If Jesus really born without human sexual intercourse, AND in the image of God (as some say) would this make him a clone? Just a thought.
Not in my book. Unless of course Atlantis is a true place and extraordinary technologies (way beyond what we have) were common place.
no, I wouldn’t think of him as a clone.
the name atlantis reminds me of Decipher.
I don’t understand, who’s Decipher?
But we’re all in the image of God. Jesus was born with God as the father and Mary as the mother. That’s two parents.
That it was done without sex, does not lead to the conclusion that cloning was involved, but rather in-vitro fertilization.
He was the product of a sexual reproduction. Mary was the incubator. He’s not separate from God, he is part of God, like budding almost. Although, maybe he didn’t have genes. How would you encode God in DNA, anyway?
PC
Jesus Haploid Christ!
Well, there is this:
"A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit. – Isaiah 11:1 (traditionally taken by Christians to be a Messianic prophecy of Christ)
clone: “…ETYMOLOGY: Greek klon, twig.”
Q.E.D.
Along the lines of what another member said, just because it is very, very, very, very, very unlikely does not mean it is impossible. Mary could have been insemenated by God. Just because nobody saw it happen doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Otherwise macroevolution could be discredited since nobody saw it happen.
:smack:
Sorry, 0rbytal, but that particular hijack makes no sense whatsoever. “Macroevolution” isn’t “unlikely” because “no one saw it happen”; macroevolution is well established because we have seen the evidence that it happens. No one has ever seen an atom split, either, but the evidence of atoms splitting has been all too plain.
The evidence for the Virgin Birth of Jesus is that two of the gospels (Matthew and Luke) contain the story that Jesus was born of a virgin. As far as I remember, the other two gospels, and the epistles, don’t mention this tradition. Since the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke are otherwise completely contradictory, this is actually an indication that the Virgin Birth story is an early tradition among Christians, and was independently picked up by the authors of the two gospels (whereas features like the Star of Bethlehem, the wise men from the East, the census that required everyone to return to their ancestral villages, and Herod’s massacre of the infants and the flight into Egypt only occur in one or the other gospel). Still, it’s hardly a well-attested story. And “virgin births” and heroes being the sons of gods are well-known mythic motifs. Of course there’s no evidence for any of those “virgin births” either.
I was merely saying that the virgin birth is possible. Don’t you agree that anything is possible, no matter how unlikely?
Decipher’s a book. It deals with the return of atlantis
No. Some things are impossible by definition–mainly of interest in systems like mathematics where terms are rigorously defined. But other things are so improbable as to not be worth worrying about. What with Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and all, there is a certain indeterminacy in the location of any object, so I suppose it’s possible that my computer and your computer might suddenly spontaneously trade places, so that I’d be looking at your monitor and vice versa. But it’s not something you need to worry about actually happening in time frames up to many, many multiples of the expected lifetime of all the stars and planets that will ever be formed in the Universe.
In an orderly and predictable Universe, like the one we evidently live in, lots and lots of things are impossible. The Moon won’t fall out of its orbit next Tuesday, you won’t spontaneously turn into a pillar of salt, and my cats won’t suddenly sprout wings and fly around the room. And virgin human females don’t give birth without some major medical or technological intervention.
Let us not get into the parthenogenesis debate again. However, this, while a good example of a highly improbable event, is not in the same “effectively impossible” class as your other examples.
IIRC, there is an allegation that a virgin girl did conceive parthenogenetically and give birth to a daughter who was her effective clone, but no proof one way or another is available on this claim. There is no other evidence of human parthenogenesis other than urban legends, but there is strong evidence that females of many mammal species will (very rarely) conceive parthenogenetically.
However, the whole point behind the Virgin Birth myth is one that seems to have escaped everyone. It is not, even in legend, a case of God having inseminated Mary; rather, the idea is that God is the third parent in every normal birth, causing the sexual intercourse of husband and wife to result in the conception and birth of another human being. In the case of Jesus, uniquely, He “short-circuited” the normal process and caused Mary to conceive without the use of Joseph’s sperm to fertilize her ovum, to the end that He would uniquely be the Father of Jesus – a point that Jesus was at pains to stress in His conception of God not as tyrannical King and Judge but as loving Father of all mankind.
Whatever the facts behind His conception and birth, that is the underlying theological message behind the doctrine.
No, his mother was raped by a Roman soldier.
Well, although it’s not as biologically improbable as mammalian parthenogenesis, there’s not really any good evidence for that, either.
Enderw24 wrote:
What does that mean exactly? The range of appearences in humanity is pretty broad. A naked pygmy woman standing next to that Chinese guy in the NBA (also naked) would appear sufficiently different to a UFO type visitor that they could be excused for assuming they were two widely different species.
I really wouldn’t expect there to be any evidence.
Occam’s Razor cuts through all of this metaphysical drek quite easily… Even if a Roman soldier isn’t to blame, a virgin that bears a child is not a virgin. Not in Roman times anyway.
I’m not discounting mammalian parthenogenesis as a possible explanation. Just pointing out that if a supernatural explanation is going to help a terrified young woman save some face, she may well opt for it.
Plus, the idea of God actually having intercourse with Mary goes against all Hebrew and Jewish thinking. Not only was Judiasm unique in the idea of a monotheistic god (yes, I am aware of syncretism and other similar ancient tolerance), but also Yahweh is not one of those gods who walks on Earth, has any sort of image made, or turns various women into various animals or whatever to have sex with them.
Also, since Christian doctrine is that Jesus is not a demigod, but both fully human and fully divine simultaneously, that contradicts the idea of an actual impregnation physically by God as well.
(we could bring in the clones-identical twins chestnut here, too. Some gnostics argued that Jesus and Thomas Didymus (and/ or Judas Thomas. . . gets confusing) were twins and that Thomas/ Judas actually died on the cross. . .)
Just to interject more wackiness here.