised by the male generative cell, the sperm. In this fertilisation half the chromosomal complement, from the mother, combines with half the chromosomal complement, from the father.

Human development is impossible without the full chromosomal complement. Not only that, it is impossible without specifically BOTH a maternal and paternal set of genes, because, as we learned fairly recently, some genes are expressed only from the maternal OR the paternal chromosome, or otherwise show parent-sex-specific expression patterns.

Mary's ova contained only Mary's half of chromosomes.

Getting from that to a healthy male child demands not one, but maybe half a dozen "miraculous" and biologically utterly unlikely, when they are not completely impossible, steps.

> 12. the mystery of the Incarnation, and of the ultimate reality of the divinity, is not therefore grounds for rejecting the pursuit of knowledge and intellectual and scientific inquiry.

The problem is that people seem to expect that they can understand the "ultimate reality of the divinity" through scientific inquiry. And then when they're not able to do so, for some reason they conclude that there is no "ultimate reality of the divinity".

>14 JGL53:

I'm unclear why exhibiting such ignorance of the basics of Christianity isn't an embarrassing ignorance. It seems to me that, as regards knowledge of the topic, you are running around naked and barking like a dog, and we're all supposed to sit back, stroke out beards and say "How wise! How trenchant!"

so just an ordinary bloke who presumably had god talking to him

I think the adoptionists would claim more than that. We should interview one.

I'm surprised to hear you think it might not be officially addressed

I said it wasn't addressed. You're surprised? This strikes me as a rhetorical move, designed to open the door to the crack about stem cells, but if you were actually surprised, I have overestimated something in your understanding.

One out of 11 turkeys are "virgin births" as I recall. The genes in ova can be prompted to double by chemical or electrical stimulation (?) The thing is such turkey offspring are MALE, since in that species, females are heterozygous (XY?) And males are homozygous (XX?).

But in our species, males are XY--XX develop as females, or almost so if XO (sterile). Jesus could have all his human mother's genes (thought to be infinitesimally rare in our species) but she could not have given him a Y chromosone, that is, without divine intervention?

#16

The problem is that people seem to expect that they can understand the "ultimate reality of the divinity" through scientific inquiry.

The problem is that some people claim science and religion can be friends.

I'm just pointing out one of the instances where that definitely does not seem to be the case--where everything we learned so far from science brings into question a pretty major foundation of a pretty major religion.

If, you know, astrophysics and evolution aren't enough.

>16 jburlinson: people seem to expect that they can understand the "ultimate reality of the divinity" through scientific inquiry. And then when they're not able to do so, for some reason they conclude that there is no "ultimate reality of the divinity".

I'm not sure what "ultimate" means in this context but it is a logical conclusion.

Gotta have a First Mover. Otherwise it's all meaningless, which leads to nihilism. And Breaking Bad.

#17

No call for defensiveness, I genuinely didn't expect the question of Jesus' karyotype wouldn't be something rehashed to death since forever (or since the term "karyotype" was invented, anyway). A casual remark, I assure you.

> 20. I'm not sure what "ultimate" means in this context but it is a logical conclusion.

It's only logical if one assumes that "reality" (whether "ultimate" or not) can be fully understood through scientific inquiry.

"Reality is silly Putty." - Paul

Surely nobody believes reality can be FULLY understood through scientific inquiry. To a scientific materialist the maximalist understanding would be the universe itself, as well as all past states and perhaps all future ones. It would be a map of India as large as India. No mind could take that in, particularly no mind in the same universe.

I do not use this to make a larger objection. It may be that there are no answers that aren't theoretically available to science—that is how the thing should be phrased. Practically, there are obviously many, even most.

#18

Jesus could have all his human mother's genes (thought to be infinitesimally rare in our species) but she could not have given him a Y chromosone, that is, without divine intervention?

Not sure what is infinitesimally rare? As far as I know, humans with 23 chromosomes don't exist. Sorry--unless by "infinitesimally rare" you mean zero--a very sciency way of putting it!

These are my sci-fi scenarios for Jesus-son-of-Mary:

1. Mary produces both sperm and ova (no, I don't know how), one of each combine, Mary is Jesus mom and dad, physically at least

2. Mary produces ova with either X or Y chromosomes (no, I don't know how), one of each combine, AND produce a viable zygote, it implants etc. Jesus would presumably turn out a boy, but, again, knowing what we know of epigenesis, not a healthy child, or even one capable of uterine development

3. Parthenogenesis (I don't know how), but--this is the big twist--Mary was a man all along.

4. Parthenogenesis (I don't know how), but--again the big twist--Jesus was a woman all along!

> 25. Practically, there are obviously many, even most.

How can we say "most" unless we know the universe of all possible answers? It's entirely possible that however many answers are available to science, they constitute only a tiny fraction of all possible answers.

>25 timspalding: It may be that there are no answers that aren't theoretically available to science—that is how the thing should be phrased.

I defer to your careful phrasing. But I don't think believers want to put forth an argument that God is that which is unknowable (empirically, at least) -- doesn't that distill down to a "God of the gaps" position?

Whatever is noumenal is left to God.

> 29

Christopher Hitchens disagrees.

Oh, wait - he's dead.

Never mind.

I don't get the insistence that Jesus is a SON of god, rather than a divinely-inspired human being (conceived by human parents, living and dying as a human being).

Why the divinity?

>31 LolaWalser:

I have an answer, but I'd prefer Nathaniel's.

All are welcome.

From my POV (which, clearly, need not be worth anything to a believer), anything that makes religion more compatible with the ever-increasing knowledge about the natural world would seem to work in favour of that religion surviving, whereas anything that raises the stakes by insisting on the miraculous is likely to weaken it.

There's plenty of evidence that religion itself "evolves"--Christianity in the West at least (which is probably significant). We are being told repeatedly--by believers--that various Bible stories are not meant to be understood literally. Eve wasn't created from a rib plucked from Adam, there wasn't an actual talking serpent in Eden, the "apple" itself is probably a metaphor and so on.

And yet for centuries, at least, many people believed exactly these things, literally--now many people don't, yet Christianity survives.

I'm driving at the conclusion that perhaps one might do away with Jesus' godhood, and yet preserve Christianity. The more reason to think so being the fact that people didn't wait until the discoveries of human genetics to question the tale of his origin, it was happening from the very start (and not merely from the detractors and the opponents).

> 33. I'm driving at the conclusion that perhaps one might do away with Jesus' godhood, and yet preserve Christianity.

It might be interesting to consider whether or not one might do away with Jesus altogether and yet preserve Christianity. I tend to think it's not only possible, but perhaps inevitable. After all, Jesus was willing to sacrifice himself physically in order to achieve his ends. It's not much of stretch to imagine that he might not have had a problem with sacrificing the memory of his legend, if he were ever to have imagined that he would have a legend to sacrifice.

#34

Is that tuned in the ancient Greek Sarcastic mode? ;)

I won't presume to imagine what Jesus might imagine, but I can't resist digressing on the topic of sacrifice, which is another of the things I don't get about Christianity.

Boiled down: what's the big deal about Jesus' sacrifice? I have absolutely no intention to diminish the horror of the torture and death of an innocent man (I've mentioned frequently enough my disgust at the spectacle of Jesus' torment and death), no intention to diminish anyone who is willing to sacrifice themselves for others. But how does a sacrifice for all humanity, past and future, even begin to work?

Can it be said that Jesus suffered more than anyone else ever living, if that's of importance (it seems to be, at least to some)? And how, why, would his sacrifice be bigger, more important than that of anyone else?

We have evidence of many people, often much better documented than Jesus, selflessly sacrificing themselves for others. Sometimes one or two or several specific others, sometimes for much bigger encompassing categories, or even, yes, "all of humanity" (maybe not retroactively, though).

Why does Jesus get a cult and they don't?

I know that one answer is "it's symbolic", but to me that just defers the question. If it's symbolic then his literal torment and death mean nothing, meaning that there's no reason for them to be symbolic etc.

The topic reminds me of a couple of points:

1) Today, right here in 21st century America, about one mother in 200 claims that their newborn child is a Virgin Birth.

In a time and place when bearing an illegitimate child would require your neighbors to stone you to death on your father's threshold, the claimed rate was probably even higher.

2) The interesting aspect of Jesus' genetics is that wherever his Y chromosome came from, it was explicitly not contributed by Joseph.

Which makes the first page of Matthew (listing his genealogy) false. (Jesus is NOT descended from David through Joseph, in fulfillment of the prophecies of the Messiah . . . because he's not especially related to Joseph - - except legally.)

Edited to add a third point:
3) The most logical assumption is that Jesus - being fully human - was a parthenogenitic birth, and DID receive two X chromosomes from his mother... and simply passed as male. (As one would, if one wanted to be treated as a human being in that time-and-place. Which would destroy the reasoning behind "Priests MUST be male because Jesus was". )

Edited to add, just having seen #35:

Yeah,

a) I don't understand the whole sacrifice/grace/redemption thing going on with Christianity - except to note that today we find communal punishment and scapegoating to be deeply immoral. (E.g., punishing people for someone else's transgressions is pretty universally viewed as a war crime.)

b) How is it a "sacrifice" if Jesus knows he's going to be reborn?

>30 JGL53:

Hitchens once commented, with admirable satire and rationale..... (paraphrasing him).....

...."what are the odds that Mary was a virgin or that a Jewish mink would tell a lie ? " lol.

Imagine the skulduggery and shenanigans in pre- Dark Age Bronze Age Middle East, as a woman in that beautifully antiquated dustbowl part of the world dubiously announced that the lump in her tummy was not because of sex. The mind boggles :-)

about one mother in 200 claims that their newborn child is a Virgin Birth

Ha. I want to see the data on that, though.

The interesting aspect of Jesus' genetics is that wherever his Y chromosome came from, it was explicitly not contributed by Joseph.

Well, see above #3. Strictly speaking, an orthodox Christian only need assert that Joseph did not have sex with Mary.

Which makes the first page of Matthew (listing his genealogy) false. (Jesus is NOT descended from David through Joseph, in fulfillment of the prophecies of the Messiah . . . because he's not especially related to Joseph - - except legally.)

Excellent! Now, keep with this half-thought for a moment. Read on. Matthew CLEARLY believes Jesus was born of a virgin birth. Only ONE SENTENCE separates his genealogy from his positive assertion that Mary was pregnant before he either married or had sex her.

You have a choice:

1. Matthew was batshit insane, or so stupid he could write completely contradictory "false" things within two sentences of each other.
2. He intended something you'd have to discover by thinking and maybe soaking up some context other provided by a "horse sense" modern reading.

I propose #2. I propose this not because I'm a Christian. I propose it because ancient texts from ancient and foreign cultures are full of these sorts of things. We understand them by assuming their authors generally aren't totally fuck-ups, and might be doing something we need to think about to understand, not by reading them like a modern reading some obvious modern genre

No, the third possibility is that all children of a husband are legally assigned to the husband as the father. The modern understanding of paternity awaits the discoveries of genetics.

some context other provided by a "horse sense" modern reading.

I'd just like to remind us that the impetus for this thread arose from the supposition that scientific "horse sense" is not only compatible with, but actually friendly to religion.

So, either you have some respect for "horse sense" or you don't--but it can't be both at the same time.

> 37. pre- Dark Age Bronze Age Middle East

As opposed to the post-dark age bronze age middle east?

Oh, and here's the data:

British Medical Journal:Objective: To estimate the incidence of self report of pregnancy without sexual intercourse (virgin pregnancy) and factors related to such reporting, in a population representative group of US adolescents and young adults.

Results: 45 women (0.5%) reported at least one virgin pregnancy unrelated to the use of assisted reproductive technology. Although it was rare for dates of sexual initiation and pregnancy consistent with virgin pregnancy to be reported, it was more common among women who signed chastity pledges or whose parents indicated lower levels of communication with their children about sex and birth control.

Conclusions: Around 0.5% of women consistently affirmed their status as virgins and did not use assisted reproductive technology, yet reported virgin births. Even with numerous enhancements and safeguards to optimize reporting accuracy, researchers may still face challenges in the collection and analysis of self reported data on potentially sensitive topics.

> 40. Is science the same as horse sense?

Hooray—you thought about it! Ancient understandings of "family" were not modern American ones. You could follow this up by looking into ancient Jewish understandings of adoption.

See, it wasn't "false" at all.

Now, you might think about the genealogy, perhaps looking up some of the names. It's a very odd, even bizarre, list. It might be—just might be!—that Matthew is doing something non-obvious.

