Original Sin-Virgin Birth Debunked-101

[James and Terry Hamilton]

Part 1

The Virgin Birth and Original Sin...?

Q: Why was Jesus born of a virgin?
A: Because sex is dirty, nasty and sinful, of course!

"If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands." ~ Douglas Adams

Excerpt taken from pp. 82-86:

"Marital Relations, Birth Control and Abortion in Jewish Law"
by David M. Feldman

Early Christianity had departed from Judaism not only in its attitude to all pleasures of this world but in giving special preeminence to sexual abstinence. To achieve spiritual perfection through renunciation of the world and the bodily appetites, every means was to be employed - fasting, solitude, prayer, mortification; "but always," our Anglican authority, D.S. Bailey, writes, "the decisive test, the critical discipline, was that of sexual continence. This cult of virginity followed inevitably from the ethical dualism implicit in St. Paul's comparison of the married with the single state to the advantage of the latter."⁵ The Church Fathers, he continues, treat continence as "the first fruit of faith" and, significantly, regard it as "a new and distinctively Christian virtue."⁶

The coital act was singled out for special contempt by Tertullian, Arnobius, and Jerome,⁷ but it remained for Augustine to designate it as the vehicle of original sin.

All of this is the more remarkable in view of the fact that in those instances when asceticism did invade the Jewish community, such as in moments of national calamity and spiritual stress, sexual abstemiousness was still not prescribed.⁸ Prof. Gershom Scholem, in writing of the pietistic ascetics in medieval Germany (who foreshadowed the Lucianic Kabbalah of the post-Safed period and preceded the Hasidic revolution of the Baal Shem Tov [eighteenth century] with his emphasis on joyousness), has this to say:

QUOTE

"There is, however, one important respect in which [medieval] Hasidism differs sharply from its Christian contemporaries: it does not enjoin sexual askesis [asceticism]; on the contrary, the greatest importance is assigned in the Sefer Hasidim to the establishment and maintenance of a reasonable marital life. Nowhere is penitence extended to sexual abstinence in marital relations."9

He sums up his reflections on Jewish spiritual history: "At no time was sexual asceticism accorded the dignity of a religious value, and the mystics make no exception."¹⁰


"Conceived In Sin"

Augustine (355-430), Bishop of Hippo in Africa, is the architect of a system of sexual thought which, together with the complementation of Aquinas in the thirteenth century, formed the twin pillars of the classic Church's attitudinal structure.

Before the Fall of Man in the Garden of Eden, Augustine taught, sexual activity was wholly under control. It was obedient to the dictates of the will, never stirring in opposition to it or without its behest. But when pride and self-will led Adam and Eve into sin, a new experience befell them: "The eyes of both of them were opened and they knew they were naked" (Gen. 3: 7). That is to say, they became conscious within themselves of a new and destructive impulse which he termed "concupiscence," or lust generated (as it were) by their act of rebellion, inordinate and independent of volition.

Their awareness of nakedness was an awareness of the new disobedience of their genitals, no longer innocent or docile, no longer amenable to the will. Shame followed upon this demonstration of unruliness; they could not bear to look upon the manifest consequences of their sin; the pudenda had to be concealed lest they betray the truth of the Fall.¹¹


The consequences of this sin are transmitted, Augustine taught, through the generative act from one generation to the next. Concupiscence continues to reveal itself in the unbidden motions - or absence of motions when bidden - of the genital organs; but, above all, concupiscence is displayed through the sexual impulses themselves, which are stronger than the other passions, less tractable, and can only be satisfied in an orgasm, which engulfs the rational faculties in violent sensual excitement.

All of this led Augustine to a virtual equation of original sin with venereal concupiscence - so that every child can be said literally to have been conceived in the "sin" of its parents.¹² The link between this concept and the doctrines of Virgin Birth and Immaculate Conception is obvious.


