Word: godly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...family of her cousin Elizabeth that she, a barren woman, will bear "a child that will be great in the sight of the Lord"; that is, John the Baptist. After Mary's Annunciation, she visits Elizabeth, and the fetus in Elizabeth's belly miraculously leaps up in recognition of God's promised Messiah. Surrounding this and other subplots are a series of stunning poems, or canticles, which the church later gave Latin names like the Magnificat and the Benedictus. Later Luke will provide a full angelic chorus to accompany Jesus' birth...
...Luke, the angel Gabriel explains to Mary about her son's conception as follows: "The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee; therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God." Although neither of the Nativities marks a moment for the beginning of her ensuing pregnancy, Christians have long assumed it followed directly upon her "Let it be" response...
...suggest that this (and Matthew's verse, "that which is conceived in [Mary] is of the Holy Ghost") is anything other than reported fact is to court blasphemy. The Holy Spirit's role in the conception in Mary's womb of God's Son, so spectacular and yet also touchingly intimate, is part of Christianity's theological bedrock and began entering the faith's creeds by the 2nd century. (Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy's beliefs go further, maintaining that Mary remained a virgin during and after Jesus' birth.) Says John Barclay, a New Testament expert at the University of Durham...
...landmark work The Birth of the Messiah, dean of historical Jesus scholars until his death in 1998 and a Sulpician priest, observed that the idea of divine conception in the womb appeared to be part of a theological progression. The very first Christians thought that Jesus had become God's Son at his Resurrection; Mark, the first Gospel written, seemed to locate the moment at his baptism in the Jordan; and it is only by the time that Matthew and Luke were writing that believers had dated his Sonship to before his birth. Thus, if Mary was the eyewitness source...
...literature of the non-Jewish world. Stephen Patterson of Eden Theological Seminary lists divinely irregular conceptions in stories about not only mythic heroes such as Perseus and Romulus and Remus but also flesh-and-blood figures like Plato, Alexander and Augustus, whose hagiographers reported he was fathered by the god Apollo while his mother slept. "Virgin births were a rather Gentile thing," says the Very Rev. John Drury, chaplain of All Souls' College at Oxford University. "You get it in a lot of the legends in Ovid where the god impregnates some young girl who has a miraculous...