Because it came up in another thread...

Was Jesus born of a virgin?  Was Mary a virgin when Jesus was conceived?

If that is the argument, is that really the accurate translation of the New Testament, or is "virgin" a mistranslation?
This message was last edited by the GM at 00:34, Fri 21 Feb 2014.

Is there a particular word in question? (almah?)

Are Luke and Matthew the only ones to discuss Jesus' birth? How does Isaiah effect this?

I'm not really sure I understand how to interpret this at the moment, but I'm very curious as to how this plays out.

For the record, though, I don't think that being impregnated on account of the Holy Spirit or by the power of god has any need to mean that she gave birth as a virgin.

Why not? Even animals have off spring through having sex. There's nothing special about that.

Let's say that, in order to impregnate Mary, there needs to be a physical presence that negates her virginity... that'd be possible without removing the potential for divine impregnation.

I don't understand what you're saying.

Yeah... I feel kinda lost on that first statement of yours, but I tried to respond as best I could.

Okay, I need to clarify; is this the belief that Mary was impregnated without the touch of a man? Or is it the belief that Mary gave birth via miraculous means, and she died with her maidenhood intact?

In reply to katisara (msg # 7):

not being that in touch with anatomy (and a man) i have an issue with that statment. is it even possible to give birth and have it remain intact.

Is it even possible to give birth with it still being there at all. it could cause complications wit the birth (though i highly doubt this one, but not being a medical student or anywhere near the doctors profession these are questions that need to be asked.)

---

In either case is there any evidence to suggest that the marrage was never consumated? as i know protastant faith says it was yet the catholics say it wasn't and i have no idea where this split comes from.

Is it possible to conceive without sex or artificial insemination? Is it possible to die, then come back to life three days buried?

yes it is possible to concieve without sex or artificial insemination. but id rather not go into graphic detail so lets just say the shot went of course.

The other one i'm less sure about but people have been thought dead burried then turns out they are alive.

I suppose the point would be that any measure of detecting "virginity" is usually not passable after giving birth, and that if Mary could, that'd be a miracle.

The word we commonly translate as "virgin" is more appropriately translated as "young woman."

The original word in Hebrew was "Almah," which simply means a young woman or a woman of marrying age.  The problem was that the Greek Septuagint used the Greek word 'parthenos' to translate Isaiah 7:14. This word, in Greek, does denote a sexually pure woman.  So the error went through the translation, and then on into English.

What makes it more probable that it wasn't meant to be a "virgin" as we know it is that there is a Hebrew word "bethulah" that Isaiah would have used if he had meant a sexually pure virgin instead of a young woman of marrying age.

(Which is not to say she wasn't a virgin, just that manipulating a translation to fit a belief isn't intellectually honest, I don't think.)

Doesn't Matthew 1:22 specifically state that she is a virgin? And wouldn't that passage modify the previous passages?

There were two different versions of the Old Testament in use at the time Jesus was born, the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint.  The Gospel writers of the New Testament (such as Matthew) used the Septuagint, which used the Greek translation/mistranslation that I cited above. This is why Matthew is not an authoritative source. Here are translations from the two versions:

"Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, the young woman is with child, and she will bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel." (Masoretic Text.)

"Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive in the womb, and shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name Emmanuel." (Septuagint.)

But I also don't think "virgin" is necessarily inaccurate, just ambiguous.  A "young woman" of marrying age was supposed to be sexually pure, so that assumption naturally attached to the engaged Mary.

I happen to believe she was technically a virgin, but I just don't see that being absolutely the only way it can be interpreted.  Further, some scholars say the Isaiah prophecy, read in context, means that Mary was already pregnant, and that the birth of the child was the sign, not the "virgin" birth.

For me, the historical fact is irrelevant to my faith because Jesus can still be the Son of God regardless.

If you want a point of view from the Jewish side, they point out that Matthew used a rescension, not the original Septuagant, so they point to a number of problems with Matthew's translation in particular:

http://www.outreachjudaism.org...cles/septuagint.html

EDIT: Here's a quote from that:


This message was last edited by the GM at 18:30, Fri 21 Feb 2014.

Heath, I think that the issue is that some people (me, and perhaps you) are willing to accept that Isaiah didn't actually mean "virgin," and that the author of Mathew mis-read it, and made up a story about Mary being a virgin in order to back up his claims about Jesus being the Messiah.  But for more christians, admitting that one of the gospel authors made up deliberate falsehoods in order to convince people that Jesus was the Messiah would call the whole thing into question.  If they lied about that, what else were they willing to lie about?  Why believe anything they say, particularly the miraculous stuff, if you've already accepted that they've lied about something already.

Note, in this case, I use the word "lied," rather than "just got it wrong."  It's one thing to say the NT authors made an error or two.  I think many christians could accept that.  But you can't really say that in the case of the virgin birth.  The author of Mathew really wanted you to believe that Mary was a virgin.  There's the whole story of the angel, and stuff.  It's not just a "oops!" moment to put that stuff in if it didn't actually happen.  It's a complete fabrication of a miraculous event.  It'd be a deliberate and intentional lie if it weren't actually true.  And that really calls into question the credibility of anything else they say.

So for most christians (and as a non-christian, I'll agree with them, for whatever that's worth), you either accept that what Mathew said was true, or you have to accept that he was willing to make stuff up out of nowhere just to convince his readers that Jesus was the Messiah.  For me, as a non-christian, the latter is easy enough to swallow.  But for most christians, that's just not really compatible with their faith.  An imperfect gospel-writer is one thing, but a one that deliberately tries to mislead is another.

So I think you can make a good case that Mathew mis-read the verse in Isaiah, and that Isaiah never made any predictions about a virgin birth.  I also think you can make a pretty strong case that the verses Mathew points to in Isaiah had absolutely nothing to do with Jesus, and weren't at all intended to.  But I think the only way someone can really accept that, is to accept that Mathew was making up miracles.  And accepting that really means re-examining everything else he claims as well.  I think people should do that, but I think asking them to do that and then still accept Jesus as the son of God is something you'll really struggle to do.

Put another way: sure, it's possible that Mathew lied about the virgin birth, but told the truth about "the important stuff," but why would anyone believe that?  If you accept that he lied about the virgin birth, why not suspect his other claims too?

I'm not implying deliberation.  Three possibilities exist:

1) Isaiah really mean "virgin" even though he used an ambiguous word
2) Matthew used the Septuagint and believed it really meant virgin and did not mean to mislead
3) Matthew manipulated the translation to say what he wanted the translation to say.

My point is simply that most people will not deviate from a belief that option 1 is the only option, but the evidence does not support that as the only (or even most likely) option.

This also goes back to my point about people putting all their religious faith in little historical facts that might not be all that important to their personal salvation.  The author of Matthew was not a prophet and did not speak for God, nor was the Council of Nicea several hundred years later when they decided to adopt the Gospel of Matthew as canon (which by then had entrenched the virgin birth idea).  So why do people accept that every word of it is the same as if written by God?

(Now, remember that I say all this, but my religion firmly believes also that Jesus was born of a virgin.  We do not simply rely on those writings, but have modern day revelation of a prophet that also confirms it.  My point is simply that when people rely on the writings of the scriptures out of historical context, and put too much faith in the individual facts allegedly true, they can lose sight of whether those facts are actually true.)

>>my religion firmly believes also that Jesus was born of a virgin.

Excuse, please, but it was my understanding of the LDS faith on this point was that Mary knew God physically, and not just spiritually. Has this changed recently?

What happened between them is not known or disclosed.  The belief is that physically Jesus is the actual Son of God.  How that conception happened is not known.  You are jumping to a conclusion that the only way God could physically inseminate Mary is through a sex act.

But in any case, I did kind of misspeak.  To be clear, the belief is that Mary was a virgin at, or immediately prior to, the time of conception.  ("a virgin shall conceive in the womb," as the one version of Isaiah is translated)

I don't really see how #2 could not involve intentional misleading.  Him misreading it, sure.  But that story of the virgin birth had to come from somewhere.  Someone had to make that up if it's not true.  Not just an accidental mistranslation thing, but a real big deliberate fabrication.  Again, the issue of making an honest mistake I think most, or at least many, christians could accept.  But someone can't really "accidentally" make up a story about an angel coming and impregnating a virgin woman.  The reason the author of Mathew might have made that up might have been because he made the honest mistake of mis-interpretting Isaiah, but the fact (if you view it as such) that he then went ahead and did make that part of the story up implies a willingness to play loose with the facts.  And I don't think many christians can accept that and still feel any confidence in the other stuff the gospels claim, including the stuff you consider to be "important".

As I said, the "virgin" part of it is just one interpretation of an ambiguous word, so a true believer would not be "deceptive" in believing the "young woman of marrying age" implied "virgin" for the "Mother of God."  Also, the Septuagint version used for the Matthew Gospel was widely believed at the time to be a good translation.  So I can totally see a situation where that was not in the least bit deceptive.

I think you're missing a key part of what I'm saying, Heath.  Yes, he could make an honest, non-deceptive mistake mis-reading one word in Isaiah.  But if he did make that honest mistake, he also then went on to make up a story to match it.  It's not just saying "Isaiah said this" that is the deception, but then going on to make up a story about Jesus to match it.  The whole Angle coming to Mary part isn't just mis-translating a single word, it's making up a whole story.  If that story isn't true, it's not an honest mistake on his part, it's an intentional fabrication.

