The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that he might devour her child the moment it was born. She gave birth to a son, a male child, who will rule all the nations with an iron scepter. And her child was snatched up to God and to his throne. The woman fled into the desert to a place prepared for her by God, where she might be taken care of for 1,260 days.She gave birth to a son whom the dragon was waiting to devour at the moment of birth, but the child was snatched up to heaven, and the woman fled the dragon. Sounds pretty clear to me, if you are trying to interpret this in any way literally. If you want to argue there's a 33-year time period when the dragon was distracted from his mission to devour the child at the moment of birth, you have pretty much abandoned the pretense of it being a literal or historical story -- which was my point.
The Bible teaches that all the elect are God's children. But not Mary's children. But even if you accept the teaching that we are all Mary's children, that is clearly allegorical, not historical, and lends further credence to the idea that the story is not a literal story with Mary being a Queen with a 12-starred crown.
I'm sorry as to the rest. Are you saying that Catholics believe that Mary sprung wings after Jesus' birth and flew into the dessert for 42 months? I've never heard a Catholic express that view to me, so I presumed they didn't believe that was an historical fact.
You may have misunderstood what I meant by story. Daniel, as with many books of the Bible, contain many stories, some of which are texts of historical documentation, and others which are teachings, and others which are prophesies, or warnings, or pictures painted with words.
My point is that if you are in the middle of one type of story, you can't lift individual sentences out of the story and claim that the sentence is historical, while the next sentence must be just imagery.
Wrong, see the "seventy weeks" prophesy of Daniel.
Cough, cough (Acts 1), cough.
And just about every other New Testament fulfillment of Old Testament prophesy.
You are simply wrong.
I have been taught that this particular verse speaks of the nation Israel in end times and has nothing to do with Mary.
Did you perhaps conveniently forget Herod's attempt to kill Jesus "immediately after he was born" by slaughtering every male child born in that time frame, and the flight of Mary and Joseph to Egypt (upon being warned by Heaven). It sounds pretty darned historical to me.