NOTE FROM SMADEWELL: Here is the true justification for the Church's belief in the Virgin Birth. In the mind of the Gentile Church, Jesus had to be born of a virgin, without the introduction of male sperm, in order that "original sin" could not be transmitted to him via sexual intercourse, so his blood could be untainted and thereby serve as a PURE sacrifice that would atone for the sins of mankind. In short, Christian beliefs and doctrines have their origin in the sexual hang-ups of the Fathers of the Gentile Church and are completely foreign to the worldview and belief-system of Mar Yeshua and his Jewish disciples!

A slight modification of the Augustinian theory was introduced by Gregory the Great (who reigned as Pope Gregory I from 590 to 604). In his view, the evil element in coitus is to be found not in the act itself nor in the concupiscence which impels it, but in the peculiar sensual pleasure (voluptus carnis) which accompanies it.

The delectation incidental even to lawful intercourse is always sinful; how much more so when the couple's dominant motive is not procreational.


For Gregory, coital evil lies not in the inordinate impulse of concupiscence but in the acquiescence of the will in the enjoyment thereof.¹³ Gregory's view was, in turn, qualified by Aquinas some six centuries later when the medieval Scholastics revealed "in a slighter degree the same fundamental antipathy or indifference to carnal intercourse displayed in the literature of the early Church."

They, too, "found the sexual act a source of theological embarrassment."¹⁴ Aquinas located the seat of "coital evil" not in the act itself, nor in concupiscence, nor yet in venereal pleasure, but in what he regarded as the act's inevitable irrationality. As Augustine, influenced by Platonic dualism, had viewed with suspicion anything deflecting from contemplation of the Eternal, so Aquinas, equally inspired by Aristotle's doctrine of the golden mean, found an element of evil in whatever disturbed the exercise of the rational faculty.¹⁵ In the final determination of the Scholastics, coital pleasure was not sinful as such, but it could not be pursued for its own sake without sin: within marriage the sin was always venial; outside of marriage, it was mortal.


The higher valuation of marriage advanced by the Protestant Reformation did not extend to its view of sexual activity.
Luther regarded marriage as more natural and honest, but in his treatment of sex, he:

QUOTE

...follows Augustine and Aquinas and ascribes our present experience of the venereal impulse to the Fall....  We continue to bear the penalties accruing from the original transgression of Adam and Eve.  Consequently coitus cannot now be performed entirely in the knowledge and worship of God, but is accompanied by a sense of shame ... somehow it is always unclean....16

Calvin, more affirmative about marriage, still "was somewhat uneasy - characteristically, on account of the pleasure concomitant with coitus. This pleasure, he held, must inevitably be attended by a certain element of evil due to the immoderate desire resulting from the corruption of human nature by the Fall";¹⁷ yet when it is incidental to procreation, "the fault is covered over with the veil [of matrimony] so that it no longer appears in the sight of God."¹⁸


NOTE FROM SMADEWELL:  So, even as far along as Calvin, the Gentile Church holds sexual intercourse to be so disgusting that YHVH's Spirit must not look upon the sex act itself!  No wonder the Gentile Church rejected the Jewish belief that each and every human being has three parents!

Quote:
There are three partners in man ... his father supplies the semen of the white substance out of which are formed the child's bones, sinews, nails, brain and the white in his eye. His mother supplies the seed of the red substance (mazra'at odem) out of which is formed his skin, flesh, hair and black of his eye. G-d gives him the soul and breath, beauty of features, eyesight, hearing, speech, understanding, and discernment. When his time comes to depart this world, G-d takes his share and leaves the shares of his mother and father with them - Niddah 31a; cf. She'iltot, Yitro, 56; Leviticus Rabbah 14.5 (on Psalms 27:10).  End quote.


Quote:
Job said, "Hast Thou not poured me out like milk and curdled me like cheese, ..." (Job 10:10-12). A mother's womb is full of standing blood, which flows there from in menstruation. But, at God's will, a drop of whiteness enters and falls into its midst and behold a child is formed. This is likened unto a bowl of milk: when a drop of rennet falls into it, it congeals and stands; if not it continues as liquid - Leviticus Rabbah 14.9; Yalkut to Job 10:10.  End quote.

