Contents Updated: Saturday, April 24, 1999
The ancients felt that an offspring of a god, a son of god, should have a purer maternal origin than mortals, and this was evidence of his supernatural or divine origin. A man, even if he were thought of as a god, had to be born of a woman, and this could not be concealed, but paternal parentage is never so obvious, being known only to the mother, if anyone.
The purity of his maternal parentage required the saviour to be born of a pure woman—a maiden. Hence, saviours often were born of virgins. Besides normal conception ordinary birth was also too ignominious for a god. It had to be spotless, or immaculate. Jesus Christ in an apocryphal gospel, like Krishna was born through his mother's side, rather than the impure route. Though not in the canonical works, some of the Christian fathers endorsed this story.
Not only saviours but famous men, like Plato, Pythagoras, Alexander, Augustus and others, were thought to have been born miraculously. Plato was born of Paretonia, begotten of Apollo, not Ariston, his father, according to one authority.
The doctrine of immaculate conception is ancient but the manner of the holy conception was different in different countries. Zoroaster was immaculately conceived by a ray from the Divine Reason or Word and this was adopted by medieval artists.
But the idea of being overshadowed by the Holy Ghost seems to have been most current. God, the father of a god was believed to overshadow the mother of a god, to impregnate her. In 550 BC, Pythais, the mother of Pythagoras, conceived by a spectre or ghost of the god Apollo, the sun god. Does the ghost of the sun god differ in principle from the Christian Holy Ghost?.
Juno of Rome grew pregnant at the touch of a flower to give birth to Mars. No impregnation could have been purer. So the most immaculate conception of all was that of the god of War! If it sounds absurd, how is it more senseless than conception by a ghost? Botany has shown that, at least, a flower can fertilise other flowers but no science has yet investigated the virility of ghosts.
The Greek Juno, Hera, was immaculately impregnated by the wind to give birth to Vulcan. Here is a close parallel indeed for the word habitually translated as spirit or ghost in the scriptures and continued into the Greek of the New Testament really means breath or wind! So literally the virgin Mary was impregnated by the wind just like Hera. The author of the Perennial Calendar tells us the miraculous conception of Juno Jugulis, the blessed virgin queen of heaven, fell on the second of February, the day of the early Christian festival of the date of the conception of the ever Blessed Virgin Mary.
A Chinese sect worshiped a saviour known as Xaca, who was conceived of his mother, Maia, by a white elephant, which she saw in her sleep, and for greater purity, she brought him forth from one of her sides. In Chinese popular religion, the virgin mother Shing-Mon gave birth to the God Yu from a conception by a water lily. The procreative refinement evinced here is equal to that of Juno. In another story Yu was conceived of a star!
Tamerlane's mother conceived having had sexual intercourse with the god of Day. The mother of Ghengis Khan, being too modest to claim that she was the mother of the son of God, said only that he was the son of the sun.
Osiris of Egypt and even Julius Caesar were immaculately conceived—the latter being the son of the beautiful virgin Cronis Celestine, and begotten by the Father of all Gods, Jupiter. His heir and nephew, Augustus Caesar, was curiously his half brother, as another son of Jove, by whose divine lust he was immaculately conceived in the temple of Apollo.
Both Buddha and Krishna, of India, were immaculately conceived. The mother of Krishna was overshadowed by the supreme God, Brahma, and the Holy Ghost was Naraan. Krishna's mother had given birth seven times previously but remained a virgin. Philostratus, a disciple of Apollonius of Cappadocia, who was contemporary with Jesus Christ , tells that Damis, the mother of Apollonius, gave birth to this god and rival saviour of Jesus Christ, by being overshadowed by the god, Proteus.
Several of the virgin mothers of gods and great men go ten months between conception and delivery.
Plainly the tradition of the miraculous conceptions of gods, sons of gods, saviours and messiahs was prevalent in the world from ancient times on, beginning long before the mother of Jesus was overshadowed by the ghostly representative of the Most High. The belief in immaculate conception extended to every nation in the world. Grote, referring to Greece, declares that the furtive pregnancy of young women, often by a god, is one of the most frequently recurring incidents in the legendary narratives of the country.
