Horsefeathers.
So easily is it forgotten that not only did Christ have no earthly father...the Heavenly Father DID supply all that earthly fathers would otherwise (though somehow not sexually) including probably a Y chromosome, or else Jesus was the only person in the world to have ever been born, who was not XX thus female, but not XY thus male, making Him not fully human but some sort of freak instead.
Needing Mary to be "unflawed" is not necessary. We do not inherent guilt of sin from our mothers, per se. We otherwise ARE born with a fallen, sinful nature or propensity. As the Son of God, directly Begotten, Christ received not only the Godly nature of His Father, but what served in stead of Adam's own spiritual legacy, for the "sin nature" is not a thing of the flesh but of spirit.
Sin entered the world by the sin of one man, as Paul wrote in his Epistle to the Romans chapter 5:12-21.
Paul did not write that sin entered through Adam and Eve.
Searching the scripture, we see in Genesis, if we are to there contemplate things in order of occurrence with that order itself revealing anything much, although Adam was in fact instructed to not eat fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, God was addressing Adam directly, with there no mention of Eve.
16 And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat:17 But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.
Taking things in order, Eve was not created until only after Adam had received this instruction.
When Adam himself ate, then as it is written; ...And the eyes of them both were opened.
After the two of them both had eaten, the text there indicates boththeir eyes were opened, suggesting (admittedly remote?) possibility that if Adam himself had not eaten...then Eve's own eyes would not have been opened to the knowledge of good and evil.
Backtracking a bit, in Eve's own conversation with the Serpent, it can be seen that there was additional instruction which she claimed to have been God's own -- but according to text in the chapter just previous, God told Adam to not eat of that tree -- He did not there say "don't even touch it" as Eve related to the serpent that God had allegedly said.
It makes me wonder if Adam had not relayed the message and in discussion between himself and Eve concerning this, somehow the "don't even touch it" was added to the original more limited instruction.
Poor Eve, eh?
What was she supposed to have been aware of lies that `snakes' by their slithering nature make, anyway?
Up until then, herself and Adam both were innocent of the knowledge of such things as evil, and lies.
So she garbled the message a bit, and the snake took immediate advantage of the situation. Eve had just said that if they (herself and Adam) were to eat AND/OR EVEN to touch it -- then God had said not to do either, "lest they die".
The snake said (hissed?) "you shall not surely die".
As the story goes, Eve saw that the fruit was pleasant, touched it (and did not die, hey, the snake was right?) then ate of it and again did not die. No harmful effects were noted at that point...so it seemed like a good idea to offer it to our boy (super-duper grandfather of all) Adam.
Adam went along with it with nary a protest.
THEN --- again, following the order of operations of the text, both of their eyes were open. If one is to assume that Eve's eyes were open at that point, after she herself had eaten, bu before Adam dis so ...by the same freedom to assume to do that in reading between the lines, one can also assume the contrary --- that Eves eyes were not opened to the knowledge of good and evil at that point.
That type of consideration results in getting Eve part-way out of responsibility, and fully out of the way for having sinfully stumbled her own husband --- only IF --- her own eyes after she herself had eaten, and before Adam had done so also the same were OPEN to knowing good and evil. I suggest the text suggest not. Happy news? Eve wasn't such a bad gal? Let's not ultimately blame it all on the womenfolk, due to Eve.
Leaving it to be there needed be only "a man" to serve as sacrifice for the sin -- for all sin. Being born of a virgin Mary who was herself not entirely beyond having the sin nature herself, makes Christ's own sacrifice just that more complete.
Would you like to go over the scriptures where Jesus indicated that He had choices...that He could have done differently had He not decided to surrender "not my own will, but thine" to God, even in the Garden (of Gethsemane)?
If there was no chance of at all of not doing as God desired, then both of them are reduced to automatons of a sort. We know that (or can take it as article of faith) that neither of them were automatons.
Turning back to the first chapters of Genesis;
When God finds out the details, He tells the serpent off, telling that creature of his own eventual defeat which he [the serpent] will suffer, and how it will come about.
AHA. But here again we run across yet another bad Latin translation induced theoligical error, in Gen 3:15, for it is not Mary who shall place her foot on the serpent and crush it;'s head, but is instead the seed of the woman, and in the Hebrew clearly denotes that will be male.
