Irish Bishop: Consider Married Priesthood, Female Deacons

Consider the following:

- Gabriel could have said the word “conceive” by itself, which is what is said otherwise.

- Given the miraculous nature of Jesus’ conception, and that an angel was speaking, we can believe that what Gabriel said about Him being conceived in the womb was true on its face. All of the questions over what Gabriel actually said and meant, and what Mary would have understood him to mean, aren’t simply answered, but need to be looked into.

- The phrase used here in Luke 1 is “conceived” plus the words for “in” and “womb,” which is gaster. Gaster is used quite a few times in the New Testament. In one case, a form of it is used for “glutton.” In the rest, it is used with “in” and “echo,” a word for “have” or “hold,” and the phrase is translated, “(being) with child. It is used in fact in Matthew 1 to speak of Mary’s pregnancy.

- Among other things, I looked up “conceived in the womb” and “ancient” and “ancient Greek” and found a number of mentions of it, and in each, the pregnancy talked about was a miraculous one. Most notably, the Septuagint translates Isaiah 7:14 as “conceive in the womb,” but there were other mentions as well. In a non-canonical work called Enoch 2, believed to be written around the first century, the birth of Melchizedek is supposedly told. He was said to be “conceived in the womb,” though his mother was very old and hadn’t at the time been with her husband. Looking up “conceived in the womb” also turned up another Greek word, anaireo, which means things such as to kill, but also to “conceive in the womb.” It turned up in my searches, again, in connection with miraculous conceptions, specifically stories of Greek gods impregnating humans.

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