Virgin Birth of Jesus

[stromboli]

http://www.rejectionofpascalswager.net/virgin.html

Both Matthew and Luke stated that Jesus; conception was not a commonplace one. In these gospels Mary was a virgin who became pregnant, not through sexual intercourse, but through the "power of the Holy Spirit" (Matthew 1:18; Luke 1:34-35). The gospel of Matthew explicitly mentioned that this virgin pregnancy took place in fulfillment of the scriptures:
Matthew 1:22-23
And this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: "The virgin is with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel-which means 'God is with us'".   

Matthew is quoting the book of Isaiah (7:14) from the Septuagint. The word for virgin is rendered in the Greek Bible as parthenos. This word carries the explicit meaning of virgin. However, if we are to look at the Bible in its original Hebrew, from the massoretic text, the word used there is almah. Now the nearest English translation for almah is a young woman and does not carry with it any strong connotation of virginity. [1] To show how far almah is from the meaning of virginity, I have quoted below some passages from the Old Testament where the word was used:

The word is used to describe occupants of a harem in the Songs of Solomon:

Songs of Solomon 6:8
There are sixty queens and eight concubines, and almah without number.   

The occupants of harems are not, as a rule, virgins.
Finally we have a passage from Proverbs:

Proverbs 30:18-19
Three things are too wonderful for me; four I do not understand; the way of an eagle in the sky, the way of a serpent on a rock, the way of a ship in the midst of the sea, and the way of a man in an almah.   

Surely it could not be a virgin that is being referred to above. So while the use of the Hebrew word can sometimes mean a young girl of marriable age, as for instance, when it was applied to Rebecca before her marriage to Isaac (Genesis 24:43), sometimes simply a woman (see Proverbs 30:18-19 above) and sometimes even for women in a harem!

If the author of Isaiah wanted to make clear the prophecy, he would not have used the word almah for all the ambiguity that it entails. He would have chosen the Hebrew word that does explicitly mean a virgin: bethulah. This word would have been the Hebrew equivalent for the Greek parthenos. The Greek equivalent for almah should actually be neanis, which means young woman.

Matthew's assertion of the virgin birth being prophesied in the scripture is therefore based on a mistranslation of the Hebrew word for a young woman. The virgin birth is nowhere prophesied in the original Hebrew. [2

Earliest Sources of Jesus Life Do Not Mention the Virgin Birth

The question arises: did Matthew invent the story of the virgin birth based on the mistranslation of Isaiah or did he or some other early Christian read into Isaiah a tradition that was already circulating among the believers at that time Matthew was written around the end of the first century CE? The former is unlikely as Luke seems to have written about the virgin birth independently of Matthew. Hence it is more likely that Matthew was writing down (and perhaps embellishing it with additional details from his own creative mind) what was community tradition regarding Jesus circulating among the believers at that time.
Parthenogenesis, or virgin birth, is among human beings, to say the least, an extremely unlikely occurrence. This is not to reject the idea out of hand but simply to point out that anyone making such a claim is making an extraordinary assertion. The burden of proof lies squarely with the party that asserts that such an event had occurred in history. And extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof. We have seen that the Bible can contain error, inconsistencies and downright falsehoods, it is therefore not enough to assert that just because it is in the Bible it must be true.

Let us now get back to the virgin birth. Now most of the people who knew Jesus during his ministry knew him as an adult, so they are pretty useless as witnesses in this case. From the people who should have known him before his ministry, we get a reaction that positively suggests that the miracle of parthenogenesis never happened.

For example as Mark reveals, when Jesus started preaching, his family, including his mother went to call him back because they thought he was "out of his mind" (Mark 3:21). Now why on earth would Mary, of all people, think her son "out of his mind" when he started preaching when she had been a willing and knowing party to the first miracle in the messiah's life?

Now the people whom Jesus grew up with, the next best candidates to have knowledge about his special birth, what did they do? According to Mark they initially rejected his teachings (Mark 6:1-6).

