Adam and Jesus Both Sprang from the Ground - Eden and Mary's Womb

Then the Holy Spirit "overshadowed" them to give them life

Docetism is a heresy that denies the true humanity of Jesus Christ, claiming that his physical body was an illusion. The name derives from the ancient Greek verb δοκεῖν or dokein meaning "to seem," "to appear.” Docetism is also sometimes known as “Illusionism.”

It is hard to even call Docetism a “Christian” heresy since a Christ without both his divinity and his humanity is unrecognizable — there would be no incarnation, no atonement, and no resurrection. By the time of the Council of Nicea (A.D. 325), it had largely died out. However, heresies like death and taxes are eternal. In our modern era, the heresy seems to occasionally exist particularly among the scrupulous.

The heresy can manifest itself in the difficulty some have in understanding Jesus’s conception in Mary’s womb. As an otherwise normal woman, only without sin, of course her body produced eggs like any other young woman. The trouble comes in the difficulty of visualizing where a sperm would have come from since Jesus was a virgin birth.¹

Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign: Behold, the virgin² shall conceive and bear a Son, and shall call His name Immanuel (Isaiah 7:14).

At the Annunciation, Jesus’s conception is described as the Holy Spirit overshadowing Mary (Luke 1:35). In the Greek, “overshadow” is επισκιαζω or episkiazo. It appears nine times in Scripture. When it appears, it is associated with a “cloud” and the Holy Spirit. For example,

And Moses was not able to enter the tabernacle of meeting, because the cloud rested above it, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle (Exodus 40:35) .

"Rested above it,” is episkiazo in the Greek.

He shall overshadow you with His shoulders,
And under His wings you shall hope;
His truth shall be your shield and buckler (Psalm 91.4)

In this psalm, the context is that God will protect the psalmist from the spiritual warfare of Satan and his angels. Episkiazo appears again in Psalm 140:7 in a similar context. At the Transfiguration³, the disciples are overshadowed by a cloud from which the Father then speaks. We also see the word in Acts in relation to Peter who is imbued in a special way with the Holy Spirit.

Insomuch that they brought forth the sick into the streets, and laid them on beds and couches, that when Peter came, his shadow at the least, might overshadow⁴ any of them, and they might be delivered from their infirmities (Acts 5:15).

From the earliest days of Christian iconography, Mary has been depicted wearing a blue cloak or veil. The color blue represented the sky, heaven, and of course God to the Hebrews. As Yahweh says to Moses,

When the camp prepares to journey, Aaron and his sons shall enter and take down the overshadowing veil and cover the ark of testimony with it. Then they shall put on it a blue leather covering, and on top of this they shall spread an entirely blue cloth, and then insert the carrying poles (Numbers 4:5-6).

“Blue” overshadowing the ark is of course a parallel to God overshadowing Mary — the Ark of the New Covenant.

“The Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and the power of the most High shall overshadow thee. And therefore also the Holy which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God” (Luke 1:35).

“The power of the most High” will overshadow her. “Power” here is δυναμις or dunamis which is an inherent power residing in a thing by virtue of its nature, particularly a power for performing miracles. Of course, the only thing with such an inherent power is God.

Every living thing receives its inherent nature from its parents. Animals have the inherent nature of their specific animal parents, humans of their human parents. Here, the Holy Spirit “overshadows” the human mother Mary and she conceives. Since all offspring receive the nature of their parents, in this case, the nature of one parent being a human nature, and the other being a divine nature, their mutual offspring then would have received the natures of each parent — both human and divine. While it is true that a divine nature far surpasses the human, there is some commonality, since human nature is made in the “image and likeness of God” (Genesis 1:27) and each of us is ultimately intended for deification. Humans are enfleshed spirits after all.

Luke makes clear that this “overshadowing” is made possible by the miraculous dunamis power of God and the “one who is born” must necessarily be the “Son of God,” both in a Trinitarian sense as well as a human sense. The Son of God in a Trinitarian sense is the one “begotten” by the Father. The child is begotten by God in a human biological sense as well by the overshadowing of Mary and is therefore the human as well as divine Son of God. A common difficulty among Protestants is confusing Mary’s role as the “Mother of God” with her as the source of his divinity. He receives his human nature through her, not his divine nature. She is, however, the mother of Jesus the person. Natures are different things than persons. It is possible for something to have more than one nature, but not to be more than one person.⁵ The Trinity is three separate persons sharing one divine nature, but these Persons are one God because of their shared divine nature.

What makes no sense at all is that God would go through this playacting with a human woman only to clothe himself in a phony human suit. The opposite is also true. If Jesus were only a man, then these descriptions from Scripture are nothing more than fables to no theological purpose. Why bother with them?

The Apostles’ Creed teaches us that Jesus was “conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary.” What does “conceived” then mean? In a human being, it only means one thing, a sperm cell meets and penetrates the egg, forming a fertilized egg that then inevitably develops into an adult human being. Where then in the case of Jesus did the sperm come from if he was “conceived by the Holy Spirit?” It could not come from a man in the normal way since Mary was a virgin. A woman has two X chromosomes, while a male has an X and a Y. The egg always contains a maternal X chromosome, while the sperm has a 50-50 chance of containing either an X or a Y contributed by the father. A body must have a Y chromosome in order to be male — without exception. Jesus was a male, his body absolutely and without a doubt had a Y chromosome that he received from someone.

