Mary’s Virginity Product of Prudish, Puritanical Catholic Church
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Stories of gods born to virgins could be found in many countries thousands of years before Jesus. In Greek mythology, Danae was the virgin mother of the demigod Perseus. The Egyptians had Isis as the virgin mother of Horus, and she was worshipped throughout the Roman Empire in Jesus’ time. Mithras, whose cult outshone Christianity for popularity in the first three centuries, was conceived when God entered a virgin. Attis, Adonis, Buddha, Krishna, Osiris and Tammuz were all born to virgins. To be a god your mother almost needed to be a virgin!
Many men find the thought of an adolescent female virgin attractive, as are reports about them getting pregnant. Matthew made out Mary was a virgin, (see below) and Luke followed suit:
“In the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. The angel went to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.” Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God. You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.” “How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?” The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God.” (Luke 1:26–35, KJV.) It’s impossible to imagine an elderly Mary, battle weary after bringing up a brood of seven, describing such a doubtful anecdote.
Matthew, who’d never met Mary, manufactured a virgin pregnancy prediction from Isaiah:
“Now all this took place to fulfill the words spoken by the Lord through the prophet: ‘The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son and they shall call him Emmanuel…’” (Matt. 1:22, NJB.) However, the original Hebrew text from Isaiah reads:
“The maiden is with child and will soon give birth to a son whom she will call Immanuel” (Isa. 7:14, NJB.) Isaiah wasn’t referring to a pregnancy sometime in the future, but one that had already occurred. The maiden wasn’t a virgin, as she was pregnant. Furthermore, Jesus’ name wasn’t Immanuel. Matthew was improvising, and Luke followed suit. Most modern bibles dishonestly translate Isaiah by using the word “virgin.”
Mark and John mentioned nothing about Mary’s virginity. Paul, Christianity’s mastermind, clearly stated that Christ…
“…was born of the seed of David” (Rom. 1:3, NJB,) although this verse may have been an interpolation. The author thought Jesus had a human father, so he couldn’t have thought Christ’s mother was a virgin either.
The Catholic Church promotes the notion that Mary was a perpetual virgin; that she abstained from sex throughout her whole life! Jerome and Augustine proposed this preposterous idea in the fourth century, when virginity was associated with purity. Augustine wrote that Mary….
“….remained a virgin in conceiving her Son, a virgin in giving birth to him, a virgin in carrying him, a virgin in nursing him at her breast, always a virgin” (St. Augustine, Serm. 186, 1: PL 38, 999.) Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274) claimed that Mary gave birth painlessly without opening her womb and without injury to her hymen, (Summa Theologiae III.28.2, view HERE ), but there were no anesthetics or caesarian sections in his day.
The King James bible states:
“Then Joseph being raised from sleep did as the angel of the Lord had bidden him, and took unto him his wife: And knew her not till she had brought forth her firstborn son: and he called his name JESUS.” (Matt. 1:24-25, KJV.) Numerous other biblical translations also make it clear Joseph had sex with Mary after the birth.
A Catholic Bible, however, conveniently mistranslates the passage:
“He had not had intercourse with her when she gave birth to a son; and he named him Jesus” (Matt. 1;25, NJB,) thereby deliberately avoiding mentioning the post natal sex.
Mary’s womb was, in fact, quite prolific. Mark, Matthew, Luke, John, Paul, and Acts each cite Jesus had siblings, despite there being no theological need to do so. After spending her best years bearing at least seven babies, she must have been quite worn out, and her birth canal was obviously functioning as nature intended it to. There was no barrier to traffic in either direction.
In 1987, Pope John Paul II wrote (in Redemptoris Mater) that the Holy Spirit entered Mary’s virginal womb. One wonders how an intelligent man could genuinely believe such nonsense. In 1996 he reiterated, without a blink of his eye, that Mary remained a virgin throughout her life. He obviously hadn’t read the Gospels carefully. I’m sure he was just restating tradition; thinking about Jesus and his family in a way that was divorced from reality.
Consider the newly married couple’s humanity and culture. The primary duty of any Jewish bride was to fall pregnant so the man’s progeny was produced and the purity of Israel preserved. A scenario in which a young Jewish bride tells her new husband sex wasn’t on the menu because a yet-to-be-invented religion will one day venerate her as a virgin, is absurd.
Mary’s virginity is a product of the puritanical, prudish catholic church. If the Vatican (and other Christians who choose to believe in Mary’s maidenhood) hopes to be taken seriously in weightier matters, they need to stop pretending they believe such nonsense.
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[…] In my childhood experience my Christian beliefs included the fearing God, who was giant white man who lived in the skies in which we were to call heaven. We were taught to believe that he had a son called Jesus who was born (by Immaculate Conception) to a mortal woman called ‘Mary’, but his father (Mary’s Husband) was called Joseph. The story had never made sense to me as a child and what made it worst is that I was not allowed to asked for clarity in what didn’t make sense so I had to suppress my thoughts and beg forgiveness from God for doubting him and at the same time fearing that I would be sent to Hell as these thoughts were my own and nobody else that I knew were questioning the concepts given. The follow blog by Mark Fulton examines Mary’s Virginity. […]
Well. A lot of preachers on my side have ceremonies that restore “virginity.” They quite possibly could have had rabbis that did that sort of thing in the old days. With The Lord anything is possible.
My mother wasn’t exactly a virgin – well, as far as I know – but she couldn’t have kids so adopted me. Does that make me a sort of ‘demi-God’?
And the words of Norman are “Give me your vodka!”
I can do this.
Another of the feel good stories is also a misinterpretation of language it seems. The original language did not intend to be construed as virgin but as pure, as in a non sinner. None the less, Christians have to have miracles in order to have God.
It disturbs me that for so many years I actually believed this silly claptrap. Then I got much older.
“The bible dishonestly.” That says it all. Thanks for the citations, though.
like the song goes “whoops, there it is!!!!”