Again, to be extra clear:  mistranslating Isaiah to say "virgin" when it didn't could totally have been an honest, non-deceptive mistake.  Making up the story of Mary being a virgin, and an angel coming to get her pregnant, when none of that happened isn't an honest mistake, and could only be done by intentional deception.  If Mathew wasn't correct that Mary was a virgin, he (or whoever gave him the story) made up a bunch of stuff that never happened.  It's not just a quibble over the meaning of a greek translation of a hebrew text.  It's the whole claim that Mary was a virgin, with the story included to say how it all happened, that is the issue here.  That story can't have come about unless EITHER it's true, or someone made it up to mislead people.  There's not really anyway way you can come up with that story "on accident."

In reply to Tycho (msg # 16):

I think you go too far in calling Matthew a liar. How could he even know if Mary was a virgin? He probably read it in the Septuagint, drew the implication that since Mary is the mother of Jesus she must have been a virgin, and wrote it that way.

In reply to Tycho (msg # 22):

Hm, now I see where you're coming from. You're not really replying to the topic of the thread. You want to discuss whether or not Mary was impregnated by God.

I don't really see how we can discuss that. It's one of those "believe it or not" things.

In reply to hakootoko (msg # 23):

I'm saying that in order to accept that it's not true (that Mary was a virgin), you have to accept that Matthew made up a story to match his beliefs (or to convince his readers) that he didn't know to be true.  If the story wasn't true, then he (or someone else) made it up out of thin air.  If they were willing to do that, that calls into question all the other stuff he wrote.

Again, to be clear, what he read in the Septuagint doesn't really come into.  Regardless of what it said there, he made specific claims about Mary.  If those claims weren't true, he made them up.  Mis-reading Isaiah isn't really the issue;  Claiming Mary was a virgin is, along with telling a story about how that came to be.

And I would say your line of reasoning, that he thought "oh, Mary was the mother of Jesus, so she must have been a virgin" would qualify him as a liar to me.  If you make up story, and tell people they're true, simply because you assume it must have happened that way, you're not being honest.  If someone did that in the court room, they could definitely be found guilty of lying under oath.

In reply to hakootoko (msg # 24):

Yeah, I can agree with that.  I'm more talking about Heath's position that christians shouldn't care if Mary was actually a virgin or not.  I can agree that we'll never know for certain (though I'd argue the slip-up of mistranslating Isaiah is good reason to doubt), IF one accepts that Mary wasn't a virgin, I think it'd be very difficult for them to put much stock in lots of the other things Mathew claims.

What if we throw out the book of Matthew... what've we got to work with that might give us answers about this?

In reply to Tycho (msg # 25):

Let's try to keep these two points separate:
1) Mary was impregnated by God
2) Mary was a virgin at the time of (1)

My reasoning is that Matthew knew (1) [by tradition, or testimony, or because the Holy Spirit told him, whatever]. Given that and the version of Isaiah he had, he drew the conclusion that since (1), and since he trusted his copy of Isaiah, (2) must have also been true.

He's being honest, because an authority he trusted said "if (1), then (2)".
This message had punctuation tweaked by the player at 20:49, Fri 21 Feb 2014.

To me, if you say "I think this must have happened because X happened" that's fine.  If you say "This happened" and don't make clear your assumption, that, to me, isn't honest.  Keep in mind, he didn't just say God impregnated Mary, he made up a narrative of this, including what she said, what an angel said, etc.  Even if he was just filling in blanks he thought must have been true, he was still making stuff up completely out of the blue and claiming it was absolute truth.  To me, that's not very honest.

But again, let me stress that I'm really addressing Heath's point that you a christian should be able to accept that Mary wasn't a virgin and still believe all the other stuff.  To me, that seems very unlikely, because you've got Mathew making stuff up (even if we're charitable and say it wasn't deliberately misleading, which I think it was), which calls his whole testimony into question.

If you believe it's all true, then fair dues.  I'm really addressing the idea that someone could/should be able to accept that Mary wasn't a virgin, but all the other stuff in the gospels is still true.

If we throw out the book of Matthew, then we're accepting that some books of the bible need to be "thrown out".  And then you have to decide if others do as well.  And how do you decide?  Which do you trust, and why?  This is what I'm getting at, and what I think Doulos was getting at in the OOC thread:  Once you accept that there are errors (or worse, deliberate misleading) in the bible, it's hard to accept any of the things it claims which are even more miraculous and which you can't prove.

In that case, why don't we bring back everything from before the Nicean Creed? All of it was valuable or at least as inspired, right?

Tycho, I think you are mistaken.  You are looking at Matthew in a vacuum.  Matthew was a product of his times, and his account was a recounting of the tradition that was related.  He wasn't making up a firsthand account at all, so I really see nothing deceptive in his putting down into words the tradition that was told to him.

This brings us back to a discussion from a few years ago (possibly even before you joined here, Tycho).  And that is about Document Q, a common document which some believe formed the basis of the common elements of the Synoptic Gospels.

So, for example, if Matthew were relying on a Document Q or similar document, there would be no deception in him, nothing created from wholecloth in his story, and it reads just fine as his account.  Remember that Matthew did not live during or witness the events he recounts in his gospel, which gives more credence to the Document Q theory.

In reply to Tycho (msg # 30):

This is a good point, and one that is answered in the LDS church.  We have a modern day prophet who can receive direct revelation from God as to which books should be considered "scriptural canon" or not.  Other religions, or even the Nicean Council, really can't make that claim (even as to the Pope, as far as I know).

So I agree with you as to all other religions but the LDS one.  :)

I have the prophet "Me" and "Me" says that the only books I can trust are Judges, Ruth, and Mark.

I just take it on faith that that's right.

Sure, maybe it wasn't the author of Mathew who made it up, but if it wasn't true, then somebody made it up, and was being deceptive.  And if a deliberate lie made it into the bible, that calls into question other bits of the bible as well.  If someone somewhere along the line was willing to lie about the virgin birth, then probably someone was willing to lie about other stuff, like the resurrection, other miracles, etc.  A deliberate lie by someone makes it hard to trust the other things in the bible, especially the parts you can't test directly yourself, which are the "important parts" for the most part.

Just because someone is a believer does not make them a deceiver.  Whoever first started stating that either (1) had good reason to know it (maybe firsthand knowledge), or (2) took it on faith based on religion or inspiration.  I really don't ascribe anything intentionally deceitful to it...or anything in the Bible.  At worst, there was some manipulation in translations to conform to what had become canonical doctrine to avoid dissension.

Is honesty worse than dissension?

Long ago, we talked about the "Principle of Reserve."  You have to put yourself in the context of the ignorant, illiterate people who lived in those early centuries, and the numerous variations of Christian, Pagan, and Gnostic beliefs.  The Council of Nicea was meant to unite one faith (Catholic meaning "universal") that would avoid all the splintering.  As such, they adopted the writings and so forth that supported their universal beliefs into the canonical Bible, and rejected the rest of the writings as being not as trustworthy.

So even there, I don't think it was deceptive, as much as wanting a unifying book and doing their best to figure out which writings were the most unifying.  What they chose included things like the virgin birth and traditional books that they believed were more reliable.  But does that mean they were 100% true?  Does that mean anyone was being deceptive?  Probably no on both counts.

So, now that we've had all that splintering and stuff, we may as well put it back in!

So the conclusion we're coming to is the Bible, our primary source of information on God, for which literally millions have laid down their lives and for which trillions of hours of labor have been volunteered, is either intentionally deceptive, or grossly unreliable.

And Heath is totally cool with that?

Yep.

Of course not, but making up a story out of whole cloth does make you a deceiver.

For example, if I think you were at the grocery store yesterday, and I tell someone, "I think Heath was at the store yesterday" I'm not deceiving anyone, even if I'm wrong.  On the other hand, if I say "I saw Heath at the store yesterday, and we had a nice conversation, and he bought some bread," but none of that happened, then I am a deceiver.  And I'm still a deceiver, even if I honestly believe that you bought bread at the store yesterday.


OR (3) just made it up because they thought it would make their story more attractive.

I would call (3) absolutely deceptive.  (2) is deceptive if they don't make it clear that they've inferred it rather than that actually have some evidence for it.  (1) would not be deceptive, but doesn't fit into the situation you're describing where Mary wasn't actually a virgin at all.  Also, even you're really charitable and consider (2) not to be deceptive, if Mary wasn't a virgin, it still calls into question all the other things the author "took on faith" in the rest of the book.

Your premise is misleading.  You could say the same thing about Greek or Roman religions.  How many were crucified because of those gods?

But that's not my point at all, and your attempt to demonize me isn't helpful.  You jump to the conclusion that because one misinterpretation of the Bible was made, every person who died for the entire tome is somehow lessened.  The message is as strong, powerful, and true regardless of the virgin issue.  Your complaint is unfair in that regard.

Or are you saying that millions of people died, not for the Bible, but in the sole pursuit of saying that Mary was a virgin?  I think not.

My point is very simple:  whether she was a virgin or not is not my issue.  The interpretation of the particular phrase is only one possible interpretation.  So you cannot say with certainty that that usage "proves" anything, or even that the Bible itself claims she was sexually pure.  It only diminishes the believer to demand that an ambiguous word can only be interpreted one way, or to demand in the face of opposing evidence, that the traditional belief has to be right without exception.

