Jesus' Siblings

[tabycat]

If Jesus had siblings, then why did St. John have to take care of Mary after the Crucifixion. Under Jewish Law, shouldn’t that have been Jesus’ siblings responsibility?

You will not get a streight answer. Most of the times that I’ve been on theards with simaler subjects, I have gone through the same question-and-no-anwser. :banghead::bounce: I keep on reading and posting in them; some day I’ll learn my leason! :hug1::slapfight:

 

[codephined]

I don’t know if anyone mentioned this, I didn’t read it if someone has. Correct me if i’m wrong,… isn’t it true that there is no specific Hebrew word for cousin, aunt, uncle, step-brother, step-mother, etc? From what I seem to remember, that there is only one word for “relative,” which is likened to brother or sister.

That’s my couple of pennies

 

[ConstantineTG]

I don’t know if anyone mentioned this, I didn’t read it if someone has. Correct me if i’m wrong,… isn’t it true that there is no specific Hebrew word for cousin, aunt, uncle, step-brother, step-mother, etc? From what I seem to remember, that there is only one word for “relative,” which is likened to brother or sister.

That’s my couple of pennies

Yet Elizabeth was clearly referred to as “cousin”. I wonder how the translators were able to tell the difference.

 

[Trebor135]

I don’t know if anyone mentioned this, I didn’t read it if someone has. Correct me if i’m wrong,… isn’t it true that there is no specific Hebrew word for cousin, aunt, uncle, step-brother, step-mother, etc? From what I seem to remember, that there is only one word for “relative,” which is likened to brother or sister.

That’s my couple of pennies

Those interviewed by the Gospel writers wouldn’t have been speaking Hebrew, because Aramaic was the colloquial language of the day.

Arabic, another Semitic language, doesn’t have one-word equivalents for “cousin”, but it uses particular expressions like “son of a paternal uncle” and “daughter of a maternal aunt”. If Aramaic as spoken by Christ, his family, friends, and apostles had the same way of talking about cousin relationships, the Greek writers should have been able to render them into Koine with the relevant one-word equivalents.

 

[ConstantineTG]

Those interviewed by the Gospel writers wouldn’t have been speaking Hebrew, because Aramaic was the colloquial language of the day.

Arabic, another Semitic language, doesn’t have one-word equivalents for “cousin”, but it uses particular expressions like “son of a paternal uncle” and “daughter of a maternal aunt”. If Aramaic as spoken by Christ, his family, friends, and apostles had the same way of talking about cousin relationships, the Greek writers should have been able to render them into Koine.

Only Luke was non-Jewish among the Gospel writers. So the others would have understood Aramaic just fine.

 

[Trebor135]

Only Luke was non-Jewish among the Gospel writers. So the others would have understood Aramaic just fine.

What I meant was that, if first-century Palestinian Aramaic used expressions to describe cousins like those in Arabic, the Gospel authors should have been able to connect those phrases to the more concise Greek one-word terms.

 

[Prieldedi]

Godmachine,

Check the following reply I posted answering the question Did Mary & Joseph have children? which was the subject of that thread:

forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?p=9383780#post9383780

The link takes you to Post #159 and it continues in posts 160, 161 & 162. With this explanation you can go back to the Baptist Minister. FYI I used only the Bible, and a protestant one.

On some of the issues you have raised: If I say that Benjamin was the twelfth son of Jacob, by having mentioned twelfth, does it mean that there was a thirteenth? In the same line, Esau was the first son of Isaac and Jacob was the second son of Isaac, and Esau sold Jacob his “firstborn right”, which is a title as BlueHorizon said. So, if Jacob was the “second” son of Isaac, then it is implied there was a third. Who was the third? And who was the fourth, and the fifth? and…?

When we use the word first there are instances in which there cannot be a second. You can make a “GOOD first impression” only once. There never can be a SECOND “GOOD first impression.”

