Toto

Immaculate Conception is a later Catholic doctrine that says that Mary was conceived and born without sin, so that she would be pure enough to be impregnated by the Holy Spirit and become the mother of God. It's a common confusion.

I don't blame anyone who can't keep this all straight.

patcleaver

I don't know about the Greek. I can not figure it out from the blueletterbible or Strong's online at http://www.eliyah.com/lexicon.html.

The Hebrew phrase "to spread your cloak over a women" idiomatically means to have marital relations or sex with her.

There are two Hebrew words that can mean cloak kanaph and talith. Kanaph could also mean wing, and talith could also mean shadow. Thus, to spread a wing over a women or to spread a shadow over a women could also mean to have marital relations or sex with her.

In Ruth the Hebrew word kanaph is used for "cloak".
In Luke 1:35 the Greek word episkiazo (ἐπισκιάζω) means overshadow which would mean the same thing as "to spread a shadow (talith)" in Hebrew, which would probably mean to have marital relations.

To a Christianized Jew who spoke Hebrew or Aramaic, when the angel says that he will overshadow Mary, they would understand that he will have some kind of sexual relations with her.

Having sexual relations with God does not really solve the problem of what actually happened - it could mean anything from normal human sex to transporting the Y chromosome of David directly into Mary's egg.

Whatever Yahweh did to Mary would have been something magical, if for no other reason, then just because he is a god.

Amaleq13

Exactly and that is why it makes no sense to assume a physical act was involved and why examples of the metaphor applying to interactions between two humans are not sufficiently similar to sustain the claim.

patcleaver

What are some of the possibilities?
•There were no Christians before the 4th century.
•The canonical epistles and gospels did not exist before the 4th century.
•There were early Christians, and their were early epistles and gospels, but the early Christians believed that they were metaphor, allegory or fiction.
•The Jews believed that all Jewish children were the result of the Holy Ghost coming upon them and the power of the Most High overshadowing them - it is the magic of conception.
•The early Christians believed that Joseph and Mary had physical sex after the visitation of the angel Gabriel, but that it was magical because Holy Ghost came upon them and the power of the Most High overshadowed them.
•The early Christians believed that God had physical sex with Mary.
•The early Christians only had Mark and believed that Jesus' birth was not miraculous at all, and that Jesus was an ordinary man until the Holy Ghost possessed him when he was baptized.
•The early Christians thought that Jesus was just a famous magician and philosopher who they believed in.
•The early Christians did not have any gospels, but only had an early version of Paul that did not have anything in it about Jesus of Nazareth, but only some vision of Christ who became flesh, was killed on a stake, and resurrected as evidence of a future resurrection of the dead.
•The early Christians were Gnostics who believed that spiritual truths could only be understood through metaphorical stories - they believed that the stories were not literally true.
•The NT is fiction (forgery, mythology, legend, original fiction or historical fiction), and the angel Gabriel, Jesus, Mary, Joseph, the apostles, Mark, Matthew, Luke, John, Paul and God are all just fictional characters.

We are discussing what early Christians might have believed about Jesus' magical birth - this requires a few assumptions without reasonable evidence:
•First that there were, in fact, early Christians (whatever that means) before the 4th century.
•Second that Paul and the four canonical gospels existed as we know them before the 4th century.
•Third that before the 4th century early Christians believed that Paul and the four canonical gospels were literally true and not just allegory, metaphor or fiction.
•Fourth that the early Christians were familiar with Jewish culture including the Jewish Scriptures.

There is nothing in the gospels that indicates that God did not have physical sex with Mary. There is nothing in the gospels that indicates that Mary was a virgin after she had sex with God. The alleged prophesy that "a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son" only literally requires that she is a virgin before conception and could have been interpreted as only requiring that this is her first child. The Jews believed that they were made in the image of God, so Christianized Jews would not even think that Yahweh would have to take on the appearance of anything to have sex with a women - unlike Zeus who had to appear as a swan or snake or a human.

The Jews believed that god had children.

Genesis 6:1 And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, 2 That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose. 3 And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years. 4 There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown. ( Also see 2 Kings 14.13, 2 Kings 13.6, 17.16; Deuteronomy 16.21)

According to the book of Job, these "sons of god" were the angels Job 1:6, 2:1, 38:7.


Yahweh or El (male god) had to have sex with someone to have children - presumably with his goddess wife Asherah or Eloah (goddess) or El Shaddai (literally God with breasts). El (male god) and Eloah (female god) together form Elohim (female god with 'im' male suffix). Asherah was the sea goddess of the ancient Canaanites. Eloah appears 57 times in the Old Testament; and 18 of those occur in the book of Job. Shaddai or El Shaddai appears in the Old Testament 48 times, and 32 of those occur in the book of Job. El and Elohim and Yahweh appear in Scripture many more times than Eloah or El Shaddai.

There is no real support, that I am aware of, for any theories of non-physical sex between Mary and God.

Usually making babies involves physical sex, so unless there is some reason to think otherwise, it is more likely that the early Christians would have presumed that God had physical sex with Mary to conceive Jesus. Certainly converts from pagan religions that involved God having physical sex with a women would have presumed that God had physical sex with Mary.

Converts tend to keep whatever previous beliefs they had that they can not rationalize with their new beliefs, for example, if you believed that there were three gods, and you converted to a religion with only one god, then you might rationalize by believing that your three gods together were mystically the one god.

Amaleq13

Like the direct and necessarily magical involvement of God by way of a spirit.

Then it should be a simple matter for you to find evidence of such a belief among early Christians. I look forward to reading it if and when you produce it.

Amaleq13

The following from this post appears relevant: