Do you believe that Mary was a virgin?

I will NEVER understand what being the Prince of Peace has to do with peoples' sex organs.

--p!
WWJF?

Christianity's turn I guess. Even Gilgamesh was born to a virgin. Or so they say.

If she was - she may have been abducted and impregnated by aliens???? (I'm not kidding - that much.)

Anyway - even if you are not a "Christian" - Jesus has some wonderful and even revolutionary teachings. Love thy neighbor. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. He teaches us to be about love and compassion - and THAT is what matters.

What is so sad is that the more "Christian" people are, the more judgmental and closed minded they seem to be - almost like the Jesus they follow is a completely different fellow than the one I've always heard about.

BTW - some historians think that it is possible that Jesus was influenced by Buddhism. There are a number of years during which we don't know exactly where Jesus was, but he came back and began teaching. And historians think Buddhism had reached into the Middle East during Jesus' time. I'd look for links about this, but then my post wouldn't work.

I feel that Jesus was a wonderful teacher and his messages were profound. It doesn't matter to me about all of the miracles supposedely that happened about his birth or the ones that he supposedly performed or that the actually died and rose up. I believe that all of those things were made up to hype the following because his teachings were thought not to be strong enough to keep the following going.

The problem now is that a few million that claim that they posses the truth about Jesus are trying to force others into believing their concepts regarding Jesus, the stuff I mentioned, yet most of them do not follow the teachings.

alone know where he was.

The first written account that mentions Jesus comes some 50 years after he supposedly died. There is no verifiable chronological account and no factual evidence that can confirm his existence, let alone where he traveled or what he was influenced by.

Any suggestion that he was influenced by Buddism is speculation, and has equal merit to a suggestion that he was influenced by space aliens, since there is no way of knowing.

the time of jesus's death, as I understand it. But in any case, there are no contemporaneous accounts of Jesus that I know of. Which does seem a bit odd, to say the least.

and the described lineage of Jesus comes through Joseph.

The original word describing Mary did not imply a woman who'd never had sex but rather a young woman who did not belong to a man, wasn't married.

I can imagine a virgin birth, call it divine stimulation of an egg to divide or do what eggs do. But that would be a female child. For a male child you have to have sperm.

As a child I got in trouble pointing out she at least did not stay a virgin, Jesus' brothers are mentioned in the bible. I hope it was those nuns who insisted she even died a virgin and not the teaching of the church.

Sometime later the church wanted to match other myths and the story of Mary made her a virgin.

"without sin" . . . as in pure . . .

And why do we only hear about Jesus's siblings through a comedian?

At least until she was 10-12 maybe. Life was hard until recently (and it still is for most people on the planet) and young people were never children. They just went from being children to adults with all that that entailed.

By the way, I seem to recall that Mary's family, traced back through the bible, came from the region we now call Ethopia. So jesus was really half black.

OK, OK, I'll admit I'm a believer. I've also read too much science fiction and I've seen too many seeming coincidences to believe that the universe operates at random. So I believe that JC's conception WAS possible.

Yet this brings up another interesting point. The New Testament goes on and on about JC's patrilineal antecedents and his supposedly being descended from old Israelite kings. Yet if G*d Almighty was the sperm (or fertilized egg) donor, what does it do to those early Christian scribes' claims if poor St. Joseph was apparently one-upped by the Big Guy in the Sky?

Early promoters of Christianity molded it so as to fit the expectations for the Messiah. It was required that the Messiah be of the Davidic line, so they had to establish that right away. And so we see it in the very first part of the nativity story with the census. But what is most interesting is, as another poster noted, one genealogy of Jesus is given thru Joseph, which, if Mary was impregnated by God, would be totally irrelevant, as Joseph was then not related to Jesus at all.

And I have no idea if that is correct. I make the choice to believe that and could certainly never argue for or against it because I don't know.

But I choose to believe she was. The whole thing has led to some awesome music, though. Magnificats are among my favorite genre of music. Below is a translated magnificat.

My soul doth magnify the Lord
And my spirit doth rejoice in God my Savior
Because He hath considered the lowliness of His handmaiden;
For, behold from henceforth all generations shall call me Blessed.
He who is mighty hath done great things for me, and Holy is His Name.
His mercy is from generation to generation on those who fear Him.
He hast scattered the proud in the conceits of their heart.
He hath put down the mighty from their thrones,
and He hath exalted the lowly.
He hath filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he hath sent empty away.
He hath holpen his servant Israel, mindful of His mercy,
Even as he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and to his posterity forever.

I also choose to believe she was a virgin. And, I love the Magnificat. It's a beautiful verse.

It became "Virgin" out of the traveling preacher's equivalent of the game "telephone."

Was there a Mary?

If there was, was she a virgin? :rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl:

Good one.

either a first born child or astrologically born under the sign of Virgo. Mary's birth date according to the Catholic church is September 8. Making her a virgo/virgin.

All three words are used in the context of the same Bible prophesy supposedly fulfilled by Mary: the Hebrew word "alma" (in Isaiah 7:14), the Greek word "parthenos" (in the original New Testament) and the Latin word "virginis" in the Latin translations of the New Testament which served as the basis for Christian thought in Western Europe. All of these words have been translated in to English as "virgin."

Problem is, they all mean different things.

If the general story around her is true, I think she got pregnant out of wedlock, during her betrothal to Jospeph. Not that being born illegitimately instead of immaculately concieved made Jesus any less great.

could now do this. I'm surprised nobody has tried it, just to stir the pot, since there always seems to be some people who want to be the "first", or do something controversial ...

It's been my personal experience that people obsessed with virginity are sort of creepy. Everyone here probably knows some guy who demanded his future wife would be a virgin as he himself was certainly not.