Another example, “America was waiting to be discovered by the Europeans. Columbus was the first European to discover America.”

There has not been a second discoverer of America for the last 500 years, yet Columbus remains the first.

Languages change constantly. Every language spoken today is not the same as the one spoken 200, 300 years ago. Words change meaning. Nouns become adjectives and vice versa. New words are introduced. You need to acknowledge this to understand what the writers of the New Testament meant 2000 years ago. And since neither of us is a scholar of languages, we must rely and “trust” in someone who is, someone who can teach us. Same thing happens with the Bible, it was written not as a book of riddles to be solved. The Gospel was oral, taught by Jesus who spoke to His Apostles and followers for three years, that’s more than 1,000 days. In the Bible there are less that 50 (maybe even less than 25) days that narrate events of the life of Jesus. It’s impossible for the Bible to contain all the words that Jesus spoke. The Bible is the minimum necessary, it’s the tip of an iceberg. So the Church, who knows the rest of the iceberg, is the one we must “trust” who can explain what the tip of the iceberg says about the rest of the iceberg. With this in mind, when the Baptist Minister tells you “That 's not in the Bible!” in reference to some of the teachings of the Church, you can tell him, “but the Bible left out more than 950 days of the life of Jesus, that’s why many things are not in the Bible!”

If his reply is “why should I believe in what the Church says?”, then the answer has to be “Jesus said that Heaven and earth will pass away, but His words will not pass away.” Then ask him, “do you know what Jesus taught in the other 950 days? If you believe His words DID NOT pass away, do you know the missing words? If you don’t, who knows them? They must be known by someone, somewhere, because they will not pass away.” Then tell him that the “someone” that knows them is the Catholic Church, and that she received the whole iceberg 2,000 years ago FROM JESUS HIMSELF, and She has kept it intact to this day… which includes the knowledge that Jesus was an only son of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

 

[Prieldedi]

Those interviewed by the Gospel writers wouldn’t have been speaking Hebrew, because Aramaic was the colloquial language of the day.

Arabic, another Semitic language, doesn’t have one-word equivalents for “cousin”, but it uses particular expressions like “son of a paternal uncle” and “daughter of a maternal aunt”. If Aramaic as spoken by Christ, his family, friends, and apostles had the same way of talking about cousin relationships, the Greek writers should have been able to render them into Koine with the relevant one-word equivalents.

I was under the impression that the words uncle and aunt didn’t exist in Aramaic. If they did, why didn’t Abraham use it Genesis 13:8 when talking with Lot?

I was told the expression for cousin would have been “son of the brother of my father”.

What about nephew and niece? They are in our Bibles, but where they part of the Aramaic language, or for that matter, of the Hebrew language?

 

[LilyM]

Excellent point about ‘good first impressions’. What about daybreak being called ‘first light’ - does that really mean there is such a thing as second light? No - it is all one and the same light, throughout the day, no?

Or how about indigenous peoples on the North American continent calling themselves ‘First Nations’. How can there be multiple nations that were first? Surely one of them came prior to all the others.

Does it mean the people who called themselves that were literally the first on the content? There may well have been others before them.

And does it mean European settlers were literally a ‘second nation’?

Did the indigenous peoples even have a concept of nation as it is now understood?

How does the fact that North America for a long time was divided among separate spheres of Spanish, French and English influence and only coalesced later into the US and Canada figure into who exactly wer the ‘second’, ‘third’, and subsequent nations?

And finally, as a term of endearment my mother has called my oldest sister ‘my firstborn’, as she has called me as youngest ‘my baby’. Does that mean she waited only until AFTER her second child was born before calling my older sister thus? Of course not.

 

[LilyM]

I was under the impression that the words uncle and aunt didn’t exist in Aramaic. If they did, why didn’t Abraham use it Genesis 13:8 when talking with Lot?

I was told the expression for cousin would have been “son of the brother of my father”.