Both the prevalence and antiquity of the idea of immaculate conception among the heathen is conceded by earlier Christian writers in their arguments from precedents of the divinity of Christ. St. Augustine, Origen and Lactanius tried to persuade us of the immaculate virginity of the mother of Jesus Christ by the example of similar pagan events. The doctrine of immaculate conception is, then, conceded as long anterior to Christ and therefore not unique in his case.
As soon as the God-begotten saviours were born into the world they were adored by shepherds from near by. In some cases they were also visited by wise men, or Magi, as the Persians and Brahmins called them, from far away. Sometimes the visitors were from even farther away, even angels leaving their heavenly ranks to wing their way to this rude tenement to adore its new born saviour.
Angels appeared to Confucius who was born in 598 BC as well as Christ. In both cases Magi also assembled to present their offerings to the infant God. Magi is used in the Apocryphal Gospels to designate the wise men who visited Christ at birth. Magi, Magic and Magician are derivations from the same root, all suggesting a wisdom correlated to the gods.
When Confucius was born five wise men from afar came to the house, celestial music was heard in the skies, and angels attended the scene. In Matthew the circumstances are the same (Mt 2:1). The only difference in the popular imagination is the number of wise men. Matthew does not say but popularly it is three. The Persian story also gives the number of Magi who visited the young saviour of that country as five.
Luke speaks of a multitude of the heavenly host praising God (Lk 2:13). Popularly the heavenly host was singing its praises so we have another way of saying that celestial music was heard. How complete the parallel!
It goes further. Confucius, like Christ, had twelve chosen disciples. He was descended from a royal house of princes, as Christ from the royal house of David, and like Christ was born poor. He had a disagreement with a monarch and retired for a long period from society into religious contemplative seclusion. He taught the same Golden Rule of doing to others as we desire them to do toward us, and other moral maxims equal in importance to anything in the Christian scriptures.
When Krishna, the eighth avatar of India (1200 BC), was born he was inundated in flowers by angels (gods). Pipes and drums were played in the heavens, trees blossomed and pools were filled with clear water. The room was illuminated by his light, and the countenance of his father and mother shone with its brightness and glory. They had an image of him as a king and, realising he was the preserver of the world, they began to worship him, but like the virgin Mary quickly forgot all this and soon regarded him as an ordinary infant!
In Luke's gospel an angel is reported to have saluted his mother (Lk 1:28):
Hail, thou that art highly favoured; the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women.
And in the next chapter the angel joins with the heavenly host in praising God. The same is found in the Ramayana, when Brahma and Siva, with a host of attending spirits, came to the mother of the eighth saviour and sang,
In thy delivery, O favoured among women, all nations shall have cause to exult.
The ninth avatar of India, Buddha (600 BC), is similar. On a silver plate in a cave in India is an inscription stating that a saint in the woods, at the time of the advent of Buddha, learned by inspiration that an avatar had appeared in the house of Rajah of Lailas. He flew through the air to the place beheld the new-born saviour. He declared him to be the great avatar destined to establish a new religion.
When the fame of Pythagoras (600 BC) reached Miletas and neighboring cities, their wise men came to visit him. In the Anacalypsis Magi came from the East to offer gifts at Socrates' birth, bringing gold, frankincense and myrrh, the very same offerings given to Christ. Gold, frankincense and myrrh were traditionally offered as gifts to the sun in Persia more than three thousand years ago; and in Arabia about the same time. Zoroaster of Persia (1,000 BC), says he also was visited by Magi at his earthly advent.
It seems odd that the divine Father chose to reveal the birth of his son, Jesus, to heathen idolaters hundreds of miles distant in Persia. And why should a skill in astrology give them the privilege of seeing the world saviour at birth while people of God's own election—His Chosen—were denied the honour? Indeed they were denounced as fools and a vipers, despite their having put up with countless troubles at His behest, in attempting to stave off the pressures of mightier surrounding nations with their heathen gods in favour of Him, Yehouah, the ungrateful god.
There are so many incongruities in divine revelation that it becomes knavery to dismiss them as god's mysterious ways, as Christians and Jews do. Yet both agree that God gave us reason. So why doesn't He expect us to use it when He chooses to reveal something to us? Why are Christians so sure that they have not been hoodwinked by the Devil posing as God? As a supernatural theory of the events of the world, it makes more sense than the Christian idea.