Original sin in this special connotation is, from the Jewish point of view, an unfortunate and untenable concept. It is the result of an orientation foreign to biblical and certainly to post-biblical Judaism. The departure and the contrast are best expressed or deplored by the Anglican Dr. Bailey:

QUOTE

The Christian attitude to sexuality in all its aspects was profoundly affected by the ascendancy of Hellenistic dualism over Hebraic naturalism during the first great age of the Church.  The Jewish conceptions of coitus, marriage, and children, positive and affirmative within their inevitable limits, were almost entirely over-laid by the Graeco-oriental tendency to regard the good life as one essentially of ataraxia or impassive detachment from all that might impede the rational exercise of contemplation, and to look upon sexuality as something not only emotionally disturbing, but also in some sense defiling and tainted with evil.  It is futile to speculate how Christian thought might have developed, in this as in other realms of theology, had the early Church clung more closely to its Hebraic roots.19

NOTE FROM SMADEWELL: DOH! Isn't this what I've been saying all along!?

These "Hebraic roots" teach no antipathy to sex, and the sin of Adam and Eve has no special connection with sexual activity. Since the only sex that is sinful in Judaism is the illegitimate variety, whatever rabbinic interpretations did see the sin of the first couple in sexual terms - they saw it in terms of several other kinds of sin - had to strain to find something improper about it: [the] lack of modesty in that they indulged in the presence of "living things" (the serpent), for one example,²⁰ or indulging with unholy motives, for another.²¹


Legitimate sexual activity simply cannot be called evil. Most certainly, whatever was the sin of Adam and Eve, it cannot be transmitted to their descendants. On the contrary: if male aggressiveness or female coyness is etiologically associated with the "curse of Eve" (see Chapter 4, above), then, says the Talmud, it is the husband's mitzvah to spare her embarrassment and to initiate sexual activity.²²

End of Part 1. To be continued....

5. D. S. Bailey, Sexual Relations in Christian Thought, pp. 19-20.
6. Ibid., p. 20, Note 1.

7. Ibid., p. 45.
8. The attitude of the first-century Essene sect, said to have been a forerunner of Christian asceticism, was rejected by normative Judaism. For new evidence now from the Dead Sea Scrolls on this sect, see the article by Menahem Brayer in Hebrew Medical Journal, 38 (1965) (English, 302-295).
9. G.C.Scholem, Major Trends In Jewish Mysticism (194I) (Schockcn, 1965), p. 106.
10. Ibid., p. 235.

11. Bailey, pp. 53-56.
12. Ibid., p. 55.
13. Ibid., p. 59.
14. Ibid., p. 133.

15. Ibid., pp. 135-36.
16. Ibid., pp. 170-71.
17. Ibid., pp. 171-72.
18. Elizabeth Draper, Birth Control In The Modern World, p. 168. See also Note 103 below.

19. Bailey, pp. 100-101.
20. Gen. Rabbah 18:10; cf. R. Jacob Emden, Mor Uk'tziah to O.H., 240.
21. Iggeret HaKodesh (Note 87, below). See also N. P. Williams, The Ideas of the Fall and of Original Sin (London, 1927), pp. 34 and 45.

22. TB Eiruvin 100b. See Chapter 4, Notes 26 and 27.
23. TB Niddah 31b. See Chapter 13.

A lot of Christians use psalm 51:5 for proof of original sin.

Behold , I was brought forth in iniquity,
And in sin my mother conceived me.(NKJV)

How they can take something David says about himself and apply to everyone is beyond me./Smadewell

For more info on this subject Refer to the book

"Marital Relations, Birth Control and Abortion in Jewish Law"
by David M. Feldman

The Virgin Birth and the doctrine of Original Sin. Sadly, very few Christians understand the history behind these doctrines