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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." |
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