************************************** (Russ, earlier) This morning's paper carried a story about an article in *Nature* concerning the Y chromosome, a follow-up on work reported last May.
Analysis of this chromosome indicates that all modern men are descendants of one male who lived about 190,000 years ago. I assume "modern" includes the last several thousand years.
Here is my question: Did Jesus possess this chromosome?
Russ
P.S. Yes, the answer to this question has consequences. *************************************** (Dave Probert answered)
Perhaps this is a trick question, but other than speculation, what tools are we supposed to use to detemine the answer? Analysis of the blood on the Shroud of Turin? Or do you want a purely theological argument?
My suggestion would be that we cannot know. Assuming immaculate conception and that Jesus was male and fully human, the Spirit of God must have crafted the male contribution to His DNA (or perhaps Jesus' entire DNA). What basis would we have to draw any conclusions about the content of the DNA? We don't even know what Jesus specifically looked like.
> P.S. Yes, the answer to this question has consequences.
But only if we could *know* the answer. *************************************** (Denis Lamoureux answered)
My answer would be no. Jesus was indeed fully man (therefore I am assuming He had a full genetic program [thus an XY] and was not haploid) I am also assuming that the X came from His mother, the Y was miraculously provided. *************************************** (Russ, now)
In the following, I am assuming that the reported research holds up.
As I see it, a person might give one of three answers to my question-- yes, no, I don't know. I'll take up these three in reverse order:
1. "I don't know." This answer represents no more than a statement of the limitation on what one knows. The actual state of affairs corresponds to "yes" or "no." So it's ontology, not epistemology, that is the issue. After all, we do assume certain things about Jesus's body even though we have no biblical statements to prove our assumptions and the science of Jesus's day had no way of deciding the issue. Thus, we assume his blood circulated, that his body contained DNA, and so forth.
2. "No." The doctrine that Jesus is fully human and like us except for sin surely ought not to be limited to the kind of test that could be applied in Jesus's day. That doctrine ought to hold up if he were among us today. So, if Jesus's Y chromosome could be shown to be different from that of other men, we would have scientific proof that he did not descend from any contemporary man. Scientific proof of the Virgin Birth? Scientific proof of divinity? Scientific proof that Jesus was just a little different from other human beings, that is, different in a little more than the matter of sin?
3. "Yes." Then his Y chromosome was miraculously created to *look like* the Y chromosome of a being from whom he was not descended. If that is so, then what is the objection against holding that the first human beings possessed genetic material which *looked like* the genetic material of beings from whom they were not descended?
In Jesus Christ,
Russ
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