What does the virgin birth mean? Does the Immaculate Conception exist? What is conception
Orthodox Christians know that Christ is the Son of God. He became incarnate from the Heavenly Father, and the Virgin Mary became His Mother.
But few people know how the Savior was born. This does not mean the environment at the moment of His birth, but the process itself. How did the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary take place? Let's talk about this in the article.
What is conception?
Before we move on to the topic of the virgin birth, let's remember what a normal conception is.
Union of sperm and oocyte. We will not describe further details here, because our main topic is different. Why is the question of “classical” conception raised? To remind readers: the birth of a new life requires the “participation” of two parties: father and mother. Dad has something mom doesn't have. And accordingly, vice versa.
Immaculate Conception
How did the Immaculate Conception occur in the Holy Virgin? Just think about it: Virgo conception. I mean, the Mother of God was a maiden. She didn't know her husband.
Some will say that this is all fiction and this cannot happen. It is difficult to take something for granted, especially in our time, when there is practically no trust and faith left. However, for any Christian, conception by the Mother of God is one of the most important aspects of faith.
There is a wonderful poem by nun Maria (Mernova) on this topic. Here's an excerpt:
In a wonderful way, unnatural for us.
In the most honest, brightest and virgin womb.
He was born - the Divine Son,
Mira Lord. Master of us all.
That is, conception occurred miraculously. The fact that after him Maria remained innocent is enough. How so? How did it all happen?
Nobody will tell us this. The Immaculate Conception is a mystery. Perhaps in the next world everything will open up and become clear. There is a version that the Holy Spirit descended on the Virgin Mary while She was sleeping. Whether this was so is unknown.
Annunciation
The Immaculate Conception is something that is hidden from the human mind. We cannot comprehend this miracle with our minds.
How is the Feast of the Annunciation connected with the conception and birth of the Savior? In the most direct way. Let's remember the history of the holiday.
The Mother of God was sinless from a young age. But, due to her humility, she could not imagine that she would have the honor of giving birth to the Savior.
Mary knew that Jesus Christ would be incarnate from pure virgin blood. And she wanted to be honored to become a servant of the One who would become His Mother.
At that time, Mary was betrothed to Joseph. That one took care of Her virginity. And so, 4 months after the betrothal, the Mother of God read Scripture. When the Archangel Gabriel came to Her with news. That's why the holiday is called Annunciation - good news.
Gabriel told Mary that She was chosen to be the Mother of God. The Savior will incarnate in Her. The Virgin was surprised: after all, She was innocent. And she asked the archangel how this would happen if She did not know her husband.
To which Gabriel replied that the Holy Spirit would descend on Her. And the Virgin Mary obediently accepted the will of God.
Here's another point. God didn’t just go and descend on the girl (the Mother of God was 14 years old). No, He humbly asked Her consent. And only when Mary gave a positive answer, Life was born in Her womb.
The mystery of the immaculate conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary is hidden from us. Until a certain point.
Ever-Virgin
Why is Mary the Ever-Virgin? After all, the birth of a child involves the deprivation of the hymen. More precisely, its final destruction. How did the Savior enter the world?
Here's another wonderful moment. It is known that Jesus Christ emerged from the side of his Most Pure Mother. How so? God is able to pass through obstacles, let's not forget this fact.
That is why the Mother of God is called the Ever-Virgin. She retained her virginity despite the birth of her Son.
Joseph's attitude to what happened
It is known that the husband of the Virgin Mary was many years old. He was very old, and She was very young. And the elder was entrusted with the Mother of God, so that he would preserve Her in purity and innocence.
What was Joseph’s horror when he realized that the Virgin was carrying a child? Fear of being blamed for it. Fear because he did not keep the Maiden pure.
But the elder did not make excuses and did not betray Mary. On the contrary, he told Her that he would let her go secretly, without telling anyone. Then an angel appeared to Joseph, telling him that Mary was not guilty before her husband. Her conception is the will of God, and the Child that the Virgin will give birth to is the Son of God.