What about nephew and niece? They are in our Bibles, but where they part of the Aramaic language, or for that matter, of the Hebrew language?

But it is so clumsy and awkward to have to keep saying ‘son of the brother of my father’, is it not? I can’t imagine people would always spend the time required to rattle off the precise relationship. To this day I certainly wouldn’t bother distinguishing between my ‘second cousin once removed on my maternal side’ and my ‘first cousin on my father’s side’ unless it was really necessary - all would simply be ‘cousin’ to me.

Rather like enumerating all of Queen Elizabeth’s very long list of honours and titles when a simple ‘Your Majesty’ would do.

 

[Prieldedi]

But it is so clumsy and awkward to have to keep saying ‘son of the brother of my father’, is it not? I can’t imagine people would always spend the time required to rattle off the precise relationship. To this day I certainly wouldn’t bother distinguishing between my ‘second cousin once removed on my maternal side’ and my ‘first cousin on my father’s side’ unless it was really necessary - all would simply be ‘cousin’ to me.

Rather like enumerating all of Queen Elizabeth’s very long list of honours and titles when a simple ‘Your Majesty’ would do.

That’s why they were called “brother”, for lack of a word that denotes the cousin relationship.

In the Spanish speaking countries for instance, we don’t group several relationships as it’s done in the USA with cousins. In a family tree, cousins are only those who are at the same level. The ones who are “once/twice removed”, if the person is up in the levels of the tree we call them uncle, to them we would be down in the levels, so we would be called their nephews. Cousins is just for those at the same level, whether first, second, third… cousins.

 

[Marc_Anthony]

But it is so clumsy and awkward to have to keep saying ‘son of the brother of my father’, is it not? I can’t imagine people would always spend the time required to rattle off the precise relationship. To this day I certainly wouldn’t bother distinguishing between my ‘second cousin once removed on my maternal side’ and my ‘first cousin on my father’s side’ unless it was really necessary - all would simply be ‘cousin’ to me.

Rather like enumerating all of Queen Elizabeth’s very long list of honours and titles when a simple ‘Your Majesty’ would do.

Indeed-I have relatives in my family that I’m not even sure what the exact capacity it is that we’re related. Some of my “Aunts/Uncles” aren’t even actually related to me. Some are second cousins twice removed or something, some are Great Aunts and Uncles…I just call them all “Aunt”, Uncle" or “Cousin”. Much, much easier.

 

[Godmachine]

Thank you all again for your responses. You’ve all done a great job articulating your beliefs. But I must reiterate, I am not taking sides. Why? Because it all boils down to a matter of interpretation of writings that are translations of copies of interpretations of translations…

My Baptist friend claims the words written in standard English in his copy of a translation of the King James Bible mean exactly what they say (unless he says so). You, my Catholic friends, claim that what it says in the Bible is not always exactly what was meant by the original authors (unless you say so). I do not see any attempts from either side to mislead, I’m sure your intentions as well as his are good in your attempts to show me the “truth”. I do not doubt your sincerity. What I doubt from both sides is your certainty.

 

[Blue_Horizon]

I am not taking sides. Why? Because it all boils down to a matter of interpretation

My Baptist friend claims the words written in standard English in his copy of a translation of the King James Bible mean exactly what they say (unless he says so). You, my Catholic friends, claim that what it says in the Bible is not always exactly what was meant by the original authors (unless you say so). I do not see any attempts from either side to mislead, I’m sure your intentions as well as his are good in your attempts to show me the “truth”. I do not doubt your sincerity. What I doubt from both sides is your certainty.

GodMachine
Thanks for the heads-up.

