Is mother Mary without sin?
No. But ritually speaking, she represents אדם הראשון (Adam prior to the first sin) since prior to Genesis 2:21 ----where a new gender was formed according to the Hebrew phrase ויסגר בשר ("closed up the flesh," hint:
penile-raphe) ----Adam was able to give birth him or herself rather than through the original sin of phallic-sex. Mary is a latter-day
ha-adam.
Mary only ritually represents the first Adam אדם הראשון since she was herself conceived by means of the
evil smelling drop of semen (Avot 3:1) making her a born-sinner like everyone else save one, her son, who is the saver, or savior.
So how can the daughter of sinners (Mary is herself a born-sinner) birth someone without spot or blemish (who's abel to be a
korban קרבן offering to God) if she is herself a sinner? . . . Glad you asked.
The Messiah would need to be born of a virgin pregnancy to escape the contamination of Adam’s sin nature passed down through the male seed in procreation (1 Cor. 15:22; Rom. 5:12). Although the sin nature is passed down through the man’s seed (sperm) in copulation (thus the figurative removal of the phallus to block the spread to the Messiah), one could rightly ask why the female reproductive cell wouldn’t carry sin nature, since it (sin nature) contaminates the entire cell structure of the body? In other words, how does cutting off the sperm guarantee that a virgin birth will provide a body uncontaminated by the sin nature? In R.B. Thieme, Jr.’s book, The Integrity of God, he describes how the seed of the woman is cleansed from the stain of Adam’s sin, and is therefore free (if fertilized apart from Adam’s progeny) to give birth to a Child uncontaminated by Adam’s sin nature.
Human cells are repaired and replenished though a process called mitosis. In mitosis one cell splits and becomes two identical cells; but a more specialized (two-stage) process called meiosis produces the reproductive cells. After the process of meiosis, each cell contains only half the original forty-six chromosomes - twenty-three chromosomes. In this way the child gets his characteristics from both parents as the twenty-three chromosomes of the two reproductive cells combine to reconstitute the needed forty-six chromosomes.
If the male and female process of meiosis were identical - the one immature female reproductive cell would produce four mature reproductive cells. But the female reproductive cell undergoes a unique additional process called oogenesis. Each immature male reproductive cell creates four mature reproductive cells (sperm). But, because of oogenesis, the immature female reproductive cell produces only one mature reproductive cell (ovum). During both stages of meiosis, the female reproductive cell throws off (through oogenesis) unneeded cell matter including the contamination of `original sin,’ into small non-functional polar bodies that soon disintegrate. All contamination related to Adam’s sin nature passes over into the polar bodies leaving one large uncontaminated ovum ready to be re-contaminated by the sperm. It’s the injection of the twenty-three contaminated male chromosomes that re-contaminates the ovum – causing all non-virgin pregnancies to deliver up a contaminated biological body.
It’s an amazing fact that every biologist considers `meiosis' one of the most paradoxical activities in the biological process. There seems to be no explanation whatsoever for the `cross-over’ of the chromosomes into the polar bodies that disintegrate. The cost of meiosis has even worried many of the top evolutionary biologists. To quote Richard Dawkins: `Two of our foremost modern evolutionists have failed to explain to their own satisfaction the advantage of this extraordinary procedure [meiosis] for the individual organism. . .’
ii Dawkins continues:
When we try to solve the paradox of the cost of meiosis, perhaps instead of worrying about how sex helps the organism we should search for replicating `engineers’ of meiosis, intracellular agents which actually cause meiosis to happen . . . Although at present it is just a joke to picture chromosomes being dragged kicking and screaming into the second anaphase by ruthlessly selfish centrioles or other miniature genetic engineers, stranger ideas have become common place in the past. And, after all, orthodox theorizing has so far failed to dent the paradox of the cost of meiosis.
iii
The paradox of meiosis is solved when we realize that meiosis is necessary to undo original sin by producing an ovum uncontaminated by the very disease infecting every cell of the body. Meiosis is a miracle indeed, and thus Dawkins’ amazement at a picture of genetic engineers (during both anaphases) pulling the contamination of sin nature over from the twenty-three contaminated chromosomes into the twenty-three that are thrown-off through polar body. Dawkins and Maynard Smith concede that there seems to be no explanation (outside Thieme’s teaching) for why this process occurs.
