I had a religion class in college where one of the questions on the final was “Did the Blessed Virgin Mary exist?” Short of existentialism, does anyone know of any proof to the Virgin’s life?
Do you mean “Was Jesus’ mother a Virgin” or “Did Jesus have a mother?”
The man named “Joshua Bar Joseph” certainly existed. I’m assuming his mother did as well.
As to the other question, that is entirely up to you to decide.
Asking whether Jesus’ mother existed is a trivial question. Now asking whether his father existed, that’s a poser.
And if she wasn’t a virgin after his conception, she probably was at some time prior to that…
There’s another thread in here where I argued in vain that the best evidence is that Jesus did exist, and by extension, that the stories about him were believed by people who knew the family, so any gross errors such as naming the wrong mom would probably not go unchecked (while attributions of miracles would likewise be pretty much unbdoubted if most everyone believed they occurred – in other words, people WANTED to believe he healed the sick, but I don’t see any reason for them to WANT to believe his mother’s name was Mary unless it was Mary. The miracle of the virgin birth is unverifiable because the burdon of proof is higher for claims of unrepeatable events. The existence of Mary, the mother of Jesus, is believable based on evidence from the scriptures. The distinction between believable and unbelievable claims from the same source is easy to allow, even though it’s difficult to define with any precision.
The problem that the prof. posed was to try to prove she existed, or didn’t, through use of other references than the bible. The understood assumtion was that she existed in some form as the mother of Jesus, but the burden of proof is slightly higher than saying that if there was a Jesus, he must have had a mother. That is akin to medevil proofs that God exists. It doesn’t realy prove the specific, just the general. Yes, Jesus had a mother, but what else was she than the vessel of His appearance…see the problem?