I am more likely to believe Jesus's real father was a young shepherd that Mary met in her journeys into the hillsides.

A story was needed quickly when Mary started to show her condition. The shepherd realized the very bad position he was responsible for so he started to pass word to other shepherds that maybe Mary was "the one" that had been prophesied about.

Shepherds would walk long distances to tend their flocks and it was not unusual for them to communicate with other shepherds from other communities. Jesus knew that the young shepherd was his real dad. And Jesus refers to himself as a shepherd not a carpenter in his teaching.

The young shepherd loved Mary and watched from a far. He would know when her delivery date was because pregnancies are measured in Lunar months. He would know where Mary and Joseph were headed for the birth and he was one of the first to be there and to see her with their baby boy.

Joseph agreed to step in as the father in order to protect Mary and her family.

So what do you think? is this more likely than the immaculate conception?

Why all those eyewitnesses who consulted as needed and wrote all the gospels

......but what and who did they eye witness'? The apostles weren't around yet and John the Baptist's dad was getting old and could have been talked into anything--- in my opinion. Mary's dad would have backed the story of immaculate conception in order to protect his daughter. What am I missing here?

My sarcastic point is that we have no eyewitness account, and the accounts we have are late and distant from whatever events might have occurred/inspired the content. Historic game of Telephone taken literally and word for word by Christians.

https://medium.com/interfaith-now/jesus-and-osiris-how-christianity-adapted-egyptian-myths-c63ef171cd10

Nevertheless, there are striking specific similarities between the two narratives and theologies:

Jesus’s mother Mary was venerated as a miraculous, holy virgin, just as Horus’s mother Isis was worshipped as a goddess. The image of Mary nursing Jesus is drawn from the Egyptian icon of Isis nursing Horus.
Jesus is supposed to have been born miraculously to a virginal mother, just as Horus’s birth is miraculous since Isis compensates for Osiris’s lack of penis with magic.
Christians believe Jesus needed to sacrifice himself to save us from original sin, since that corruption which results from human freewill prevents us from atoning with a judgmental God.
Likewise, Egyptians believed the moral order was divided between Ma’at and Isfet, between order and disorder or chaos. Isfet was represented by the god of chaos, Apophis or Apep, who is the huge serpent that tries to defeat the sun each night at its lowest ebb, near midnight. Apophis was born from Ra’s umbilical cord or was depicted as swimming in the primordial waters of chaos and eluding Neith before she used magic to create the natural order. Apophis is responsible for duality and conflict and was thus comparable to the serpent of Eden that provoked Adam and Eve to commit the first sin, corrupting Creation.

Jesus as the incarnation of God, or his relationship as the divine Father’s Son are like the relationships between Osiris and Ra, and between Osiris and Horus. Add the Holy Spirit, and you have the trinity of Osiris, Horus, and Isis. In both cases, there’s a family of gods that are united by a greater god, by Ra or by the monotheistic essence of the Trinity. (Patriarchal Judaism and Christianity downgraded feminine divinity, whereas Egyptian religion ranked Isis and Hathor as the official partners of their male counterparts.)
As the Gospel of John says, Jesus as the Logos descends to earth to prove with his miraculous signs that there’s a way out of death. This Gnostic aspect of Christianity, together with the “light shining in the darkness” metaphor, are grounded in the Egyptian solar cycle. The sun physically seems to descend so that it can rise again in the morning.
Jesus and Osiris are both gods who live as humans. Osiris was depicted as a king of Egypt whose body floated down a river in a coffin. As Ancient Egypt Online says, “The oldest religious texts known to us refer to him [Osiris] as the great god of the dead, who once possessed human form and lived upon earth. After his murder by Set, Osiris became the king of the underworld and presided over the judgment of dead souls.”
Jesus is betrayed and effectively killed by Judas, just as Osiris is betrayed and killed by Set.
Christians revere the cross of crucifixion as the symbol of Jesus’s triumph over death. Long before Christianity, though, Egyptians revered the ubiquitous symbol of the Pillar of Djed, which was associated in later Egyptian history with Osiris’s backbone. This was the pillar made from the tree that had grown around Osiris’s coffin, and its form in the hieroglyph looks like a cross, with stylized vertical lines at the top representing cut branches or segments of spine.

Mary was a virgin because Matthew wanted Jesus to be the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy.

Part of the problem is the facile presumption that the order of the books in the Bible is sacrosanct. That's why people think the Book of Revelation describes the God-approved culmination of the Jesus story when in fact at the time it was just another Apocalypse out of dozens of other Apocalypses that was being kicked around by some believers as an interesting proposal that had some merit perhaps in some of its claims. It got tacked onto the end because all the other books had been somewhat organized and they had to put it somewhere. But ever since then, people have been conditioned to believe that the order of the books was deliberately ordained by God and so suck it up, you heathens.


