Ask A Catholic

Yeah, it was Mary who was a virgin at the time of Jesus' conceptions. Anne and Joachim definitely porked.

the wiki summary sort of implies the doctrine of the IC was a little bit political:

From early on in the history of the Catholic Church, in numerous places in the writings of the Church Fathers, the belief is implicitly stated.[citation needed] In various places the feast of the Immaculate Conception had been celebrated for centuries on 8 December when, on 28 February 1476, Pope Sixtus IV[6] extended it to the entire Latin Church. He did not define the doctrine as a dogma, thus leaving Roman Catholics free to believe in it or not without being accused of heresy; this freedom was reiterated by the Council of Trent. However, the feast was a strong indication of the Church's traditional belief in the Immaculate Conception.[7][8] On 6 December 1708 Pope Clement XI decreed that the feast of the Immaculate Conception be a Holy Day of Obligation.[9] throughout the entire Catholic Church.

The Immaculate Conception was solemnly defined as a dogma by Pope Pius IX in his constitution Ineffabilis Deus on 8 December 1854.[10] The Catholic Church teaches that the dogma is supported by Scripture (e.g., Mary's being greeted by the Angel Gabriel as "full of grace") as well as either directly or indirectly by the writings of Church Fathers such as Irenaeus of Lyons and Ambrose of Milan.[11][12] Catholic theology maintains that since Jesus became incarnate of the Virgin Mary, it was fitting that she be completely free of sin for expressing her fiat.[13] In 1904 Pope Saint Pius X also addressed the issue in his Marian encyclical Ad Diem Illum on the Immaculate Conception.[14]

check them dates!

"expressing her fiat"

oh well if ambrose had her checked out first then i guess i believe

any takers on the alternate view of virgin as a mistranslation from the hebrew? i always found that interesting.

oh and i am like a catholic once removed or something - raised atheist but oh man never to be mentioned around my irish catholic grandmother. who was awesome btw, so i figure catholicism is aok. also radical nuns are the coolest shit ever. ok then.

I find it interesting too. It's was supposedly maiden or something and not virgin, right?

maiden is a virgin?

by definition I think it just means unmarried

The whole virgin vs maiden vs maid thing is v confusing. Really it used to just be a young unmarried woman. I think for a very long time there wasn't necessarily a connotation that she was also sexually pure!

p sure 'maiden' suggests virgin but that the mistranslation suggested only 'young woman' or somesuch

"Several distressed correspondents have queried the mistranslation of 'young woman' into 'virgin' in the biblical prophecy, and have demanded a reply from me. Hurting religious sensibilities is a perilous business these days so I had better oblige. Actually, it is a pleasure, for scientists can't often get satisfyingly dusty in the library indulging in a real academic foot-note. The point is in fact well known to biblical scholars, and not disputed by them. The Hebrew word in Isaiah is (almah), which undisputedly means 'young woman', with no implication of virginity. If 'virgin' had been intended (bethulah) could have been used instead (the ambiguous English word 'maiden' illustrates how easy it can be to slide between the two meanings). The 'mutation' occurred when the pre-Christian Greek translation known as the Septuagint rendered almah into ... (parthenos), which really does usually mean virgin. Matthew (not, of course, the Apostle and contemporary of Jesus, but the gospel-maker writing long afterwards), quoted Isaiah in what seems to be a derivative of the Septuagint version (all but two of the fifteen Greek words are identical) when he said Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, 'Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel' (Authorised English translation). It is widely accepted among Christian scholars that the story of the virgin birth of Jesus was a late interpolation, put in presumably by Greek-speaking disciples in order that the (mistranslated) prophecy should be seen to be fulfilled. Modern versions such as the New English Bible correctly give 'young woman' in Isaiah. They equally correctly leave 'virgin' in Matthew, since there they are translating from the Greek."

Yeah - it was young woman - my b.

i forgive u

VERY INTERESTINGLY, wiki has just told me that "bandit" is one translation, but that "insurrectionary" or "revolutionary" is another one. So perhaps the interpretation is that the Jews who voted for Barabbus betrayed Christ by picking the WRONG revolutionary/the wrong version of their future??

Use this site or this one to cross-reference any claims made on wikipedia regarding this sort of thing imo. Wikipedia tends to slant a bit on any given day. Number of different translations of Mark 15:7.

btw in case the Holy Father is reading this thread I apologize for reading the Bible

again btw in re: virgin vs. maiden the Church very conveniently regards tradition as one of the ways that God speaks to us. So if an early translator happened to say παρθένος for עלמה that was God's hand telling us more about the story

Yeah dude everyone knows Catholics don't read the the Bible. What are you doing? x-post

I'm not sure what your point is, aero, because pretty much all of those translations confirm that Barabbas was an "insurrectionary" and had been involved in an uprising in which some murders were committed, although they differ on whether he was a murderer or just involved with a gang or rebel group who were accused jointly.

Which is still interesting to me because I was only taught that he was a robber and murderer when in fact neither is proven and one isn't even suggested.

@ ENBB when I was getting my training to teach Catechism I had a Bible question and I asked this young priest whose weekly homilies were pretty heavily Get Back To Tradition stuff and his answer, hand to God, was: "Why do you need to know?"

hahaha

well Laurel take this one:

English Standard Version (©2001)
And among the rebels in prison, who had committed murder in the insurrection, there was a man called Barabbas.

vs this one:

New Living Translation (©2007)
One of the prisoners at that time was Barabbas, a revolutionary who had committed murder in an uprising.

To "rebel," in the tradition, is to be against God. To be a revolutionary, that's another matter.

What is this, pick the examples we like day?

