The Virgin Mary and the conception of Jesus

This book and those in this collection do not intend to show a religious tradition as superior, since this is not something proper to the academic, intellectual and comparative exercise, but it is intended to clarify the reader's own judgment and to motivate his religious and spiritual experience. Thus, these studies do not present here a unique and definitive truth, but constitute a dialogue, a path and an open method for all those who seek knowledge, truth and beauty in religions, their Sacred Books, languages and histories.

The Hebrew and Aramaic texts have been taken for the Jewish scriptures, the Greek for the New Testament, its Latin, Syriac and Coptic versions and its apocryphal texts, as well as the Arabic text for the Qur'an, in each case in order to present the concepts in their language, culture and theology as original as possible. In turn, classical and modern commentators and the most important biblical translations have been examined to confirm the opinions, theses and commentaries referenced.

The thematic, methodological and scientific diversity of these studies has a twofold purpose; first, to increase the perspectives on such topics from the human sciences such as theology, history, philosophy, phenomenology, philology, hermeneutics, ethics, politics, textual criticism and comparative studies; second, to present a comparison between such sciences in order to recognize their shortcomings and advantages in the case of the study of religions and interreligious dialogue; thus the reader will find Jewish, Christian and Muslim thinkers from ancient, medieval and modern times intertwined throughout the studies in this collection.

For each study there is a way of citing the texts of the Holy Scriptures: on some occasions only the text in Spanish is cited in order to make it easier to read and when it is not necessary to resort to the original languages for its understanding; while in others the available versions and translations are cited, such as in the case of philological or linguistic analyses of a biblical verse or Qur'anic verse, either in the text itself or in a footnote, when such citation is secondary.

Quotations from the Qur'an include, in parentheses, the important Arabic texts in the theological context or, sometimes, the complete text as relevant to the subject matter; in this case the surah number will be cited in parentheses followed by the verse number.

In the footnotes the reader will find the bibliographical references abbreviated to facilitate reading, and at the end of the book in the Bibliography the complete references of each cited text to be consulted in libraries or online.

The reader will then find comparative theological, biblical and Qur'anic studies on the figure of the Virgin Mary, the annunciation and conception of Jesus, his disciples and an appendix on the Christians between the canonical and apocryphal gospels and the Qur'an.

Dettagli