Wednesday, December 13, 2023

James F. McGrath on the Biological Makeup of Jesus and His Having a Y Chromosome

  

I have sometimes heard people say that it is crucial to accept the virginal conception either to distance Jesus from sin or to safeguard his divinity. The New Testament passages about Jesus's miraculous conception are concerned with neither of these things. Matthew and Luke do not depict Jesus as the incarnation of a preexistent divine person, while the Gospel of John does so without any mention of a miraculous conception. No gospel connects Jesus's miraculous conception with avoidance of the taint of original sin. Often contemporary theological views, at least in their popular form, are a hodgepodge of snippets from the New Testament mixed with modern ideas that the ancient authors of these works did not have in mind. Hence the title of this chapter ["Y Chromosome?"]. If Jesus had no human father, did he have a Y chromosome. If so, was it borrowed from Joseph, miraculously created, or something else? If Jesus only inherited chromosomes from his mother, he would be biologically female, having two X chromosomes. If we ask about Jesus's chromosomes, we are asking questions the New Testament authors do not answer. Yet as people who know about chromosomes, we cannot completely set aside that knowledge when we read ancient texts. (James F. McGrath, The A to Z of the New Testament: Things Experts Know That Everyone Else Should Too [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2023], location 3871-2804 of 3996, comment in square brackets added for clarification)