The Jesus story got better each time it was reported. Mark is the earliest of our written gospels, and it says nothing about Jesus' birth. Matthew was put first because it has the birth story and so it had to go before Mark- and his birth story was one long string of miracles and prophecy fulfillments. The glaring error was that whoever wrote Matthew did not know any Hebrew beyond Shalom and Mazel tov. The OT translations at the time and forever after said that Isaiah said that the Hero would be born from a virgin. In order to make Jesus the hero, his birth had to be retconned into just such a virgin birth and moreover the only actual virgin birth.

Anybody who could read Hebrew then and now know perfectly well that Isaiah said no such thing, not really. He said "young woman", not "virgin", and he didn't actually even say that said young woman was destined to be the actual mother of the Hero. But that's just not special enough and so Jesus had to be extra special because he was our hero and so he just has to be more special than anybody else in the whole wide world. That's why Jesus was born of a virgin. Thank you.

for a while, some Mormons said/ taught that Mary had some sort of spiritual intercourse with god, and since god was ‘ only a spirit (not a resurrected being …???), it didn’t count so Mary was considered a virgin… OK!

Has anyone heard this gibberish lately in - from ChurchCo/ Morland?

Yup, that Was the explanation for a while, A While Back at least!

Not quite.

God is a resurrected being. Young, Talmadge, Joseph F., and McConkie all stated that God literally and physically impregnated Mary.

Thus god wasn't a 'Mortal Man' so allowing the virginal status a wee bit of credibility

I remembered hearing this--but it usually was talked about in high priest group meeting and then the rest of the ward would hear about it for the next couple of weeks.
I guess those days are all behind us. But no one else was allowed to speculate in class like the high priests.

Villager Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I remembered hearing this--but it usually was
> talked about in high priest group meeting and then
> the rest of the ward would hear about it for the
> next couple of weeks.
> I guess those days are all behind us. But
> no one else was allowed to speculate in class like
> the high priests.


Now most of that cohort have been thrown under the bus, 'Speaking as a man' is almost official doctrine instead of those teachings (another word for 'doctrine').

When asked a pointed Q, another reply / response is: "It's not important for your (individual) salvation - exhaltation"



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/29/2023 02:24PM by GNPE.

What you are missing is that you are assuming the claim that Mary was a virgin was around from day one, or rather day -200, prior to Jesus birth.

We have precious little evidence Jesus even existed, and even less about the existence of Mary. I suspect this whole virgin birth myth cropped up at least decades, perhaps a century or more, after the supposed virgin birth.

Agreed.

There were in the centuries and before Jesus's time several mystery cults in the eastern Mediterranean with myths of gods and their virgin births. When Christianity entered the competition with them for popular followings, it became important to have an immaculately conceived God.

Yes, I agree with Anybody (above) that Christianity most likely borrowed from local cults and beliefs that were in circulation at the time.

But I also think it stems from the fundamental misogyny of the Abrahamic religions. We can't have a woman producing an exceptional baby the old fashioned way, now can we? That would imply that she might have had some fun in the process.

Do not confuse virgin birth with immaculate conception.

Immaculate conception is the belief/declaration that Mary, mother of Jesus was born without original sin. It derives from the problem that arises when a divine being is born of a person with sin. The church had to reconcile this, so proposed the idea centuries later. Not sure if it was voted on, the way the divinity of Jesus was.

Correct. Thank you.

But the Bible, god's inerrant word to his children (would HE LIE?) is that

'all have sinned and come short of the glory of god' (note the word 'all')

Some of us more than others. :o)

I see it the same way. Like the Epic of Gilgamesh turning into the story of Noah, the people of Israel seemed to borrow legends that they knew of and adapt them to themselves. I think that is what happened here.

Religions don't develop in a vacuum.

The ancient Eastern Mediterranean was a nexus of trade from India and Asia, and ideas came too.

If Jesus of Nazareth were a real person, he was relatively unknown and unimportant. There's no mention of "Christians" in Roman documents until the beginning of the Second Century CE.

What is important are the legends that became associated with him after he died — a sacrifice, resurrection, virgin birth, miracles, etc. just like other gods or spiritual leaders. The Hero Twins, Zoroaster, Mithra, the Buddha, Mani, etc., etc.


You can make anything up about anyone after they are dead and gone.


https://teahouse.buddhistdoor.net/the-extraordinary-conceptions-of-mary-and-maya/

The conception of Prince Siddhartha, who later became the historical Buddha, has a mother with a similar story of miraculous purity (according to that culture of the time). The name of his mother Maya, which means “illusion” in Sanskrit, implies the fundamental Buddhist belief that everything that we perceive is a magical illusion, including the birth and life.

