Word: virginal
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...Elvis drank while performing. Wade Jones says that after an Elvis concert he attended in 1977, he was given the cup by a security guard. For decades he preserved the liquid in a sealed glass vial, but after seeing a grilled cheese sandwich ostensibly bearing an image of the Virgin Mary garner $28,000 on eBay, he decided to part with the holy Elvis water. Jones was so pleased with the financial results that he has put the actual chalice--which takes the form of a plastic-foam cup--on offer. Top bidders will...
...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, England: "Theologically, this is the one thing that people will go to the stake for. If they defend the historicity of anything in the Christmas stories, they will defend this...
Such irresolution irks other Christians, who see Luke's line that "Mary kept all these things, pondering them in her heart," as a sign that she simply delayed telling people, and who must fight claims, some 2,000 years old, that the 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...
...Testament scholars have delved deeper into the pagan faiths that competed with early Christianity for followers, Mary's virginity has been challenged from the opposite direction--not as an impossible novelty but as a theme borrowed from the 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...
...singer Kylie Minogue hovers angelically, Hugh Grant and Samuel L. Jackson appear as shepherds while Tony Blair, George W. Bush and Prince Philip portray wise men in the display, which will stay up until January. The Vatican has called the scene blasphemous. And with Posh as the Virgin, the church may have a point...