It might be—it also just might be!—that Matthew is making shit up for the credulous.

No, the third possibility is that all children of a husband are legally assigned to the husband as the father. The modern understanding of paternity awaits the discoveries of genetics.

Uh. No. Ancients were perfectly aware that adopted children had a different biological paternity, and parents contributed some physical essence to their children, giving them certain characteristics from both. The discovery of genetics has nothing to add to that.

>41 jburlinson:

If it was post-Dark Age , it wouldn't be the Bronze Age, eh, that's about it really.

Then is Matthew asserting the LEGAL descent from David, and not a line of descent of David's "seed" to Jesus?

> 40. Is science the same as horse sense?

If applied to an ancient text, reading the ancient text as a straight-up historical description, yes. Texts are words, devoid of context. Context consists of things like culture, language and genre. Ignoring context gets you literature as retold by Rain Man.

Then is Matthew asserting the LEGAL descent from David, and not a line of descent of David's "seed" to Jesus?

In your mind, legal means notional, right? To you, such a genealogy would be a pointless exercise, no more worth telling than the numerical values of "fourteen" generations being the same as the numerical value of "David"—another trick in there. If he thought the way you think, would he have written it? It seems to me there are very severe limits to understanding ancient texts if you refuse to understand them as their readers and authors would have.

It seems to me you're as handicapped in your reading as Matthew would be reading a scientific paper today—although he'd probably decide it was all some sort of coded message he wasn't getting, rather than deciding it meant something obvious to him, but wrong.

> 49. Is science the same as horse sense? -- If applied to an ancient text, reading the ancient text as a straight-up historical description, yes.

"Reading the ancient text as a straight-up historical description" is neither science nor horse sense.

Here's the thing about virgin birth: Some of these young women are telling the truth. It's entirely possible for a woman to conceive without penetrative sex.

It's common enough that it's not usually considered to be a miracle.

In your mind, legal means notional, right?

No, legal means legal. In plenty of cultures - including our own - adoptive children are legal equals.

It's the pre-scientific world that's hung up on ideas like "pure lines of descent" and "the seed of Abraham" and "House of David" and whatnot.

Edited after Tim quotes this to explicitly add "House of David"

> 51. It's common enough that it's not usually considered to be a miracle.

So, it's unusual to consider it a miracle -- is that right?

No, legal means legal. It's the pre-scientific world that's hung up on ideas like "pure lines of descent" and "the seed of Abraham" and whatnot.

Clearly Matthew is not hung up on the purity of the line.

Except in needing to assert the descent from David.

>52 jburlinson:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5v42jtet5c

From 44seconds onwards in this short clip the virgin birth is talked about.

It's cogent, gives quotations and references and is an honest summing up, albeit in the Hitchens satirically barbed tone.

......."Apparently, if you want to have a prophet, it's better if his mother is a virgin..."........" there is no end to the way in which these kind of things can be fabricated....".

It seems to be a common denominator with a large % of the multitude of religions that man has created, this virgin mother. Not so much a miracle, as a moldering cuddly pre-requisite if you wanna rubber-stamp a new belief.

Christianity?, amazing virgin birth? Take a number and get in line.

There are still societies in Africa where legal and biological descent are different. If a man dies without marrying, then his brother has to take a wife in the name of the dead man and produce children who belong to the lineage of the dead man, not that of the biological father. There are all sorts of variations on this theme.

Almost the same is true of Judaism—although it applies to dead brothers who were married but had as yet no children. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yibbum

Yes, that's also found in parts of Africa, eg the Luo in Kenya.

The Shilluk of South Sudan have an interesting custom (or had - I don't know if it still exists) where for various reasons a royal princess could marry a wife. The princess is the husband, and any children born to that wife are of the lineage of the princess, not the biological father.

>31 LolaWalser:: "Why the divinity?"

There are two intertwined ways of answering this (by which I mean, the two inform one another like a feedback loop), offered here in vastly simplified form (I note that ahead of time lest I later be accused of "lying" when I have to go back and nuance something because of subsequent misunderstandings):

1. The scriptural answer:
(At the risk of adding fuel to the literalist misunderstandings that seem to float about amongst several in this group...) Throughout the Gospels--and in a special way in John--Jesus makes statements that, for a Jewish man, would be blasphemous unless he really were the Son of God. At this point, we're going to bracket questions of the historical evolution of the Gospel texts (e.g. the objection that Jesus didn't really say everything he is claimed to have said), because we're dealing with a separate question: why is it necessary for Christianity to continue to insist on the divinity of Christ?

2. The theological answer:
Given the evidence of Scripture, how does one make systemic sense of the nature of reality, based on the idea that Jesus was somehow divine? (It should be noted that there is no easy or simple answer to this -- after all, it took the Church about 500 years to navigate its ways through the variety of major differences on {a} the relationship between Jesus and God and {b} the relationship between the divine and the human in Jesus' own person and nature. And even after the major controversies were for the most part settled by the sixth century, minor points of contention continue to rankle between East and West to this very day, although thankfully we seem to have come to a mutual understanding in the last few decades on the issue of the procession of the Holy Spirit.)

Basically, this is the question of Cur Deus homo? -- Why did God become a human being (as per Anselm)? The more traditional interpretation (as offered also in Athanasius' On the Incarnation) focuses on the notion of repairing the divide between divinity and humanity that was/is opened up when the latter turn away from the nature for which they were created by the divine (aka "sin"). Because divinity is infinite but humanity is finite, humanity alone does not have the ability to bridge that gap. Thus, only God could cross the chasm, by taking the nature of humanity into the divinity -- i.e., by becoming a human being.

That is why Jesus must have been divine: the Incarnation of the Word (preordained from before all time in the "eternal counsel"{Ps. 32{33}:11}) is the moment, the event, in which the Creator and the Creation were united in a single person. Irenaeus of Lyons famously put it this way: "God became a human being so that human beings might become as God."

The philosophical question seems to me not why does man need God to bridge that gap, but could God have bridged that gap in other ways? It seems obvious to me that he could. But this leads one to the conclusion that, while efficacious and consequently necessary for our salvation, the incarnation was in some way unnecessary.

C.E.S. Wood answered these questions back in the 1920s

"I loved your mother, and you were born as the flowers are born." (God, speaking to Jesus.) A completely natural procreation and birth. No fancy DNA required.

It's implied in Wood's texts that God doesn't make arbitrary changes to natural laws. ("I am them; they are Me.")

Wood also answers the 'mystery' of Creation. "I contemplated how to make the universe at the beginning. I could either make the entire universe at once, with everything coming into existence fully formed; or I could set out all the natural laws necessary for the universe to be born and evolve to its current condition. It occured to me that the latter answer was not only more elegant, but that it relieved Me of a lot of work."

#43

Is science the same as horse sense?

A lot of it is horse sense, assuming we mean the same thing by it--conforming consistently to some basic rude logic. But I don't quite see the relevance? I am wondering, rather, what sort of sense discards the talking serpent and Noah's Ark, but clings to the "mystery" of Jesus' genes; what's the criterion here.

#59

Thanks.

it took the Church about 500 years to navigate its ways through the variety of major differences on {a} the relationship between Jesus and God and {b} the relationship between the divine and the human in Jesus' own person and nature.

What I'm getting from this is that this is (was) a debatable question, so difficult (no obvious answers) that it took, as you say, 500 years to settle, to at least some majority's satisfaction/opinion. Is it entirely impossible it might be revisited, and, in keeping with the theme that prompted me, is it impossible that it might be revisited in the light of new scientific understanding? Do you personally feel that, for example, questions such as raised in this thread might warrant a re-examination of religious doctrine? Even if only to dismiss them.

Because there, Nathaniel, lies the problem (if I haven't repeated it often enough!) in your attempt to represent religion and science as friendly to each other. If you wish to assume a position of respect towards science, you must allow its methods and discoveries to be of some consequence. If they are of consequence, then you must entertain the idea that Jesus the son of Mary was--in all likelihood--also the son of some, perhaps unknown, but human father.

If, otoh, science has no business contemplating the circumstances of Jesus' conception--because it's a miracle, or because it's taboo--then science has no business trafficking with any aspect of religion. Then you might have the talking serpent and Noah's ark and all the rest too.

#60

could God have bridged that gap in other ways? It seems obvious to me that he could.

It's probably some kind of faux pas to bring up "how other religions did it", but yes, Buddha and Mohammed were human, one eventually ascending to godhood (of sorts, possibly more in interpretation), the other just god's messenger.

The odd thing, to me, about Christianity's god "incarnate", is that it almost seems a throwback to the gods of the pagans, cavorting on earth with mortals and whatnot.

If, otoh, science has no business contemplating the circumstances of Jesus' conception--because it's a miracle, or because it's taboo--then science has no business trafficking with any aspect of religion. Then you might have the talking serpent and Noah's ark and all the rest too.

I am not sure I follow the logic in that. If A does not work in area c' of B, then A cannot have anything to do with B at all?

I've been talking about a specific case here, so please translate that into the same specific terms.

You seem to be saying that science "does not work" when it comes to Jesus' genes, but "works" in other areas (of religious teaching?)

As I asked above--what's the criterion? How do you decide which part of ancient religious teaching to regard metaphorically, and which literally?

And, for those who DO care about science, about whether their views are compatible with science or not, are they therefore going to allow science to affect their religious beliefs?

As an interesting aside although somewhat off-topic the original 1611 text of the King James Bible has a genealogy (covering 34 pages) connecting Jesus all the way back through Mary to Adam. An anniversary essay in the Oxford 400th Anniversary edition states that while we are all descended through male and female lines from Adam and Eve, Jesus only through Mary. The genealogy claims that Mary was his mother "by nature" and Joseph "by law". I really haven't a clue what exactly that means but it does suggest that that the 1611 compilers were wrestling with the same problems as have been raised in previous posts.

A) I am not sure whether science works or does not work in the case of Jesus. If God is not really present in the world in any way, and if God has nothing to with creation at all, and if God's presence in the world is incapable of changing the world at all, then you have case. But you have to assume all those things, which you do and which I do not, to make your case. I am not arguing with you on your assumptions or saying they should be different, but those seem to be the assumptions you are working off of.

Your questions are really good though, and are the sorts of questions that people of faith have wrestled with from the beginning of faith (and not just Christians).

As to what to regard metaphorically, different people have had different answers over the ages. As early as Augustine (and before) we have theologians who do not take Genesis 1 or 2 literally. Granted scientific knowledge was in its infancy back then, but still he had enough to go on to reject Genesis as a literal reading of the creation story.

In the end I would have to use my denominational constitutional policy. In the Presbyterian Constitution (Yes, we are a constitutional organization) every member is guaranteed Freedom of Conscious. No one person's conscious can be bound by any other person, minister or otherwise. We are called to do what we feel is right before God. In practice I am not sure how well this works (just like the US constitution, which is great in theory also), but it is there.

Also, we are big on generalities of faith, but not so big on defining the specifics for people. Yes, we encourage a belief in the authority of Scripture, but we don't say exactly what that has to look like, and there are Presbyterians all over board on this.

I wish I could be more eloquent or give you more to go on, but this is all I got.

#66

Out of curiosity, and if it's not prying, are you personally hung up on Jesus being god incarnate, or would it make no difference to you if he were only human (but presumably divinely-inspired, communicating with god etc.)?

I am not sure whether science works or does not work in the case of Jesus. If God is not really present in the world in any way, and if God has nothing to with creation at all, and if God's presence in the world is incapable of changing the world at all, then you have case. But you have to assume all those things, which you do and which I do not, to make your case.

Well, I am assuming far less than what is necessary to assume in case of the faithful. Supposing "Jesus was probably conceived and born in the manner human beings are conceived and born" is much simpler than the string of miracles (highly unlikely events) that need to occur if we try to accommodate the ideas of Mary being a virgin, Jesus not having had a human father, God (whose very existence is scientifically unprovable) having influenced his birth and nature etc.

Certainly, we cannot prove that a string of miracles didn't occur, but then we cannot prove that once there didn't exist a talking serpent in a garden.

Your questions are really good though, and are the sorts of questions that people of faith have wrestled with from the beginning of faith (and not just Christians).

Right, but information regarding human development has increased and been refined much past what was opined two thousand years ago, so it would seem there'd be an ongoing debate.

I'm wondering--and I know there's no definite answer to that--whether science can or will affect religion further, whether it can have implications for doctrine (e.g. stem cell biology and artificial fertilization already have?)

