Sources
- James M. Robinson, editor, 1990. The Nag Hammadi Library, revised edition (San Francisco: HarperCollins)[ ISBN missing ]
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The Act of Peter is a brief miracle text celebrating virginity that is found in the 5th-century papyrus Berlin Codex (Berolinensis Gnosticus 8502). It treats of the crippled virgin daughter of Peter, who was accused by the crowd that gathered before his door, among whom he had caused many blind to see, the deaf to hear, and the lame to walk: "But your virgin daughter, who has grown up to be beautiful and who has believed in the name of God, why have you not helped her? For behold, one side of her is completely paralyzed and she lies crippled there in the corner."
Peter bids the girl rise and walk, and she does, and the crowd rejoices. "Then Peter said to his daughter, 'Go to your place, sit down, and become an invalid again.'" The crowd weeps.
Peter then relates the vision he received when the girl was born, that she would wound many with her beauty. "When the girl became ten years old, many were tempted by her. And a man rich in property, Ptolemy, after he had seen the girl bathing with her mother, sent for her so that he might take her for his wife."
A section is missing, and when the text resumes, Ptolemy's servants are putting her down before the house, and depart. Finding her "with one whole side of her body, from her toes to her head, paralyzed and withered, we picked her up, praising the Lord who had saved his servant from defilement, [and] pollution."
The contrite Ptolemy receives a vision, saying "Ptolemy, God did not give his vessels for corruption and pollution. But it was necessary for you, since you believed in me, that you not defile my virgin, whom you should have recognized as your sister, since I have become one Spirit for you both." This is the one Gnostic detail of the text, which is in every other way a conventional miracle tale.
Ptolemy leaves a plot of land to the girl, "since because of her he believed in God and was saved", and Peter sells it and distributes the price to the poor.
Only nominally connected with the Peter of the New Testament, this brief Act expresses in a characteristically extreme form the cult of virginity in the male-dominated 5th-century Christian Church, a cultural thread that may also be detected in many early Acta of female martyrs.
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The Gospel of James is a 2nd-century infancy gospel telling of the miraculous conception of the Virgin Mary, her upbringing and marriage to Joseph, the journey of the couple to Bethlehem, the birth of Jesus, and events immediately following. It is the earliest surviving assertion of the perpetual virginity of Mary, meaning her virginity not just prior to the birth of Jesus, but during and afterwards, and, despite being condemned by Pope Innocent I in 405 and rejected by the Gelasian Decree around 500, became a widely influential source for Mariology.
Virginity is the state of a person who has never engaged in sexual intercourse. The term virgin originally only referred to sexually inexperienced women, but has evolved to encompass a range of definitions, as found in traditional, modern and ethical concepts. Heterosexual individuals may or may not consider loss of virginity to occur only through penile-vaginal penetration, while people of other sexual orientations often include oral sex, anal sex, or mutual masturbation in their definitions of losing one's virginity.
The virgin birth of Jesus is the Christian doctrine that Jesus was conceived by his mother, Mary, through the power of the Holy Spirit and without sexual intercourse. The modern scholarly consensus is that this idea, explicit only in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, rests on very slender historical foundations. The Fundamentalist movement in the U.S. adopted it as one of its five key tenets and the Roman Catholic Church taught it as official doctrine until Vatican II, but today there are many churches in which it is considered orthodox to accept the virgin birth but not heretical to deny it.
Sarah is a biblical matriarch and prophetess, a major figure in Abrahamic religions. While different Abrahamic faiths portray her differently, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all depict her character similarly, as that of a pious woman, renowned for her hospitality and beauty, the wife and half-sister of Abraham, and the mother of Isaac. Sarah has her feast day on: 1 September in Catholic Church, 20 January in LCMS and 12 and 20 December in Eastern Orthodox Church.
Our Lady of Fátima (Portuguese: Nossa Senhora de Fátima, formally known as Our Lady of the Holy Rosary of Fátima,, is a Catholic title of Mary, mother of Jesus based on the Marian apparitions reported in 1917 by three shepherd children at the Cova da Iria, in Fátima, Portugal. The three children were Lúcia dos Santos and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto. The bishop of Leiria, José Alves Correia da Silva declared the events worthy of belief on 13 October 1930.
The New Testament describes James, Joseph (Joses), Judas (Jude), and Simon as brothers of Jesus. Also mentioned, but not named, are sisters of Jesus.
The miracles of Jesus are proposed miraculous deeds attributed to Jesus in Christian and Islamic texts. The majority are faith healings, exorcisms, resurrections, and control over nature.
Maryam Bint Imran or Maryam, daughter of Imran, mother of Isa (Jesus), holds a singularly exalted place in Islam as the only woman named in the Quran, which refers to her seventy times and explicitly identifies her as the greatest of all women, stating, with reference to the angelic salutation during the annunciation, "O Mary, God has chosen you, and purified you; He has chosen you above all the women of creation." In the Quran, her story is related in three Meccan chapters and four Medinan surahs, and the nineteenth Surah titled Maryam, is named after her. The Quran refers to Mary more often than the Bible.