These are the things that lead to invasions, the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, etc.  Are you saying that those things should have happened and millions should have been killed based on those misinterpretations of the Bible?  Maybe they didn't always get it right 100% of the time...

There is no point to saying that Jesus was born of a young woman. So was I.

Maybe they felt Mary had to be distinguished from all the 90 year-old women giving birth in the bible?

The translation is "young woman of marrying age," which was used to mean typically someone who was not yet married.

But my point is that the word has an ambiguous definition.  You can't translate it one way definitively.

It was also used throughout the Bible, even when there was not a definite "point" to that particular word.

In fact, you could read it as not emphasizing Mary but emphasizing Jesus, in that "the young woman will give birth to a Son, and call him Emmanuel."  The focus is not on Mary; it is on Jesus.  So there doesn't really have to be a "point."

This is also an interesting source:

When the New International Translation of the Bible came out in 1978, they had to change "virgin" to "young woman" to be true to the original text.  And by "they," I mean a counsel of bishops, not just laymen.  Here is a quote:

1) I don't think it's misleading. It is the honest conclusion I'm coming away from after reading your posts. I don't mean to be difficult, but if I'm reading you wrong, by only response is 'explain better' (please).

2) From my reading, no one really considered Roman and Greek myths inerrant, and no, not many people were crucified because they were fighting for those religions (I am not aware of any, although Greek martyrs isn't something I've spent a lot of time on). In fact, one of the major distinguishing features of Christianity, which seems to be pretty unique among religions of the time, is how literally true everything was taken. So no, I can't say the same about Greek or Roman religions, and if I could, it doesn't really help your point anyway.




Also not trying to demonize you. Just boiling it down to a salient conclusion. In fact, your attempt to demonize me for perceiving to demonize you is doubly unhelpful :P



I feel like it really isn't, and since this is a qualitative metric, my opinion is wholly valid as a primary piece of evidence.

But more critically, it is quantifiably reducing the strength of the message, and you, as a lawyer, are all too aware of that. The fact that you are even suggesting otherwise is rather baffling. This is the concept of witness reliability.

If you were in court and the witness you're questioning starts talking about how humans originated on the Moon and came to earth in 1914 on spaceships, you know fully well he'd be tossed out on his ear as incompetent.

For most of us, the Bible is our sole witness to the life of Jesus. For you, the Bible is still a primary witness. However, we need to hold the Bible to the same stringent requirements as we might hold any other witness, and if the Bible starts spitting out crazy-talk, even if it's only a *little* crazy-talk, we need to step back and say hey now, this source might not be all that reliable.



I'm okay with that, and I'm not aware of any crusades about that particular issue. Even among Catholics, who have other sources of information to confirm one belief, it's pretty much a "hey, you're wrong according to the catechism, but whatever" type thing. However:

1) It's fun to review the evidence, discuss, etc. So I'm happy to take a position and support it.
2) I'm responding to you in particular because, well, your explanation seems to have much more destructive ramifications for Christians than either of the hypothesis put forward prior.

  So you cannot say with certainty that that usage "proves" anything, or even that the Bible itself claims she was sexually pure.  It only diminishes the believer to demand that an ambiguous word can only be interpreted one way, or to demand in the face of opposing evidence, that the traditional belief has to be right without exception.

These are the things that lead to invasions, the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, etc.  Are you saying that those things should have happened and millions should have been killed based on those misinterpretations of the Bible?  Maybe they didn't always get it right 100% of the time...
</quote>

I have to say, rereading the article I posted above, it gives more credence to Tycho's idea that Matthew intentionally mistranslated the scripture, assuming everything in the article is accurate.  It was a "retrofitting" of definition, so to speak, since Matthew was trying to convince a Jewish audience that Jesus was the Messiah.  This is why his account is different from that in Luke.

To me, it is very interesting to read these Jewish historical versions because they do not have the pretense of trying to prove that the "virgin" interpretation is the only correct one.

It is possible that Matthew used the Septuagint, where (I'm told; I don't read Greek) the term used is completely ambiguous. He was writing in Greek, so maybe he felt more comfortable reading Greek than reading Hebrew.

Yep, I think everyone gets that. But it sounds like you don't like/understand that for other people it IS an issue, because, as katisara points out, it calls into question the reliability of the 'witness'.  Your focus is on whether it matters to salvation, while others are saying "why would we even believe what that person said about salvation, if we know they've lied about something else to convince us?"  I don't feel like you've really addressed that issue at all yet.


Here I disagree strongly.  The passage is Isaiah is arguably ambiguous (if we're charitable to those who interpret it as meaning "virgin").  The stuff in Matthew is absolutely unambiguous.  There is no question what the intended meaning was in Matthew, and there is no question that Matthew (which is, in fact, in the bible) claims that Mary was a virgin.  You seem to be saying "Isaiah is ambiguous!  It could be either way, and it really doesn't matter which!"  And I could be on board with that.  But Isaiah isn't really the issue, since Isaiah doesn't even actually talk about Jesus.  The issue is Matthew, and whether or not he made up a story about Mary being a virgin, in order to fit his own mis-reading of Isaiah.  Again, whether or not he misread Isaiah could be called a non-issue.  But whether or not he was willing to make up a miracle out of nowhere in order to bolster his case is in fact a pretty key issue when one is trying to determine if you believe all the other stuff he claims.  If you you add in the fact that there are other places in Matthew where the author seems to have changed the story in order to fit dubious misreading of scriptures, his credibility as a witness becomes questionable.  For example, the other gospels talk about Jesus riding into town on a donkey.  But Matthew has him ride into town on two donkeys instead.  Why, because the scripture said that the Messiah would ride in "on a donkey, lo! even the foal of a donkey!" which most people take to mean "not just any donkey, but a donkey foal" where as Matthew took it to mean "two donkeys, one of which is a foal."  You see enough examples like that, and you start to wonder if Matthew is just willing to say whatever he thinks is most likely to get people to believe, without any concern for what actually happened.  And that makes it very hard to believe him when he starts talking about raising from the dead, or Jesus being God, etc.



Again, the passages in Matthew are completely unambiguous.  There is no question about what he meant, only whether he was correct or not.  As for demanding that traditional belief be right without exception, it comes back to the credibility of the story.  It's not that "tradition" has to be correct, but rather that the people making extraordinary claims (eg, Jesus rising from the dead, Jesus being the son of God, Jesus performing miracles) are people you trust enough to take at their word.  And if they're found to have been, not just wrong, but actually making up lies to convince you, that really calls into question whether you should believe what they say about the "big" stuff.

Again, I feel like you haven't addressed this point at all.  You keep only talking about Isaiah being ambiguous, but ignoring the issue of "why should we believe what Matthew says about Jesus, if he's already lied about Jesus' miraculous origins?  If we accept that he's sometimes lies about Jesus, what makes us think he's not lying about him rising from the dead, or being the son of God?"  You keep implying that such questions are unreasonable, but I don't think anyone else here agrees with you on that.  Both myself, as an atheist, and all the believers of various flavours in this discussion, seem to agree that Matthew lying about Jesus' birth would be sort of a big deal.

I think that this is agreed to be the source of the confusion for Matthew.  It's thought he used the Septuagint as a source, rather than the original Hebrew.  So where his mistake/mistranslation of Isaiah is fairly clear and understandable.  The real issue, though, is what he did after having made that mistake.  He made up a whole story of an angel coming down to talk to Mary, and Joseph wanting to divorce her, and yada yada yada, all of which never actually happened (if we're accepting that Mary wasn't a virgin).

So again, to be extra clear, the fact that Matthew made a mistake translating old scriptures isn't a big issue.  I think most people, atheist, christian, or otherwise, wouldn't view that as something that anyone's faith should hinge upon.  What IS a big issue, however, is that he told a story, unambiguously claiming that Mary was in fact a virgin, and which involved conversations with angels, etc.  If that whole story was just made up out of nowhere to fit his mistaken translation, that IS something that calls people's faith into question, because the author of Matthew is one of the key witnesses to the "important stuff," and if he's willing to lie about the little things, why believe him about the big stuff?

You're conflating two different things here (virgin birth, and divine impregnation). Matthew didn't make "up a whole story of an angel coming down to talk to Mary, and Joseph wanting to divorce her, and yada yada yada". He read what he thought was an authoritative source saying that the messiah would be born to a virgin, and saw that it was consistent with what he knew of Jesus' birth. It turns out to be consistent (Jesus was born to a young woman), but not in the strict sense that Matthew thought, and not in a strong enough sense to prove Jesus was the messiah.

Matthew wasn't a liar. He made an honest mistake.

In reply to hakootoko (msg # 53):

So, you're saying that the story of the angel talking to Mary, God impregnating her, etc., really did happen, and Mathew correctly retold it, but he just mis-quoted Isaiah when thinking that story had something to do with OT-prophecies?  I thought the issue we were discussing in this thread was people believing that Mary wasn't a virgin, but still accepting that Jesus was the Messiah.  If you're considering a different possibility (that Mary was a virgin, but Isaiah didn't say she needed to be), that's maybe where we're getting confused with one another.