For myself I am rather confused about your methodology wrt “finding truth”.
Maybe I misunderstand you somewhere along the line but I find your approach to “truth” (on almost anything let alone relgion) doomed from the start. Let me just throw out a few aphorisms I take for granted in this respect which I thought were readily self-evident…but obviously not for your good self.
(1) Mature people take a committed and consistent “trajectory” through the mess of life based mostly on “a high mass of probabilities” (circumstantial scientific evidence if you like) or faith (esp when the “mass of probabilities” is low or inconclusive)

(2) It is not possible to live a mature or worthwhile life sitting on the fence until we are knocked off by incontrovertible facts (or even “a high mass of probabilities”).

(3) Incontrovertible facts (or “a high mass of probabilities”) (of any importance) very rarely come along and hit us in the face when we were not even looking that way.

(4) Incontrovertible facts (usually we mean “a high mass of probabilities”) (of any importance) do readily reveal themselves one way or the other if we first make a lived commitment regarding those “facts” (i.e. we live as if they were true) - we might call this incipient faith. This is the position of any good student who accepts, for example, the formulae/proofs that his Physics/Maths teacher draws up on the board. We don’t get it at first but with experiment or reflection we eventually see he is right (or wrong) for ourselves. Faith turns into fact.

I find life is like #4 above. We initially accept many things both scientific and religious on a “provisional faith” and that stance/commitment is the necessary means by which we gain further tools/insight/evidence to see if further commitment is warranted. That means we might get hurt - but it is the only way I know of to find any degree of certainty on important thiungs in life.

Certainty will never be found (in important matters) by not making a commitment because there is no significant certainty to start with.

WRT Christianity/Catholicism - it is even more fraught because we will only get what we normally call “factual certainty” in the next life. Faith is faith. However I do see the “mass of probabilities” increasing in favour of Christianity the older I get (though of course it will never be the same certainty as a E=1/2 mV^2).

However, I personally have not regretted one bit the renewed commitments I keep making to Catholicism. I have not yet found anything that would contradict the core of my Catholicism (there is much crumbling on the extremities) - and I am open to this being possible (e.g. if Jesus’s bones were credibly discovered).

To be honest I do not think the virginity of Mary perpetual or otherwise is a big deal. Jesus could still be Divine even if he had full blood brothers/sisters. Its the resurrection that did it for the Apostles and what does it for me. If we are clearly mistaken on that (and it is possible) then Christyians, as Paul says, are the silliest of people.

 

[Marc_Anthony]

Thank you all again for your responses. You’ve all done a great job articulating your beliefs. But I must reiterate, I am not taking sides. Why? Because it all boils down to a matter of interpretation of writings that are translations of copies of interpretations of translations…

My Baptist friend claims the words written in standard English in his copy of a translation of the King James Bible mean exactly what they say (unless he says so). You, my Catholic friends, claim that what it says in the Bible is not always exactly what was meant by the original authors (unless you say so). I do not see any attempts from either side to mislead, I’m sure your intentions as well as his are good in your attempts to show me the “truth”. I do not doubt your sincerity. What I doubt from both sides is your certainty.

While I don’t doubt the good intentions of your Baptist friends, and I may be simplifying his views, it seems to me that there IS a difference in the way we interpret the writings. Cathoic reasoning about the intent of the original authors is based around what the early Church thought. Baptists merely use the Scriptures as they get them and try to interpret in a vacuum.

Basically, we have other sources to back us up. The Baptists have only the Bible. And there is a difference.

Of course, perhaps your Baptist friends don’t think exactly the way I’ve described, but this seems to me to be an accurate, if simplified description of what most Baptists believe.

 

[Prieldedi]

Thank you all again for your responses. You’ve all done a great job articulating your beliefs. But I must reiterate, I am not taking sides. Why? Because it all boils down to a matter of interpretation of writings that are translations of copies of interpretations of translations…

My Baptist friend claims the words written in standard English in his copy of a translation of the King James Bible mean exactly what they say (unless he says so). You, my Catholic friends, claim that what it says in the Bible is not always exactly what was meant by the original authors (unless you say so). I do not see any attempts from either side to mislead, I’m sure your intentions as well as his are good in your attempts to show me the “truth”. I do not doubt your sincerity. What I doubt from both sides is your certainty.