The wise old man humbly accepted the will of God and began to care even more deeply for the Virgin Mary. And we know what happened next. Departure for the census and the Nativity of the Savior.
Are there churches dedicated to the conception of the Savior?
There is a Church of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary in Moscow. This is not a church, it is a huge Catholic cathedral in the Gothic style.
In general, Catholics have many cathedrals built in honor of the Immaculate Conception all over the world. The largest of them, as mentioned above, is located in Moscow.
Humility of the Mother of God
The virgin birth is something that is incomprehensible to the human mind. And here the complete humility of the Virgin Mary is revealed to us. She surrenders herself to the will of God. She is God's servant. Not in the sense in which the word "slavery" is known today: a person who does not have the right to express his opinion. Not at all, the Mother of God loves God. And he surrenders himself to His will not because of fear and lack of opportunity to object. She does this just out of love.
If appropriate, let's give an example from life. When we love someone very much, it won’t even occur to us to disobey or object. We know that if we are told to do it this way, then this is what we need to do. The one we love does not wish us harm. He knows better how to do it right.
It's the same here. The Mother of God had the firm confidence that God knows best what is good for her. And she agreed to become the Chosen One. Become the Mother of the Savior.
This wonderful color, this Child
She will give birth to the Savior.
From the cruel clutches of hell
The whole world will be freed.
These lines are from a poem by nun Maria (Mernova), dedicated to the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Conclusion
Now the reader knows that the virgin birth is a mystery. A mystery unknown to the human mind. It is impossible to understand it, you can only accept it on faith.
We also talked about how the feast of the Annunciation is connected with conception, and why the Mother of God is called the Ever-Virgin.
In 1698, law school professor Johan Klein from the University of Rostock (East Germany) described the second case of the virgin birth after Jesus Christ. (website)
There are not so few cases of immaculate conception
A noble lady named Marie de Mondelon went to court to confirm her little son's inheritance rights. The woman claimed that she conceived this child in a dream, and in the dream her husband appeared to her. In reality, this could not have happened, since Marie's husband, a nobleman named Jerome Auguste de Mondelon, spent four years in distant countries and died before he could return home. Nevertheless, the widow insisted, contrary to the obvious, that her son should become the legal heir of his father...
At first, the court tried to reject such an unusual statement, but its decision was appealed in the Grenoble parliament, since doctors and midwives confirmed that such conception during sleep is not only possible, but quite widespread.
But here is a case that dates back to our time and is reflected in the medical documents of a antenatal clinic located in the Northern District of Moscow.
...Olga L.’s family life stopped because doctors gave her a gynecological diagnosis, which is popularly called “children’s uterus.” With such a disease, a woman, by definition, could never become a mother. However, three months after her beloved husband left her, twenty-year-old Olga learned from the local gynecologist... about her eight-week pregnancy. As the woman says, she saw a dream in which her returning husband deeply repented, begged for forgiveness and showered Olga with affection. During intimacy, she heard someone's voice whispering in her ear that today the woman had conceived a son.
Time passed, Olga’s son was already three years old. She insists that the boy is an exact copy of his father. By the way, Olga’s runaway husband is not going to recognize his child, who came from nowhere.
Incubus - voluptuous fallen angel
And now the question naturally arises: where do children come from in such cases and is this as rare as we think?
It turns out that not only magic, but also the Fathers of the Church testify that the “culprit” of such conceptions actually exists. His name - incubus - reflects the history of the origin and status of this creature. For a very long time it was an angel, but later the incubus fell out of favor due to its inexhaustible attraction to the female sex. It is believed that demon spirits do not have their own body. For this reason, they either materialize into the bodies of deceased people, or use a temporary body-abode. The most insidious of these spirits are embodied in real, living people - a husband who is currently absent, or another attractive man...
