Dylan's Question

Divine Nature

Today’s entry is taken from a recent question from Dylan. Here are some of the questions he was grappling with, and they provide an excellent foundation for a great discussion on the human and Divine nature of our Lord and Savior.

Jesus, being fully man in addition to being fully God, would have had a full set of human genes. Every normal set of human genes has paired alleles from the father and the mother, except in the Y chromosome. Where did Jesus get his "father" alleles? If God created a sperm cell with a Y chromosome and alleles untainted with Adamic behavioral traits or original sin wouldn't that mean Jesus wasn't a descendant of Adam but, only of Eve considering he would only be inheriting Mary's mitochondrial DNA and the non-Adamic Y chromosome created in that instance? How would this relate with that in Biblical times descent was usually only traced paternally through the father (e.g. tribal affiliation transferred from father to child)? Could you please help me understand this?

In answering his questions, we will see that one of the best ways to get a better understanding of the dual nature of Jesus – that he was at the same time man and God – is by thinking about how he actually came to be. That is the essence of Dylan’s question. Being fully human, Jesus had normal appearing human chromosomes - so a paired set of 22 autosomes and an X and Y (note that Dylan refers to “alleles” in his question. Alleles are forms of genes that are contained on chromosomes). Anything else wouldn't make sense when one considers that he was fully human. However, in that truth lays the full realization of God's endless power and the miracle of his conception. In order for a human being to form, one set of chromosomes come from the father and one from the mother. In Jesus’ case, the father’s chromosomes were chromosomes that were miraculously placed inside of Mary by THE Father. Jesus could not have started to develop as a fetus until the chromosomes from Mary and those from God joined together and formed Jesus, which then would have lead to him developing as any human fetus would have developed over 9 months.

The only way to fully comprehend the miracle of Jesus' conception is to first completely disregard the "usual biological concepts of reproduction" that Dylan mentioned because none of them apply. That’s because God miraculously created a perfect set of 22 unpaired autosomes and a Y chromosome and placed them directly in contact with the egg or inside the egg where the two sets of chromosomes fused and made Jesus the zygote. Whether he packaged the chromosomes in a sperm or simply placed the chromosomes into the egg, I don't know, and really isn't important. The important concept here is that GOD was the source of the father's portion of Jesus' DNA, which is entirely consistent with the Biblical description of God being the Father. If He is the Father, of course he is the direct source of the Son's genetic material.

Descended from Adam

As for Jesus being directly descended from Adam, he is because God was also the Father ofAdam and, when He formed Adam from the dust of the earth, He would have had to have created Adam’s full, entirely human set of chromosomes just as He created Jesus' chromosomes- through miraculous genesis of DNA. So Adam and Jesus share the same miraculous creation of their genetic material from the same source - God the Father. For all I know, God used the exact same "male half" of chromosomes for Adam as he did for Jesus (in the beginning Adam was perfect just as Jesus was) and as such they would have been, genetically speaking, as closely related as brothers as they could have shared 50% of their genomes! (That's just a hypothetical). The point is that God the Father was the source of the male part of Jesus’ DNA, which, when thought about, allows us to understand a little bit better just how miraculous His conception really was. Luke 1:35: The angel answered, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God."

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Until next time!
Science Shepherd