My position is this:  IF Mary wasn't a virgin, THEN parts of the story in Matthew about an angel telling her she was going to have a baby even though she was a virgin simply didn't happen.  So if you accept that Mary wasn't a virgin, you have to accept that Matthew (or someone else that he copied) made that story up.  He may have done so because he thought "well, Jesus is the Messiah, and the prophecies say the Messiah's mother would be a virgin, so I guess Mary had to be a virgin then!" but to me that doesn't make it a "mistake" rather than a lie.  He still made it up, claiming it to be true when he had no indication that it was true (because, remember, we're starting with the assumption that it wasn't true--if you reject that assumption, the whole discussion is moot).  Also, it's important that he didn't say "well, this must be the case because of what Isaiah said."  Instead he said "this is what happened, and because that matches Isaiah, that means Jesus must be the Messiah."  Even if you're charitable, and assume he "made an honest mistake" by believing that Mary was a virgin based on what he (mis)read in Isaiah, for him to turn around and then use that as "proof" that Jesus was the Messiah in that way would be, in my view, a deliberate lie.

It might be easier to understand what I'm saying with a cartoon example.  Say your friend is accused of a murder.  You've known your friend for years, and just can't imagine he's capable of murder.  So you're convinced he didn't do it.  And because you're convinced of that, you're sure he wasn't at the scene of the crime, and must have been somewhere else when the murder occurred.  If you then tell the cops, "Oh, my friend couldn't have done it, because he wasn't there at the time!  I happen to know he was at his mother's place on the night you say the murder happened!"  that's not an honest mistake.  It's a deliberate falsification of a story to convince someone (the cops in this case) of what you believe but don't know to be true (that your friend is innocent).  You can get in pretty big trouble for doing that (though I'll defer to Heath as to letting using just what trouble it would be), and I think we'd all agree it'd be dishonest and wrong to make up a story, even if you felt really strongly that your friend was innocent.

Likewise with Matthew.  Even if (mis)reading Isaiah made him sure that Mary had to be a virgin, it's still misleading and dishonest of him to make up that story of an angel and such, and then say "see, that matches Isaiah, so you can be sure Jesus is the Messiah!"  There's no "honest mistake" in making up that story.  It might be an honest mistake to say "Isaiah says that the messiah's mother will be a virgin, and Jesus is the Messiah, so it follows that Mary was a virgin."  But That's not what Matthew did.  He said "Isaiah said the Messiah will be born to a virgin.  And Jesus was born to a virgin, so it follows that Jesus is the Messiah."  That's not an honest mistake, and a making up facts to support your case.  And that's dishonest and misleading.  Does that make sense?  I feel like this should be a fairly straight forward idea, but people seem to disagree, so either I'm missing something, or I'm just doing a really poor job of explaining this.

Nope, you're misreading what I wrote (or I didn't make myself clear). My view is:

Matthew believed in the virgin birth from other sources (oral, written, or spiritual), and then found that his version of Isiah said that the messiah would be born to a virgin, so he included it as evidence that Jesus was the messiah. He was wrong about Isiah, and this wasn't evidence that Jesus was the messiah (or very weak evidence, since a great many people are born from young women).

Yes, if you assume Mary wasn't a virgin at the time of Jesus' conception, then someone lied about it. This is a bit rich given that you're usually the one telling people they are assuming what they want to prove :)

I think this is a very likely scenario.  Good summary.

I can accept (from a logical, not religious or spiritual viewpoint) that Matthew was surrounded by crazy stories about Jesus; he was born from a rock, he was born from a man, he was born from a virgin--and when he heard the one that matched his understanding of Isaiah, he said "ah, born from a virgin, you say? Tell me the whole story so I can write it down in my book!" I also wouldn't consider that lying (at least not on Matthew's part).

However, I would consider it gross incompetence.

If Matthew is willing to just quote stuff willy-nilly, it shows:
1) The Bible is not a divine and inerrant source as many people hold it to be true, and in fact an unknown percentage of it is absolute poppycock; and

2) Matthew in specific is an awful witness who claims he sees things that never happened, and thusly ALL testimony from him needs to be tossed out unless it can be corroborated by a second, trustworthy source.

This whole discussion is reminding me of Fozzie Bear's character in Muppet Treasure Island. He honestly believes there's a tiny man living in his finger. Everyone knows he's making stuff up. He is clearly proven unreliable. Yet people keep trusting him with stuff to terrible results, and after the fact they say 'why did we trust him??'

If you're not going to trust Matthew, don't trust Matthew. Otherwise you're doing exactly what he did; trusting a bad source when it agrees with you, which in the end makes YOU the unreliable witness.

But keep in mind the context of this discussion.  This all started when Heath said that he didn't get why people were worried if Mary was actually a virgin or not.  He said why get hung up on whether she really was a virgin, since your salvation doesn't depend on that.  My point is not to say whether Mary really was a virgin or not (I have a view on that, but it's not really important to this discussion), but rather to explain to Heath (and anyone else who doesn't get why many christians would disagree that Mary being a virgin "doesn't matter), why accepting that Mary might not have been a virgin would likely cause them to question other aspects of their faith.

So again IF you accept that Mary wasn't a virgin, THEN Matthew doesn't just contain a mistake, but rather a deliberate falsehood.  And that calls into question the author's reliability as a witness.  And since that book is one of the key sources of information on Jesus, it doubting it's reliability as a source really undermines what one believes about Jesus.

Please note I put the "IF" in caps back there, to stress that making a conditional claim, not just focusing on the conclusion.  I'm not just here saying "Mary wasn't a virgin, you should all stop believing!"  I'm trying to explain why someone would be likely to stop believing IF they were to accept that Mary wasn't a virgin.  I'm countering Heath's position, which is that people should be able happily accept that Mary wasn't a virgin, but going on believing that Jesus was the son of God, died for our sins, etc.  I'm trying to answer Heath's question of "why do people care if Mary was a virgin or not?"  And the answer to that starts with "well, if she wasn't then..."

So, it's not me assuming what I'm trying to prove.  I'm explaining why the issue in question is important to people.

Going along Tycho's line of reasoning...

If one believed that Jesus was not born of a virgin, then one would have to accept that there are errors in the NT. This can lead to questioning and doubt, and questioning and doubt are healthy aspects of a mature faith.

In the long run, it's no big deal for non-literalists; I already know of errors in the NT, and I'm still a Christian. I accept that imperfect as it is, the NT is the best source we have of the life and teachings of Jesus. We make do with what we have.

I'm a non-literalist, and I'd say a quarter of the gospels being totally unreliable is something I'd consider to be a Big Deal.

In reply to hakootoko (msg # 59):

Again, though, it's not accepting that there are "errors" in this case.  Errors I can understand people accepting.  Humans make mistakes, and that's not a huge surprise for most folks.  In the case of the virgin birth, though, it's not an "error," it's a deliberate lie, either on Matthew's part, or whoever gave him the story's part.  My whole point is that there's a significant difference between "errors" and "lies."

I can totally understand how people wouldn't be bothered by a few simple errors.  Were I a believer, I'd have no trouble with those either.  But lies would be another kettle of fish for me.  If someone was willing to lie (again, not make an error, but straight up LIE) about the virgin birth, how could I trust them about the resurrection?  The feeding of the masses?  The water-into-wine?  On anything miraculous, really?  I could trust someone who makes a simple mistake.  But I once you lie to me about one miracle, I'm never going to believe your claims about another.  Miracles are sort of hard to believe in the first place, by their nature, so any history of dishonesty about them pretty much disqualifies a source for me.  And I'd imagine I'd not be alone in that.

I used error as an ambiguous term, but you see it as a more specific one, so I'll be more clear. If Matthew made up the story, it's a lie. If Matthew believed someone else's lie, it's an error.

If someone was able to show that Matthew indeed invented the story of the virgin birth, then that would call into question his honesty and his whole account. I just don't see that happening at this distance from the writing of the gospel.

Other classic authors have included stories that we know to be wrong (e.g., Herodotus, Livy), but we do not throw out these authors because we believe they had erroneous or lying sources and trusted those sources, and that most of what they have to say is still useful.

An error on Matthew's part, but a lie on one of his source's parts.  It'd show that someone we're getting info on Jesus was willing to lie to win converts.  Regardless of who's lying, and who's just made the mistake of passing the lie on, it calls into question the reliability of the information.


Oh, I agree that proof isn't likely to be coming.  I'm just working with the assumption of the discussion here.


Most, but not all.  And if they claimed miraculous things, we'd probably put that in the category we don't trust.  It takes a lot of trust to believe miraculous claims, and far less trust to believe mundane claims.  If one were to accept that Matthew contains a deliberate lie, they could probably still believe that the Romans crucified Jesus.  But accepting that he then rose from the dead would be a pretty big ask, I'd wager.  The more extraordinary the claim, the more trust you need to have in the source to believe it.  And what Heath would call "the important stuff" tends to be the really extraordinary parts of the gospels.  If Matthew was known to contain deliberate lies, it would still have value as a historical account, but people probably wouldn't believe the religious claims it makes.

No, if Matthew believed someone else's lie, he is in error. However, it is still a lie.

And considering how frequently every Christian has had to work to defend the Bible against claims that it's nothing but tall tales and lies, yeah, proving it has a lie is a pretty big deal.



I would be inclined to agree. Like I said though, this keeps coming back to Heath's original proposition (and huge kudos to Heath for bringing it up!)

Heath brought up some evidence to suggest Mary wasn't a virgin, and went on to say that Mary's sexual history shouldn't be a point of basis upon which we hang our faith. But I would argue that the gospels writing honesty would be one of those points of basis.



