Jaybees

I wonder, would the mother of god, should she return to earth, be allowed to become a Roman Catholic priest?

Vallhall

And so it is in the works of people like Cicero and Lucretius. The conceptualization - ex nihilo nihil fit, the "God-spark" that brings the self into existence, is argued as philosophy by some today as if it brought something new to the table. Israel being reference to virgin mother to a certain tribe being its child, while later being given status as name of a specific geographical area, can easily be interpreted wrong with respects to origin. If the birth comes from a miracle where a man is not needed, the necessity of a woman is equally removed. But to advocate nature of man representing God without connection to comprehension of what is known to be natural would be counter productive. How else could he be both God, and additionally son of man, if neither man nor woman are in some way involved?

It is like people hearing the voice of some god, as such is known when it comes to hearing other people speak. Why the god/gods speak by creating vibrations in the air that the ear receives as speech, is not merely a necessary miracle. Where the rational and logical method would be to simply plant thought directly to the mind without the burning bushes and talking supernatural creatures as some extra performance intended to impress or something close.

When the "Holy spirit" acts as if it relates to the natural laws and world, by moving and either descending from or rising up in the sky, because that is known way of interactions from the natural world. Simply to teleport should not be difficult for the "Holy spirit". To have birth, miracle involved or not, thus invoke comprehension by representation of a woman. The presence of Jesus or his followers in order for someone to be healed kind of relates to the same. If multiplying some fish and some bread with help of miracle, the initial fishes and bread have no relevance or purpose to what have been done.

To make it short. Mary is needed so that the birth of a child can be understood. The stork makes it a fairytale for children, as pure magic is logic preserved for some adults as the reasonable alternative.

Tenorikuma

That much is true. But why Mary, and not Salome, Doris, or some other Jewish name? What do you think the source material for the invention of Mary was? I'm leaning toward the Yeshu stories now, and thinking that the name "Miriam" inspired Matthew to craft Jesus' nativity with an Egypt/baby Moses theme.

Apparently, the Jesus Seminar voted on whether Mary was really the name of Jesus' mother. The result was a red marble ("definitely authentic"). Sadly, even the world's leading Jesus scholars are, as a whole, rather ignorant about the Gospels and early Christian tradition, and will be of little help to us.

outhouse

What are your qualifications and credibility that you can talk down to these professors?

<edit>

Tenorikuma

I have never claimed to be a mythicist. I'm just asking questions.

If you have nothing informative to contribute, you are encouraged to ignore this thread and my posts.

Robert Tulip

Tenorikuma

Here is a post I made on a related topic

This is a review of the chapter The Virgin Isis-Mery in DM Murdock's Christ in Egypt.

This chapter is central to the cultural politics of Christ in Egypt. There is abundant evidence that the virgin mother archetype was widespread for thousands of years before Christianity. As well, the word ‘meri’ in the Egyptian sources means ‘beloved’, so Isis is continually referred to as Meri. As well, there are references in ancient Greek sources such as the scholar Epiphanius about the annual rituals of the virgin giving birth to the savior at Christmas time, as the days start to lengthen just after the winter solstice. The motif is widespread.

It has been a source of great frustration for Murdock that this observation is the subject of obtuse denial by Christian apologists. Her chapter on the topic is very long, because she wants to collect and present evidence from a very wide variety of ancient sources on the myth of the virgin mother. It seems like she uses a sledgehammer to crack a walnut here, and it does get a bit repetitive, but the reason is that this topic has been one of the main agendas for those who wish to assert that the virgin birth of Jesus Christ was a literal historical event that was unique and new. It was not new at all; rather, the evidence shows it was in clear continuity with ancient traditions from many countries.

So why do the dogmatists insist Jesus was special against all the evidence? This opens up some subconscious questions about motives and assumptions. My view, and I confess this is somewhat speculative, is that in pre-Christian myth the virgin mother was used to celebrate female identity and equality, whereas in Christianity it was turned into a patriarchal weapon to control and denigrate women. Abrahamic religions are completely patriarchal, emphasizing the authority of men over women. If they admit that the miracle of the virgin birth of Christ is subject to doubt, then their cultural construct of male superiority also becomes open to question. For those who use religion to justify traditional authority, creating an idol of a woman whose perfection is based on sexlessness has served as an instrument of social control of men over women.