Biologists Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan agree with Dawkins that `meiotic sex’ is a major paradox as far as standard biological reasoning is concerned. In their book, Microcosmos, they dedicate an entire chapter to the “Riddle of [meiotic] Sex.” In chapter 10 they say:
At first—even second—glance, this kind of sex [meiotic] seems a superfluous and unnecessary bother. It has none of the virtues of the free bacterial genetic transfer associated with the world-wide microcosm. In the economic terms that biologists have used to describe it, the `cost’ of this kind of sex—producing special sex cells with half the usual number of chromosomes, finding mates, and timing and performing the act of fertilization—seems all out of proportion to any possible advantage.
iv
Margulis and Sagan state that two parent sex was never maintained by natural selection, and that if evolutionary processes can ever bypass biparental sex—through parthenogenesis (like that in beetles, or cloning of humans, or any other way) while still preserving complex multicellularity—then according to Margulis and Sagan, there is no doubt that meiotic sex will go the way of the dinosaurs. They respond to the claim that meiotic sex persists because it increases variety and newness of offspring, which supposedly allows sexual organisms faster adaptation to changing environments, by stating that there, ` . . . is absolutely no evidence that this is true. When the idea was tested by comparing animals that can reproduce either asexually or sexually, such as rotifers and asexually reproducing lizards, scientists found that as the environment varied, the asexual forms were as common as or even more common than their sexual counterparts.’
v
In John Maynard Smiths latest work, The Origins of Life, he too goes into some detail to suggest (what every biologist knows) that sex itself appears to be inexplicable as far as evolution is concerned. Sex appears to exist for the express purpose of `meiosis’ and yet from a Darwinistic biologists’ perspective, what is the purpose of `meiosis’? Smith says:
To ensure proper distribution of chromosomes, the production of gametes is a complicated process, as anyone familiar with the accounts of meiosis in biology textbooks will be aware. Because of these complications, and the obvious disadvantages associated with them, it is not surprising that the origin and maintenance of sex continues to be a matter of controversy among biologists.
vi
Sexual reproduction is said (in the Scriptures) to have begun at the fall of Adam. Sex is actually an allegory for the rising entropy of the universe. Sex causes the human race to expand (like the universe) as rising entropy (the second law of thermodynamics) brings about the death of the universe. Rising entropy in the human race (which rising entropy is a result of original sin, and sin nature, spread through sex) causes the expansion and rising entropy of the race. The biologist William Clark says in his recent book, Sex and the Origins of Death:
Obligatory death as a result of senescence – natural aging – may not have come into existence for more than a billion years after life first appeared. This form of programmed death seems to have arisen at about the same time that cells began experimenting with sex in connection with reproduction. It may have been the ultimate loss of innocence.
vii
Now don't you wish you'd never asked?
i R.B. Thieme, Jr.,
The Integrity of God, p. 59-63.
ii Richard Dawkins,
The Extended Phenotype, (Oxford University Press, 1982),p. 160.
iii Op. Cit.. p. 161.
iv Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan,
Microcosmos, (University of California Press, 1997), p. 155, 156. See Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan,
Waters of Eden, where, among other things, Rabbi Kaplan says: "
Actually, there is no biological or medical reason why the uteral lining must be expelled and restored each month. There is no reason why the ovum has to `die' only to be replaced by another egg. Most biologists look upon this as an example of unexplained inefficiency in the human reproductive system."
v Op. Cit., p. 163.
vi John Maynard Smith,
The Origins of Life, p. 81.
vii William Clark,
Sex and the Origins of Death, (Oxford University Press, 1996), prologue XI.