While Queen Maya was not a virgin, she and King Suddhodhana did not have any progeny for twenty years. Once during full moon, the queen dreamt that she was carried away by four goddesses to the lake Anotatta in the Himalayas. They bathed her in the water and clad her in celestial garments, and perfumed and adorned her body with heavenly flowers. Then a white elephant with golden tusks appeared, holding a white lotus in his trunk, made three rounds around her and penetrated her womb through her right side. Through this heavenly act the prince Siddhartha entered the womb of Maya and she became pregnant. When the queen awakened, she shared her dream with king Suddhodhana and the royal clairvoyants, who declared that this was a sign of the conception and extraordinary abilities of the future prince. Most biographical accounts of the Buddha maintain that his conception was immaculate and did not include a sexual act.


Maya’s pregnancy lasted ten lunar months with no complications or pains of any kind. She even developed extraordinary healing powers during that time. According to Buddhist legends, Prince Siddhartha emerged from her right side, which symbolizes the pure and noble path, far from the “impure” path of the vaginal birth.

The belief of the extraordinary birth from the right side of her body serves the religious purpose of removing the “impure” connotation of a sexual union and the painful, messy process of childbirth. According to Buddhist teaching, the cause of birth is in direct relation with samsara, the world of desire and suffering, which need to be prevailed upon through walking on the spiritual path. In patriarchal expressions of Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism, the woman is a symbol of the sensuous and the spiritually compromised, who incessantly impedes the final goal of liberation. On the one hand, the mystery of the female body and sexuality are thought to be uncontrollable and destructive, while on the other hand, her maternal power is believed to be creative and compassionate. Hence, the mind-set of the adherents of these two Buddhist schools critiques sexuality and motherhood as being “impure” and “pure” respectively. This paradox was circumvented only through the wisdom of emptiness or shunyata, a doctrine that declares that all phenomena, including sexual union and childbirth, are inherently pure. Shunyata was particularly prominent in Mahayana and Vajrayana.

What is “pure” and “impure” in sexuality, conception, birth, and motherhood is matter of beliefs, concepts, and culture. The idea of extraordinary conception aims to demonstrate a literal, miraculous kind of purity and perfection, which is a real miracle. This miracle gives faith and hope. The white elephant, the radiant angel, the white lotus, and the white lilies are symbols of the appearing of extraordinary beings that bring auspiciousness and goodness to all.

Mary and Maya are revered as the divine personifications of maternal love and purity. They are symbols of the extraordinary power of a mother, without whom no being, holy or not, could appear in this world. Regardless of the “historical” truth behind the conceptions and births of Jesus and Buddha, one thing is for sure—the irruption of these great people into the world completely transformed it, forever.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/29/2023 11:01AM by anybody.

God checked and said so.

He sees you when you are sleeping
He knows when you're awake
He knows if you've been bad or good
So be good for goodness sake

I have heard that "virgin" was a mistranslation. In the earliest known written biblical texts in greek the word was "alma" ;which literally means "young girl." As I understand it then, jesus was born of a young girl. Virgin was part of a debate of what a "young girl" is. So the jury is still out as to whether or not Mary was a Virgin, or just a young girl, or both.
HH =)

If you ask any Christian, the answer will be "virgin." Will it not?

Good point. Except:
Mormons consider themselves christians
Mormon Doctrine states that God had sexual intercourse with Mary.
People who have sexual intercourse are not virgins.
Therefore: Some Christians clearly do not believe that Mary was a Virgin.


In Mormon theology Mary was a licked cupcake. Joseph should have waited for a temple-worthy spouse. Instead he married a woman who had sex out of wedlock. Tsk tsk.

HH =)

That's like saying that being shot in the head with an assault rifle doesn't kill people. It's true something like one in a thousand times and hence is the exception that proves the rule.

Meanwhile the exception, the Mormon, is walking around with serious brain damage.

Correct spelling is almah.

Duly noted. I can't spell in English, so greek and hebrew are both Greek to me.


HH =)

Mary needed to be a virgin since earlier gods were sometimes born to virgins. Nothing about christinsanity is original.

I would read that book.

Like with all religion, a new religion just descends from previous religions. The Mary/virgin thing came from the earlier traditions of non-Christian religions.

I'm no Bible scholar, but there's an argument to be made that virgin did not mean a woman (or man) who has never had sex, but an unmarried woman.

So she could be a virgin even though she wasn't a virgin.

pharmacy where she got her morning after pill.

Actually the powers that be decided on the virgin story after wearing a scarlet A was dismissed.