MrLoverLover

I don't mean for this to offend anyone (christians), but I'm curious what one must think of Mary if she gave birth to someone that wasn't from her husband to be? While Christians wouldn't agree, it seems that the virgin birth has basically been discredited (not to mention Jesus following the line of David and the virgin birth bring about serious problems.) So, if one assumes there was no virgin birth, doesn't it seem somewhat plausible to maintain that Mary is what we would normally consider a slut? If i knew a woman who was dating/supposed to marry someone else and she ended up getting pregnant and shooting out a kid that wasn't her future husbands, i'd be inclined to call her a slut.

Toto

If you reject the virgin birth, you might as well go ahead and reject all of the rest of the mythology of the Gospels.

I suspect that the idea that Mary was pregnant when she wed Joseph was a detail put in to go along with the virgin birth; the virgin birth was not a story concocted to explain the pregnancy.

The penalties for not being a virgin on your wedding night were very severe in those times

Simon Richmond

MR Lover Lover
What is your reasoning here?
She screwed around and blamed the pregnancy on Joe. Maybe, but the Slut idea is borne of the same Judeo – Christian morality that I encounter everyday and pisses me of equally as regularly.
Is the virgin birth something that interests you ? If so I would like to hear your take on it.

Toto

<a href="http://ii-f.ws/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=6&t=000992" target="_blank">A Christmas question</a> is on the same topic.

And what is this obsession with the word "slut"?

CX

There is one thing that everyone seems to keep ignoring. All such lines of reasoning presume that any part of the infancy narratives is historical. I see no reason to make that conclusion. This is very much like creationists sitting around and discussing how Noah got all those animals on the arc. If the infacny narratives are rhetorical devices aimed at establishing the validity of future messianic claims, there is no reason to think Jesus wasn't born to Mary and Joseph the usual way and that no such controversy actually existed in their community.

aikido7

The virgin birth is meant to be seen as an example of the divinity of Jesus, not the sexual biology of his mother.

In an interesting aside, when early Christians and pagans wrote their back-and-forth debates on the merits of their respective beliefs, both sides took virgin birth (for Ceasar and Jesus) as a given. The pagan argument revolved around "How can you say that this man Jesus can be divine since he came from the lower class?" (not that he was divinely conceived, which in their world was a given).