religiosity
& virginity
Many
religions, those of the patriarchal societies in particular, paid
high attention to virginity. Humans who elevated themselves to the
ring of gods were suppos- edly born by virgins or at least highly
moral mothers. Like Huitzilopochtli who was born of an apparently
innocent flirtation that a virtuous widow carried on with the Sun.
No virginity there but his brother Tezcatil- poca, also at the ring
of gods, consumed twenty-five thousand virgins. Well, back to
smaller numbers, why Christian God while having a penis (recall,
Adam was made in His image) resorted to other means of the Jesus
conception?
Here
is how Sam Harris in The End of Faith (2004) answers this
question:
"The
writers of Luke and Matthew, in seeking to make the life of Jesus
conform to Old Testament prophecy, insist that Mary conceived as
virgin (Greek parthenos), harking to the Greek rendering of
Isaiah 7:14. Unfortu- nately for fanciers of Mary’s virginity, the
Hebrew word alma (for which parthenos is an erroneous
translation) simply means young woman, without any
implication of virginity. It seems all but certain that the
Christian dogma of the virgin birth, and much of the church’s
resulting anxiety about sex, was the result of a mistranslation from
the Hebrew.
Another
strike against the doctrine of the virgin birth is that the other
evangelists, Mark and John, seem to know nothing about it - though
both appear troubled by accusation of Jesus’s illegitimacy. Paul
apparently thinks that Jesus is the son of Joseph and Mary. He
refers to Jesus as being "born of the seed of David according
to the flesh" (Romans 1:3 - meaning Joseph was his father), and
"born of woman" (Galatians 4:4 - meaning that Jesus was
really human), with no reference to Mary’s virginity.
Mary’s
virginity has always been suggestive of God’s attitude toward sex:
it is intrinsically sinful, being the |

mechanism
through which original sin was bequeathed to the generations after
Adam. It would appear that Western civilization has endured two
millennia of consecrated sexual neurosis simply because the authors
of Matthew and Luke could not read Hebrew." |