I think it's absolutely necessary for salvation and the mass to make sense. God was not play-acting. But I am not sure if other ways would have been possible.

I'm wondering--and I know there's no definite answer to that--whether science can or will affect religion further, whether it can have implications for doctrine (e.g. stem cell biology and artificial fertilization already have?)

I think the "god of the gaps" will continue to shrink. We scarcely notice how much ground has already been ceded.

I mean, believers no longer bother to argue with (or persecute...) physicists or astronomers; pretty soon, they're going to have to retreat from their war on biology.

> 67. Supposing "Jesus was probably conceived and born in the manner human beings are conceived and born" is much simpler than the string of miracles (highly unlikely events) that need to occur if we try to accommodate the ideas of Mary being a virgin, Jesus not having had a human father, God (whose very existence is scientifically unprovable) having influenced his birth and nature etc.

I'm not so sure about that. Many people have a hard time reconciling biological conception with the the immensely nuanced complex of thoughts, emotions, desires, imaginings, etc. that constitutes their horse-sense notion of themselves. It seems so incommensurable to consider that sperm + egg = the wonder of me. It's much simpler (and more apt) to explain it with a string of miracles.

And if I have a hard time believing (in my heart) that biology = me, how much more difficult to accept that biology = God?

> 69. I think the "god of the gaps" will continue to shrink. We scarcely notice how much ground has already been ceded.

We scarcely know how much ground there is to be ceded at all. We only know how much we didn't know in the past but that we know now. What we don't know is how much we can't know.

>66 Arctic-Stranger: No one person's conscious can be bound by any other person, minister or otherwise

Likewise.

Over the Pope as expression of the binding claim of ecclesiastical authority, there stands one’s own conscience which must be obeyed before all else, even if necessary against the requirement of ecclesiastical authority. This emphasis on the individual, whose conscience confronts him with a supreme and ultimate tribunal, and one which in the last resort is beyond the claim of external social groups, even the official Church, also establishes a principle in opposition to increasing totalitarianism.

Joseph Ratzinger (aka Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI) in: Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II ,Vol V, (Ed) Herbert Vorgrimler, 1967.

>69 AsYouKnow_Bob: the "god of the gaps" will continue to shrink

It seems to me that it's mainly atheists who speak of the "god of the gaps". Maybe it's a narrative which means something to them, but religious people generally do not view the divine as filling gaps.

> 72. religious people generally do not view the divine as filling gaps.

Wouldn't the apophatic tradition in Christianity be a kind of "god-of-the-gaps"?

>73 jburlinson: I would see it more in the light of your comment about not knowing how much we can't know. I think the apophatic tradition seeks to discern what God isn't, but that's not the same as filling gaps.

Since I am a pastor, I really cannot object to any questions about my personal faith.

If it were in some way proven to me that Jesus was not god incarnate, it would change what I believe, but not destroy my faith in God. (as to the Virgin part, at least two Gospel writers did not see the need to include in their take on Jesus, so I am not as dependent on that particular part of the story) I guess you would say I have a soft faith that particular issue (as opposed to other areas where I am not so squishy.)

I do feel it is an important part of my theology however, however it works out in practice, but not crucial to everything, and I know a lot of Christians who do not hold to that. (Some of them are my parishioners.)

I have a strong belief in the immanence of God, where God is in us, and we are in God. God is not some distant deity who sits on high and watches us, but is present with us, and a part of creation in ways we often do not understand. While the incarnation is not essential for that, it is important. Also having God as a part of nature means that we must care for the natural world, but in our obscurity about it, as well as our care of it. I know you do not see it this way, but for me all science is a working out of understanding the world we are given, (and given to us by God, I believe).

I think science, among other things, will affect religion more and more. For me, one of the things that caused me to change my mind on LGBT issues is the research that shows that homosexuality tends to be ingrained in a person, and not a chosen behavior. I know other people who have been convinced by that same argument. If that is true, and I think it is, Christians are not rejecting behavior, they are rejecting people, based on who they love. Not good in my book.

Anyway, enough said, and this has probably been a confusing (or confused) post.

I'm not so sure about that. Many people have a hard time reconciling biological conception with the the immensely nuanced complex of thoughts, emotions, desires, imaginings, etc. that constitutes their horse-sense notion of themselves. It seems so incommensurable to consider that sperm + egg = the wonder of me. It's much simpler (and more apt) to explain it with a string of miracles.

No, it absolutely is not. What you are saying is that ignorance is easier than knowledge. Sperm + egg does not amount to the wonder of you, there's a long and by now well documented process between conception and birth of a person, all the way to their death.

It's your personal choice to sweep away all of that, all of science, everything we have learned, in favour of gaping in mute wonder at some vague, meaningless string of purported miracles.

Incidentally, by "string of miracles" I meant the sequence of specific biological events that would need to take place before a girl who has never had sex could find herself pregnant with a male child, who would then develop and be born healthy.

And if I have a hard time believing (in my heart) that biology = me, how much more difficult to accept that biology = God?

This is unclear to me, and nothing I have said or would say (as far as I can judge). Biology is the science of living organisms, which include human beings. Whether one believes human beings were created by a god, or that they evolved without any divine intervention, surely no one can deny our biological attributes?

Do you suspect your tissues aren't made up of cells, that these cells contain genes etc.?

In short, even if human beings were created by god, they were created as biological organisms, with all the characteristics we use science to explore. And if god uses biochemistry and genetics, perhaps even the religious ought to hold them in some respect, pay some attention to their principles?

#75

Thanks.

It can't be proved that Jesus wasn't god incarnate, that's just what science strongly suggests (the language of probability, which people frequently misunderstand. "Strongly suggest" is as close to the positive as science usually can get.)

How convincing or important this will be to someone depends on how significant one finds science to be.

>77 southernbooklady: What you are saying is that ignorance is easier than knowledge.

Also, perhaps, that it is prettier than knowledge. As if knowing somehow takes the wonder out of life.

>75 Arctic-Stranger: For the vast majority of Christians (of whom I know you are one) who are not bible literalists, it's more important to ask why the gospel writers included virgin birth stories and what they were trying to tell us by using that motif, than to worry about whether or not it was literally true. We might also ask why the early church made a point of struggling with the issue. From that hermeneutic we will learn something about our faith, but maybe not about whether or not there was a virgin birth.

I think science, among other things, will affect religion more and more

You may be right, and I agree with you on the LGBT issue. Within my church the concept of natural law is used. The church is currently still stuck in the old idea that homosexuality is unnatural. Once it really sinks in that it isn't unnatural, that it is in fact part of the natural order of things, then the church can change its teaching. The recent pardon of Alan Turing reminds us of how recently virtually the whole of society thought it was unnatural and criminal, not just the church; society has moved relatively quickly on this one but the church still lags behind.

So I've been giving the genetics thing a bit of thought, and despite my earlier protestations of ignorance, I think I'm willing to give it shot, mainly because I'm not going to wade to deep into the science.

I think the simplest and most plausible answer would be that the paternal half of Jesus' chromosomes came from Joseph.

If we are committed to the idea that Joseph and Mary had no sexual relations prior to Jesus' birth, then the only really logical conclusion left is that, in the "overshadowing of the Holy Spirit" (Luke 1:35 -- which, incidentally, is followed immediately by a notice of Elizabeth conceiving in extreme old age, "for with God, nothing is impossible" {v. 37}), God performed a miracle in which one of Joseph's sperm (or its equivalent) was inseminated into one of Mary's eggs, and presto! a healthy baby boy got his start.*

The major hermeneutical issue, then, is what exactly does it mean for Mary to have been a virgin? It's been pretty standard Christian thought since the first century that sexuality is the major locus of sin. From the more extremely gnostic angle, sexuality was (together with drunkenness and gluttony) the most egregious example of the wicked entanglement of spiritual humans with the flesh -- the body being the dark prison of the spirit and all. As Christianity started to recover from its gnostic offshoots in the second century--think here of Irenaeus of Lyons--it developed the concept of "original sin", i.e. that the original disobedience that caused the expulsion from paradise was inheritable; and of course, the vehicle of inheritance from one generation to the next is procreation.

But the idea of Mary's perpetual virginity is not simply limited to the idea that she didn't have sex. Rather, it stood for the fact that she herself was graced by God to be wholly without sin, in any of its forms and manifestations. As theologians elaborated the framework of the Incarnation, of the event in which God became a human person, it was understood as necessary that the matrix for God's entrance into humanity--Mary's womb--must have that purity that graced humanity before the Fall. She was the first person to receive the central, divinizing gift of the Incarnation, to be made by grace into what Christ was by nature, i.e. a perfect human. (N.B. The distinction is crucial: Jesus was perfect human by nature; Mary, and all the rest of us subsequently, was / can be made perfect by grace, i.e. by God's gift of that perfection to us.)

So what does all of this have to do with the biology of Jesus' conception? As many of us have often pointed out, the concept of original sin can often best be explained as an alienation between both ourselves and others and, more importantly, between ourselves and God. Sin is fundamentally a turning away from God, away from the true nature of reality as created and vivified by the divine (pace those who don't see any evidence for that); that's why the term for "repentance" used in the gospels is metanoia, a "turning around of the mind/heart" back towards God.

Despite the longtime insistence on sexuality as the vehicle for inheriting the propensity to sin, the fundamental nature of sin is not strictly sexual. Rather, it is a question of pride. Within the Christian mythology, the first exemplar of pride was Lucifer, the highest and most beautiful of the angels. Lucifer's problem was that he wanted to ascribe his beauty to himself, to exist by himself, without the encumbrance of acknowledging the God who created him. It was for that act of disobedience, that attempt to ascribe the principles of divinity to himself rather than to God, that he was cast out of heaven. As my favorite theologian, Hildegard of Bingen, put it:

For because Satan held a place of great glory on high, he reckoned to himself that he could do anything he wished, and that by doing so he could have everything he wanted without diminishing the glory of the stars. But in coveting all things, he lost everything that he had.
    --Liber Divinorum Operum III.3.2

and

The first angel (...) was not of the same mind as God; rather, he wanted to exist all on his own, which is not something he could do, for there is only one Life that exists on its own, from which all living things exist.
    --Explanatio Symboli Sancti Athanasii, ed. C. P. Evans (CCCM 92; Brepols, 2007), p. 112, ll. 80-3.

This pride, which seeks to twist reality to suit its own will rather than acknowledging reality as it really is, is the most fundamental root of sin.

(Realizing now just how long this post has become, let me try to wrap it up.)

There thus exists within the theological tradition several threads that could, possibly, be drawn together to loosen the concept of Mary's virginity from a strictly sexual definition while maintaining its deeper meaning of sinless purity by grace. How? By positing that Joseph was, indeed, Jesus' biological father, but that his intercourse with Mary (outside of marriage, if we are going to preserve the basic gospel narrative) was made by grace an act of obedience rather than disobedience; an act of virtue rather than vice.

Final caveat: It is not likely that such a theological position would be adopted officially by any large Christian denomination (except perhaps some of the Anglicans) any time soon, as it does radically rework the tradition of what Mary's virginity meant and means. In fact, even if it became generally agreed by theologians that such a scenario might make best sense of everything we know, it is doubtful that it would ever be adopted as official dogma, because the Christian tradition makes a careful distinction between dogma (that which is to be believed for the sake of salvation -- the first principles) and theological doctrine (that which can be reasonably deduced from the first principles of dogma).

-------------------------------------
* Luke 1:35: "And the angel said to her, 'The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God.'" Although this overshadowing of the Holy Spirit would likely and technically be the miraculous vehicle for such an insemination, such a literal/physical interpretation should NOT be taken as the primary or important implication of this verse.

Rather, the import of this verse is that the divine nature of Christ, which is a metaphysical rather than physical feature, was infused in the Virgin's womb by the divine power, because no human power could bring that nature into being.

>79 nathanielcampbell: I think, with all due respect, that "the simplest and most plausible answer" is that it doesn't matter!

>80 John5918:: Granted -- the answer itself is along the lines of angels-on-a-pin, though the whole background on sin and grace and "virginity" is of greater importance.

Or, as you put it in 78, "From that hermeneutic we will learn something about our faith, but maybe not about whether or not there was a virgin birth."

>80 John5918: "the simplest and most plausible answer" is that it doesn't matter!

To the believer, you mean. In which case, the answer to Lola's point in #62 is that science and religion are, at a fundamental level, not friendly to each other. They are at best civil neighbors who must maintain a well-preserved fence between their properties.

>82 southernbooklady: Well, I don't see it as a conflict between faith and science. The statements by pre-scientific authors who had never heard of genes that it was a virgin birth, taken alongside other gospel texts which didn't mention it, was trying to tell us something about the nature of Jesus, that this was Emmanuel, God-with-us, the Eternal Word who dwelt amongst us. It was not trying to tell us anything scientifically testable about Jesus' genes.

>82 southernbooklady:: " In which case, the answer to Lola's point in #62 is that science and religion are, at a fundamental level, not friendly to each other."

I think that to go from a single case (the genetics of Jesus' conception) to such widereaching conclusion is rash and premature.

We'll never know the genetics of Julius Caesar, because neither his remains nor those of his children survive. To admit that we will never know such information does not automatically imply, however, that the study of ancient Roman history is, "at a fundamental level, not friendly to science."

Since it's in the forefront of my mind from working on it this week, I'll offer another passage from Hildegard of Bingen's "Explanation of the Athanasian Creed" -- crucially, the context here is a discussion of the nature of the Trinity, the relationship between the uncreated Creator and the things he created, and the human exploration of that creation:

For if a person knew nothing except what is light and pleasant, they would not actually know what a thing is or what to call it. The most complete form of knowledge comes from the full weight of hardship and injury—only thus does a person recognize both what is good and what is evil (...). For if a person knew only one thing among many, the work of God could not be perfected in them—they would see something but not understand it, hear something and not be able to know what it is. Such a person would be empty and burnt out, like a thing that has been turned to char after being burned up by fire.
    --Explanatio Symboli Sancti Athanasii, ed. C. P. Evans (CCCM 92; Brepols, 2007), p. 117, ll. 241-9 (my translation)

Though some questions about the nature of God may lie beyond the bounds of human knowledge and inquiry, that does not preclude all questions about the nature of reality. Indeed, humans have a responsibility to pursue as much knowledge as they can, because otherwise they remain trapped in the hollow shell of ignorance (which Hildegard elsewhere links to the hollowness of that pride that turns away from reality and constructs its own, distorted and impoverished version of the world). And because God created all things, to come to know those things does, indeed, give us a glimpse of their Creator, however much that glimpse is shaded by the difference between finite and infinite, temporal and eternal.

>84 nathanielcampbell: We'll never know the genetics of Julius Caesar, because neither his remains nor those of his children survive. To admit that we will never know such information does not automatically imply, however, that the study of ancient Roman history is, "at a fundamental level, not friendly to science."


No, but we might well decide that the conclusion that Aeneas's mother was the goddess Venus was scientifically unwarranted.

I should perhaps make it clear that I actually am among those that think that the genetics of Jesus "don't matter." -- His role is inspirational and symbolic, with all the "reality" that those terms imply, and any empirical proof of his actual divinity is both unlikely and (if you are a believer) unnecessary.

However, we seem to be faced with this continuing effort to make religion and science "sync up," for lack of a better phrase. Like that story you told once about how your Sunday school teacher laid the creation story in Genesis side by side with the scientific understanding of the formation of the earth to show how much agreement there was between the two.

That still strikes me as wrong-headed, an attempt to force an association between apples and....go carts or something.

In actuality, going from "a single case (the genetics of Jesus' conception) to such wide reaching conclusion" is not only not "rash and premature," it is actually how science works. Theories can be proved wrong, or at the least incomplete, by a single experimental result. And all conclusions are always provisional, so nothing is ever 100% "right." (Even the theory of evolution).

If Jesus's genetic make up "doesn't matter," then a scientific assessment of him doesn't matter. Which means that that science and religion part ways, since science does not operate by declaring certain parts of reality "off limits."

>85 southernbooklady: we seem to be faced with this continuing effort to make religion and science "sync up"... That still strikes me as wrong-headed, an attempt to force an association between apples and....go carts or something

I agree. Religion answers different questions than science, in a different manner.

On what grounds do Christians deny that Krishna was the son of the virgin Devaki?

>85 southernbooklady:: I suppose I ought to have made clear before now that the example of my sunday school teacher was meant to be paradigmatic of an attitude but not necessarily of specific content. I don't think that it much matters whether the order of events in Genesis 1 can be loosely matched up (and only loosely) with the basic scientific cosmogeny. As a theologian now, there are many other things that Genesis 1 does for me that are much more important and have nothing to do with the physical relationship between sea creatures and birds (e.g.).

The point of the story, rather, was that at the elementary-school age, when a kid's understanding of both science and theology is necessarily vastly simplified, my sunday-school teacher chose an approach that sought harmony between faith and science, rather than discord and conflict. The specifics of his comparison were not important; it was the open and constructive approach that was important. (It's the difference between method and data, I suppose.)

I'm just surprised that no one has offered the obvious: the genes if Jesus were clearly of the Levi variety.

>89 Arctic-Stranger:: Would that be Claude Levi-Strauss? ;-)

But of course. My savior is not a Lee or Wrangler man!!!

Religion answers different questions than science

Religion doesn't answer any questions. It just offers pseudo-answers.

Doughnuts are not bad for you. They are health food.

We don't have to worry about global warming. Science will fix it!

Obama was really born in Pakistan.

Religion is a crock.

See, I can unwarranted assertions too!

#79

Thanks!

I think the simplest and most plausible answer would be that the paternal half of Jesus' chromosomes came from Joseph.

Interesting (that you think so); I agree that it is simplest (that Joseph/a human male at the most basic, provided the other half-complement of Jesus' genes).

Regarding "what does it matter?" and the discussion further down--well, whether it matters or not depends on what is being asserted. If we are asserting that Mary never had sex with anyone, that she just found herself pregnant with a male child, we are placing lots of pressure on what we know about human biology.

This much was evidently clear to the earliest Christians, hence the long (and schismatic) quarrels on that very topic. And this was before any inkling of molecular genetics, genomic imprinting etc.

Furthermore, if the extraordinary assertion is actually a cornerstone of that faith, as was my understanding (and as, in this thread, only Tim seems to think so, although he didn't say much about it), then it would seem it ought to matter, very much.

I think that to go from a single case (the genetics of Jesus' conception) to such widereaching conclusion is rash and premature.

As per above, it is a pretty important case. No major religions arose around Julius Caesar, nor is there any suggestion that he was conceived in a supernatural way.

And, it doesn't really matter how many "cases" there are, whether science is allowed to address religious teaching or not is a matter of principle.

O.P.
==========
You might as well ask, what is it that Santa puts into reindeer food to make them capable of flight?

There was gossip around town that a Roman soldier did it.

Furthermore, if the extraordinary assertion is actually a cornerstone of that faith, as was my understanding (and as, in this thread, only Tim seems to think so, although he didn't say much about it), then it would seem it ought to matter, very much.

"Cornerstones" of faith come in different shapes and sizes. Something can be true, and necessary for you to believe and be wholly orthodox, but not a cornerstone.

The divinity and humanity of Christ is surely both necessary and important. It is a true cornerstone, inextricably tied to salvation and the eucharist.

That Mary was a virgin, and indeed "ever virgin" (aeiparthenos), whatever precisely that means, is simple orthodoxy. Anyone who says the church's creeds with a straight face believes it. I think it's important, but mostly because it supports the first claim--that Jesus was fully human and fully divine. The early heresies of gnosticism and Arianism attacked the fundamental statement, and thereby threw into question the meaning, efficacy and effect of salvation and the eucharist. Whatever Mary's gynecology, she gave birth to something theologically unworkable—either an unreal, 3D projection made for our education, or merely a man. By contrast, to disbelieve that Mary was a virgin, but not take it further, strikes me only as dangerous, not fatal. So long as you understand it as purely gynecological issue, it does not need to threaten the cornerstone. As a matter of the history of modern belief, however, it has often been a first step on the road away from Christian faith.

96: And this is why protestations that Biblical literalists are somehow engaged in some sort of invalid interpretation ring hollow. You are a just as much of a Biblical literalist when it comes to certain parts of the Bible, and the parts you take literally are just as silly as the parts the people you deride as "Biblical literalists" take literally.

You're all on the same silly train, and none of you have any standing to call the beliefs of the others any more silly than your own.

>97 StormRaven:

Can you explain which part I'm taking literally and which not?

I think your problem may stem from the belief that Christian belief derives from the Bible, specifically the New Testament. It does not. It was written into the New Testament before anyone tried to take it out again. The New Testament post-dates the church, and the faith. It is of course critical as a repository of that belief. But I do not read the Bible apart from that church—not the hierarchy but the entire church—and faith, and therefore care what that church understands as central, which includes things like the salvation of humanity through Jesus but not the number of archers Cyrus fielded.

The way you presume the thing operates is typically Protestant fundamentalist or American atheist, which is largely the same thing. I might still be an idiot, but your attacks aren't pointing out my idiocy so much as completely misunderstanding their source. It would be interesting for you to continue your attacks with that understanding in mind. After all, I don't constantly berate you for believing things that you don't believe just because I can't fit your ideas into my ears.

Tim, do you mean a first step away from the Catholic faith or the Christian faith?

Virgin birth? Christian faith. As a matter of fact—what happens, not what must happen—I think that's often been shown to be a common path, and one that could be illustrated in various thinkers. But it's not a necessary step, and no doubt many resist it.

Here's what Archbishop Williams had to say to Bishop Spong. Spong had asserted, together with a laundry list of other things, that:

"4. The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ’s divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible."

Williams' reply is worth reading overall—I've pointed to it before. But here's the part I find apposite:

Spong clearly has no time for the empty-tomb tradition; so it is no surprise that he also dismisses the virginal conception (though why on earth this makes Jesus’s divinity ‘impossible’ I fail to understand). ... The virginal conception looks less straightforward, if you are neither a fundamentalist nor someone committed to the principled denial of miracles. Is it possible to believe in the incarnation without this? Yes, I think so (I did for a few years). But I also have an uncomfortable feeling that the more you reflect on the incarnation, the less of a problem you may have. There is a rather haunting passage in John Neville Figgis about – as it were – waking up one day and finding you believe it after all. My sentiments exactly.

Source: http://anglicanecumenicalsociety.wordpress.com/2010/06/10/bishop-spong-and-archb...

98: I think your problem may stem from the belief that Christian belief derives from the Bible, specifically the New Testament. It does not. It was written into the New Testament before anyone tried to take it out again. The New Testament post-dates the church, and the faith.
I'm not sure about this, specifically "The New Testament post-dates the church". Perhaps I've misunderstood what you mean by "church" but reading the gospels and even Paul I can't see much evidence for a "Church" as distinct from scattered groups of believers in the NT writings. My own feeling is that the "Church" post-dates the NT writings rather than the other way round.

Can you explain which part I'm taking literally and which not?

As you have repeatedly stated, you think people who take Genesis "literally" are using their Bible wrong. You have spent lots of time (such as in post 98) carefully differentiating yourself and the faith you adhere to from Biblical literalists, as if yours is somehow more credible, and theirs is somehow more cartoonish.

On the other hand, you take the story about the divinity of Jesus literally, a position that is just as ridiculous as believing that the universe was created in six literal days. Despite your hollow denials, your faith is exactly the same in kind as that of a Biblical fundamentalist. Once you board the silly train, as you have, you can't point to the other passengers and claim that you are any less silly than they are.

It doesn't matter if your beliefs or their beliefs stem from the Bible or not, by accepting the ridiculous things you accept, such as the alleged divinity of Jesus, you forfeit your right to point at people who are Biblical literalists and say they are doing it wrong. You simply don't have a leg to stand on. Your beliefs are just as silly as theirs are.

So when you criticize people as holding the belief of a "typically Protestant fundamentalist or American atheist", you are engaging in rank hypocrisy. Every time you claim that your beliefs are somehow different in kind than those of a fundamentalist Protestant, you are lying. You are the same, even if you don't recognize it.

>101 PossMan:

This is understanding the church as the church understands it—the body, one can even say "group," of Christian believers. If believe the authentic Paul uses the term ekklesia, which means an assembly or gathering, only in the sense of a specific, local gathering of Christians, not of all the gatherings together. But Paul is also our source for the strongest, and earliest assertion of the corporate existence of all who belief in Christ, namely his metaphor of "the body of Christ." So, while he didn't use the term in the technical sense Christians came to use it, his understanding of it was was essentially the same.