1) We aren't expected to take their crazy stories as true. If Matthew said 'here's a crazy story I heard, isn't that cool?' it wouldn't be an issue. He's saying it IS true.
2) We aren't expected to pin our immortal salvation on Herodotus's character as a witness.

One point that I think is being lost in the discussion is that Matthew was not a contemporary of Jesus.  His writing occurred many decades after Jesus died and is not based on firsthand accounts.  He recorded what he believed based on a translation that may or may not have been in error.

No, I get that.  I absolutely get that.  But as I've said several times, but which still doesn't seem to be registering, the translation error isn't the issue!  He didn't get the story of the angel talking to Mary, and about Mary being an actual virgin from that translation.  If it's not true, he, or somebody else, made it up.  It's not a simple mistake, it's not an "error", it's a lie.  The part where he mis-quotes Isaiah, sure, simple mistake.  Easy to do.  No one's going to fault him too much for that.  But again that is not the issue.  The issue is when he claimed that Mary actually was a virgin.  Getting Isaiah wrong isn't a big deal.  Saying an angel came and talked to Mary, and that Mary got pregnant without ever having sex, if none of that actually happened IS a big deal.

I feel like I've been saying this over several posts now, but people just keep saying "yeah, but he probably just read a dodgy translation of Isaiah, so it's not really his fault."  But really, the bit about Isaiah isn't really important in the context of this discussion.  It's important (outside this discussion) because it's arguably evidence that Matthew made the whole thing up.  But it's not important in this discussion because we're already assuming (for the sake of discussion) that Mary wasn't really a virgin at all, and asking if anyone should care if that's true.  At that point, the mis-translation of Isaiah is non-issue.  The fact that somebody made up this story about Mary being a virgin is the issue, and an important one I argue.

No, I get what you are saying.  That's why I went back to the Document Q argument.  Matthew (and the other synaptic gospels) were likely using a common source.  They did not create their books from wholecloth.  That's why I don't attribute anything necessarily deceitful to the author of Matthew, at least not purposefully.  I think he was putting it into words as he understood things.  The question is whether what he put down was inspired, influenced, or independent, or some combination.  But I don't immediately jump to a conclusion of deceitfulness.

I get your point, Tycho. I've gotten it since before I chimed in on this thread.

I still contend there is a big distinction between whether Matthew lied or whether he believed someone else's lie. It impacts significantly on the his character and the trustworthiness of his gospel.

I agree it reflects better on Matthew's character (at least his honesty). But I guess the gap from "the Bible is true and its creation was guided by God" to "the Bible includes complete fabrications" is larger for me than the gap between "The Bible includes complete fabrications, but they were made up by someone else" and "The authors of the gospels made up fabrications".

Whether Matthew is a great and honest fellow doesn't really matter for me because I'm not Matthew's friend, I'm not inviting him over to dinner, I'm not lending him money. That the Bible contains fabrications *does* matter, because I study and follow the Bible, and a major point of faith is that the Bible is an accurate testament of Jesus's life.

I guess for hakootoko and Heath, how honest Matthew is is a bigger point than how honest the Bible is. I'm okay with that, but I frankly can't understand it.

In reply to hakootoko (msg # 68):

I think you're by trying to save Matthew's integrity, you're just further undermining his credibility.  Sure, if he's just repeating someone else's lie, Matthew is innocent of deceit and intent.  But if that's the case, he's an even less credible source of information than if he had lied.  A liar at least knows that he's making stuff up.  Someone who believes the lies of others can't even tell fact from fiction.  If Matthew is just repeating stories from an unknown number of unknown sources, and we accept that some of those sources were feeding him lies that he believed hook, line, and sinker, that makes him a very, very unreliable source of information.  Not the kind of person who's word you want to hang your faith on.  Sure, he may not be a bad person, but he's a horrible source if information.

Put another way, it sounds like you and Heath are saying that Matthew is just one link in the telephone game; he's just repeating stories that he's heard, not the source of them himself.  Which is fine, and largely I can agree with it*, but it doesn't help the issue any.  It just means the person who authored Matthew is sort of a non-issue, and whoever told him the stories is the one that actually matters (or whoever told them, or told them, and so on back to the source), unless Matthew was changing these stories, which then just calls it further into doubt.

Remember we don't actually know who the author of Matthew even was.  I'm just treating him as a stand-in for whoever came up with the stories in his gospel.  If he's just repeating someone else's stories, call him Tim if you like, then just transfer all the things I've been saying about Matthew's credibility to Tim.  Matthew is just some a stenographer in that case, and not really a source of information, but just a recorder of it.  I'm focussing on the actual source, whoever that happened to be.  If it's Matthew, fine, if it's someone else, that's fine too.  But whoever the source is, that's where we're getting a ton of our info on Jesus from.  And if they're telling lies about Jesus being born from a virgin, it doesn't seem too hard to believe that they'd also be willing to lie about resurrections, miracles, angels, etc. too.


* in this particular instance, because the virgin birth story isn't in mark or john, and since it's generally though that the author of Luke was familiar with the gospel of Mathew, my guess is that the author of Matthew is actually the source of the idea of the virgin birth.  Also, the fact that Matthew seems particularly keen to link Jesus OT prophecies (real or imagined) of the messiah, tends to add to my feeling that the author of Matthew was playing fast and loose with the facts to make his claims.  But I stress that that's irrelevant to the current discussion.

Interesting point.

That's why I was trying to say that there are two issues: (1) one is that "virgin" is actually accurate, but (2) we just cannot say that is the definitive interpretation of Isaiah.  Just because I say "virgin" is not the only possible interpretation does not mean that it is not the correct one.  Matthew may very well have been entirely accurate and not lying or repeating someone else's lie.

My point is just that the jury's out on that.

In reply to Tycho (msg # 70):

I don't think it would cast doubt on the later miracles he reported (if he was gullible about the virgin birth), because the latter life of Jesus during the time of his ministry would have better and more numerous sources, and an audience that was familiar with them already. He'd have a harder time passing off untruths there.

In reply to hakootoko (msg # 72):

More sources, perhaps, but why necessarily "better"?  People are just as likely to lie about a resurrection as they are about a virgin birth, as far as I can tell.  I don't really see any reason that people would be willing to lie about one and not the other.

And as for having a harder time passing off untruths, again, I just don't see why.  Christianity spread largely in places so far away from where the events happened that the people who were adopting it had no practical way of checking out the claims.  Look at the letters that Paul wrote (which were older than the gospels, remember), to places like Ephesus, Philipi, Corinth, Thessalonika, etc.  These are places in Greece, not the holy land.  People there couldn't just take a walk to Jerusalem and do some fact checking.  There was no internet they could use to snope Mathew and see if it was a scam or not.  They pretty much either had to believe or disbelieve based on the claims the early christians were making alone.  And remember there WERE people at the time saying "this Jesus story isn't true, don't fall for it!"  (the fact that they were being rather heavy-handed about it doesn't make us very sympathetic towards them, however).

So, I guess everyone can (and will) believe whatever feels right to them, but to me, someone who is at best a gullible repeater-of-lies, and at worst a liar himself isn't someone I'm going to trust when they start making miraculous claims.  And that's not just because I'm an atheist.  Plenty of believers feel the same, which is why they feel it's important that Mary really was a virgin.  The idea that the gospel writers could never have gotten away with their claims if they weren't true is laughable to me, since I see founders of other religion pass of claims that people of the time scoffed at, but people many years later are willing to believe.  But we each have to make up our own minds about that, I guess.  To me, scepticism is important, but to those for who trust everything someone says until its proven wrong, I guess these things don't matter.  But again, I stress my position isn't just some anti-christian, only-an-atheist-would-say-that position, but rather is the position that lots and lots of christians hold as well.

My assumption (and it is my understanding that this assumption is shared by most Christians) is that everything in the Bible is true in one form or another. Minor details may be incorrect, for instance Abraham may not have traveled with camels, but it is true that he traveled. This assumption is something I accept on as an article of faith, so it's not something I specifically question without questioning the WHOLE faith package.

The whole angel visitation would be a massive untruth. Isaiah saying 'virgin' or 'young lady' isn't an untruth, but the Matthew passage would be.

For Tycho to bring it up, that would make sense to me. He has no assumptions about the authenticity of the Bible, so saying large swathes are incorrect is perfectly fine. However, for a Christian to say it is quite surprising. I guess I've never met anyone to say 'oh yeah, my holy book has a bunch of mistruths and huge inaccuracies, but it's the word of God and divinely inspired scripture, so I follow it anyway'.

I guess what I'm confused at is why is this discussion about an angel?  Whether Mary was a virgin or simply a young girl has no bearing on whether an angel visited her.  I agree with you that the angel visitation is pretty standard belief, and I don't see that we can refute it or prove it.

The virgin issue is slightly different because we can see that the interpretation of the word itself was incorrect--or not exactly correct, to be more exact.

In reply to Heath (msg # 75):

Because the story is that an angel came and told her she was going to be give birth jesus, despite being a virgin.  That whole "how can this be?" conversation didn't take place if she wasn't a virgin.  That's sort of the point I've been trying to drive home here.  Getting a translation wrong is no big deal.  But if Mary wasn't actually a virgin, the implications aren't just that Matthew mis-translated Isaiah.  The implication is that whole conversation where an angel tells Mary she's going to be a virgin-mother of God never happened, and somebody just made it up out of nowhere.  And stories that people just made up out of nowhere making it into the bible cast a lot of doubt on its credibility.