In fact the earliest sources on Jesus are silent on the issue of the virgin birth; we see nothing in Paul's letters (AD51-64) and Mark's gospel (cAD70) about Jesus' miraculous conception. This silence is actually strong testimony against the historicity of the virgin birth. For both Mark and Paul were convinced believers and had it occurred or had they heard about it, they would surely have written something about it. In fact a natural reading (i.e. without any theological preconception) of Paul's letter to the Galatians showed that the "apostle to the gentiles" believed Jesus came into the world like anyone else:

Galatians 4:4
But when the time had fully come, God sent his son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem under the law, that we might receive the full rights of sons.   

The message conveyed by Paul here is that Jesus was a normal Jewish child called by God. [4]

Pagan Sources for the Virgin Birth

If the virgin birth was not prophesied in the Old Testament and has no claims at all for being historical, where did the idea come from? And how did it become embedded into the Christian tradition? The answer immediately suggests itself when we turn our attention to the Gentile world where Christianity took root and flourished.
The gentile cultures, religions and mythologies during the time of Christian beginnings around the first century CE were filled with stories of divine incarnation. For example in the Greek myth, Perseus was born of the virgin Danae. Danae was conceived by the God Zeus who took the form of a shower of gold. [6] In another Greek myth Dionysius was born of the virgin Semele. Semele was impregnated by Zeus with a bolt of lightning.

And in almost all the popular mystery religions [a] around the Meditteranean, the beliefs of the uneducated masses, the divine personalities are born of virgins. For example, Horus, a major god of the Egyptian mystery religion, was born of the virgin Isis (like Jesus in Luke, Horus was also born in a stable). And Mithra, an derivative of the Persian sun-worship, whose cult rivalled Christianity during the first few centuries of its existence, was conceived when God himself, in the form of light, entered a virgin. Phoenecian mythology had Adonis being born of the virgin Myrrh. [7]

The popular culture also ascribed to many famous men miraculous, divine and, sometimes, even virgin birth. [8] Thus the emperor Augustus, the reigning sovereign during the time of Jesus, was reputedly miraculously begotten when a snake descended upon his mother in the temple of Apollo. [9] So too, Romulus, the legendary founder of Rome, was born of a vestal virgin. [10]

It was therefore to be expected, in fact inevitable, that Christianity, which vied for converts with these mystery religions, would itself be imbued with such mythological elements. It could happen in many ways. The Christians, desiring to provide conclusive vindication of their faith in the divine nature of Jesus, would naturally turn to the signs that were accepted in the culture as proofs of divinity. [11] New converts from the mystery religions would also naturally carry the mythological baggage from their previous beliefs.

http://www.harrington-sites.com/terms.htm

"As early as the second century B.C.," says the distinguished Hebrew scholar and critic, Salomon Reinach, "the Jews perceived the error and pointed it out to the Greeks; but the Church knowingly persisted in the false reading, and for over fifteen centuries she has clung to her error." (Orpheus, p, 197.) The truth of this accusation of conscious persistence in known error through the centuries is proved by confession of St. Jerome, who made the celebrated Vulgate translation from the Hebrew into Latin, and intentionally "clung to the error," though Jerome well knew that it was an error and false; and thus he perpetuated through fifteen hundred years the myth of the "prophetic virgin birth" of Jesus called Christ.

Why do Jews Reject the Christian dogma of the
Virgin Birth?
(The Second Jewish Book Of Why)
(By Alfred Kolatch 1985)
    Based on Isaiah 7:14, Christians claim that the birth of Jesus was predicted long before the event. The verse reads, "Behold, the alma shall conceive and bear a son and shall call him Immanuel [literally, 'God is with us']." Although the Hebrew word alma literally means "young woman," when the Gospel of Matthew (1:23) cites the verse from Isaiah, it translates Alma as "Virgin." This translation is useful in supporting the contention that the miraculous birth of Jesus was predicted in the Old Testament.
   Jewish scholars reject the idea of the Virgin Birth because, they point out, in Isaiah 7:14 the word Alma is part of the Hebrew phrase ha-alma hara, meaning "the alma is pregnant." Since the present tense is used, it is clear that the young woman was already pregnant and hence not a virgin. This being the case, the verse cannot be cited as a prediction of the future.
    Jewish scholars, supported by many Christian scholars, have also noted that the word alma in Isaiah 7:14 cannot mean "virgin" because elsewhere when the Bible wants to specify "virgin," it uses the Hebrew word betula.
    When the Revised Standard Version of the Bible was issued in 1952, the words "young woman," not the word "Virgin, were used for alma in its translation of Isaiah 7:14. This upset the Fundamentalist Christian community, which maintains that alma in Isaiah refers to the mother of Jesus, who conceived miraculously, without cohabitation with a man. These Fundamentalists expressed their vehement opposition to the new translation by holding burnings of the Revised Edition of the Bible.