>102 StormRaven:

I understand you think the contents of my belief are ridiculous. Obviously I believe the things I believe. That is, I suppose, "accepting the ridiculous things you accept." But it's not the charge of Biblical literalism, however much you repeat it. And it's not any other sort of "literalism" unless literalism is simply believing things you think are ridiculous.

Every time you claim that your beliefs are somehow different in kind than those of a fundamentalist Protestant, you are lying.

Here we go back to the definition of lying. If two historians, philosophers or mathematicians come to different conclusions, only one of which can be true, are the other ones "lying"? It seems an unusual as well as uncharitable redefinition of the term.

Uncharitable is actually an improvement on some people's behavior.

> 76. It's your personal choice to sweep away all of that, all of science, everything we have learned, in favour of gaping in mute wonder at some vague, meaningless string of purported miracles. ... Do you suspect your tissues aren't made up of cells, that these cells contain genes etc.?

In short, even if human beings were created by god, they were created as biological organisms, with all the characteristics we use science to explore. And if god uses biochemistry and genetics, perhaps even the religious ought to hold them in some respect, pay some attention to their principles?

I think I've probably expressed myself badly. As I've said repeatedly (actually, repetitiously) on other threads of this forum, it's clear to me that I'm made up of cells, containing genes etc. and that my consciousness is really a complex of electrochemical actions taking place within a nervous system made up of cells etc. That seems to me to be quite uncontroversial.

What's also uncontroversial is that many people, including myself, most of the time, are seduced into thinking (or at least believing) that there's a substance or an essence called "me" that is somehow independent of these biochemical processes. Language is obviously a big part of this problem, since I'm forced by the language into saying "I" think this or that, when, upon consideration, I realize that there is really no "I" there -- only a certain complex of processes that are constantly undergoing change, so that the "I" who is finishing this sentence is not the same as the "I" who started it, an "I" who was actually never there in the first place. Biochemistry and genetics teaches me that.

edited to add italics where appropriate

> 103. This is understanding the church as the church understands it—the body, one can even say "group," of Christian believers.

I assume the church you're speaking of is the Roman Catholic Church.

So, while he didn't use the term in the technical sense Christians came to use it...

Again, "Christians" here means Roman Catholics, is that right?

> 1. But if Jesus is Joseph's son, how does one claim parenthood for god?

Would it be useful to answer that question with something like this:

The essence of Christianity is to enter the Kingdom of Heaven by loving God with every fiber of one's being and to love one's neighbor as oneself.

It is very hard to do this. Therefore, in order to help accomplish it, people have come up with lots of notions, images, traditions, etc. that seem to work, at least for some people. The virgin birth of Jesus seems to be one of these things. If it helps a person enter the Kingdom of God etc., great. If one person takes it literally and it helps them, super. If another person takes it metaphorically and it helps them, super. If it doesn't help at all, forget about it. It, in itself, is only a tool.

The problem is that, while tools like this help some people, they don't necessarily help everyone. If one person insists that everyone else has to use the same tool, even though other people don't like that tool or find it useful, then trouble starts to brewin'. This is a nutshell version of the history of the Christian church.

Tim, your explanations of Christian belief just leave me dizzy.

To me, it seems to run something like:

1) Something Happened in 1st century Palestine, something big and important;
2) There was a community of people drawn together by whatever the heck happened;
3) They got together and assembled some writings about whatever happened.

But

4) The details of these writing don't much matter, because

See #1.

To this non-believer, "Christian non-literalism" looks to be the intellectual equivalent of climbing a tree and then sawing off the branch you're sitting on.

If the only accounts you have of the Big Events don't much matter, what the heck CAN you base your religion upon?

(This first came up a few months ago, when you carefully explained to me that just because the Nicene Creed says that Jesus ascended to heaven, that in no way implied that Christians ritually affirm that Jesus actually "ascended into heaven" - - and that it was ridiculous of me to think so.)

Edited to add See the discussion around HERE: http://www.librarything.com/topic/155600#4160808

>109 AsYouKnow_Bob: But the writings were written in the style of the time, using the pre-scientific knowledge of the time, using different literary genres, by different authors, in different cultural, linguistic and geographical milieux, to different audiences, with different agendas, over a period of many decades. Of the many texts which emerged from the community of believers during that period, it was several centuries later before the community finally agreed on which ones were important and/or authentic enough to be preserved as part of the core tradition of the community.

That's why we have to use a hermeneutical process, biblical exegesis, to try to understand what they are saying. It's not that the details are not important, but simply that they are not necessarily to be taken literally with a 21st century mindset.

It's also why Tim is correct in saying that Christianity did not come from the bible but rather that the New Testament was written by Christians. The nascent Christian community existed before anything was written about it, and it was members of that community which eventually wrote it. It was also the more firmly established community which confirmed several centuries later what should be in the bible (Old and New Testaments).

But there seems to be a great willingness to throw out the Biblical text whenever it has become obvious that the text is describing ridiculous or impossible events.

E.g., A text as basic to Christianity as the Nicene Creed says that Jesus "ascended into heaven"; Tim tells me that that the Nicene Creed in no way suggests that heaven is "above" us, and that I'm being simple-minded to read it as it is written. The eyewitness accounts of the Ascension are to be discounted and deprecated by "sophisticated" believers.

Where is the basis for Christianity if the Biblical accounts aren't to be believed?

>112 AsYouKnow_Bob: It's not that the biblical accounts are not to be believed. It's that they are not necessarily to be taken literally. I think the two are different.

>107 jburlinson: I don't think it is only Roman Catholics. Most of the churches outside of a particular strand of evangelical protestantism are not bible literalists. Some of the greatest 19th and early 20th century biblical exegetes who really opened up the field were protestants.

>jtf at #113 It's not that the biblical accounts are not to be believed. It's that they are not necessarily to be taken literally. I think the two are different.

And admittedly that's a subtlety too fine for large numbers of non-believers.

If the Bible is "not necessarily to be taken literally", then nothing it contains is authoritatively "true". What are you left with?

If biblical accounts are to be believed, but are not to be taken literally, what is the relationship of these accounts to reality? Is the reality of these biblical accounts that they serve as convenient fictions (stories, Märchen, etc.) which aid the routinization of the charismatic authority of a single, unique prophet?

>115 AsYouKnow_Bob: And admittedly that's a subtlety too fine for large numbers of non-believers

So be it.

But would you not accept that something said in a song (Psalms), or a poem (the Song of Songs), or in a particular genre of literature such as the Apocalyptic style, is not necessarily to be taken literally as that probably isn't the intent of the author? And yet it can still be "true" in a sense? Or that a parable or a proverb is not to be taken literally but may have a very real and "true" lesson contained in it? Or that something written by a pre-scientific culture is not trying to tell us something about science but is trying to express some other reality in the best way they can using their current language and knowledge? Or that even today different cultures will express things in terms which may not be immediately obvious to another culture without a bit of interpretation? I don't find these concepts particularly strange or even subtle. But then I have spent my entire adult life living in cultures different to my own, and recognising that my first "literal" interpretation of what is being said might not in fact be sufficient has become second nature to me.

I assume the church you're speaking of is the Roman Catholic Church.

Definitely not. While church has various additional, technical senses in various denominations, all Christians today agree that the church is the body of Christian believers. If anything, Protestants hold this more closely, as many conservative Catholics would stress that non-Catholics are only in "imperfect communion" with the church—they have one foot in and one foot out.

So, while he didn't use the term in the technical sense Christians came to use it...

No.

To this non-believer, "Christian non-literalism" looks to be the intellectual equivalent of climbing a tree and then sawing off the branch you're sitting on.

It only seems this way because you've swallowed the red pill of Protestantism. Non-literalism was simple orthodoxy for all of Christian history until after the Reformation. Christian communities knew what they believed. When there was doubt, they drew upon scripture and tradition for inspiration, but taking the Bible "literally" is an entirely modern invention. You feel like your branch is in danger because you picked a newly-grown and rather wobbly one to sit on.

don't much matter (over and over)

Just because we don't always take things literally does not mean that they don't matter!

Life is basically one big demonstration of this for all who aren't cognitively impaired. You're having a party for friends. Your wife sent you to Whole Foods to buy some of those fried shrimp canapés. They're out. So instead of going home, you decide to see if Trader Joes has any, and if they don't, you pick up some other tasty appetizer. Did your wife's directions matter?

A text as basic to Christianity as the Nicene Creed says that Jesus "ascended into heaven"; Tim tells me that that the Nicene Creed in no way suggests that heaven is "above" us, and that I'm being simple-minded to read it as it is written. The eyewitness accounts of the Ascension are to be discounted and deprecated by "sophisticated" believers.

Yes, you're being simple-minded. The ancients were not. When Heraclitus said the road up and the road down were the same, he wasn't being literal either.

So all is metaphor. Including the resurrection. Not an actual physical resurrection at all?

But would you not accept that something said in a song (Psalms), or a poem (the Song of Songs), or in a particular genre of literature such as the Apocalyptic style, is not necessarily to be taken literally as that probably isn't the intent of the author?

Sure I would, but that's entirely beside the point. If you take things like the divinity and resurrection of Jesus to be literally true, you've got no leg to stand on when someone says that Psalms and Song of Songs are to be taken literally. You're all in the same nonsensical boat at that point.

It doesn't matter how many times you say "biblical exegesis", your beliefs are just as ridiculous as the beliefs of a Biblical literalist, a Mormon, or a Scientologist (to list a couple of examples). All you are doing when you say biblical exegesis is saying that your nonsense is on stilts. That doesn't change the fact that your nonsense is still nonsense. And it doesn't change the fact that your nonsense is exactly the same as the Protestant fundamentalist's nonsense. Every time you, Tim, or anyone else who accepts the ridiculous beliefs of the Catholic church pooh-pooh's the equally ridiculous beliefs of Protestant fundamentalists, you are engaged in pure hypocrisy.

>115 AsYouKnow_Bob: And admittedly that's a subtlety too fine for large numbers of non-believers.

Anyone who has ever enjoyed a great novel, or a great poem, or a Shakespeare play can discern it.

>118 timspalding: Just because we don't always take things literally does not mean that they don't matter!

Which means, I think, that ultimately the Bible is not like a great poem or a Shakespeare play, because it is somehow more true than those things. And there, like @AsYouKnow_Bob, I find myself wondering about the strength of that branch the believer is clinging to. Because the truth the believer deals in is ultimate, paramount, all-encompassing. In a line up with Moby-Dick and Hamlet, the New Testament's truth apparently puts all other pretensions to such to shame.

And I'm left wondering, how? What makes the New Testament "more true" -- might we even say "more real?" -- than Hamlet?

And this is inexplicable to me. I'm left with the conclusion that the only thing going for it is people's faith that it is so. But why people choose to believe this thing in the Bible and not that thing, why they might argue that Jesus's Resurrection and Ascension is literally necessary for mankind's salvation, but also that turning water into wine or walking on the waves might not be, that remains opaque to me. It's like listening to some of my geekier friends argue the niceties of Klingon grammar or the relative merits and characteristics of the races of elves and dwarves in Middle Earth.

What makes the New Testament "more true" -- might we even say "more real?" -- than Hamlet?

The sheer weight of tradition (all those centuries, all that social and political super-structure) which has insisted on its special significance? Whether one believes or not, this would seem to play a role.

I don't know whether any text comes into the world "sacred", but I see people consecrating them.

Tim at #118: It only seems this way because you've swallowed the red pill of Protestantism.

JTF has told the joke here of the IRA ambushers who stop the car, and demand to know the driver's religion: "I'm an atheist." "Ah, but are you a Protestant atheist or Catholic atheist?" I'm third- (...or maybe even more) generation of cradle non-believer, but this is not the first time that I've realized that yeah, I'm a protestant atheist.

SR at #120: If you take things like the divinity and resurrection of Jesus to be literally true, you've got no leg to stand on when someone says that Psalms and Song of Songs are to be taken literally. You're all in the same nonsensical boat at that point.

SBL at #121: And this is inexplicable to me. I'm left with the conclusion that the only thing going for it is people's faith that it is so. But why people choose to believe this thing in the Bible and not that thing, why they might argue that Jesus's Resurrection and Ascension is literally necessary for mankind's salvation, but also that turning water into wine or walking on the waves might not be, that remains opaque to me. It's like listening to some of my geekier friends argue the niceties of Klingon grammar or the relative merits and characteristics of the races of elves and dwarves in Middle Earth.

That's it.