It was believed that the legendary and black magic Merlin was also the fruit of such copulation, which his mother did not deny. The woman stated that she was taken by force by an incubus.
It is interesting that with such close attention to the voluptuous spirit, neither the Church nor magic for many centuries have found worthy, and most importantly, guaranteed protection from the incubus.
Nowadays, ufologists are collecting information on this topic. This is explained by the fact that incubus today prefer to take the form of alien creatures, UFOnauts. For their purposes, in 99 out of 100 cases they choose ladies who believe in space aliens and are interested in various kinds of anomalous phenomena...
The term "immaculate conception" is widely used in both religious and fictional literature. However, the possibility of this phenomenon in ordinary life was completely denied until recently. Is it really? To answer the question, you need to understand the main stages and conditions of conception.
Conception
In medicine, conception is understood as the fusion of two germ cells. They are the ones who give rise to the embryo. A typical human cell contains 46 chromosomes. In contrast, in the sexual one this set is halved - to 23.
22 of them are called autosomes and only one is called a sex chromosome. It can be X or Y. The first is responsible for the female gender, the second for the male.
When the egg and sperm merge, the half sets are combined, and subsequently all the cells of the embryo carry 46 chromosomes, which are called a karyotype.
All eggs carry the X chromosome. With sperm the situation is different. Half of them contain an X chromosome, and the other half contain a Y chromosome. The cell formed after fertilization with a set of XX will lead to the birth of a girl, XY - a boy.
For a person, the participation of a man and a woman is mandatory in the process of conception, which is why in religion it is considered vicious. After all, sexual intercourse is closely connected with the concepts of sinfulness and vice.
Immaculate Conception
In contrast to ordinary conception, virgin conception means one for which the participation of a man is not necessary. Its second name is seedless.
A striking example of the virgin birth is the birth of Jesus Christ, described in the Bible. It lies at the core of the concept of Christian theology.
From a medical point of view, such reproduction is devoid of practical meaning, since in this case the fetus inherits all the characteristics of the mother and is her copy. This means that the variability of the human body will be impossible in principle, and after it, adaptation to changing environmental conditions and the survival of the fittest organism.
The existence of people with the same genotype will sooner or later lead to their extinction. After all, spontaneous mutations in genes occur constantly, and they will be inherited by each subsequent child.
However, both in nature and in science today, the immaculate conception is found. Its main options can be distinguished:
- Parthenogenesis.
- Cloning.
Parthenogenesis
Parthenogenesis is a sexual type of reproduction that does not require the participation of a male individual. Thus, it can be considered the scientific name for the Immaculate Conception.
This type of reproduction occurs in many insects, invertebrates, and even some vertebrates (such as lizards). There are various options and mechanisms of parthenogenesis.
Often, both parthenogenesis and normal conception occur within the same species. A striking representative of such reproduction are bees, the males of which develop from unfertilized eggs, and the females from fertilized eggs.
However, for mammals (and humans, in particular), conception in the form of parthenogenesis is not typical in ordinary life. But in the laboratory, scientists managed to achieve some success.
Artificial parthenogenesis
Scientists have repeatedly conducted various experiments to study parthenogenesis.
It was noted that when the egg was irritated, it began to spontaneously divide and even turned into a so-called blastocyst - one of the early preimplantation stages that a human embryo goes through. However, cell death inevitably followed.
The culprit for this, according to scientists, is considered to be genomic imprinting - a special mechanism that regulates the degree of influence of certain genes on the development process of the embryo. Thus, the genes of a male individual are more responsible for the formation and development of the placenta, while female genes influence the embryo itself.
Thus, it becomes clear that even if, under the influence of any irritant (including severe stress), a woman’s egg begins to spontaneously divide, such an “embryo” will still not be able to implant.
To date, genomic imprinting has been defeated only in experiments with mice.