This is as simple as I could think of:

If your great great grandfather (GGF) left a document 100 pages long of which you have a copy, and he asked all his descendants to follow his writings, who would know better what he says in his writing, you or me? I happen to have a copy of his writing in my hands, but my copy has only 90 pages. Would you still concede I know better than you what your GGF meant in his writing?

Better still, I accuse your family of tampering with his writing, I accuse your family of adding 10 pages to his document more than 100 years ago. I will even put it better, I claim I’m a direct descendant of your GGF, not you. I claim the interpretations you make are wrong. I’ll tell you in your face I know better than anybody else in world what your GGF said. Will you concede? Will you surrender your king?

You are the Catholic Church, I’m the other churches.

 

[Blue_Horizon]

I got called away before I could finish the above…

But I must reiterate, I am not taking sides.

I do not think anyone expects you to take sides. It is clear that commitment to a “side”
requires faith when it comes to this particular historical question (because, as you say, there is not always a clear agreement amongst experts over what the NT author actually meant by his choice of words in some texts). As you are approaching the question purely by means of a “scientific” methodology no credible conclusion may then be reached either way.

You, my Catholic friends, claim that what it says in the Bible is not always exactly what was meant by the original authors (unless you say so).

No, this isn’t what we are saying.
If we could know exactly what the author meant by the actual words he wrote then that is the meaning we would have to live with and accept.

The problem is that a number of distorting veils/barriers lie between us and the original words of the Evangelists.

(1) You need to know Koine Greek (the Greek colloquially spoken in the first centuary AD). Even someone from Greece with Greek as first language cannot understand the NT easily, if at all. Today’s Greek and classical Greek is significantly evolved/different in meaning.

(2) You need to know the locale, customs,culture of the environment that each Evangelist was from and the same of that for those he intended to write for.

(3) There is also the further problem that we do not have the original Greek NT manuscript. The first early copy (incomplete) I believe is from around the 300s. As this manuscript is a copy of a copy of a copy…and it provably has many errors from imperfect scribal copying. So there is no single “true original” of the New Testament. What we have are lots of different and incomplete copies full of errors from different time periods which scholars compare to make there best shot at what was the original.

(4) Then it has to get translated into English. No word for word literal translation of words in another language ever truly succeeeds in communicating the fulness of meaning of the original language as many bi-lingual contributors have testified to in this thread. You do not seem to understand this which suggests you are mono-lingual. Sometimes you will find a Bible translation which goes for “paraphrase translation” (e.g. The Good News Bible) instead of “literal word for word translation”. Its purpose is to create in the reader the same understanding/feeling that a reader of the original language would have from reading. If you have ever read the Good News Bible you will know it is very refreshing and different from a literal translation. This approach also has its weaknesses but the point I make is it gives insight into how much meaning is always lost when we cannot personally read in the original language.

So the conclusion from the above is clear. To get even the “literal” meaning one has to do much much more homework than read the King James English Bible or the Catholic Jersualem Bible. And even with all the expertise mentioned above at our fingertips there will always be some cases in which we can never clearly know what the Evangelist originally meant because the distortions above prove too great and the fine meaning has been lost to the ravages of time and entropy.

In other words, sometimes neither your Baptist friend nor us Catholics can always be sure of what an Evangelist really meant when it comes to fine detail - especially when we throw modern day issues back onto their text which they were not aware of or attempting to defend either way.

And, by the way, Catholic scholars appear to take a far more tentative approach to this than your Baptist friend. We are only sure that the interpretations of the passages concerned are dubious either way, purely on scholarly grounds.

 

[Marc_Anthony]

I got called away before I could finish the above…

I do not think anyone expects you to take sides. It is clear that commitment to a “side”
requires faith when it comes to this particular historical question (because, as you say, there is not always a clear agreement amongst experts over what the NT author actually meant by his choice of words in some texts). As you are approaching the question purely by means of a “scientific” methodology no credible conclusion may then be reached either way.

