What they need to learn besides the Bible is Basic Biology 101.
No, what needs to be
relearned is
Biblical Biology 101.
It’s hilarious to see all the talk about DNA. Neither the Prophets, the Apostles, nor the Fathers had any conception (pun intended) of DNA when they formulated the doctrine of the Virgin Birth. DNA simply wasn’t known by them to exist and therefore could not have informed their thinking on these matters.
The Fathers – for the sake of brevity I’ll use “Fathers” to refer to the Prophets, the Apostles, and the Fathers collectively – understood human reproduction to function similarly to plant biology and used similar terms to describe both. This is why a man’s emission is called “seed” and why women’s wombs are called “fertile” or “barren” depending on whether or not they could produce offspring. It wasn’t just metaphor. Human reproduction was actually thought to take place in the same fashion as plant reporduction – the “seed” of the man was sown into the “soil” of the woman’s womb, and if the woman’s soil was “fertile”, a child would result, while if the woman’s soil was “barren”, no child would result.
What is particularly important about this paradigm of human reproduction are the male and female contributions to the development of the child. Under this paradigm, the child’s existence starts
entirely with the man. In the man’s “seed” is the basic principle of life that will either take root or not in the “soil” of the woman. The woman, in other words, contributes
NO original material to the child. The woman is merely the vessel in which the child is planted while in “seed” form. So what does the woman contribute? Well, what does soil contribute to the seed of a plant? While in the soil, a plant’s seed takes nutrients from the soil and coverts those nutrients into the building blocks of its own body. Under the Fathers’ paradigm of reproduction, the human child-seed does exactly the same thing: it takes nutrients (i.e., “flesh”) from its mother’s womb and converts those nutrients in the building blocks of its own body. This is why we commonly hear that Christ “took flesh” of the Virgin Mary – the divine (i.e., not Adamic) seed implanted by God in the Virgin Mary “took flesh” from her and formed a human body for itself, eventually resulting in the child Jesus Christ.
This “seed and soil” paradigm is the understanding under which the Church worked for over 1500 years. It wasn’t until the microscope was invented that male sperm and female eggs were discovered, thus causing a radical redefinition of human reproductive biology that the Church felt compelled to take into account. In the process, we’ve generally lost the understanding that it was once thought, prior to the discovery of sperm and egg, that the child originally came wholly from the man and only took flesh of the woman, and that’s an epic loss considering the implications of biblical reproductive thought on topics like Original Sin, the Virgin Birth, the Immaculate Conception, and even artificial birth control. How much of the Fathers’ – and, consequently, the Church’s – teachings and writings were (and perhaps still are) influenced by what really amounts to a faulty understanding of human biology?
–Mike
