Radio Four’s programme last night about “virgin births” did not know whether it wanted to be about the conception of Jesus or about natural parthenogenesis and the possibility of confecting such among mammals. There really isn’t anything to connect those two subjects, and there was only half an hour in which to discuss either of them, never mind both.
Much time was wasted on such things as whether Our Lady might have had testicular feminisation or such like, in each case only to arrive at the conclusion that she could still only have conceived miraculously, just as the Bible teaches that she did while an entirely normal, fertile woman who had simply never “known a man”.
The bits about parthenogenesis were interesting, although I have no idea how competent they were; since the presenter was a working geneticist, I assume that they were more than passable.
But the bits about theology were hopeless, as much as anything else trotting out the old canard that the Biblical story has numerous parallels in ancient mythology.
In fact, the mythological commonplace that is the sexual impregnation of a woman by a god or whatever is exactly what does not happen in the Bible (although it does in the imaginative writings of Joseph Smith).
Apart from its own partial retelling in the Qur’an, the Biblical account is unique, and could not be less like any of the parallels that are routinely alleged.
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Was it a fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy?
ReplyDeleteEither yes, so that's good; or no, so that, if there were no expectation that the Messiah would be virgin-born (I, like many others, think that there was, by the way), then there was no reason to invent any such account.
ReplyDeleteSo it works either way.
Which of these do you believe?
ReplyDeleteThat it was a fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy:
ReplyDelete- "alma", a young woman not yet married, does effectively mean "virgin" in the Hebrew context;
- the Septuagint writers must have got the idea from somewhere when they translated "alma" as "parthenos", which really does mean "virgin" in the directly physical sense (the Septuagint is invaluable for that sort of thing, being the first ever translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into another language, and all translation being to some extent exegetical); and
- The Septuagint itself was in fact widely used in first century Palestine, now known to have been profoundly Hellenised (just as the New Testament depicts it as having been, in fact).