A note here: the Septuagint was translated into Greek about 200 BCE. Supposedly the writers of the Gospels were Jewish, and should have known the difference in meaning. The mistake is one of translation not just from Isaiah but from Hebrew into Greek. So..... if the gospels were written by Jews, why would they make the mistake of translation if they knew and understood Hebrew? Paul wrote in Greek because he was a Roman, and Greek was the common language of the era. It would indicate to me that either the original gospels written in hebrew or Aramaic were mistranslated along with Isaiah, or written originally in greek.

http://www.levitt.com/essays/language

Some scholars have argued that these Gospels were originally written in Aramaic and later translated into Greek. If that is the case, no extant copies or fragments of the Aramaic text have been found. The only evidence we have is that the original text of Matthew and Mark was in Greek.

And if they were written originally in greek, they may not have been written by Jews at all.

[AllPurposeAtheist]

So what are you trying to tell us, it's just made up shit? OMG OMG OMG! NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

OK.. maybe. I'll buy that.

[stromboli]

I have writer's cramp.

[GSOgymrat]

Invitro fertilization doesn't require sexual intercourse, so "virgin birth" isn't as impressive as it used to be.

[stromboli]

Yeah, all the above. I'm still going with the "pregnant by Roman soldier" explanation.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Anyway, what have the Romans given us?

[SGOS]

That was an interesting bit of information.  So much is lost in translation by over zealous scribes with an agenda (or charlatans who just willfully change things).

[stromboli]

Anyway, what have the Romans given us?

Concrete.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Concrete.

Sewers.

[AllPurposeAtheist]

I'm going with Roman soldier with a really little dick.. Hey, it was embarrassing enough for the poor guy. Let's not keep rubbing it in.

[stromboli]

Sewers.

Dead Christians. The Romans ROCKED!

[AllPurposeAtheist]

Dead Christians. The Romans ROCKED!

So much so they gave us the gift of Catholicism. Gee thanks Rome.

[stromboli]

This is the part that intrigues me:

A note here: the Septuagint was translated into Greek about 200 BCE. Supposedly the writers of the Gospels were Jewish, and should have known the difference in meaning. The mistake is one of translation not just from Isaiah but from Hebrew into Greek. So..... if the gospels were written by Jews, why would they make the mistake of translation if they knew and understood Hebrew? Paul wrote in Greek because he was a Roman, and Greek was the common language of the era. It would indicate to me that either the original gospels written in hebrew or Aramaic were mistranslated along with Isaiah, or written originally in greek.

Some scholars have argued that these Gospels were originally written in Aramaic and later translated into Greek. If that is the case, no extant copies or fragments of the Aramaic text have been found. The only evidence we have is that the original text of Matthew and Mark was in Greek.

The bottom quote is from Zola Levitt, a Christian apologist.

The real possibility that the Gospels were written in Greek and never in  Aramaic is an indicator that the gospels were in fact not written by a Jewish author. Obviously it is a question that will never be answered, but it certainly casts doubt on their authenticity.

[Solitary]

Thanks Strom! The Romans gave us lead water pipes, and that is why the older generation is slow.  Solitary

[Green Bottle]

So what are you trying to tell us, it's just made up shit? OMG OMG OMG! NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

OK.. maybe. I'll buy that.

Yeah, all the above. I'm still going with the "pregnant by Roman soldier" explanation.

I'm going with Roman soldier with a really little dick.. Hey, it was embarrassing enough for the poor guy. Let's not keep rubbing it in.

That bitch Mary has a lot to fuckin answer for.......