Word: greekness
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...pair of lab-mice studies roared in the world of reproductive biology. In the first, scientists created a mouse born by the fusion of two eggs. In the natural world this is known as parthenogenesis (from the Greek for "virgin birth"), a reproductive strategy used by some insects, invertebrates and the odd fish or reptile but unheard of in mammals. Given the technical difficulty, it's unlikely that you'll see this offered at the local IVF clinic anytime soon...
...keeping with his view of Joseph and Mary as year-round residents, Matthew has the Magi visit a "house." Luke introduces the manger as part of his view of them as involuntary short-timers. The English word manger, like the original Greek word phatne in Luke, is even more modest than our usual understanding of it. It means not a stable but simply a feeding trough or at best a stall. Either word would be consistent with the kind of rural poverty that has inspired poor people and their champions throughout the history of Christianity. Today's crèche scenes...
...before Luke. "He would have found it very odd, very goyish, perhaps even offensive," says the University of Texas' White. But that, he contends, is the point. Unlike Matthew, Luke is thought to have been a pagan rather than a Jewish convert to Christianity, writing in fine Greek for other non-Jews and so using references they would find familiar. His version's heraldic announcements, parallel pregnancies, angelic choirs and shepherd witnesses bear a tantalizing resemblance to another literary form, the reverential "lives" being written about pagan leaders in the same period. In such sagas, a hero...
...Nativities got the virginal conception wrong. Fellow Jews early on challenged Matthew's Gospel assertion that it fulfilled a prophecy in the Book of Isaiah that the Messiah would be born to a "virgin." (Isaiah's Hebrew actually talks of a "young girl"; Matthew was probably working from a Greek mistranslation.) Critics may also have alleged that Jesus' birth early in Mary's marriage to Joseph was the result of her committing adultery; much later Jewish sources named a Roman soldier called Panthera. Those accusations, some scholars believe, account for the verse in Matthew in which Joseph considers divorcing Mary...
This line of thought, with its possible implication that the Gospel writers imagined the Holy Spirit and Mary engaged in the kind of physical divine-human intercourse that vividly marked many Greek and Roman myths, is one of the most rancorous areas of the new scholarship. Brown found no merit in it. "Every line of Matthew's infancy narrative echoes Old Testament themes," he argued. "Are we to think that he accepted all that background but then violated horrendously the stern Old Testament [rule] that God was not a male who mated with women?" Other scholars claim that Luke especially...