But "despite being a virgin" could also be part of the mistranslation of "despite being an unmarried young woman."  She still doesn't have to be a "virgin" in the physical sense of the word.

I just looked it up, and the only mention of "virgin" I see in Matthew was in quoting the Isaiah prophecy.  The rest of the verses just rely on the fact that Joseph and Mary were not yet married, and the angel convincing him that he still should marry her.

True, the "how could this be" conversation is actually in Luke, which would make someone else the liar if Mary wasn't a virgin, I suppose, but still a liar's story would be in the bible.

Also, Matthew creates a very clear message that the reason Joseph is going to divorce Mary is because he assumes she's had sex with someone else.  If that's not what he was actually saying, then I'd view it as intentionally misleading without (technically) being a lie.  It also says that "before they came together she was found to be pregnant through the holy spirit."  That, to me, sounds like a claim that she was a virgin, even if the word isn't actually used. And the angel tells Joseph that the child is "conceived of the holy ghost."  It also says that "Joseph knew her not until" Jesus was born, again indicating this wasn't Joseph's child, even if the word "virgin" isn't used.  If Mary wasn't actually a virgin, Mathew 1:18-25 seems pretty misleading, and Luke 1:27-35 is a complete lie.

I agree with you on that point, I suppose, but I do so with a grain of salt, which is this:

1) I actually do believe she was a virgin, so Matthew is consistent with my beliefs in any case (and in which case he would not be a 'liar' under any definition);

2) My point was simply that the Isaiah prophecy had been mistranslated, so focusing on a different passage in the New Testament strays from the point.  In other words, even if she was a "virgin," that doesn't mean that Isaiah must be translated as a "virgin."

3) The points you make have been made before and there are arguments going both ways  -- for example, arguments that the writing in the beginning of Matthew is different from the writing later in Matthew and may have been spliced together later (i.e., maybe not even put there by Matthew).  This is really why I hesitate to call Matthew a "liar" in any sense of the word; he was a true believer and recorded what the true beliefs were; and his writings are so ancient that we are not even positive all of Matthew was written by Matthew.

4) My point at the beginning was to give a credible argument to both Jews and Christians that either interpretation of Isaiah might be accurate.  Matthew is a Christian text and would adopt that view.  Therefore, except where it references Isaiah, it cannot be used to refute or argue against the Jewish teachings.  They don't accept it as scripture, so we have to look at the common canonical text, which is Isaiah.

As I recall, your original argument was that christians shouldn't care if Mary was a virgin or not, and you didn't understand why they would "hang their faith" on that idea.  You were arguing that it wasn't important for salvation, so people shouldn't base their faith on whether it's true or false.

You were saying things like:

And


And


After saying stuff like this, I don't think it's entirely fair to just say "well, I do believe it, so it's all consistent with my beliefs," or "oh, but I was only talking about a translation of Isaiah."  You made some very strong claims, telling people they were "absolutely, positively, 100% wrong" to care whether Mary was a virgin or not.  You were basically telling people they were doing religion wrong, and that there was something wrong with their type of faith.  It seems a bit disingenuous to claim you were only ever talking about a verse in Isaiah now.  But perhaps we can agree that it does matter if Mary was a virgin; not because it determines whether you get salvation or not, but rather because it should have a major impact one whether you believe that things that are said to get you salvation.  Is that something you could agree with now?

You are confusing two separate things:

1) Issue 1: I was talking about Isaiah and the mistranslation, which is its own issue; and

2) Issue 2: I was talking about whether historicity matters as far as religiosity.

These can both be compatible.

In other words, whether she was a virgin or not is irrelevant as to whether he was the Christ, and only whether he was the Christ is important to my salvation.  Why?  Because the prophecy (i.e., Isaiah) can be interpreted as simply a "young girl," so the prophecy can be true regardless of historical accuracy of whether she was a virgin.  The only reason I think Isaiah is particularly important is because that "prophecy" is somewhat determinative of whether the person proclaiming to be the Christ actually is the Christ.

Matthew, on the other hand, is a story for believers told to believers as a faith-inspiring account.  Regardless of whether a faith-based account is true or not, the underlying principles do not change.  That is why it is irrelevant to my salvation.

Second, the facts of what happened are irrelevant to salvation.  This is an entirely different discussion (and one that was in the other thread for a reason).  Mary's identity and status are irrelevant as to how I live my life, and if Jesus is the Christ, nothing else written down about what is or is not factual really matters.

So I can believe Matthew or not, and it doesn't change anything.  We can argue whether every fact he stated is true, but that can never escape the underlying principle that the historicity of it does not affect my personal salvation (or anyone else's).  It is merely a faith building story.  Just because I argue the facts back and forth does not change the underlying relevance (or irrelevance) of it to salvation.

That's the crux of it, and I'm glad it got sussed out a bit.

To you, Heath, the Matthew account is a faith-building story, so it only makes sense that the historicity doesn't matter.

To others it is also, and just as importantly, history.  That matters to those people but not to you.

There's nothing wrong with you feeling it's only a faith-building story.  However, people's hackles get up when you claim that it shouldn't have any effect on someone else's faith, because then you are making the decision for them as to whether it is history or not.

No, I am not saying whether it is history or not.  I am saying whether it is history does not matter to their salvation.  It might matter to their personal beliefs; it might matter to their own idea of their religion...but not to their salvation.

I do not want this message lost.  Salvation is about an individual's destination of his soul.  What happened thousands of years ago, whether true or not, whether the basis of faith or not, whether part of scripture or not, is absolutely irrelevant to the person's salvation.  That is someone else's story, someone else's salvation.  This should not even be controversial.

What a person looks at for salvation is how to run his own life -- what it means to be a good person, what is required to save his own soul (whether it be baptism, faith, repentance or whatever).  These are principles, not historical facts.  The historical facts do not affect the destination of my immortal soul, and they should be regarded as much.

Time for me to step away again.  I can 100% see your view Heath and why you PERSONALLY hold it.  I frankly find it the height of arrogance that you want to impose your own view of salvation on others.
This message was last edited by the player at 22:05, Mon 10 Mar 2014.

It's not a viewpoint at all.  It's a philosophical truth.

If you disagree, please tell me how whether Mary was a virgin affects an individual's salvation.  It is not a principle of action (like the 10 Commandments), nor is it a necessary rite for salvation (like baptism), nor does it instruct one in behavior (like the Sermon on the Mount), nor is it a fact directly related to a person's salvation (like believing Christ is the Savior for one's personal salvation).

It is nothing more than a prophecy and a historical fact that can build one's faith.

But it's pretty relevant to whether you beleive he was the Christ or not, which will impact your actions, which will impact your salvation (or if you're protestant, changing your beliefs is enough, whether it changes your actions or not).


But whether you accept those principles or not depends heavily on whether the account is true or false.


But false stories about Mary's identity will influence whether you actually believe Jesus was the Christ or not.  And if your beliefs about Jesus being the Christ change, how you live your life will change, right?

It's very simple, and goes like this:
1.  IF Matthew lied (or retold-a lie) about Mary
2.  THEN it's much more likely that he'd lie (or repeat a lie) about Jesus.
3.  WHICH IMPLIES Jesus is much less likely to have risen from the dead (or done all the other miracles attributed to him).
4.  WHICH IMPLIES he's not the son of God
5.  WHICH IMPLIES your religion is wrong and you shouldn't be worshipping him
6.  WHICH IMPLIES your actions will change
7.  WHICH impacts your salvation (or really whether there even is "salvation" at all)

You're trying to tell people that the bible could be chock full of outright lies and falsehoods, about miracles as well as boring history stuff, and that shouldn't affect their beliefs at all.  That seems pretty absurd to me, and to most christians.

Earlier I brought up the idea of what if undeniable proof was found that Joseph Smith lied the golden plates and the seeing stones, and actually just made up the whole book for Mormon out of nothing.  Wouldn't that affect your life in some way?  Would still carry on with your religion in exactly the same way, even if you believed that Smith was a fraud?  I really can't see why you would.  But Smith being a liar (for you) isn't any different from Matthew being a liar (for most Christians).  Certain parts need to be true in order to believe the rest of it in each case.  What are your thoughts on this?  Are there many Mormons who believe that it doesn't matter if there were any golden plates?  Are there any Mormons who believe that even if Moroni didn't exist, their religion is still A-okay?  If a sect of Mormons emerged that rejected the idea that Joseph Smith had golden plates or ever spoke to an angel, would you view them as misguided?  Would the church elders tolerate such a view?

I think you see this same refusal to accept fallibility in the Mormon church leaders that you do in people refusing to accept that Matthew was wrong.  When we discuss the ban on black men in the priesthood in the Mormon church before the 70s, Mormons always want to stress that "it was never revealed!" and "no one knows where that view came from!" and such, even though people at the time were pretty sure it was revealed, and even had stories explaining the reason for it.  But why do people care whether it was "revealed" or not?  Not because it's an issue of salvation.  But because if it was "revealed," that calls into question the whole system.  It casts doubt on whether the prophets actually get messages from God at all.  In order for them to keep on believing the whole story, they need to believe that this was just some human mistake, not a lie from someone claiming to speak for God.  Because once you allow a single instance of a prophet lying while claiming to speak for God, you can't really trust them when they make such claims anymore.

