God's Child(ren)?

[Loki_999]

Wow, using one book of fairy tales to counter another, how productive.

Well your comments seem to be getting more & more productive as time goes by. Must be your superior intelect.

Sorry, but that was quite funny.

If Jesus was supposed to be born of a virgin, why does he even [i]have[\i] a genealogy? Joseph wasn't his biological father, so why would he have a bloodline?

Still his mother's side. But as others have explained, the early Christians were desperate to show a genealogical link between their messiah and David, otherwise they would have not got many converts and the OT says he would be of the line of David. Still, the whole virgin birth story was probably invented by Mary to cover up the fact that she was shagging the milkman while Joseph was at work. Joseph: "You're pregnant!" Mary (thinking quickly): "Yes, it was God who did it!" In those days the penalty for a women getting pregnant to a man other than her husband was I understand a little more harsh than a slap on the wrist.

The angels were apparently considered sons of God but they were created while Jesus alsways existed.

Oh dear, again with this crap. We had this not long ago. Where in the OT does it show that Jesus already existed. Don't give me that crap from Genesis which does not say anything about Jesus, and don't quote the NT because that is just blatant reconning by the early Christians.

Uh...that's MY book...and yeah...it has been trashed.

Nope. Try again.

Oh, this is productive.

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Now for my take on the whole business.

The early OT, especially the Genesis and Exodus, was based on earlier religions. Sorry Christians, but your religion was based on Judiasm and the early Hebrew religion was based off older religions, where Yahweh was but a minor god in a large pantheon comprising something like 50 demi-gods (the sons of Ur). Later the evolving Jewish religion associated Yahweh with Ur and effectively replaced him.

In the older religions we had large pantheons similar to most of the older religions and as usual these gods and demi-gods had children of their own, in many religions by mating with mortals. Hence we have a possibility for the "sons of god(s)" story in the early books and the stories of angels. Angels (or servants of the gods) are also common features in most mythologies.

As the OT books were written they introduced the concept of a messiah who would be the son of god (Yahweh by now, having evolved from the earlier demi-god and Elohim). After the death of Jesus (either as an actual person or a collection of stories about some preacher or preachers that became the story of Jesus) some of the early groups of Christianity wanted not only to make the Jesus figure the messiah, but also the son of Yahweh. So, they promoted him to being the son of God and accepting the books where this view was promoted and dismissing those that presented him as a mortal messiah as being heretical. There were groups of Christians who did not take this view, but I would presume the group who were saying "our messiah is the son of God" got better reviews and ratings than those who were saying "our messiah is a mortal". Hence this laid the foundations for the modern version of Christianity.

What we cannot say for sure is how the early Christians interpreted the whole "sons of God" issue, especially as there are translation issues and cultural issues. For those of you who know more than one language you will know that in translating from one language to another quite often things seem strange and when you add in cultural idioms and set phrases things become even more twisted. What the early oral tellers of the tale that became Genisis meant by "sons of god" could have meant something quite different from what the translators wrote when they set it down, and then later what the newer versions became when it ended up in English as "sons of God".