intercultural misunderstanding creates interesting theology

Intercultural miscommunication is a force that should not be underestimated.  We find a great deal of that occurring in text.  As we have seen, the masculine Hebrew noun mishkav was translated into the feminine noun κοιταν (sorry about the occasional transliterations:  my Word has fits of autocorrecting text that it refuses to rectify).  Translating a masculine noun into a feminine one makes sense if the feminine noun is the only possible word that can be used to approximage the masculine original.  It can cause confusion, however, if the receiving audience doesn’t know or doesn’t realize  that  the translation was made because it was the only option.  It is likely that in that event, the receiving audience will assume there was an agenda to the choice of word used in the translation.

Things are complicated when a word is translated to its approximate in another language, but that approximate translation has a completely different cultural connotation.  The word navi in Hebrew was translated into the word prophetes in Greek.  Navi means “prophet,” but the cultural connotation for “prophet” in Hebrew is something closer to “socio-political commentator.”  Prophetes, in Greek, means “oracle” in the sense of the Oracle of Delphi—one who sees the future.

We find in the Navi Isaiah, “a virgin will conceive and bear a child.”  In its Hebrew context of socio-political commentary, the ancient Judeans read this as “Mrs Hezekaih [the wife of the king of the navi’s era] is going to have a baby.”

Greco-Romans read the same text in Greek, because it appears in the LXX in Prophetoi, and decided it meant that a young woman who had never had sex was going to give birth to a male child. Because the text did not mention the paternity of the child, Greco-Romans inferred that the child was born without a known father.

It is possible for a woman to self-fertilize.  The event is known as parthenogenesis.

However, a parthenogenic birth presents something of a difficulty, because while parthenogenesis has been documented in a few rare instances, due to the absence of male participation and the accompanying Y chromosome, a male offspring would be impossible. 

The early church did not decide that the young woman who had never had sex suddenly was impregnated by an unknown male.  Nor did it decide that the young woman who had never had sex spontaneously self-impregnated.  

The early church decided that God came down and impregnated a human female.  This presented problems for the early church, though.

We can infer from Tertullian that intercultural tensions were an additional issue in the developing church.  Tertullian (ca 160-220 CE) in his “Apologeticum” noted that both pagan theology and church doctrine say that God impregnated a human female and created Divine progeny.  The difference, according to Tertullian, is that the pagans’ gods are really demons. 

The claim that a male God impregnated a human female and produced  a male offspring, is not particularly miraculous: a male God would be able to produce a male offspring. 

Tertullian's argument makes sense only by the elevation of the early Christian cult and the consequent demonization of all other competing cults.  Even so, it indicates that the early Christian cult was making use of pre-existing narratives to support its origin story.

If, on the other hand, we were to accept that the supposed maleness of God derives only from the fact that the unpronounceable Divine Name is prefixed by י because י is the prefix used for the third person plural in a group that is either exclusively male or inclusive of both males and females, then it is logically possible for some of the Gods to be female, and the plural prefix י  is used because of the plurality of Gods.  If we were to suppose then that one of those Gods who was female came down and impregnated a human female and that the human female produced a male, that would indeed be Divine intervention.  

Not only that, but it would indicate clearly that such God does not prohibit homosexuality.

QED.

Read that again.  It not only makes sense, it is some very cool theology.

Regrettably, even those Christian communities that like to perceive themselves as “radical” would not consider this possibility.