That depends on the individual, but it still is not necessarily true.

Let's put it another way.  Say that you learned two facts to be true (for the sake of argument):

1) That Jesus was the Christ and Savior; and
2) That Mary was not a "virgin."

Now, how would that affect your salvation?  How would that affect your behaviors?  How should it?

What you are saying is that a person's belief of #1 is hinged on their belief of #2.  That's a subjective value of that individual and is irrelevant as to the direct salvation of the multitudes.  If #1 is true, that is all that is needed.

If your idea of what is important so salvation is based on the subjective value placed on historical facts in the Bible, then we are back at square one.  They are not "essential" facts to salvation (for the most part), even if certain individuals make them "essential" for their own beliefs.

In other words, my point is not about the subjective value of the truth of historical facts.  My point is that we need to get to what is objectively important for the religion.  In other words, which facts, if proven wrong, in and of themselves, would invalidate the religious belief or principle?


Principles are not based on historical facts.  They are independent of them.  Religious truths, on the other hand, are critical as to particular religious doctrines (such as whether Jesus is the Christ).  I think you are referring to religious truths.

In that case, for example, the religious truth of whether Jesus is the Christ is not co-dependent on whether Mary was a "virgin."  It was my point of showing the inaccuracy of the Isaiah prophecy to show that such a truth is not essential.  The Matthew stated facts are not as relevant as Isaiah, because Isaiah contained an accepted prophecy about how to determine if Jesus is the Christ.  Matthew just recounts events that happened as a faith building story.




Again, that is the subjective line of thinking that is not relevant to this discussion.  You can say that your belief in Christ depends on whether the sun was blotted out from the sky for three days, or whether the earth is on the back of a turtle, and it doesn't matter.  The only fact that matters is whether Jesus was, in fact, the Christ, not an individual's personal belief.  That is part of the sifting process of this mortal existence, to have the maturity to sift through facts and truths to get at the eternal and significant ones.  Not every person can or will do that.


What I'm saying is that if they distill their religion down to the absolutely essential facts for their salvation, the other stuff doesn't matter.  You are using the term "lies" and "falsehoods."  I used terms like "figurative language" and "parables."


What Jesus said was also thought to be pretty absurd to most Jews when he revolutionized their entire religion.  What Joseph Smith said to Christians was also thought to be pretty absurd to the Christians, and they martyred him.  "Absurd" ideas in religion tend to separate the wheat from the chaff.


How it would affect my personal life is not relevant.  All that is relevant is whether the underlying principles are true or not.

However, it is a little different in that we have "prophets" now, and they have said that one historical fact critical to our religion is whether Joseph Smith was a prophet.  This is because through being a prophet he restored Jesus Christ's gospel on earth.  If he did not do that, then of course, the ordinances for salvation we find critical would not be so.  That is an "essential" fact.

To bring this more aptly to this conversation, whether Joseph Smith was the same Joseph prophecied of by Isaiah is not an "essential" fact, just a faith building one.

Your statement is false.  Mormon church leaders are very fallible, and this is accepted by all members of the faith, including the prophets themselves.  You cannot build an argument on a false premise.  Sorry.


I think your facts are mistaken here.  Again, you are trying to use a few facts out of context to build an argument on false premises.  Your "people at the time" comment is also pretty far off the mark.

In fact, I suppose this strengthens my position.  We believe in continuing revelation, and that many things we believe true may not be true.  But the principles will not change.  Blacks holding the priesthood was not a principle.  At worst, it was an interpretation of ancient prophecy; at best, it was an issue that had not been taken to God by the priesthood leaders until the 70s.  Neither of those is important to salvation.

It is important to note that LDS members themselves don't really concern themselves with this issue.  It is not important to their salvation.  What you are discussing here is simply the anti-Mormon attacks and the apologetics which answered them.

Sure, *IF* you magically learned both those facts, completely independently from one another, then I'd absolutely agree with you.  However, pretty much no one does learn those topics independently of one another.  Pretty much everyone learns them (or, rather, the first, and the opposite of the 2nd) from the same exact source.  In fact, how many people have ever learned #1 without looking at the bible?  Not many around today, I would wager.  So in the real world, these aren't two completely independent ideas that someone could learn from two very different sources.  Instead, the claims about Jesus being the Christ, and Mary being a virgin are made in the exact same place (the bible).  For pretty much everyone in the world, if they believe #1, it's because of what the bible says.  And another thing the bible says is that Mary was a virgin.  So it's all well and good to say "If you learned these two facts...", and assume you could someone how learn Jesus was the christ without reading the bible, but most people haven't done that.  For them, if you call the credibility of the bible into question, they have no other reason to believe that Jesus was the christ.  For most people, the bible is all they've got.  I feel like you really need to address that fact if you want to move the conversation forward here.


[emphasis added by Tycho]
Your whole point was originally that people shouldn't make them essential for their own beliefs.  I'm just explaining why they are rational to do so.  It's no good saying "well, they just don't matter" at this point.  If it didn't matter, you shouldn't have told them what they should or shouldn't do in the first place.


Perhaps, but whether anyone believes it *IS* dependent on whether their source contains lies and mistakes.  Remember, you didn't just say "it doesn't matter if they believe it or not, they'll be fine either way!" you said "they shouldn't rest their faith on something like this".  You made a statement about what they should care about and what they should believe.  That's a stronger statement than saying "it doesn't matter what they believe," right?  So all the things you're saying could be true, but still be sort of irrelevant to the issue I'm getting at.  In order to convince me of what you said, you don't need to talk about what actually does save people, but instead you have to tell me why anyone should believe that Jesus is Christ if the bible is full of lies and mistakes.  Saying people could believe X and still believe Y is all fine, but it doesn't answer why they should.  And if your answer is "well, because Y is all you need for salvation," that sounds like a horrible reason to believe something to me.  We should believe what the evidence leads us to believe is true, not what we want to be true.  If your argument about why people should believe something is based on the pay-off and/or costs of believing it, we'll probably just have to agree to disagree.  But if that's the case, stating it explicitly would at least let us clarify the point of disagreement.


For the record, I disagree with this, as I don't think Isaiah was talking about that at all, but that's probably a can of worms we're best avoiding for the moment.


I don't feel like you can unilaterally declare that "not relevant."  You can't really say "people are wrong to think X" and then have someone say "they think X because of Y", and then turn around and reply "well, it's not relevant if they think that."  If people have a reason for their belief, and then you say their belief is wrong, you really need to address their reasoning.  Declaring it not relevant won't convince anyone who doesn't already agree with you.  If you want anyone else to believe you, you have to address the objection (which, in this case, is "why believe what the gospels say about Jesus being the Christ, if they get wrong stuff like Mary being a virgin?").


No, really, for that person, it DOES matter.  It's why they don't believe what you tell them they should.  You can't just ignore it if you want them to believe you.


But some people will do that sifting, and come to the conclusion that Jesus wasn't the christ, didn't raise from the dead, etc.  Part of that "sifting" is deciding which sources you can trust, and which you can't.  You seem to be saying "believe the important stuff, but feel free to ignore the rest," without considering the issue of credibility.  If a source (ie, the bible) makes a spectacular claim (such as Jesus rising from the dead), you need to really, really trust it in order to believe that claim.  The more amazing the claim, the more trust you need to have in order to believe it.  A source that lies about "unimportant stuff" isn't a source most people will trust, and with good reason.  I stress that so far, you haven't said why people should believe the important stuff, only that they should.


Yep, and I'll say it again:  if Mary wasn't a virgin, the stories in the bible saying she was are lies, and falsehoods.  I'll also add that calling them "figurative language" and "parables" would be deception.  I agree that the bible contains figurative language and parables.  The story of Mary being a virgin wasn't either of those.  It was either true, or a lie.  Read Matthew and Luke.  They make the claim that Mary was a virgin.  It wasn't a parable, it wasn't figuratively language, it was given as evidence that Jesus was divine in nature.  If it's not true, it's a straight-up lie.


Heh!  You said it mate, not me!


And yet, over and over again, you kept asking "how would it change your life if Mary wasn't a virgin?" before.  You can't really have this both ways.  Does it matter if something changes someone's life, or not?


Awesome, then you can relate to how people feel.  This isn't something critical to your salvation, it's critical to your beliefs about salvation.  It doesn't change whether you're saved or not, it changes what you think about salvation.  And this is exactly the same for people when you tell them about Mary not being a virgin.  For them, it's an "essential fact" as you call it.  Because if Mary wasn't a virgin, then the bible isn't a trustworthy source of information about Jesus' miracles, including him raising from the dead.  So for many christians, Mary being a virgin is just as important to them as Joseph Smith was a prophet is to you.  Neither is directly responsible for anyone's salvation; but both have a huge impact on what people believe about salvation.  So you need to know that when you tell people they're wrong to care about Mary being a virgin, that they feel like you would feel if someone said "Mormon's shouldn't care if Joseph Smith was a prophet or not!"

I don't think you two are disagreeing with each other. Heath, when you said:



I think that really summed it up. No question, some people have no issue with a false item in the Bible. But also, some people do. And if someone lost faith because he discovered there was a false item in the Bible, that is probably pretty important.

