[Mrs. Don-o]

Good early afternoon to you! I don't know where you are, but we got shower upon shower that might have been part of your weather system (I'm upper east Tennessee) and I've got to get my fall spinach out NOW or it's not going out at all.

I'm glad I'm just a hobby gardener. If I had to live on what I grow, I'd be--- a very slender lass ...

However, if I learn from my mistakes, I'll be a genius :o).

OK, to save time, I agree with purt'near everything you wrote in the first half of your reply, up to the midpoint sentence which begins, "From that living flesh body..."

Here I think it starts to be a little ambiguous. You say "However, in doing so, He left something out of every cell of [Eve's] body: the y chromosome."

Look, Eve had 2 big strong X chromosomes and was initially designed to live forever, just Adam was. The male Y chromosome, in contrast, has far fewer genes, and codes for only 23 distinct proteins (out of, like, tens of thousands.) It's also particularly exposed to high mutation rates. It's like a fragment of an X chromosome, and much frailer.

That may be significant or insignificant, I don't know. I'm not pressing a wider point here. But I just wanted to correct the impression that the female is like a male "with something left out." It's more likely the contrary.

You go on to suggest (if I am understanding you correctly) that God made Mary pregnant by means of something like IVF: that she had an embryo transferred into her who was not her genetic offspring, i.e. she was the gestational but not the genetic mother. Am I getting your meaning here?

If so, this is surely false. The genealogy from Luke is the genetic line of descent through Mary, who was Jesus' only human genetic parent. She was His genetic, gestational, parturient and lactational (as well as legal and social) mother.

Presumably the Lord God may have chosen to create a Y-chromosome so that His Son would be a male. I don't know. But the X part of the inheritance was all Mary's. If Mary was not Jesus' genetic mother, it would be senseless to put Mary's genealogy in the Gospel of Luke, and Jesus would not truly be a Jew, a son of Adam and of Abraham and of David according to the flesh, nor even a human being.

The Muslims, incidentally, believe that God implanted a baby in Mary's womb who was simply a created individual, like Adam:

"Truly, the likeness of Jesus [Issa], in God's sight, is as Adam's likeness; He created him of dust, then said He unto him, 'Be,' and he was." Koran, S. 3:59

This is just one of the serious religious errors in the Koran.

The biological facts about the migration of stem cells through the placenta, the presence of the mother's mitochondria in every cell of her child's body, and the massive enrichment of breast milk with billions of maternal cells, are not speculation. They are true of Christ and Mary, if Christ is True Man.

What the theological significance may be --- that is speculative.

As to the Shroud of Turn, I have no opinion, one way or the other.

God bless you. Now, back to the spinach.

[imardmd1]

When I fed my family, I had an Allis-Chalmers Model B tractor and plowed a third of my acre into garden. We could never figure out how to get all the grit out of the spinach, so we grew Swiss chard instead. That just kept on growing all summer, and grit washed off it easily. It was very tender greens. But the very best was greens from thinning out the beets. Wish I had some of that food now, but --

As to my Bible, my belief started where it says "In the beginning God created ..." and no matter how one approaches translation and interpretation, the body of a man was created first. And the body of the first woman was formed from Adam, not from the elements. Believe what you want, but

a) the woman did not have anything in her that wasn't already in the first man's body;
(b) one of the things the woman's body did not have was manhood;
(c) manhood comes from what we now know is the presence of the y-chromosome;
(d) in the Garden, death entered; and
(e) since then (except for the appearance of Jesus) nothing has changed.
(f) In reproduction, some kind of death factor, warned of by God, was passed on at conception until now.

Death was introduced by simple disobedience: first by cleverly deceived Eve, but then deliberate by Adam (as a type of Christ, to save Eve?)(1 Tim. 2:11-14)(This is why women were nor are to be undertaking to teach doctrine, ever).

In making the woman's body from Adam's bone and bone marrow, all God needed was one white blood cell with one y-chromosome--remove it, replace it with one x-chromosome from another leucocyte, and then cause it to multiply.

Just thinking of the no-death case, why could God not save the remainder of cells from Adam's "rib" from which to make a body for The Son to occupy in the fullness of time? Those cells could not die'corrupt, could they? this is a concept not at all impossible.

Actually, I don't buy your arguments at all. I believe the Preserved and literal equivalency-translated Word of God, and your interpretation does not match up with that.

You must admit that a person, a soul once created, will live for ever, but it is the physical body through which its own death is propagated, whose entropy clock is set back to zero and begins again each time a new being is conceived. Thus, no matter how full of grace, willing, and obedient Mary is, any contribution from her sin-bearing body to Jesus' flesh body would bring death. The death factor is a dominant characteristic, present in the cells of all humans as well as all other moving creatures.

But in Mary's womb, the placenta effectively isolates each from the other. That is why I would not at all be surprised if Jesus, the last Adam, possessed a perfect body ab initio like that of the first Adam, not made to die; perhaps even the same body replicated (an identical twin representing all the bodies of males and females that have or will ever appear), but with His different Spirit than that of the first Adam.

This is speculative, but offers much greater biological (sarkikos), logical (psukikos), and spiritual (pneumatikos) possibilities than the opinions formed and advanced as truth by the ill-conceived theology of humans who would not live in faith in their time and leave imponderable matters up to God.

But wise Paul by the Holy Ghost spoke truth to the quibbling congregation. In the midst of the discourse of the resurrection of the saints, he wrote:

"And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit" (1 Cor. 15:45; cf Gen. 2:7, Jn. 1:4)

(Here "written" is in the perfect tense, meaning "stands written once, still in force," or "a present state resultant upon a past action.") One might pause to consider the first and the last (hu)man Adams not only figurative in type, but literal in purpose.

Mrs. Don-o: Am I getting your meaning here?

Yes, you surely are getting the idea that, based on current technology, it is entirely possible that this is the way He chose to come into the world, despite the inescapable death-to-flesh factor transmitted in the union of fallen human gametes that produces a new, but also death-slated cell.

Mrs. Don-o: If so, this is surely false.

Now, that is a silly claim in truth-finding. You may believe in that doctrinally and/or emotionally, but the constructions of practiced logicians not exercising spiritual discernment can turn out to be very clever, but misleading. What you seem to be saying is that with time and chance, somehow the perfect genetic combination will be found in a Jewish maid. Even supposing that hypothesis to be true, where is the matching male gamete coming from, eh?

And if it takes the Holy Ghost to supply such a God-gamete, why not the whole prototype cell for the last-Adam's body? It is the God-made perfect body that is once more deathless, that is the suitable vehicle for the Son of God to occupy, suffer in, and to allow to experience death through His yielding His Spirit to the Father, and his soul leaving it to go to Paradise.

Of course, it stands written,

"Therefore my heart is glad, and my glory rejoiceth: my flesh also shall rest in hope. For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell; neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption" (Ps. 16:9,10; cf Ac. 2:27).

Could that Holy Body, bereft of His Blood, His soul, and His Spirit, have begun to degrade? We do not now know, for He became the Firstborn from the dead, of many other Spirit-born brethren who are also to be resurrected. The Merciful Father did not permit Him to see (οραω=horaoh:- to see, to become acquainted with by experience) corruption (decay of the body after death, Thayer's).

He was reunited with a bloodless body to ascend into the Heaven to offer His Blood Sacrifice once, for all sins, on the True Mercy Seat in the Holiest of All, from which we freely receive the Father's grace.

Mrs. Don-o: God bless you.

That is a very thoughtful desire, and He has, in numberless ways and means, and long before my commitment to be his bond-slave.

Grace to you, and peace, through stepping in the Light.