God turns then the woman -- yet there He does not tell her the same as He immediately later tells Adam, in Genesis 3:17-19;
17 And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;18 Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;
19 In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
Can you see? Eve herself, though punished as it were for her own part, doomed to suffer in her own flesh pains of childbirth, and being subject to her husband and her desire to be for him, was not charged directly by God for having directly disobeyed Him, with that consistent with the record that God had not directly told Eve to not eat of that certain tree, with the snake playing his own role in deceiving her, and so on. She was not fully responsible, yet neither herself fully innocent of wrongdoing.
Eve's own wrongdoing limited only to not having believed and adhered to strongly enough, of what God had told Adam, and that same Adam had likely told herself, or else -- would not have God told her as He did Adam. "because you did what I told you not to"?
If this conditions I outline be the case, that would mean Eve heard things second-hand, and then was lied to by the serpent. Do you see the tough spot she was in? She wasn't any more guilty than a child perhaps, in listening to new info even if it conflicted with what she had been previously told.
We are none of us condemned for being born.
The human body itself is NOT evil, in and of itself for merely existing, or for simply being born.
Although each and every son & daughter of Adam do inherit from Adam his own (and Eve's own) fallen from state-of-grace nature, none of the sons & daughters are subject to that due to Eve -- or necessarily due to their very own earthly mothers, or else we could return to the dark days when those born with handicaps were looked upon as being in some way, in part, themselves responsible for their own handicaps.
Though all daughters born into this world have the same fallen nature as do sons whom then later become fathers themselves, the lineage of that begins with Adam, leaving mothers to be themselves "infected" with this fallen nature, but not the source of the contaminant (if we can call it containment) or disease.
Read this following very carefully, for it is not Protestant theology, or my own understanding of what that may be, and how that could best coincide with Orthodox and RC theologies where and if possible.
From Orthodox view of Immaculate Conception © 2014 Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of Australia, New Zealand and the Philippines, footnote [edited from an article in "The Word" Magazine. The Word is the official print publication of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America] Taken at face value, the Western doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is seen by the Orthodox as separating the Mother of God from the rest of the human race. If true, this would have made it impossible for Christ to become truly man, because Mary would therefore not be subject to the same conditions of humanity as those for whom Christ had become incarnate in order to save. Mary is human, and through her, God became fully human as well.
The rest of that article is quite good, well written/expressed and clear in it's theological focus, aim and coverage without being condemnatory towards Roman Catholics or Catholicism (that I at all noticed). It is worth reading for any interested in the subject matter.
I'm not sure we can with total confidence stipulate that God supplied, somehow, a Y-chromosome. I do see how that would make sense, since in nature, parthenogenesis (as in mollusks, worms, certain marine invetebrates) always produces in effect a clone of the mother, a female. However,the Orthodox Liturgy/Byzantine Liturgy for Holy Saturday calls Jesus "the son conceived in the womb without seed." Since the seed is the male gamete, this seemingly rules out a male gamete.
So why is Jesus a male? I think the safest answer is "We don't know." Interestingly, Orthodox/Byzantine theology also speaks of human seed being gradually prepared by God through many generations, until at last a "pure seed" from Joachim (Mary's father) brings about the conception of Mary in her mother Anna's womb. (St. John Damascene). Although they do not use the term "Immaculate Conception," this would be a good account of what the dogma means: that Mary was born of good seed, i.e. from her natural father, in the natural way, but uncontaminated by bad seed.
Since Gen 3:15 prophesies that it's the "seed of the women" which will defeat the Serpent, the term is interesting. Again, I think it's something we just don't know.
I think part of the Catholic-Protestant difference here is that we do not have the same doctrine of Original SIn. The Catholic understanding is that Original Sin is not "sin" in the ordinary sense of the term. It is not moral guilt. It is, rather, a lack of something. It is the lak of a fully robust human nature as God intended our nature to be, as the perfect image and likeness of God, able to perceive Him and have fellowship with Him. It is a deficiency, a defect which causes us to experience a darkened intellect, a weakened will, a propensity to do evil, defects of mind and body, and morbidity and mortality: we get injured, we get sick, we die, we decay.
If I am understanding Protestants correctly, Protestants hold that Original Sin is a radical change of nature, an active moral evil rather than a passive deprivation of wholeness and grace.
And so Protestants think we ascribe a superhuman nature to the Blessed Virgin, radically different from that of her parents, and from that of Adam and Eve. But we don't believe that.
We believe she inherited human nature from her parents, just like we inherit it from ours, and Jesus inherited His human nature from her. But she was not deprived of that supernatural, unmerited grace which Adam and Eve had when they were first made,blessed and fresh from the hand of God.