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🙄 🙄 🙄 🙄 🙄 🙄 🙄 🙄 🙄 🙄 🙄 🙄 This sounds a lot like a discussion a bunch of 19 year old missionaries would engage in.
I thought it was okay to ask questions like that and discuss them. Shawn wrote:Either way, it doesn’t really make a difference to me.
+1
Shawn, It’s a perfectly valid topic for this forum, because it: – is an LDS doctrine question
– brings into focus the age-old question of whether a prophet can ever speak opinion without it being doctrine
– addresses the god-man relationship, which is a critical aspect of LDS theology
– is a highlight of doctrinal shifts over the course of the history of the church
This is one of only a half-dozen threads I’ve even bothered to open and look at over the last few weeks. So, thanks for posing the question.
For me, I’m satisfied with the BY statements not being considered doctrine, because I very much hold to the notion that a church official, even as high as the prophet, only rarely declares doctrine, and anything else is just ephemeral musings… sorry “14 Fs”. This is one of those doctrinal topics where there seems to be no official doctrine, and the unofficial position of the church is “we don’t know” how it happened. In some ways, that’s a cop-out and unsatisfying, especially given the history of the church seemingly having the answer to every question that could be posed. Yet, in another way, I sort of applaud the “we don’t know” stance on harder questions, because, that’s how many of us treat our own personal beliefs… many on these forums have a cloudy perception of God and Gospel, and ditch heavy-handed specifics of the LDS church and other churches in order to be more inclusive.
But BY and hardliners aside, I believe that it’s a perfectly tenable position to view 21st century English terms of the Virgin Mary or Immaculate Conception, to mean no sex. James E. Talmage, writing in the pre-WWI-America “Jesus the Christ”, refers to the “unique” “unprecedented” and “never been paralleled” “virgin birth”, which implies no sex, but also, in the same paragraph, declares that Jesus was the physical offspring of both divine and human parents. The only way that you can reconcile that is some miraculous, non-standard conception.
Cadence wrote:🙄 🙄 🙄 🙄 🙄 🙄 🙄 🙄 🙄 🙄 🙄 🙄 This sounds a lot like a discussion a bunch of 19 year old missionaries would engage in.
Ha.
I blame Erich Von Daniken. I’m quite proud of my 1970 edition of
Chariots of the Gods?Combine this “virgin” thread with the alien thread….yep. It all makes sense now.
Bruce and shawn have both cited the translational difficulties associated with “almah” from hebrew into “parthenos” into greek. This is more than a passing point on this — it’s essential to understand how some of this came about. From where do we get the Gospels? The ‘original texts’ of the gospels were not hebrew or aramaic, but rather, greek. for before 70 AD, the gospels hadn’t yet been written, and the “scriptures” to the early christians were what we call the Old Testament. While the Jerusalem center of the church read hebrew and likely taught the gospel in hebrew and aramaic, the missionary work under paul was entirely to greek speaking jews at first, and their book of ‘scripture’ was the “Septuagint”.
Many of the stories around Jesus early life are hagiographic, to establish to the early christians that Jesus was the annointed one, the Christus. Hence, they took a verse that isaiah meant as a prophecy around Ahaz that a young woman would conceive and bear a son ‘immanuel’ who would in his youth vanquish israel’s enemies — in other words, that god with us meant that god was on our side. But in greek, the verse said parthenos, and this changed the whole meaning, and the ‘immanuel’, “god with us” became a literalized to “god with us” actually and physically. There are other signs of the hagiographic fraud in scripture: the slaughter of the innocents by Herod NEVER HAPPENED. That particular Herod was already dead, and there is no contemporaneous account of such an atrocity, and romans kept good records. The hagiography was to promote the status of Jesus as greater than moses, by repeating the moses story of the death of the innocents into the birth narrative.
Does hagiographic fraud sound familiar here?
Good stuff! It’s my understanding that around 200 BC the Hebrews doing the translation to the Greek Septuagint purposely translated “almah” to the Greek “parthenos.” Is that true? If so, I wonder why they would have done that.
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