JESUS BORN “UNDER THE LAW?”

Christianity-Revealed

What are the implications in the New Testament that Paul claimed Jesus was "born under law?" There are two uses of this phrase.

In Galatians 4:4 Paul claims that "God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under law."

What did Paul mean by this statement? One understanding is; nothing, except Jesus was born according to the laws of nature.

Nature's law is the normal process of child bearing. A human man plants his sperm in a woman; if it fertilizes the woman’s seed, a baby is produced. If Paul meant 'nature's law' that simply was normal conception and childbirth.

Or did Paul mean another way of producing a baby “under the law?”

Matthew claims Jesus was sired by the Holy Ghost. However, if this was a conception without a human man's assistance, then there is still the problem that Jesus was not born in accordance with 'the law' as Paul wrote.

Jesus birth, according to the New Testament, violates the laws of the Hebrew bible and therefore constitutes adultery. Mary, according to the New Testament, did not conceive by her betrothed, Joseph. Therefore, she committed adultery "under the law" (Deuteronomy 22:23-24). As a result, the Christian claim that Jesus was born of a woman engaged to a man ― yet had God as his father ― is an adulterous union.

The Hebrew God's (Hashem, Adonai etc) law does not allow for god ― the Invisible Man in the Sky ― to seduce a maiden, even through the medium of some sort of Holy Spirit. What would be the worth of a moral code that is violated by god himself? The seduction of a female by a god fits, at best, in the realm of mythology. Virgin women mating with mythological gods produced demigods.

Another twist! Mormons, the bastard child of mainstream Christianity, teaches that their god ― who was actually a man at one time and now lives near the planet Kolob ― came to earth and physically did the nasty with virgin Mary - popped her cherry! This is clearly stated by Ezra Taft Benson (1899-1994), a Mormon church president, believed by Mormon faithful to be a prophet, seer and revelator:

"The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints proclaims that Jesus Christ is the Son of God in the most literal sense. ... sired by that same Holy Being we worship as God, our Eternal Father. Jesus was not the son of Joseph, nor was He begotten by the Holy Ghost" (The Teachings of Ezra Taft Benson, p. 7; cf. Come unto Christ, p. 4). .. He is the Son of God, literally, actually, as men are the sons of mortal parents.." (What the Mormons Think of Christ, a pamphlet published by the Mormon Church, p. 44)

Bruce R. McConkie, one of Mormon's 12 apostles until his death in 1985 wrote about this:

"Christ was begotten by an Immortal Father in the same way that mortal men are begotten by mortal fathers (Mormon Doctrine:, pp. 546-547).

God the Father is a perfected, glorified, holy Man, an immortal Personage. And Christ was born into the world as the literal Son of this Holy Being; he was born in the same personal, real, and literal sense that any mortal son is born to a mortal father. There is nothing figurative about his paternity; he was begotten, conceived and born in the normal and natural course of events... (Mormon Doctrine:, p. 742).

On another note, some scholars simply say that “born under the law,” when used by Paul, means Jesus was subject to and required to keep the Commandments in the Hebrew bible. You decide.

Any way you look at it Christianity, in creating this work of fiction, left a heavy burden on its apologetics' hands, just trying to cover this malarkey.

"O what a tangled web we weave, When first we practise to deceive!" - Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), Marmion, A Tale of Flodden Field (1808), xvii

RETURN