Catholics have "days of obligaiton," i.e. days you must attend Mass, and one of them is the Immaculate Conception. I used to think it was celebrating Gabriel meeting with Mary, but then I realized the feast day was December 8th, so either Jesus was impossibly premature, that was the fastest pregnancy known to man, or Mary was part whale with a gestation period of a year. But no, it's actually the immaculate conception of Mary.

Let's go back to original sin, a doctrine that we are sinful from the moment we're born because of man's sin back in the Garden of Eden. (On my xanga I explained the logic behind this; maybe some day I'll do it again.) Back in the Roman Empire days, Christians didn't think of it as a spiritual blemish on our soul; it was a literal biological thing kinda in our DNA. Augustine wrote about how it's passed through the semen.

For Jesus to be sinless, he needed to make sure none of this original sin blemished him. Well, on the father side he's cool because that's God, but Mary still would contain her own original sin from her father. Nowadays the official church doctrine is God cleansed Mary's soul in the womb (hence she's now "immaculate"), but a long time ago before the Biblical canon was laid down, the Gospel of James mentions that Mary too was born without a father. Not that her mother Anna was a virgin, but because she was childless she prayed to God and suddenly became pregnant. Hence Mary did not receive original sin from her father either.

So much emphasis is put on Jesus' virgin birth that when I first read the Gospel of James it astounded me that there are other fatherless births floating around. I mean, yeah, in other religions there's Athena popping out of Zeus' head or Amaterasu from Izunagi's eye, but in Christianity I feel there should only be one, Jesus. And lots of people agreed with me, which is why the Gospel of James isn't found in the Bible today. It was simply too problematic. And this was a mild gospel comepared to the others in the apocrypha; at least there wasn't any crazy Gnostic theology in there.