No, this isn’t what we are saying.
If we could know exactly what the author meant by the actual words he wrote then that is the meaning we would have to live with and accept.

The problem is that a number of distorting veils/barriers lie between us and the original words of the Evangelists.

(1) You need to know Koine Greek (the Greek colloquially spoken in the first centuary AD). Even someone from Greece with Greek as first language cannot understand the NT easily, if at all. Today’s Greek and classical Greek is significantly evolved/different in meaning.

(2) You need to know the locale, customs,culture of the environment that each Evangelist was from and the same of that for those he intended to write for.

(3) There is also the further problem that we do not have the original Greek NT manuscript. The first early copy (incomplete) I believe is from around the 300s. As this manuscript is a copy of a copy of a copy…and it provably has many errors from imperfect scribal copying. So there is no single “true original” of the New Testament. What we have are lots of different and incomplete copies full of errors from different time periods which scholars compare to make there best shot at what was the original.

(4) Then it has to get translated into English. No word for word literal translation of words in another language ever truly succeeeds in communicating the fulness of meaning of the original language as many bi-lingual contributors have testified to in this thread. You do not seem to understand this which suggests you are mono-lingual. Sometimes you will find a Bible translation which goes for “paraphrase translation” (e.g. The Good News Bible) instead of “literal word for word translation”. Its purpose is to create in the reader the same understanding/feeling that a reader of the original language would have from reading. If you have ever read the Good News Bible you will know it is very refreshing and different from a literal translation. This approach also has its weaknesses but the point I make is it gives insight into how much meaning is always lost when we cannot personally read in the original language.

So the conclusion from the above is clear. To get even the “literal” meaning one has to do much much more homework than read the King James English Bible or the Catholic Jersualem Bible. And even with all the expertise mentioned above at our fingertips there will always be some cases in which we can never clearly know what the Evangelist originally meant because the distortions above prove too great and the fine meaning has been lost to the ravages of time and entropy.

In other words, sometimes neither your Baptist friend nor us Catholics can always be sure of what an Evangelist really meant when it comes to fine detail - especially when we throw modern day issues back onto their text which they were not aware of or attempting to defend either way.

And, by the way, Catholic scholars appear to take a far more tentative approach to this than your Baptist friend. We are only sure that the interpretations of the passages concerned are dubious either way, purely on scholarly grounds.

Wow, excellently articulated answer!

 

[Godmachine]

GodMachine

(1) Mature people take a committed and consistent “trajectory” through the mess of life based mostly on “a high mass of probabilities” (circumstantial scientific evidence if you like) or faith (esp when the “mass of probabilities” is low or inconclusive)

I’m not sure if I agree with this or not. I don’t know what you mean by a “high mass of probabilities”. People commit themselves to things they feel passionate about, things for which they have a special talent, things they are good at.

(2) It is not possible to live a mature or worthwhile life sitting on the fence until we are knocked off by incontrovertible facts (or even “a high mass of probabilities”).

Why not? Is it not more mature to say “I don’t know” when you really don’t know than to claim some “knowledge” you do not really possess? One misconception some people seem to have about agnosticism is that we are perpetual fence-sitters, that we just cannot make up our minds. That is not so. Agnostics are just a little more cautious about what we “know”. We are much less likely to believe what we want to believe just because it is what we want to believe.

(3) Incontrovertible facts (or “a high mass of probabilities”) (of any importance) very rarely come along and hit us in the face when we were not even looking that way.

But when they do…Remember 9/11? Seems to me opposing “incontrovertible facts” had a head on collision that day. It wasn’t pretty.

