After about 4 minutes of research, I have determined that the source of confusion here is in the term “Immaculate Conception” (notice the capitalization).
The term doesn’t refer to a general phenomenon, rather a specific event. The belief is that both Mary and Yoshke were conceived without a father, but the term “Immaculate Conception” refers specifically to the conception of Yoshke
I feel funny discussing Christian theology, but immaculate conception has nothing to do with being “born without a father” that is a separate belief.
Immaculate Conception refers to the Conception of MARY not yoshke. (Though many Christians misunderstand this too)
No reason to do to much googling. Wikipedia imagines well.
OK according to Wikepedia Immaculate Conception refers to the Conception of MARY and Virgin Birth refers to yoshke. I am sorry for using the wrong term for JC
okay, I looked it up in Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary. You are right – it refers to M & not to JC. That was major news to me! (I was going to write “chiddush”, but that didn’t seem like the appropriate word to use). And here, I was always thought I was educated.
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I’m also not sure what the difference is – it sounds to me like immaculate conception and virgin birth mean the same thing – they just use one to refer to one and the other to refer to the other.
The only difference is that Christians refer the birth of Miriam the mother as the Immaculate Conception while they call the birth of JC the son to be the Virgin Birth. Both of them didn’t have fathers.
Abba, that was my impression. So it’s really a technical/semantics issue and does not change anything you said. It was certainly no different than someone making a spelling or grammatical error – both of which are very common in the CR.
“4 minutes of research,” “according to Wikipedia,” “Webster’s
Unabridged Dictionary…” And you all, except Ubiquitin, still
think they believe Yoshke’s mother didn’t have a father either.
To quote Wikipedia, “the Catholic Church teaches that Mary was conceived by normal biological means,” in other words, from a man.
The term means that the Christian theological concept of “original sin”
did not apply to her – from conception, she was kept “immaculate” of it.