Was Jesus "Sired" via Artificial Insemination?

[_Jason Bourne]

You guys and your dirty little minds are disgusting. You will have to answer to Heavenly Father on this. You should be more respectful about things you simply have not a hope of understanding.

Well Charity, Brigham Young taught God has sex with Mary, one of his wives, in order to make baby Jesus. Why are you telling us we have dirty minds?

Oh and by the way, your comments an so many here having no hope of understanding is really tiresome. You are not really vested with some special understanding or knowledge of these things. In fact the because you think you really are gets in the way fo you seeing things for what they really are.

[Physics Guy]

thus insinuating (probably on accident) that HF may have masturbated.

I don't see any such insinuation. He also wrote:

Maybe I'm way out there in left field, and we've completely caught up to the Divine Mind on this one.

He is not suggesting any particular procedure, A.I., AF, or physical sex.

He mentioned both artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization as alternatives to physical sex. Re-read the post if you don't believe me. CKSalmon asked DCP how this "literal fathering" could have taken place if not via sex. The post I quoted in my OP is DCP's reply. Clearly, when read in-context, we are meant to understand that (from DCP's perspective) AF is a preferable, viable alternative to the "physical sex" theory which so many apologists and TBMs seem to find distasteful.

[_Mister Scratch]

Does the Good Professor want us to assume that Heavenly Father scrubbed up and wielded a syringe full of his own Holy Seed prior to impregnating Mary? (Further, doesn't this suggest that HF had to have masturbated beforehand? Truly, the implications here are utterly staggering....)

You think HF would really deliver the goods? He's a busy guy...I'm betting he'd delegate distribution of his "little soldiers" to an Angel or a stork or something.

Hey, Bond---

I recall that BY preached that HF "came down in his bodily tabernacle and begat Jesus." So, if we are to follow DCP's suggestion to its logical conclusion, then I guess we'd have to assume that he "scrubbed up," or "delivered the goods," as you put it.

[_Bond...James Bond]

Does the Good Professor want us to assume that Heavenly Father scrubbed up and wielded a syringe full of his own Holy Seed prior to impregnating Mary? (Further, doesn't this suggest that HF had to have masturbated beforehand? Truly, the implications here are utterly staggering....)

You think HF would really deliver the goods? He's a busy guy...I'm betting he'd delegate distribution of his "little soldiers" to an Angel or a stork or something.

Hey, Bond---

I recall that BY preached that HF "came down in his bodily tabernacle and begat Jesus." So, if we are to follow DCP's suggestion to its logical conclusion, then I guess we'd have to assume that he "scrubbed up," or "delivered the goods," as you put it.

Puts a whole new spin on the euphemism "choking the bishop".

[_asbestosman]

Scratchie, modern biology has created sperm cells from stem cells. They have also created stem cells from adult cells (in mice).

Personally I think the speculation about how Jesus was conceived is silly. Mormons agree to the following facts: Mary was not married when she got pregnant and she had not "known" (in the biblical sense) a mortal man when she conceived and bare Jesus. This miraculous birth allowed Jesus to be fully God and fully man. The rest of the question about how precisely Jesus was conceived seems unnecessary and counter-productive. I hold as a possibility that God could fertilize eggs without even using sperm. However, I don't care how he did it. He's God and it's really none of my business. I figure that such would be a very private matter in addition to being sacred (not all sacred things are private).

[_Ray A]

Well Charity, Brigham Young taught God has sex with Mary, one of his wives, in order to make baby Jesus.

Brigham Young taught some things that were not scriptural. The JD amply demonstrates this. If you want to know what Mormon doctrine is, then your first resource should be the scriptures - not books like MD, or even the JD. Speculation is the cause of misunderstanding. There is nothing in the scriptures which explain or detail how Jesus was conceived. If the leaders had followed the Book of Mormon in the first place (as McConkie later reflected on), the black ban would never have occurred.

[Guest]

Hey, Bond---

I recall that BY preached that HF "came down in his bodily tabernacle and begat Jesus." So, if we are to follow DCP's suggestion to its logical conclusion, then I guess we'd have to assume that he "scrubbed up," or "delivered the goods," as you put it.

What I think this discussion really points out is that early LDS leaders thought they were endowing God with special extra powers by imagining him with a "glorified body," and to them that is something greater than the rest of Christianity. Really, non-LDS theology would see God as being so much greater than that, that to simply say "glorified body" would be limiting.

DCP is at least on the right track when he suggests that for theology to embrace Jesus Christ as "literally" the son of the Father, or only begotten, that it might not mean exactly what early Mormon leadership speculated. However, again, to non-LDS, even suggesting things like artificial insemination would be limiting. Those who believe in God outside the spectrum of Mormonism would see a God whose ability to create would be limitless, and reduced to our understanding would be limiting, whether it involves artificial insemination, splitting an ovum, cloning, or any other means by which humans understand the act of creation.

It really seems to be an attempt on the part of early LDS leadership to write new theology and distinguish itself from other "Christian" beliefs; in this case, it apparently failed, since there is no official doctrine or revelation claimed on the subject.

[_Mister Scratch]

Scratchie, modern biology has created sperm cells from stem cells. They have also created stem cells from adult cells (in mice).

Personally I think the speculation about how Jesus was conceived is silly.

I don't find it "silly" at all. I think it is a significant theological question, as did, apparently, BY and ETB.

Mormons agree to the following facts: Mary was not married when she got pregnant and she had not "known" (in the biblical sense) a mortal man when she conceived and bare Jesus.

Well, HF is hardly a "mortal man."

This miraculous birth allowed Jesus to be fully God and fully man. The rest of the question about how precisely Jesus was conceived seems unnecessary and counter-productive. I hold as a possibility that God could fertilize eggs without even using sperm. However, I don't care how he did it.

Obviously, you care enough about it to try and pooh-pooh away the notion that physical intercourse took place. Why not accept the Brethren's earlier pronouncements on this subject? Why opt for the "Gee, we don't know! It was just magic!" theory?

He's God and it's really none of my business. I figure that such would be a very private matter in addition to being sacred (not all sacred things are private).

It wasn't so "private" that BY and ETB felt too embarrassed to discuss it.

[Doctor Steuss]

You guys and your dirty little minds are disgusting. You will have to answer to Heavenly Father on this. You should be more respectful about things you simply have not a hope of understanding.

Look guys, a Puritan!



DCP should have said artificial insemination is just an example of a means besides sexual intercourse for God to impregnate Mary to create the embrionic Savior of the world, to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man(kind). There are other ways, too. They might have been lifted up into a flying saucer where God and Mary took a warm bath in cell culture media, and God could have fallen asleep and had a spiritually sanctionable wet dream, and then the one perfect sperm could have swam around until it homed in on Mary's vulva.

Asbestosman had a better answer. Now we know there are ways to make sperm without actual gonads being involved, so who really knows what happened at Jesus' conception. If you believe in the basic Virgin Mary story then anything is possible. Sperm could have been made of Mary's own cells, with a "God-perfect" DNA sequence reconfigured from Mary's own DNA. To keep saying Jesus was still 50% God you just have to adjust the definition of "God" -- just the kind of thing the scholars will be hammering out at the upcoming FARMS symposium.

[_Trevor]

You guys and your dirty little minds are disgusting. You will have to answer to Heavenly Father on this. You should be more respectful about things you simply have not a hope of understanding.

Hey, there! I took basic mythology in college. I think I know what's up with this stuff.