Bible in Basic English
And there was one named Barabbas, in prison with those who had gone against the government and in the fight had taken life.

American Standard Version
And there was one called Barabbas, lying bound with them that had made insurrection, men who in the insurrection had committed murder.

I'm reading this as, he was a rebel against the Roman system and was in jail primarily as a political prisoner. Which is why I posited that he might have represented a more earthly kind of victory for the Jews under Roman rule.

But I mean you are reading that based on your reading of various translations. That's in the nature of Biblical exegesis: you have the text, and you have the translation, and you have your own beliefs, and you make your interpretation based on a confluence of those three. If you're Catholic, you add in the fourth & overriding matter of tradition.

I just set up those two to show that there are several readings. And even if we all spoke Esperanto, there would be many ways of "reading"/interpreting. Absent the author here to tell us what he meant, and absent a completle documentary view of the circumstances, we're going to be interpreting and bringing our own biases to the table. That is why we need the Church to guide us.

Dude I'm not saying the Catholic Church ever needed more excuses to be anti-Semitic. Just noting a gloss that was never presented to me before.

I was raised Roman Catholic, which let me tell you, is somewhat of an exotic religion in The South. In my rural small town, my whole class was WASP except for me, the other Catholic and the Jewish guy. (And we all still qualified for the WAS part, at any rate.)

Once, my family was in Memphis and Mom found a Catholic church in the Yellow Pages that we could hit for Mass. We drove around looking for the place and finally saw a parking lot with filled with people in their Sunday best. Mom rolled down the window and asked one of them, "Is this a Catholic church?" The fellow looked up and down the street, shrugged his shoulders and replied, "I don't think you're going to find any others!"

my ex-boss is a Catholic from Mississippi. he's also gay. he had a very fun childhood.

I was raised Roman Catholic, which let me tell you, is somewhat of an exotic religion in The South.

The church I occasionally attend here is Catholic but few of the trappings of Catholicism are readily apparent. It also makes reference to the middle passage in the hymnal, which gave me pause to reflect how far I am now from where I grew up

how soon do we get to "Mary Magdalene was not a prostitute"?

"The middle passage" as in the slave trade?

how soon do we get to "Mary Magdalene was not a prostitute"?

"Now Barabbas was a robber."

Can't understand Protestantism. If you wanna believe in God, you might as well go whole hog and accept rituals: beautiful robes, saints, stained glass windows, feast days, and pedophile priests.

― Rich Lolwry (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, March 16, 2011 12:08 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

Lots of things in the Church comes to us through Legend and Tradition though – that's precisely what upset Protestants.

― Rich Lolwry (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, March 16, 2011 12:18 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

not to pick on Alfred or anything, because these sentiments seem pretty common among ex-catholics, but, ok i'm going to play capt save-a-prot itt for a second.

what upset protestants (and remember, being "upset with the church" was a state of being that preceded Protestantism) wasn't the weight placed on Legend but on authority. the money pissed people off, not the mysticism, but they issued from the same space -- the authority the church had arrogated to itself to determine what 'tradition' meant, and then grounding that authority in that very tradition. pretty convenient in worldly affairs, but kind of a bitch to deal with if you're the type to really care about the course of your own soul and the livelihood of your community.

what's funny is how Protestantism didn't really have to exist! it might not, had the church of Luther's day (which was also Michaelangelo and Leonardo's day, i always forget) wasn't truly rotten. they could have been another academic clique.

what's amazing and hilarious about about Protestantism (and all theology really) to me is how obviously it stems from the daily life (read: economics) of its community. Protestant thinking is intensely economical. it is about doing what is necessary to achieve what is asked of you and not acceding to any demands to do more. "i will get into heaven and no you aren't getting a fucking cent from me for it." this doesn't mean it's easy. i remember stuff in confirmation classes about conscience and the truth thereof that was almost confucian in its severity.

once you have decided that that jesus, himself, is sufficient for salvation, then "the rest" ie. the whole church hierarchy, the robes, praying to saints, even the idea of "acting" on your own behalf, becomes not only pointless but basically evil. and the church was evil at the time they cooked this up so it seemed to make sense...

"The middle passage" as in the slave trade?

as in vagina

xpost: goole, you knew I was partly kidding, right? I wasn't calling for nailing Martin Luther himself on the door of Wittenberg.

but I love robes

"The middle passage" as in the slave trade?

yes, and I think making jokes about this term is completely over the line. few things in history that give evidence of man's capacity for ignoring his fellow man's suffering as the middle passage

Wallace Stevens said it best re the romance of ritual:

After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.

It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.

The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.

Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence

Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as a necessity requires.

this is my favorite catholic thingy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadaver_Synod

if yer going to go whole hog on ceremony, robes, incense, mad religious paintings and stuff ... the Eastern Orthodox have every other branch of Christianity beat on that count.

of course, you have to stand for like a zillion hours during an Eastern Orthodox liturgy service ...

100 years from now I'm going to start "taking sides: Wallace Stevens vs. Jean Valentine" & if yr honest Alfred the choice will cause you genuine existential angst

lol alfred i know it was a joke, you just happened to say the things i felt like arguing against :)

Let's discuss this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marozia

uh woah cadaver trial!

man the dark ages were wild and awesome. i think they get a bad rap, too.

i think you're prob right

"Pornocracy"!

is there another institution currently in existence that can date itself back 2000 years basically continuously?

man the dark ages were wild and awesome. i think they get a bad rap, too.

― goole, Wednesday, March 16, 2011 4:11 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah for real. there needs to be more movies about this era, or hbo series or something.

The Friars Club

xp