People have numinous feelings, people have a sense of the divine.
Most people really like to map these feelings onto the old stories of their people.
The old stories are today obviously nothing more than simply folklore, and nonsense, and factually impossible.
Well, OK, then: how about if we admit that the old stories are ridiculous and false on their face and agree to read them allegorically?

The problem for me then is that these old stories are the only evidence you've got for the entire tradition. If they're describing impossibilities, it's far more likely that that they are simply untrue than that they're groping toward a description of something real. As Tim has mentioned more than once, there are plenty of ancient stories that Alexander was divine; we have not reason at all to accept these stories as true; and we also have no reason to believe that they're even allegorically "true".

I was startled when Tim told me that the RC church officially holds that the eyewitness descriptions of Jesus "ascending to heaven" were not necessarily accurate.

If the testimony given in the Bible isn't accurate and can be dismissed by believers themselves as unimportant, it seems like the entire religion is built on air.

> 123. The problem for me then is that these old stories are the only evidence you've got for the entire tradition.

It depends on what you consider "the tradition" to be. Let's assume that "the tradition" means: "'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind'; and, 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'" (With the understanding that "your neighbor" includes "your enemy".)

I don't believe that "these old stories" are the only evidence there is for this tradition.

>123 AsYouKnow_Bob: JTF has told the joke here of the IRA ambushers

Actually the one I have told is about the masked gunman who stops a bloke in the street, puts a pistol to his head and asks, "Are you a Catholic or a Protestant?" Thinking quickly, the bloke replies, "I'm a Jew." The gunman says, "I must be the luckiest Palestinian in Belfast tonight..."

it seems like the entire religion is built on air

No, the entire religion is built on people's experience of and relationship with God. These lead to the formation of faith communities of people who find some commonality in their experiences. each has its own traditions, and develops its own narratives. Most of us situate ourselves within one of those traditions and narratives. But the experience of and relationship with God is the basis, not the narrative and the intellectual beliefs. As Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast says, "Theology without the experience of God is like literary criticism without the poem."

> 125. the experience of and relationship with God is the basis, not the narrative and the intellectual beliefs

Would you say that this experience/relationship is essentially one between an entity (a person) and something external to that entity (God)? Or is this a wholly subjective experience/relationship that happens within any given person? Or both?

>126 jburlinson: Maybe both? But I suppose I prefer to take the apophatic approach and say I don't know. God can be experienced as both transcendent (other) and immanent (within).

> 127. God can be experienced as both transcendent (other) and immanent (within).

Or immanently as transcendent?

One interesting thing is that, regardless of how immanent/transcendent this experience is, it's common enough to be recognized by many people. One would think that this would result in a wider sense of solidarity or community.

And yet, if this experience is associated with differing narratives and intellectual beliefs, it becomes a source of conflict, when, in its essence, it's an experience of unity.

(Sorry for the misattribution: a search reveals that the "Protestant/Catholic atheist" joke was first told here by Doug1943, back in 2007: http://www.librarything.com/topic/12395#145057 .

My memory conflated the two jokes....)

jtf: But the experience of and relationship with God is the basis, not the narrative and the intellectual beliefs.

It seems like an awful lot of intellectual superstructure has accrued on top of that experience...

I just remain surprised at how much of the holy texts are cheerfully tossed over the side when they prove to be inconvenient.

"Six days"? Pfft, obvious, it doesn't really mean "SIX days".
"Ascended into heaven"? well, maybe. Maybe not, who can say?
"VIRGIN birth"? Not necessarily....

>130 AsYouKnow_Bob:. It seems like an awful lot of intellectual superstructure has accrued on top of that experience...

So true, and probably inevitable, considering the difficulty (impossibility?) of communicating intense personal experience from one person to another, let alone one person to many people. One is left with a dilemma -- say nothing, because whatever you say is almost certain to be misconstrued, or say something which has a chance to be understood, at least in part, by at least some other people, if not all.

Interestingly, this is a dominant theme in the gospels, especially Mark, in which Jesus is consistently misunderstood by nearly everyone, especially his disciples, who might be expected to be able to understand him best. This demonstration of the problems of communication could be considered one of the things that make the gospels "true".

If you take things like the divinity and resurrection of Jesus to be literally true, you've got no leg to stand on when someone says that Psalms and Song of Songs are to be taken literally. You're all in the same nonsensical boat at that point.

That is a bit like saying that if you take Churchill to be a fairly accurate historian, you always have to take J.R.R. Tolkien seriously as a historian because both came from the same country and wrote about the same time.

Just because it is in the Bible does not mean it cannot be poetry.

And I'm left wondering, how? What makes the New Testament "more true" -- might we even say "more real?" -- than Hamlet?

Soren Kierkegaard wrote an essay on the Difference Between a Genius and an Apostle that deals with that same question. He looks at Plato (the Genius) and Paul (the Apostle). It is found in the book The Present Age. Basically he says that the Apostle works out of paradox and authority, and this works point beyond himself to the eternal, while the genius's work is limited to essentially what it is.

That is a bit like saying that if you take Churchill to be a fairly accurate historian, you always have to take J.R.R. Tolkien seriously as a historian because both came from the same country and wrote about the same time.

No, it isn't. It is like saying that if you claim C.S. Lewis' Narnia stories are literally true, you don't have the standing to criticize another guy who says that Tolkien's Middle-Earth stories are literally true. Once you accept nonsense as truth, you don't have a basis to claim someone else's nonsense is not truth.

>132 Arctic-Stranger: Basically he says that the Apostle works out of paradox and authority, and this works point beyond himself to the eternal, while the genius's work is limited to essentially what it is.

Oh dear. I'm afraid my immediate reaction to this was "Say whaaa?" :)

It still all seems to boil down to you either believe in God or you don't. If you do, then you can construct whatever edifices you want around that belief. If you don't, then such things are all castles in the air.

A lot of textual exegesis of the bible built up over time during the middle ages, a thicket of words standing between the individual believer and the text of the bible itself that Luther cut through with his spiritual scythe: sola fide. The mysterium of ministerium serves the purposes (and interests) of specialists, the theological lectors who monopolize(d) the legitimate means of biblical interpretation.

We seem to have wandered a bit from the original topic, to which I would like to return for a moment because I want to clarify something about just what it might mean to believe that Mary was "ever-virgin" -- for as Tim points out (ca. posts 96 and 100), disbelieving the Virgin Birth (i.e. that Jesus was born of a virgin) is often a first step away from orthodoxy.

What I was suggesting as a speculative (and only speculative) compromise was that it might be possible to understand Mary's virginity, i.e. her sinlessness, in terms other than simply sexual. As I discussed at rather some length above (post 79), the root notion of sin is a prideful disobedience and turning away from God; thus, a hallmark of Mary's sinless virginity is her answer to the angel's announcement that she will be the God-bearer: "Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; it done unto me according to thy word" (Luke 1:38).

Thus, I think that one could venture the speculation that Joseph could have had intercourse with Mary in order to be Jesus' biological father, but that such intercourse was in fulfillment of Mary's pure obedience to God's will, thus making such an act of sinlessness or "virginity".

(But such would only ever be speculation hazarded on account of a demand for an explanation of the biological conception of the child that does not make recourse to a physical miracle -- I say "physical miracle", for the Incarnation of God remains a miracle of the highest order, an event to be received with awe and wonder at the majesty and loving kindness of God, whose Son did not think that majesty something to be greedily grasped after, choosing rather the humble form of a servant.)

>135 theoria:: "A lot of textual exegesis of the bible built up over time during the middle ages, a thicket of words standing between the individual believer and the text of the bible itself that Luther cut through with his spiritual scythe"

Luther replaced it with another thicket: the overindulgence of idiosyncrasy, every crackpot's pet theory now hallowed by sola scriptura into dogma.

Furthermore: in our age of near universal literacy, why would nuanced and sophisticated exegesis be something to be scorned? Why should we pride ourselves in the race to see who can be the dumbest exegete?

Why shouldn't we deploy the exegetical tools of Origen and Tyconius and Augustine today, to rescue the faith from the ridicule it suffers as the hands of novice literalists who deny the basic findings of science because nobody bothered to tell them there were more important ways of reading Genesis? (I won't bog this down with the lengthy quote, but see Augustine's none-too-kind words for the folks of the Creation Institute in De Genesi ad litteram, as I quoted them here and here.)

>136 nathanielcampbell: such intercourse was in fulfillment of Mary's pure obedience to God's will, thus making such an act of sinlessness or "virginity".

And once again, I have the impulse to go "Say whaaa?" :)

On Kierkegaard:
I have only now read that essay fairly quickly but he basically seems to say that there is no reason to believe the words of religious profits other than their God given authority. He stops for a moment to note that it might be a problem telling who has this authority, but if he provides an answer to this problem I missed it.

Interestingly, Kierkegaard and StormRaven seem to substantially agree that religious claims cannot be independently confirmed. However, where Kierkegaard thinks this makes religion more profound, StomRaven thinks it makes religion bunk. I would have to agree with SR on this one.

(But such would only ever be speculation hazarded on account of a demand for an explanation of the biological conception of the child that does not make recourse to a physical miracle -- I say "physical miracle", for the Incarnation of God remains a miracle of the highest order, an event to be received with awe and wonder at the majesty and loving kindness of God, whose Son did not think that majesty something to be greedily grasped after, choosing rather the humble form of a servant.)

This is the nonsense on stilts that I was talking about.

> 136. such intercourse was in fulfillment of Mary's pure obedience to God's will, thus making such an act of sinlessness or "virginity".

I tried using something similar to this line of argument a couple of times in high school with mixed results. All I can say is that Mary must have been one special lady if she fell for it.

137> Furthermore: in our age of near universal literacy, why would nuanced and sophisticated exegesis be something to be scorned? Why should we pride ourselves in the race to see who can be the dumbest exegete?

There was no scorn in my comment. Subjectively speaking, if I'm forced to choose between high scholasticism and crackpot televangelism, I'd rather take my chances with Port-Royal. But from a critical perspective, one has to admit that Luther had a point.

#137: novice literalists who deny the basic findings of science because nobody bothered to tell them there were more important ways of reading Genesis?

So atheists should be more respectful when talking about Christians, but Christians can be condescending and insulting when talking about other Christians? In some ways, speaking so dismissively of those not in the conversation is worse.

Tim says that the virgin birth is a starting-off point for many who leave Christianity, but I think Fundamentalists could validly argue that Genesis is, too. It certainly was a start for me; if there is no Creation, if the most mammoth miracle ever is not real, why shouldn't I believe Sagan and Asimov when they tell me they can explain the rest of it, that "I have no need of this hypothesis"?

I'm with AsYouKnow_Bob; I don't see how you can dismiss Acts 1:9-11 and have anything left.

Acts 1:9-12: "And when he had said these things, as they were looking, he was taken up; and a cloud received him out of their sight. And while they were looking stedfastly into heaven as he went, behold, two men stood by them in white apparel; who also said, Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye looking into heaven? this Jesus, who was received up from you into heaven shall so come in like manner as ye beheld him going into heaven. Then returned they unto Jerusalem from the mount called Olivet, which is nigh unto Jerusalem, a Sabbath day's journey off." (ASV)

It's clear that he went the direction up. It's clear this is not poetry or myth; this is meant as history. If you accept the Gospels, you can't really deny the account of the apostles (the "they" who looked); the antecedent implies you believe the authors of the Gospels were the apostles, talked to them, or at least got a reliable second hand account from them. If you can't accept this on face value, I don't see how you can accept anything the Bible says.

Re: Acts and the Ascension:

He disappeared within a cloud -- where he went from there the text does not say. Is it really that big of a stretch of the imagination to think that after disappearing in midair, he went to a realm not of this current material world?

I simply don't understand these seemingly serious objections about the description of the Ascension in Acts -- it's sophomoric to insist that the textual record implies a physical heaven just above the stratosphere where God holds court.

As Carl Sagan said, even if Jesus left the earth in 30 AD, ascending and travelling into space at the speed of light, he would still be in the Milky Way galaxy today.

>145 jbbarret:: Seriously? Was Sagan so doltish as to think that Christians believe Jesus' resurrected body to have ascended into outer space?

The whole point of the second coming and the creation of the new heaven and the new earth described in the Apocalypse is that the resurrected and recreated physical world is not yet this world. Christ in his resurrected body does NOT reign in a heaven that is materially contained within our present universe (rather, it contains this universe and all that exists).

This is pretty standard theology here -- yet somehow, even men so brilliant as Carl Sagan have missed the boat.