In addition, simply organizing DNA into a Y chromosome to give the egg the proper genetic material is not enough. There are many epigenetic⁶ factors (other than DNA) that are involved in heredity. The sperm would have to have all of those in order to give a human Jesus his characteristics. As we have seen, DNA in biology is nothing more than an embodier of information. It is no different than the metal and plastic that make up a computer. It is the information in their design and later embodied in them by the minds that make and use them that make them interesting. The information is what gives a computer “being” beyond a mere physical object — to the extent there is any soul in the machine, it is the imprint of the soul of its designers and of its users.

In the case of Jesus’s sperm, there is the genetic information required to make his body function, without which he could not be fully human since a human is an embodied spirit. The Holy Spirit organizes and embodies the information required for Jesus’s physical body in the sperm it creates, but also provides the “soul in the machine,” which in this case has both human and divine natures. Since nothing physical truly exists and all that exists is information, for God to take on another nature, assume other characteristics, is a straightforward act of the will. He just has to decide. An exaggerated physical and spiritual dualism can make the idea of a hypostatic union difficult to fathom, to the point that those who think this way may cling to heresies such as Docetism that are not only wrong, but self-contradictory.⁷ Those who think this way may also cling to the opposite heresies, such as Arianism, that see the Son of God as created, not begotten, and Christ only as a man.⁸

It seems clear that a special creation of a sperm must have occurred in Mary’s body that in turn fertilized one of her eggs. Accounts of special creation are common in Scripture, particularly in Genesis. For example, God brought forth Adam from the ground and “molded” him from the dust.⁹

Then God formed man out of dust from the ground, and breathed in his face the breath of life; and man became a living soul (Genesis 2:7).

The word used for “molded” in Greek is πλασσω or plasso which is used to describe the work of a potter molding clay. The process of molding is the giving of form, in other words, infusing information into an object. The creation of the New Adam parallels this with an act of special creation of his own — bringing forth a sperm to fertilize Mary’s egg. This could have meant “molding” materials already present within Mary’s body or bringing forth completely new matter from another realm.

God not only formed Adam’s body, but he also “breathed in his face the breath of life.” “Breath”¹⁰ is a clear reference to the Holy Spirit who “overshadowed” Adam to make him a man with a living soul, just as he overshadowed Mary to form the New Adam in her womb. The Holy Spirit overshadowed her to form a man with a living soul not from the dust of the ground, but from the “ground” of her womb.

After the sperm is formed, fertilization and development have to proceed as normal, otherwise he would not be like us in all things except sin and redemption could not occur from the inside out.

1. Some claim that Eucharistic Miracles show that Jesus did not have a male Y chromosome proving he did not have an earthly father. There is no such credibly published data nor is there ever going to be.

2. The word translated here as “virgin” in the Greek Septuagint is παρθενος or parthenos. The word means a young maiden or a virgin. Most English translations, even ones that otherwise rely heavily on the Masoretic Hebrew text, will also render the word as “virgin.” However, in the literal Masoretic translations, it is translated as “young woman.” The verse then becomes,

Therefore the Lord Himself shall give you a sign: behold, the young woman shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.

What kind of “prophecy” is this? Old women don’t have babies. The prophecy is only that a child will be named Immanuel? More to the Masoretes purpose, it would minimize the claim that the Virgin Mary was the mother of Jesus who is recognized by Christians as Immanuel.

3. Matthew 17:5, Mark 9:7, and Luke 9:34

4. In every Protestant bible, such as the KJV, the word “overshadow” is not used. Rather, the phrase is some variation of the “shadow of Peter passing by might fall upon them.” The notion that Peter in particular might possess a powerful charism of the Holy Spirit that might “overshadow” and heal them is diminished. The modern “Catholic Edition RSV” used by the USCCB drops the original Greek episkiazo or “overshadow” and renders it the same way as Protestant bibles.

5. That is called Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID).

6. "Epigenetics,” Wikipedia, accessed June 6, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics.

7. Christianity isn’t even interesting, let alone important, if Christ is not a man-God.

8. Islam often thinks of itself as correcting the corruptions of other religions, particularly Christianity. This search for purity has led them to reject the notion of a hypostatic union as a corruption. To them, Jesus is no more than an important prophet.

9. Isaiah makes the same analogy.

And now, O Lord, You are our Father, and all we are clay, the work of Your hands (Isaiah 64:7).

10. In the Greek, “breath” is the word πνοη or pnoe which means “breath of life” and is used to describe the Descent of the Holy Spirit in Acts,

And suddenly there came a sound from heaven, as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting (Acts 2:2).

“Rushing mighty wind” is universally mistranslated. It should be translated as a “rushing mighty breath” which is not only more accurate, but also more profound as it personalizes the “wind” as the breath of life of the Holy Spirit.