My impression is that the ancient pagan virgin mothers such as Isis and Demeter served a very different role, because their worship was controlled by women just as much as by men. I am not sure how far this is true, especially considering that patriarchal religion did start its rise well before the time of Christianity. But the fact remains that deconstructing the myth of the virgin birth is a potentially powerful contribution to contemporary feminist efforts to restore equality of the sexes. It seems very plausible that this feminist factor in the sexual politics of religion is why dogmatists react with such irrational fury on this topic.

Reading this chapter made me think about the possible astrotheological meaning of virgin birth. Isis has a strong association with the Goddess of Night. Murdock discusses the role of Nut, the sky goddess, and Neith an ancient creator goddess. Murdock mentions that Nut is a source of the Biblical line at Matthew 3:17 ‘this is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased’ spoken by God at the baptism of Jesus by John. And the great Egyptologist EA Wallis Budge said Isis is very like Neith in that both are perpetual virgins. I would be interested to know if Nut and Neith are related.

The virgin birth motif, with Horus representing the morning sun, made me wonder about how the sun is born each morning from the night. The night sky may well be regarded as virginal, in that it has a purity and peacefulness that is not violated in any way, and the sun seems to spontaneously generate each day out of the night.

Murdock is very much involved in feminist politics, for example in relation to the work of Barbara Walker on research into goddesses, although I didn’t see this aspect of the argument really made explicit in Christ in Egypt. There is an interesting speech by Walker on sexism in the Christian tradition. Feminist religion was prominent in the 1970s with writers such as Mary Daly and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza. The feminist critique of patriarchal religion, how the church is a bastion of male superiority, seems to have become less part of the public debate in recent times. But feminism is central to the cultural politics of the Christ Myth Theory, and needs to be raised as an explicit philosophical question if the debate is to become more mainstream. The construction of the myth of Christ had an explicit sexist agenda, aimed at the destruction of older visions of sexual equality, so the deconstruction of the myth has to openly challenge this dimension of the sexual politics of mythology.

steve_bnk

A response here.
http://www.freeratio.org/showthread....28#post7537628


The issue IMO is human emotion. We are biochemically emotional with reason and logic short-term overrides of emotion. To a degree emotional self preservation over rides logic and reason.

outhouse

No your not.

Your making statements you cannot cash, when called on it.

So from ignorance you claim scholars dont know what their talking about, and cant help.


Its just the opposite actually. The only way to put the traditions regarding Mary into context, is to learn the background of the different unknown authors who wrote about her. No matter how limited that information may be.

Robert Tulip

Crossan, Borg and Spong are men of deep faith and devotion and learning, and their liberal Jesus is politically attractive to a certain progressive outlook. But this claim about a real Mary mother of Jesus is faith not scholarship.

Consider the association between the Mary of the Gospels and Isis in the theme of sitting. Isis has a throne on her head as her symbol. We find this image of Mary sitting in Luke and John.

Luke 10:39 Martha (ie Nephthys) had a sister called Mary (ie Isis), who sat at the Lord's (Horus/Osiris) feet, listening to what he taught.

John 11:20 When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went out and met him: but Mary sat still in the house.

Along with the other Isis references such as in the Lazarus and cross stories, here we see a coded allusion to Egyptian religion in the Gospels.

The Jesus Seminar lose all intellectual credibility by making a faith claim regarding the historical existence of Mary. There is no external corroboration for the Mary of the Bible. Mary stands in continuity with symbolism, cult and name of Isis/Meri. Mary is primarily an archetypal myth as virgin mother, and is no more real than Isis or Asherah. Her decisive attribute, like Jesus, which trumped earlier myth, was the claim that she was real. If you can fake reality you've got it made.

We see here in this assertion from the Jesus Seminar a prime example of theologians pretending to be historians for social and political motives, insisting a claim is "definite" when the logic and evidence indicate the claim is empty. Mary is an historical fiction serving religio-political objectives.

We should no more take the opinions of the Jesus Seminar as Gospel Truth than we should accept the ex catheter promulfulminanda from His Divine Infallible Holiness the Pope of Rome. These institutions and their supernatural views are on life support and have zero scientific credibility.