ETA: My patience is wearing thin with supposed "objections" made against facile misinterpretations of standard Christian doctrine. If you're going to attack that doctrine, you should least do enough homework to avoid misrepresenting it.

ETA 2: Impending single-digit temperatures in a rental house whose heat pump can't handle anything below 20 may be making me grumpier. We woke up on Friday morning with the house a balmy 55 degrees (F), and that was only with low teens outside. Fortunately, we have acquired an infrared space heater for deployment tomorrow.

My patience is wearing thin with supposed "objections" made against facile misinterpretations of standard Christian doctrine

Who possesses the authority to decide what are "facile misinterpretations" of "standard Christian doctrine"?

I'm completely lost at this point. Which parts of the bible are true, and which are just true? I mean...

Claiming that, based on Acts 1:9-12, Christians believe that Jesus is literally hanging out in the sky above Jerusalem, just beyond the clouds, is like claiming that when Hamlet described "the something after death" as "the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns," Shakespeare really thought that after death you went to an as-yet-undiscovered island in the middle of the ocean!

Any high school English teacher would groan if you applied such a literalistically reductive hermeneutic to Hamlet -- yet y'all seem so pleased with your superior intelligence to be able to do so to Scripture.

149> I didn't offer that quote/interpretation of Acts. Get a grip.

ETA: your careful edit removed the specific ad hominem, now becoming a generalized one.

148> There seems to be disagreement on these points.

>148 Jesse_wiedinmyer:: As has been enunciated time and time and time and time again in these threads, Christianity understands that the community of believers (aka "the Body of Christ" aka "the Church") is invested with the guidance of the Holy Spirit in its faith. Thus, we rely on both Scripture and Tradition to mutually inform one another. I could go trawling (if I had the time or desire) through many hundreds of theological writings about, e.g., the Ascension to provide you with the corpus of authoritative interpretations of Acts 1:9-12.

But somehow, I don't think you'd really care. The very idea of an authoritative tradition seems anathema to this group, which seems to think that the best authority is the one that contravenes tradition.

So I reiterate: my patience has grown thin with demands against Christianity that are made in obstinate ignorance of its faith, doctrine, and practice. If I wandered around pestering physicists to answer my objections to how light is propagated through the aether, I'd get laughed out of the room or simply ignored. Yet similarly ignorant pestering of Christians is considered a badge superior honor in this group. It's loony...

>152 nathanielcampbell: The very idea of an authoritative tradition seems anathema to this group, which seems to think that the best authority is the one that contravenes tradition.

I don't know about that. I think the issue is that I'm unable to grasp just how the authority in Christian tradition is actually invested with whatever authority it possesses. It's not just "tradition" because traditions are open to interpretations. It's not just text, because the text is also open to interpretations. It's something else, something beyond both text and tradition...something that believers are all positive is there but that I don't see and they can't show me because I'm just not wearing the right kind of glasses or something.

If I wandered around pestering physicists to answer my objections to how light is propagated through the aether, I'd get laughed out of the room or simply ignored.

Or, perhaps, someone would take the trouble to explain to you the current theories on the properties of light, and show you the evidence for them.

Yet similarly ignorant pestering of Christians is considered a badge superior honor in this group. It's loony...

You do sound a little grumpy. It's going to drop below 20F here on the Carolina coast tomorrow night. Luckily my heat is up to it. But I made extra soup in preparation, just in case.

The whole point of the second coming and the creation of the new heaven and the new earth described in the Apocalypse is that the resurrected and recreated physical world is not yet this world. Christ in his resurrected body does NOT reign in a heaven that is materially contained within our present universe (rather, it contains this universe and all that exists).

Which is simply nonsense on stilts. Once you accept this sort of thing as being literally true, you have no basis to argue that people who believe that Christ does reign in a heaven that is materially contained within our present universe are getting it wrong. You're all a bunch of silly people sitting in the same ridiculous boat pointing at each other saying that the other guy's boat is ridiculous. Yet you're all on the same ridiculous boat.

This is pretty standard theology here -- yet somehow, even men so brilliant as Carl Sagan have missed the boat.

He didn't misunderstand. His statement on this point was to point out the ludicrousness of such an idea, and also the fact that the alternatives are equally as ludicrous.

So I reiterate: my patience has grown thin with demands against Christianity that are made in obstinate ignorance of its faith, doctrine, and practice.

You can believe any kind of lunatic idea you want. What is being pointed out is that your ideas, that you present as being true and reasonable, are just a ridiculous and silly as the ideas that you scoff at such as those held by Scientologists and Biblical literalists. Go ahead and grab a ride on the silly train if you want, but don't think that you'll be taken seriously when you then try to argue that the beliefs of your fellow passengers on the silly train are somehow less valid than yours.

> 152. Christianity understands that the community of believers (aka "the Body of Christ" aka "the Church") is invested with the guidance of the Holy Spirit in its faith.

I think what bothers some people is that Christianity manifests itself as a very wide spectrum with something like evangelical fundamentalism on one end and something like process theology on the other end. What's puzzling is how the Holy Spirit can be guiding all these very different communities of faith.

#152: Christianity understands that the community of believers (aka "the Body of Christ" aka "the Church") is invested with the guidance of the Holy Spirit in its faith.

Except, mind you, those dolts the Fundamentalists.

The very idea of an authoritative tradition seems anathema to this group

I believe in an authoritative tradition to US Constitutional Law. A tradition that has a clear authority, a clear hierarchy of authoritative texts, clear means to determine what is and isn't part of the tradition, and the wisdom to laugh any statement about infallibility or permanent canonicity out of the room. A tradition that tries to be clear about what the rules are and tries to be clear about when they're changing, instead of acting like what's self-evidently true and eternal this day becoming self-evidently false tomorrow.

>146 nathanielcampbell: Was Sagan so doltish as to think that Christians believe Jesus' resurrected body to have ascended into outer space?

Sophisticated Christians see the joke. (It was from one such that I first heard it.) Could anyone be doltish enough not to see that?

But I have to admit that your response is funnier.

>128 jburlinson: if this experience is associated with differing narratives and intellectual beliefs, it becomes a source of conflict, when, in its essence, it's an experience of unity

Sadly all too true.

>134 southernbooklady: It still all seems to boil down to you either believe in God or you don't

Or rather whether you interpret your experience of reality in terms of a relationship with and experience of the divine or not.

>146 nathanielcampbell:
Christ in his resurrected body does NOT reign in a heaven that is materially contained within our present universe (rather, it contains this universe and all that exists).
This is pretty standard theology

Yes, of course, heaven contains all that exists. Including Satan and hell, if they exist. The devil is in heaven, and hell is in heaven, if they exist.
I think that's a heaven I would prefer not to be in. I'd prefer the other place. But if you're right, there isn't another place, if heaven contains all that exists. So I'll have to put up with heaven, until a better place can be found.

But where would I spend eternity in burning damnation, just like gentle Jesus said I would? Or perhaps he was wrong on this, just as he was on a few other things.

Your corpse would end up in Gehenna, a perpetually burning trash dump outside of Jerusalem. And if their ain't no afterlife, where else would it go?

a perpetually burning trash dump outside of Jerusalem in heaven, because heaven contains all that exists.

Speaking of Jerusalem:
"The archaeological results in this part of Jerusalem have been impressive, but they do not mesh with the chronology of the biblical narrative. Although the site was occupied continuously from the Chalcolithic period (in the fourth millennium BCE) to the present, there were only two periods of major building and expansion before Roman times— and neither could possibly be identified with the reigns of David and Solomon. In the Middle Bronze Age, six or seven centuries before the estimated time of David, massive walls and towers of an impressive city fortification were built on the eastern slope of the City of David. And only in the late eighth and the seventh century, two to three hundred years after David, did the city grow and dramatically expand again, with fortifications, close-packed houses, and indications of foreign trade.

In fact, the impressively preserved remains of the monumental fortifications of the earlier and later periods— of the Middle Bronze and Late Iron II— contradict the suggestion that the building activities in the time of Herod and in later periods eradicated all monuments of the time of David and Solomon. During all the centuries between the sixteenth and eighth centuries BCE, Jerusalem shows no archaeological signs of having been a great city or the capital of a vast monarchy. The evidence clearly suggests that it was little more than a village— inhabited by a small population living on the northern part of the ridge, near the spring of Gihon.

If analyzed from a purely archaeological standpoint, Jerusalem, through those intervening centuries— including the time of David and Solomon— was probably never more than a small, relatively poor, unfortified hill country town, no larger than three or four acres in size."

Finkelstein, Israel; Silberman, Neil Asher (2006-01-31). David and Solomon (Kindle Locations 3622-3635). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

> 161. because heaven contains all that exists.

You seem incredulous about this, but don't you think there's a realm that contains all that exists?

After all, if something exists, it's contained within something (like a universe), isn't it? And if something doesn't exist, it's not contained anywhere, is it?

but don't you think there's a realm that contains all that exists?

Yes, and we have a perfectly good word for this already: the Universe.

> 164. we have a perfectly good word for this already: the Universe.

Yes, it's a perfectly good word. And if I understand you correctly, if something exists, it is contained within the universe, right? And if something doesn't exist, it's not contained in the universe, is that correct?

And if I understand you correctly, if something exists, it is contained within the universe, right?

That is a more complicated question that you might think. The universe is defined as the totality of existence, the broadest possible definition was conceived quite a while ago as being the totality of all things that exist and all things that don't exist. The more common definition is all things that exist, have existed, and will exist.

The waters are muddied somewhat by the existence of the multiverse hypothesis, which posits multiple universes beyond our own. But as those universes, if they exist, are completely beyond our horizon, and may as well not exist as far as we are concerned. In any event, they are speculative, and have no evidence supporting their existence so making any statements about them at this point is mere conjecture.

> That is a more complicated question that you might think.

On the other hand, it's just possible that I might think it's a very complicated question. You have very little evidence as to how complicated I think something is.

may as well not exist as far as we are concerned.

That seems to be an unnecessarily utilitarian point of view, but let's let that pass.

The more common definition is all things that exist, have existed, and will exist.

That's good enough for me, at least for the time being. So let's just content ourselves with our own universe. Would you say that, up until now, we human beings have been able to perceive (or achieve access to) everything that exists, has existed and will exist?

167: No, but it doesn't really matter for the purposes of this discussion does it?

nathanielcampbell at #144:
Re: Acts and the Ascension:

He disappeared within a cloud -- where he went from there the text does not say. Is it really that big of a stretch of the imagination to think that after disappearing in midair, he went to a realm not of this current material world?

I simply don't understand these seemingly serious objections about the description of the Ascension in Acts -- it's sophomoric to insist that the textual record implies a physical heaven just above the stratosphere where God holds court.

Well, a couple of things - not least of which the fact that we BOTH find the account of the Ascension as given to be ridiculous:

1) The eyewitness accounts were of events that are unbelievable. No, it absolutely DOES NOT make the events more believable to postulate an even more improbable explanation.

2) Sophomoric or not, the description of the Ascension is the evidence that you have. The testimony of the eyewitnesses is what implies " a physical heaven just above the stratosphere where God holds court".
Not satisfied with the story? Neither are non-Christians.

But any further embroidery of the eyewitness accounts is unsupported by the text.

If you find the description of the Ascension to be ridiculous, well, you too are fully free to disbelieve it.

>168 StormRaven:. it doesn't really matter for the purposes of this discussion does it?

It seems to me that it does. Wouldn't you think that, if we're going to be making definitive statements about the genes of Jesus (or anything else, for that matter), we'd need to be confident about our ability to perceive what exists, has existed and will exist?

It seems to me that it does.

For the purpose of determining whether the word "universe" is adequate for describing everything, or if we need to resort to substituting the word "heaven" instead, it is entirely beside the point.

Wouldn't you think that, if we're going to be making definitive statements about the genes of Jesus (or anything else, for that matter), we'd need to be confident about our ability to perceive what exists, has existed and will exist?

No. We don't need to know everything to know some things, and it certainly has no bearing on things that we know quite a bit about (such as human reproduction). Just making crap up (which is what you are doing when you are talking about things humans have not perceived) is called writing fiction, and doesn't serve as evidence of anything other than the human ability to make crap up.

Quite frankly, the "we don't know everything so this wildly improbable religious story could have happened" argument is an argument that only a moron would make.

> 171. Quite frankly, the "we don't know everything so this wildly improbable religious story could have happened" argument is an argument that only a moron would make.