Experiment with turning off imprinting
In April 2004, a mouse named Kaguya became famous in Japan. She turned out to be the first mammal to be the offspring of two mothers. Their eggs united and developed into a full-fledged embryo, the pregnancy progressed and ended with the birth of a healthy mouse.
However, this turned out to be possible only in laboratory conditions. In one of the eggs, some DNA fragments were removed, which made it possible to neutralize the influence of genomic imprinting and achieve normal development of the embryo.
Kaguya turned out to be a classic example of the virgin, or seedless, conception. She inherited genetic traits from both mothers. Subsequently - after the usual crossing with a male - this mouse gave birth to healthy offspring.
Similar experiments with female eggs have not yet been carried out.
Cloning
Cloning can only conditionally be classified as a variant of the immaculate conception. The fact is that this process is a type of asexual reproduction and is impossible in highly organized organisms without human intervention.
When cloning, the body of an individual is recreated in whole or in part. The most famous clone is a sheep named Dolly, which was copied from the cell of another adult.
This method, in theory, makes it possible to restore rare and extinct animal species. In addition, it can be successfully used in medicine, where the reconstruction of organs is needed.
Cloning living or dead people is a serious ethical issue in medicine today.
Real cases
Is the virgin birth even possible? Are there real cases confirmed by doctors and scientists?
To date, all known cases of immaculate conception in humans are considered fiction. You can find many stories on the Internet dedicated to this phenomenon, but all of them cannot bear the slightest criticism.
Most often, the immaculate conception refers to the pregnancy of a virgin. Such cases do happen and are not even uncommon. Sooner or later they are encountered in the practice of any obstetrician-gynecologist.
However, they are always easy to explain. The development of pregnancy in a woman with an intact hymen is possible in two cases:
- When sperm enters the vagina without full insertion of the penis. This happens during petting and other tricks or sexual games.
- With a dense hymen, as a result of which defloration does not occur. As a rule, a woman ceases to be a formal virgin only after childbirth.
However, these situations have no connection with the immaculate conception, since male sperm are involved in the fertilization of the egg.
Immaculate conception in humans today is impossible under any circumstances.
Immaculate Conception
The miraculous process of procreation and the birth of living beings was discussed briefly in Chapter 8. However, the greatest of all births - the birth of Jesus Christ, when God became a man - did not occur at all as usual. This required a great miracle, the miracle of the virgin birth.
In reality, the miracle is not so much the birth of Christ itself, which was in all respects an ordinary birth, but rather His miraculous conception in the womb of the Virgin Mary. Biblical skeptics have long directed their fiercest attacks on the great Christian doctrine of the virgin birth on the grounds that such an event is biologically impossible and therefore completely unscientific.
There have always been compromising Christians who, in response to this, as well as to other criticisms of the Bible “in the light of scientific advances,” downplayed the significance of Revelation and tried to explain the birth of Christ naturalistically or see in it only a “spiritual meaning.” Some said that the Incarnation could have happened by the entry of the Spirit of God into the human body of Jesus, and did not go into detail about the supernatural or legal nature of His birth. Others said that He was the Son of God in the same sense in which all people are children of God, He just understood it better. Still others explained the reason why a virgin could give birth to a child by the phenomenon of parthenogenesis (the formation of a full-fledged individual from the mother’s egg without the intervention of the father), or artificial insemination (the introduction of the father’s seed into the egg without physical proximity), or even something similar to modern cloning (birth based on somatic, rather than a genetic cell), implying that Jesus Himself may have been the product of one such natural process.
However, all such interpretations are nothing more than a compromise that denies the clear word of Scripture and dishonors the unique theanthropic essence of the Son of God, undermining the very basis of His great redemptive ministry. His unique incarnation required an absolutely miraculous supernatural conception, and therefore it is useless and even harmful to try to naturalistically explain or interpret it. It was a biological miracle—a truly great miracle of creation, absolutely comparable to the great miracle of the first creation, when (as Hebrews 11:3 says) “the worlds [were] framed (Gr. katartizo) the word of God." Hebrews 10:5 says, “For this reason Christ, entering the world, he says: “You did not desire sacrifices and offerings, but you prepared a body [the same Greek word katartizo) To me"".
