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To: Buggman
What then are you disputing? If Miryam and Joseph were engaged to be married--and as Quester rightly pointed out, the engagement between siginging the ketubah (marriage contract) and the consumation of the marriage was typically a year, and could last longer--then your whole, If you were a regular young lady two weeks from her wedding night, and an angel said "you will conceive a child" would you be befuddled as to how this could happen? argument is meaningless.

You don't understand the argument.

Forget about the two weeks, I was speaking colloquially. Let's say it was a year. My argument still makes sense.

Why would a woman preparing to engage in a normal sex-filled marriage act astonished when told she was going to conceive a child? Her response makes no sense. The angel did not tell her "you are pregnant now." That could elicit a "how can this be?"

But telling someone ready to enter a marriage that they are going to become pregnant is not exactly supposed to be a mystery.

SD

167 posted on 06/15/2006 10:20:24 AM PDT by SoothingDave
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To: SoothingDave; Quester
My argument still makes sense.

Not really. Given that having a child would be the normal, expected result of a marriage, Miryam would have been somewhat befuddled at an angel showing up to announce it either way.

Moreover, the context of Israel's dealings with YHVH give the answer: If you look at the history of messengers of God showing up to announce births, they tend to appear to women incapable of having children normally. In the cases of Sarah and Hannah, for example, they were barren until the Lord opened their wombs. In the case of Miryam, she was still a virgin, some time off from her wedding night, and so she took the angel's message to mean that there would be a miraculous element to the birth and/or that the conception would occur immediately.

The only possible avenue I can see you trying to take is to conjure some supposed "virginal marriage" out of the wind. The Jews, however, had no such concept; even the Lord Himself defined marriage thusly:

And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.
(Matthew 19:5-6, ref. Gen. 2:24)
In other words, the marriage of Miryam and Joseph would have been considered a "sham marriage" if they'd never consumated it by "becoming one flesh." Moreover, even the RCC recognizes this problem to an extent by recognizing the "lesser status" of an unconsumated marriage:
The Code of Canon Law, Canon 1061 -- §1 A valid marriage between baptized persons is said to be merely ratified if it is not consummated. It is said to be ratified and consummated if the spouses have in a human manner engaged together in a conjugal act in itself apt for the generation of offspring. To this act, marriage is by its nature ordered and by it the spouses become one flesh.
In conclusion, the supposed perpetual virginity of Mary is a classic example of imposing Greek Platonism (the same Platonism which gave rise to Gnosticism) on the Scriptures' original Jewish cultural context. If you truly want to understand what the Jewish Messiah taught, as well as the jewish Apostles, who quoted from Jewish Scriptures for their authority, stop thinking like a Platonist and start thinking like a Jew.
176 posted on 06/15/2006 10:46:18 AM PDT by Buggman (L'chaim b'Yeshua HaMashiach!)
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