I'm not aware that I, or anyone else, has made such an argument. Quite frankly, perhaps only a moron could have accused anyone of making such an argument.

We don't need to know everything to know some things, and it certainly has no bearing on things that we know quite a bit about

How do you know that it has no bearing on something if you don't know what it is that you don't know? How can a person be so monumentally self-confident as to say that things that are unknown don't matter?

edited to take control of wayward italics

>172 jburlinson: How do you know that it has no bearing on something if you don't know what it is that you don't know? How can a person be so monumentally self-confident as to say that things that are unknown don't matter?

Well, in the context of this conversation..."monumental self-confidence" is perhaps a mischaracterization of the empirical position: "we don't know, but we have no reason to think so."

An angel told Mary that she was preggers by God. Do angels fly like birds, bats, or like bees?

God is all the universe, including us.

I'm not aware that I, or anyone else, has made such an argument.

That's exactly what you are doing when you say things like:

How do you know that it has no bearing on something if you don't know what it is that you don't know? How can a person be so monumentally self-confident as to say that things that are unknown don't matter?

Because if there is no evidence for something, then there is no reason to make up stories to assuage religious feelings. We have a pretty good handle on the effects of gravity. We don't need to imagine that some unknown force nudges the planets to keep them in their orbits. Similarly, we have a pretty good handle on human reproduction. There is no evidence for magic being needed, or for it ever having occurred. Pretending that it might have happened, based upon no evidence, is writing fiction.

Here is what Tertullian says about Jesus:

"They who are so anxious to shake that belief in the resurrection which was firmly settled before the appearance of our modern Sadducees, as even to deny that the expectation thereof has any relation whatever to the flesh, have great cause for besetting the flesh of Christ also with doubtful questions, as if it either had no existence at all, or possessed a nature altogether different from human flesh. For they cannot but be apprehensive that, if it be once determined that Christ's flesh was human, a presumption would immediately arise in opposition to them, that that flesh must by all means rise again, which has already risen in Christ. Therefore we shall have to guard our belief in the resurrection from the same armoury, whence they get their weapons of destruction. Let us examine our Lord's bodily substance, for about His spiritual nature all are agreed. It is His flesh that is in question. Its verity and quality are the points in dispute. Did it ever exist? Whence was it derived? And of what kind was it? If we succeed in demonstrating it, we shall lay down a law for our own resurrection. Marcion, in order that he might deny the flesh of Christ, denied also His nativity, or else he denied His flesh in order that he might deny His nativity; because, of course, he was afraid that His nativity and His flesh bore mutual testimony to each other's reality, since there is no nativity without flesh, and no flesh without nativity. As if indeed, under the prompting of that licence which is ever the same in all heresy, he too might not very well have either denied the nativity, although admitting the flesh—like Apelles, who was first a disciple of his, and afterwards an apostate—or, while admitting both the flesh and the nativity, have interpreted them in a different sense, as did Valentinus, who resembled Apelles both in his discipleship and desertion of Marcion. At all events, he who represented the flesh of Christ to be imaginary was equally able to pass off His nativity as a phantom; so that the virgin's conception, and pregnancy, and child-bearing, and then the whole course of her infant too, would have to be regarded as putative. These facts pertaining to the nativity of Christ would escape the notice of the same eyes and the same senses as failed to grasp the full idea of His flesh."
Tertullian, On The Flesh of Christ

"Tertullian is credited with the motto 'Credo quia absurdum' -- 'I believe because it is impossible'. Needless to say, he began life as a lawyer." H.L. Mencken

> 131. Interestingly, this is a dominant theme in the gospels, especially Mark, in which Jesus is consistently misunderstood by nearly everyone, especially his disciples, who might be expected to be able to understand him best. This demonstration of the problems of communication could be considered one of the things that make the gospels "true".

You seem here to have neatly glossed the thesis of Frank Kermode's Genesis of Secrecy, a really excellent book.

> One is left with a dilemma -- say nothing, because whatever you say is almost certain to be misconstrued, or say something which has a chance to be understood, at least in part, by at least some other people, if not all.

Aleister Crowley's "Ali Sloper" (in Konx Om Pax) explores this particular conundrum, elaborating it though a Socratic dialogue querying whether it is better to speak the truth or to answer fools according to their folly.

> 175

Yes. I agree.

But god likes to argue with himself.

Apparently.

Tertullian had this to say about Jesus’ appearance:
“Whatever that poor despised body may be, because it was an object of touch and sight, it shall be my Christ, be He inglorious, be He ignoble, be He dishonoured; for such was it announced that he should be, both in bodily condition and aspect. Isaiah comes to our help again: “We have announced (His way) before Him” says he; “He is like a servant, like a root in a dry ground; He hath no form nor comeliness; we saw Him, and He had neither form nor beauty; but his Form was despised, marred above all men.” Similarly the Father addressed the Son just before: “Inasmuch as many will be astonished at Thee, so also will Thy beauty be without glory from men.” Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 3, p. 335

I'm in a fairly liberal town for Oklahoma. I know there are churches who take The Bible as the literal word of God. The literalistic flock is just a little obnoxious about it.

I'm finding out that some churches are taking parts of The Bible as fairytale. This will make my job easier. Let's keep whittling away, shall we?

> 181

Nat and ts are convinced that both the groups that you mention added together only make up a tiny minority of christians.

In contradistinction to that, nearly all christians are like Nat and ts - they say.

Here's the problem: no one know what the eff either of those gentlemen are, or stand for, or disbelieve, or believe, or anything. They are each a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma floating in a giant bowl of jiggling green Jell-O.

I.e., try and get a straight answer to a straight question put to either of them. You will get drowned in verbiage, misdirection, change of subject, and stream-of- consciousness non sequitur.

Want to waste your precious time and feel your very life force being ever-so-slowly sucked away? - Then engage either of them in a "conversation" or "debate". Ha.

>181 androidlove: " You will get drowned in verbiage, misdirection, change of subject, and stream-of- consciousness non sequitur."

That seems to come with the territory. It may be frustrating for someone involved, but to an outside observer, it's hilarious.

> 183

Hilarious as in "funny"?

There are (at least) two distinct definitions of the word "funny".

On the topic of chimerism…

Pregnancy No Proof of Motherhood; Woman Was Her Own Twin-and the Twin Was the Mother of Her Children
http://guardianlv.com/2014/01/pregnancy-no-proof-of-motherhood-woman-was-her-own...

Creepy!

Pregnancy No Proof of Motherhood

I must say how much I HATE this sort of title. If you are pregnant and give birth, you'll damn well be a mother. Even if you give the child away, you'll have been/be its mother in some, if you will, "technical" sense. Surrogate mothers are mothers. Egg donors are "biological" mothers. Adoptive mothers are mothers. Some fathers are mothers. There's a range of "motherhood".

Woman Was Her Own Twin-and the Twin Was the Mother of Her Children

My hate grows stronger. Clearly it can't have been an identical twin, or it couldn't have been true that there was NO genetic link between her and the children. Multiple markers are checked and it is virtually impossible that there would have been NO similarity found in the case of IDENTICAL twin.

So, not really a "twin", but a completely separate embryo failed to develop--probably within the first few weeks of pregnancy (grandmother's)--and the cells were resorbed into the body of the living embryo, giving rise, by the by, to the ovaries.

Not a very useful story from a Biblical point of view. The woman still had to have sex in order to have children, which apparently happened in the most ordinary way, followed by the most ordinary conception, pregnancy, and birth. Technically, her ovaries were donated by another individual, with the genetic implications of egg donation.

Creepy!

Hmmmm... you do know you're a symbiont of some 1000 species? Or that your genome is riddled with viral sequences? Tell me when to stop. :)

186: Only about 10% of a person's cells are human. Microbes make up the other 90%.

Source: Science News, December 28, 2013.

>187 StormRaven:
It seems that story has been around for several years

'Indeed, the human gut alone contains almost four and a half pounds of bacteria.'

Hey! That means I weigh less than the scale says!

Creepy?

Not exactly creepy, but weird--and marvellous--to think that my copper hair, fair skin, and light-colored eyes might have come from Neanderthal ancestors.

Which is sort of funny, considering that modern East Asians have the most Neanderthal-derived genome.

Who lost our furry genes, is my eternal query.

Who lost our furry genes:

Africans, who like some today (Bushmen), could outrun prey because, upright and perspiring, they didn't overheat?

Baby macaques on tv last night had hair pattern like ours, so our loss of hair was retaining a juvenile trait?

Sex selection?

I'm wondering if European men's heavier beards might be a Neanderthal trait?

We are such interesting creatures!

> 188

He was speaking of individual cells. By that measurement we are indeed 90 per cent bacteria and his statement is correct.

Since human cells are huge compared to most bacteria cells then by weight bacteria make up only about 2 to 3 per cent of a human. So that is also correct.

Science is not that hard, on account of it deals with facts. - Unlike religion which just makes stuff up to suit the desire and then enforces belief through childhood inculcation and a life-time of authoritarianism, imposition of shame and guilt, ostracism, murder, etc. - depending on the particular society, "tradition", era, etc.

> 190 > 191

Yes.

Also, I didn't keep the reference but the latest studies of the human genome seem to show that white skin is a mutation that only arose about 6 thousand years ago and not the 20-40 thousand years that has been the best assumption. So - we humans are ALL "blacker" than we ever thought. So I think that is good - well, for everyone except racists.

>192 JGL53:: Way to go, ruining a good joke about not counting the "weight" of the bacteria.

> 193

I wasn't going for humor in #192.

What did you find funny - specifically?

>188 2wonderY:: In 188, 2wonderY made a joke about the "weight" of bacteria -- and then you went in 192 trying to explain why bacteria don't weigh that much, thus proving your inability to get a joke.

>192 JGL53: white skin is a mutation that only arose about 6 thousand years ago and not the 20-40 thousand years that has been the best assumption

My bad. Based on 2007 study, Smithsonian says, "...The specific MCR1 mutation in Neanderthals has not found in modern humans (or occurs extremely rarely in modern humans). This indicates that the two mutations for red hair and pale skin occurred independently and does not support the idea of gene flow between Neanderthals and modern humans. Pale skin may have been advantageous to Neanderthals living in Europe because of the ability to synthesize vitamin D..." http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/genetics/ancient-dna-and-neanderthals/neande...

Today's publications say skin-and-hair keratin are among traits we non-Africans inherited from Neanderthals:

S. Sankararaman et al. The genomic landscape of Neanderthal ancestry in present-day humans. Nature. Published January 30, 2014. doi:10.1038/nature12961. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature12961.html

B. Vernot and J. Akey. Resurrecting surviving Neandertal lineages from modern human genomes. Science. Published January 30, 2014. doi:10.1126/science1245938. (Not yet posted? http://www.sciencemag.org)

ETA: I apparently misunderstood NBC report on the new studies, only one of which was available online at the time, i.e.,

"..The adaptations might have included lighter skin to soak up more Vitamin D from sunlight, or there may have been other skin or hair qualities more suited to a cold climate. "There are so many things that skin does that it's hard to say which traits were influenced more by the Neanderthal variants," Akey said..."

http://www.nbcnews.com/science/which-parts-us-are-neanderthal-our-genes-point-sk...

> 195

Well. That alleged "humorous" connection would be quite a stretch for the average person.

But you are not average, are you?

The curious mind may or may not find satisfactory answers. If the answers sought are from human thinking/understanding/reasoning, their be plenty. The plain old simple answer in scripture tells the reader that the first transplantation of life in a human female womb was performed by the Grand Creator, God (with cap G) = Almighty....use of his holy spirit evidently canceled out imperfections, since no sex from husband it could truly be believed that Mary's first born is the Son of God (only begotten son).

Joseph was therefore step/foster dad to Jesus.

Bravo, well said jburlinson. As I read the book Cruicibles the attitudes (preconceived are some) that the old alchemist/chemist brought to their research varied. I remember one struck me that he was trying to inquire into how God did things (paraphrase).
Well written...

Did anybody clear up the point that Jesus came (transfered from spirit life to human) not God, the Father
and this topic needs new thread....getting tooooo long. thanks

I think the main point being made here is that god is magic.

Magic has no rules at all. None. Anything can happen, and many times does.

If your mind is in the mode that believes in magic.

I think maybe the idea of magic is made up.

If atheism seems a downer to some, and someone feels a need for a god for something or other then there is 1.deism or 2. pantheism. Both are logically consistent and pose no problem to mental health - unlike theism and it's mother animism.

Isn't it past time that we could all cut the crap?