The other thing that can cause a virgin birth is mistranslation…
There is also a possibility that the article doesn’t consider: that Mary was herself a chimera, with some aspect of an subsumed fraternal (male) twin providing the Y in some admittedly bizarre way. Not much more unlikely than (most of) the ones covered.
Headline can also be used for an article about producing sterile, androgynous clones.
These all, of course, ignore the simplest explanation…
There’s always the old one about pregnancy through oral sex…
In 10th grade, the science teacher was sick one day. The substitute teacher decided to enlighten us on a few little-known science-y phenomena. One of which was that she once knew a girl who had gotten pregnant all by herself. Most people don’t realize it can happen but apparently it totally happened to this one girl… who we theorized to have been her daughter.
Why is it the people who scoff at taking Genesis literally are in such a hurry to take Luke literally?
That’s… a completely lose-lose outcome.
Couldn’t Mary have had an odd genetic condition that gave her one ovary and on testis and then impregnated herself? I mean, that chimera stuff seems pretty far out there too.
Where is William of Ockham when you need him?
Couldn’t someone have invented the story to parody imperial propaganda about Augustus’ supposed divine birth? Couldn’t someone else have taken it too seriously?
Bravo! I lol’d.
Seconded.
Also, Joseph was hardly a “horny young thing,” seeing as Mary was his second wife and Jesus had (would you call them half-brothers?) older than Mary was.
Of course, IVF does it. But, I know from experience, it’s not fun.
Um, no, that’s never actually stated; there are three traditional explanations for Jesus’ brothers:
First, that Mary and Joseph had sex.
Second, that Mary didn’t, but Joseph did, so then, Joseph might have had another wife, who had died young, and Joseph would have remarried.
Third, that neither of them had sex, but they had cousins.
Since every man is Jesus’ brother, James would be his one-and-a-half brother.
Weird. I thought this was going to be an article about a baby who had neither male nor female sex organs.