For the body of Christ to serve as a sacrificial offering for the sins of mankind, it must satisfy two conditions. First, from a physical point of view, it must be “immaculate and pure” (1 Pet. 1:19), that is, it must not contain mutated genes (and the physical defects they cause) inherited from the father or mother. Secondly, from a spiritual point of view, it must be “holy, free from evil, blameless, separated from sinners” (Heb. 7:26), it must not inherit from its parents [anything sinful. “In Him there is no sin” - 1 John 3:5. These conditions could only be met in one way - the private creation of an embryo in the womb of Mary.
Since all genetic inheritance - physical, mental and spiritual - is passed on to a child from both father and mother, Christ could not have been born with an immaculate body and sinless essence if either parent (either mother or father) had passed on to Him their genes or other genetic materials. Its appearance required a special creative act of God Himself. “The Holy One who is to be born will be called the Son of God,” said the angel to Mary (Luke 1:35).
Nevertheless, from the moment of His conception (when His body consisted of only one cell) through His maturation, birth, life and death, Jesus lived a completely ordinary human life, for He was to become the Son of Man, that is, the man that He wanted to be. God, and remain the Son of God. “Therefore He had to become in every way like the brethren” (Heb. 2:17). This means that He lived a normal human life in all respects, but sinless! Not only did He not inherit a sinful nature (Adam and Eve also did not inherit any sin), but He “did not no sin" (1 Pet. 2:22). He “became flesh” (John 1:14), but it was only “in the likeness of sinful flesh” (Rom. 8:3). He “knew no sin” (2 Cor. 5:21). He's like us, tempted in all things, yet without sin” (Heb. 4:15).
Perhaps, from a biological point of view, the virgin birth was impossible, but, in the end, the same can be said about the miracle of creation - an event also impossible from a scientific point of view, but nevertheless accomplished!
Some denied the need for a private creation of Christ's body, believing that the lack of a specific genetic connection to Mary would somehow prevent Him from being truly Man or truly Jew, which Scripture required of Him. Such objections are trivial; they reveal a completely inadequate assessment of God's ability to create! John the Baptist said, “God is able to raise up children for Abraham from these stones” (Luke 3:8). According to the Bible, Jesus Christ was “born of the seed of David according to the flesh” (Rom. 1:3) because His legal father was a descendant of David, and His biological mother (that is, the one who carried and nurtured Him in her womb from the moment of conception and who gave birth to Him) was also of the descendants of David. From this point of view. He was created from the seed of David (in the original - ginomai, which may be translated differently depending on the context), or alternatively American Standard Version, He was "born of the seed of David." And such a statement is no less true, since His body was specially formed in the womb of Mary and did not carry the genes that she had.
On the other hand, this fact does not in any way diminish the humanity of Jesus. Adam's body was also specially formed (Gen. 2:7) and had neither a human father nor a human mother. And yet he was a full-fledged man, moreover, the first man, the prototype of man, the father of all people.
But it is also true that all people who lived “in Adam” thereby became sinners in their essence, and Jesus would certainly have been present “in Adam” if he had genetically descended from Mary. Jesus Christ is called “the last Adam” (1 Cor. 15:45), and if so, it was not only possible, but also appropriate and necessary for the formation of His body (like the body of the first Adam) by God Himself. This not only did not prevent Jesus from being, like Adam, a full-fledged man, but it also turned out to be the only way that allowed Him to be truly human and not have sin, as God predestined for man. As a last resort. God had to perform a miracle on Mary's gene system to drive out the "sin factor" (whatever that was) from them and cleanse them of the harmful mutations that had accumulated in man since the time of Adam. It was for all these purposes and purposes that the human body was created anew in the womb of Mary.
