The Virgin Birth Is A Christian Lie (Part 1)

Was there really a virgin birth in the Bible? The answer is no.

The virgin birth of Jesus, which is a cornerstone of Christianity (and, as it happens, is important in Islam as well), is described to the unlearned, in clear terms in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Matthew (Matt 1:18) seems to say that Jesus Christ is born to Mary, who becomes pregnant before having sex with her betrothed, Joseph. And Luke (Luke 1:26-35) explains that Mary, a virgin, conceives even though she is a virgin, but what do these statements really mean?

We know that Isaiah 28:9-10 commands us to understand the scriptures by precepts, that is to add up scriptures from line to line in order to get the true understanding of doctrine. When this is done it becomes clear that there was no virgin birth

In Matt 1:22-23, the text says that the virgin birth of Jesus took place to "fulfill" the prophecy that "the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel." Matthew is paraphrasing Isa 7:14.

But he is quoting a mistranslation. The original Hebrew text of Isa 7:14 is not about a virgin. Rather, the Hebrew used to describe the woman in Isa 7:14 is almah, a word that means "young woman." But then the Septuagint, an early translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, took the Hebrew almah and rendered it as the Greek parthenos, which means "virgin."

This inadvertent shift from "young woman" to "virgin" is typical of the Septuagint, and it occurs elsewhere, too. For instance, the Hebrew text of Gen 24:16 describes Rebecca as a "young woman [who was] a virgin" (using na'arah, another Hebrew word for "young woman"). But the Greek in the Septuagint changes that into "a virgin [who was] a virgin." These errors are not surprising, because the Septuagint translators tended not to focus as closely on individual words as some modern readers might like.

In most contexts, calling a "young woman" a "virgin" in the days of the Septuagint would be only a minor translation mistake, hardly even noteworthy, because most young women were virgins, and most female virgins were young women. In modern terms, it would be like mixing up "high schooler" and "teenager"—imprecise perhaps, but good enough for most purposes.

But in one situation, obviously, turning a young woman into a virgin rises to the level of a serious gaffe. And that's when the young woman is pregnant. This is how the Septuagint, through lack of precision, turned an ordinary birth into a virgin birth.

Isa 7:14 is not about a virgin birth except through mistranslation.

This kind of imprecision was common in early Christianity and Judaism. If our modern sensibility balks at Matthew's explanation based on mistranslation and partial matching, the whole issue only highlights how much the very notion of what it means to read the Bible has evolved.

[Adapted from Chapter 8 of And God Said: How Translations Conceal the Bible's Original Meaning] Read the original article here