Matthew 1:25 is the twenty-fifth and last verse of the first chapter of the Gospel of Matthew in the New Testament. Joseph has awakened from a dream in which an angel gave him instructions about the birth of Jesus. He has taken Mary into his home, completing their marriage, and this verse explains what occurs once the couple is united.
The Maid of Orleans is an opera in 4 acts, 6 scenes, by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. It was composed during 1878–1879 to a Russian libretto by the composer, based on several sources: Friedrich Schiller's The Maid of Orleans as translated by Vasily Zhukovsky; Jules Barbier's Jeanne d'Arc; Auguste Mermet's libretto for his own 1876 opera; and Henri Wallon's biography of Joan of Arc. Dedicated to conductor Eduard Nápravník, this work represents the composer's closest approach to French grand opera, albeit in the Russian language, notably with its inclusion of a ballet in act 2.
The raising of the son of the widow of Nain is an account of a miracle by Jesus, recorded in the Gospel of Luke chapter 7. Jesus arrived at the village of Nain during the burial ceremony of the son of a widow, and raised the young man from the dead.
Menas of Egypt, a martyr and wonder-worker, is one of the most well-known Coptic saints in the East and the West, due to the many miracles that are attributed to his intercession and prayers. Menas was a Coptic soldier in the Roman army martyred because he refused to recant his Christian faith. The common date of his commemoration is November 11, which occurs 13 days later on the Julian calendar.
Babalon is a goddess found in the occult system of Thelema, which was established in 1904 with the writing of The Book of the Law by English author and occultist Aleister Crowley. The spelling of the name as 'Babalon' was revealed to Crowley in The Vision and the Voice. Her name and imagery feature prominently in Crowley's Liber Cheth vel Vallum Abiegni.
Matthew 8:8 is the eighth verse of the eighth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew in the New Testament. This verse continues the miracle story of healing the centurion's servant, the second of a series of miracles in Matthew.
A purity ball is a formal dance event typically practised by some conservative Christian groups in the United States. The events are attended by fathers and their teenage daughters in order to promote virginity until marriage. Typically, daughters who attend a purity ball make a virginity pledge to remain sexually abstinent until marriage. Fathers who attend a purity ball make a promise to protect their young daughters' "purity of mind, body, and soul." Proponents of these events believe that they encourage close and deeply affectionate relationships between fathers and daughters, thereby avoiding the premarital sexual activity that allegedly results when young women seek love through relationships with young men. Critics of the balls argue that they encourage and engrave dysfunctional expectations in the minds of the young women, making them vulnerable to believing their only value is as property, and teaching them that they must subjugate their own mental, physical, and emotional well-being to the needs of potentially or actually abusive partners.
Saint Dode was an Abbess of Saint Pierre de Reims and a French Saint whose Feast Day is 24 April. She is reputed to be the daughter of Chloderic, King of the Ripuarian Franks and the sister of Munderic, making her a princess of the Ripuarian Franks.
Lutheran Mariology or Lutheran Marian theology is derived from Martin Luther's views of Mary, the mother of Jesus and these positions have influenced those taught by the Lutheran Churches. Lutheran Mariology developed out of the deep Christian Marian devotion on which Luther was reared, and it was subsequently clarified as part of his mature Christocentric theology and piety. Lutherans hold Mary in high esteem, universally teaching the dogmas of the Theotokos and the Virgin Birth. Luther dogmatically asserted what he considered firmly established biblical doctrines such as the divine motherhood of Mary while adhering to pious opinions of the Immaculate Conception and the perpetual virginity of Mary, along with the caveat that all doctrine and piety should exalt and not diminish the person and work of Jesus Christ. By the end of Luther's theological development, his emphasis was always placed on Mary as merely a receiver of God's love and favour. His opposition to regarding Mary as a mediatrix of intercession or redemption was part of his greater and more extensive opposition to the belief that the merits of the saints could be added to those of Jesus Christ to save humanity. Lutheran denominations may differ in their teaching with respect to various Marian doctrines and have contributed to producing ecumenical meetings and documents on Mary.
Our Lady of Caysasay is a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary venerated at the Archdiocesan Shrine of Our Lady of Caysasay in Taal, Batangas in the Philippines. The image, which depicts the Immaculate Conception, is believed to be one of the oldest in the country, having been found in 1603 by a man fishing in the Pansipit River. The subsequent Marian apparitions documented by Spanish colonial church leaders were the first in the country; devotees today continue to attribute miracles to the Virgin.
Jephthah's daughter, sometimes later referred to as Seila or as Iphis, is a figure in the Hebrew Bible, whose story is recounted in Judges 11. The judge Jephthah had just won a battle over the Ammonites, and vowed that he would offer the first thing that came out of his house as a burnt offering to Yahweh. However, his only child, an unnamed daughter, came out to meet him dancing and playing a tambourine. She encourages Jephthah to fulfill his vow but asks for two months to weep for her virginity. After this period of time Jephthah fulfilled his vow and offered his daughter.
Saint Osmanna was said to be a virgin of Irish royal origin who lived alone in the woods near the mouth of the Loire in France, performed many miracles of healing, and came to be considered a saint. Her story may have little basis in fact. Her feast day is 9 September.