(4) Incontrovertible facts (usually we mean “a high mass of probabilities”) (of any importance) do readily reveal themselves one way or the other if we first make a lived commitment regarding those “facts” (i.e. we live as if they were true) - we might call this incipient faith. This is the position of any good student who accepts, for example, the formulae/proofs that his Physics/Maths teacher draws up on the board. We don’t get it at first but with experiment or reflection we eventually see he is right (or wrong) for ourselves. Faith turns into fact.

From a subjective point of view you are correct; and it is almost impossible to view the world any other way. We all have our own personal preferences, likes and dislikes, hopes, dreams, fears, experiences, beliefs, opinions, etc. All of these things create the lens through which we view this thing we call reality. Last year I suffered an eye injury and as a result my eyes today are very sensitive to light. I have to wear darkened glasses even on cloudy days. I’ve become so accustomed to seeing the world through my darkened glasses that I often forget I am wearing them. I’ve become more attuned to the fact that it is all too easy to confuse the world I see/hear/feel with the world that actually exists.

I find life is like #4 above. We initially accept many things both scientific and religious on a “provisional faith” and that stance/commitment is the necessary means by which we gain further tools/insight/evidence to see if further commitment is warranted. That means we might get hurt - but it is the only way I know of to find any degree of certainty on important thiungs in life.

OK I’ll meet you halfway. When we are children, our minds are like sponges, we soak up every bit of information, factual and not so factual. Over time we try to sort it all out doing the best we can with what we have. We never really stop learning, I think we just develop different ways of filtering the constant barrage of information. I think we filter that information based not so much on facts or a “high mass of probabilities” but on what is useful to us. I might be able to memorize a list of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and my memorization might be true and factual but it would be of no practical use to me in my everyday life. Whether I was right or wrong about this name or that would make no difference whatsoever.

Certainty will never be found (in important matters) by not making a commitment because there is no significant certainty to start with.

What are these “important matters” you are referring to? Belief in a god? What happens when I die? There is no certainty in such matters regardless of commitment.

WRT Christianity/Catholicism - it is even more fraught because we will only get what we normally call “factual certainty” in the next life. Faith is faith. However I do see the “mass of probabilities” increasing in favour of Christianity the older I get (though of course it will never be the same certainty as a E=1/2 mV^2).

So Catholicism works for you. It is somehow useful to you. I cannot argue with that. There is no way I can say that what is useful to you is wrong. More power to you. You have something I do not. I respect that.

However, I personally have not regretted one bit the renewed commitments I keep making to Catholicism. I have not yet found anything that would contradict the core of my Catholicism (there is much crumbling on the extremities) - and I am open to this being possible (e.g. if Jesus’s bones were credibly discovered).

To be honest I do not think the virginity of Mary perpetual or otherwise is a big deal. Jesus could still be Divine even if he had full blood brothers/sisters. Its the resurrection that did it for the Apostles and what does it for me. If we are clearly mistaken on that (and it is possible) then Christyians, as Paul says, are the silliest of people.

I think this above all is what makes your faith worthy of respect. It is open to the possibilities. Perhaps the difference between us is that you put your faith in a god in whom all things are possible and I put mine in possibilities in which even something as unlikely as your god is possible.

For now I’ll stick to what I have. I am more certain of the existence of possibilities than I am of the existence of a god.

 

[Trebor135]

But when they do…Remember 9/11? Seems to me opposing “incontrovertible facts” had a head on collision that day. It wasn’t pretty.

This isn’t the best example to bring in. The 9/11 attacks weren’t perpetrated by al-Qa’ida Islamists as an act of religious war, but as a response to U.S. foreign policies. The hijackers viewed Washington’s propping up of Middle Eastern tyrannies and the like through the prism of their Islamic faith, but were not motivated by outright anti-Christian prejudice. The ruthless character of al-Qa’ida is revealed in its readiness to kill as many Americans as they had to for certain objectives, more political than religious, to be achieved.

Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA unit tracking Osama bin Laden, wrote a couple informative books which I highly recommend: “Imperial Hubris” and “Marching to Hell”.