I think there may be some question as to HOW MANY people would have issues. Speaking for myself, I would.

The issue with religion is a question of "should."  With this issue, the question is "should it" affect someone's behaviors or salvation?  I think any reasonable person would say "no."  But that doesn't mean that some individuals won't hinge their entire salvation and behaviors on such a detail, which is only a fact from thousands of years ago.

It's not like the earth will unravel and the heavens will close if, for some strange reason, Mary was not a "virgin" in the sexually pure sense of the word.  It's not like any Christian religion will suddenly collapse under its own weight if God came down and said, "What Isaiah meant was a young girl.  The writers had that point wrong, but the principles they taught are right."

I mean, I can't really understand why this is controversial at all.  The Bible was written by human beings, not God.  Even worse, it has undergone numerous translations, and they don't all concur.  You can say it was written through revelation or inspiration, certainly, but anyone who insists on their personal interpretation of the book being true or else it's all a sham is simply deluding themselves.

The objective fact is that it does not matter if Mary was a virgin because that simple historical fact does not affect a person's salvation (in an objective sense).  How that person behaves affects his salvation.  The promises he makes with God affects his salvation.  His exercise of faith affects his salvation.  People who base their faith on historical facts instead of the eternal principles in the Bible are simply wrong.

Does it happen? Yes.  Should it happen?  Not for any reasonable person.

Do you really not understand why, or is this hyperbole? I ask because if you truly don't understand, I'm happy to explain. I feel like it's pretty self-explanatory, so I don't imagine it would take long :)

But if you do understand why reasonable people would have a crisis of faith resulting from errors of substance and direct contradiction of the gospels, I'll save my breath.

Well, now we get to the crux of it.  A "crisis of faith" does not affect one's salvation.  What a person does and how that person handles the crisis of faith is what affects his salvation.  Even Mother Theresa said she had crises of faith, yet she didn't let that be an excuse to sin, did she?  Her salvation was not affected.

Everyone has a crisis of faith.  But that is not relevant to their salvation.  How they behave is relevant.  What they do to overcome that crisis is relevant.  Do they pray for enlightenment?  Do they realize that maybe they themselves have been mistaken?  Or do they let their ego and pride lead them to cast away their beliefs and behave contrary to the rest of the book.

In reply to Heath (msg # 93):

Heath, I think you need to realize that a whole lot of christians think you need to believe Jesus died for your sins to get salvation.  For many christians, faith is a critical thing.  For most protestants, its the critical thing.  If faith goes out the window, many will say that sinning or not sinning doesn't matter.  Many christians (most, I'd wager, but I'll let katisara speak for the catholics on this) believe that no matter how good you are, if you don't believe Jesus died for your sins, then you don't get into heaven.  For them, faith is a salvation issue (or again, the salvation issue), much more so than actions.  So anything that makes them think Jesus wasn't the son of God, is about as big a deal for them as it gets.  And accepting that there are straight up lies in the bible about Jesus, put their to make Jesus look divine makes it very hard to accept the whole "died for your sins and rose from the dead part."

If you really don't understand this, we could try to explain, but it sort of just sounds like you don't think lies about Jesus' divinity making it into the bible isn't a legitimate reason to question its veracity.  If that's the case, I'm not sure how much more is to be said here.

Yes, this is true.



Yes, and what is faith?  Hebrews 11:1 "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."

You can have faith without every historical fact in the Bible being literally true.



You are not accurately stating my point.  "Faith" is critical to salvation.  The question is, "Faith in what?"  Is it faith in the world being created in 7 days?  So in other words, if the world was created in a million years, your entire faith structure SHOULD crumble?

"Faith" and whether Mary was a virgin are two separate things.  Apples and oranges.



Irrelevant to my point...



Still irrelevant to my point...



Here is where your logic falls apart.  The critical thing for salvation is whether Jesus was the Son of God.  I accept that.  But for your point to be accurate and mine to be wrong, they would have to believe that BOTH of the following MUST be true, and that taking away one MUST take away the other:  (1) That Jesus is the Son of God; AND (2) that Mary was a virgin.  In other words, if Jesus came down to them today and said he is the Son of God but Mary was not a virgin, just a "young woman," how would that affect their salvation?   If it wouldn't, then the Mary virgin issue is irrelevant.  If it would, then I consider that to be unreasonable because Jesus being the Son of God affects one's actions (and faith is an action, by the way), whereas Mary being a virgin is not a statement of dogma, principle, or a code of behavior, and should not affect behaviors.

Do people believe that Mary being a virgin is necessary?  Yes.  I get that.  The question is not one of their subjective and precarious faith in an often misinterpreted scriptorial reference, but of the objective reality of whether that fact SHOULD affect their faith if Jesus is the Christ irregardless of that factual, historical statement.

So here's the question:  If Jesus is in fact the Christ and this could somehow be proven, SHOULD the fact of whether Mary was a virgin affect your behavior/faith?  My answer is a solid and objective "NO."

Here you are misstating the points again, calling them "lies."  As I stated above, there is no necessity in calling any of it "lies."  Don't alter the facts to try to tear down my basic argument.  At worst, they were misunderstandings by individuals of faith who recorded the record to the best of their beliefs, not "lies" at all.

Calling them "lies" is like calling everyone who debates on this site a "liar" if it turns out their closely held beliefs are not 100% accurate historically.  That's simply not fair.

Again, I feel like you guys are saying the exact same thing and disagreeing with each other :) Heath's last response to me really clarified things for me.

I feel like Tycho and I share views so closely that I honestly can't explain it without tripping over the same blind spots as he has, so I won't try.

Heath's point though suddenly makes sense to me.

The important part is Faith in God. That's it. You can believe in the FSM and cars are demons and anything else, but faith in God seals the deal.

Things can shake our faith in the Bible. That's okay, it'll happen no matter what; we'll have crises of faith in the Bible, in Mary, in God, etc. However, that alone isn't the end of the story.

The next step is how we deal with this crisis. Do you then let your faith in God diminish? If so, THAT is the point where things are going bad. Yes, credibility issues in the Bible can result to a crisis of faith, which can result in loss of faith in God, which is what Tycho and I see as our entire argument. However, you can also say 'whelp, I guess I just won't trust the Bible so much, but my relationship with God will pull me through'. So the failure in step 1 does not have a super-strong relationship with the decision in step 2 (at least, in Heath's view).

For some people, I can absolutely see Heath's view as being correct. I think if I scientifically proved the Bible to be completely imaginary to the last word, he'd still go to church and be faithful, because his faith isn't about that; it's about tradition, relationships, identity, and his subjective experiences.

For me, I am very sensitive to falsifiability. I don't think Christianity justifies its own existence, so I want to find evidence to support it or disprove it. I don't trust subjective experiences, I don't feel like God calls me on the phone and we chat, and I want stuff I can reference and double check whether I'm in love with life or the entire world has gone dark. So for me, yes, toppling biblical evidence is a huge item, and I'd consider it (perhaps not this particular issue, but lack of credibility in general) full grounds for walking away from Christianity.

Do you guys think I'm more or less seeing things correctly?

In reply to Heath (msg # 95):

I think you're really missing the key point that I've been trying to make here, Heath.  The bible is the sole source of information for many christians.  Even those who accept other sources, the bible is still the top one.  If it contains deliberate lies about Jesus' divinity, that calls into question the whole story, really.  Many people will find it pretty much impossible to believe that Jesus was the son of God if they don't consider the bible a trustworthy source.

So yes, you're right, if Jesus showed up today and said "hey guys, my mom wasn't a virgin, but I'm still the son of God!" people might be able to get over that story and still have faith in Jesus.  But Jesus DIDN'T show up today and say that.  Because of that, the vast majority of christians depend on the bible for their information about Jesus.  Take the bible away from them, and they've got little-to-no reason to believe Jesus is anything special anymore.

As for the "lies" bit, we've been over this several times now, and I'm sticking to my guns.  A story where an angle has a conversation with Mary about the holy spirit getting her pregnant, and her saying "how can this be, since I'm a virgin?" and another story about an angel coming to Joseph and saying "hey man, I know it looks bad, but don't kick Mary to curb here, it's all legit, 'cause God did it!" and the whole nine yards isn't just an honest mistake someone could come up with if Mary wasn't a virgin.  If Mary wasn't a virgin, those stories were made up by someone to convince people Jesus was divine.  When you make up stories that aren't true, we usually call them lies.

Some mistakes could be honest errors, I totally agree with you on that.  There are plenty of things in the bible that I could happily accept as just an honest mistake, or a mistranslation, or whatever.  But whole stories about conversations between people and angels aren't simple misunderstandings or mistranslations.  That's not an honest mistake you can really make.  You would never accept it if a baptist made up stories about evil deeds by Mormons in order to discredit your religion.  You'd never hesitate to call that a lie, even if the baptist really, honestly believes that Mormons are evil.  Making up stories about stuff that didn't happen and trying to pass it off as true is lying, plain and simple.  Whether you're a "person of faith" or not doesn't come into it.

So as I said before, and as I'll keep saying if you keep challenging it, if Mary wasn't a virgin, the stories that tell us she talked to an angel about it are lies, not mistakes.  Maybe the people who wrote them down weren't the source of those lies, but someone at some point made up a fictional story and tried to pass it off as fact, and that deception made it into the bible, right along with all the stuff about Jesus rising from the dead, curing the sick, walking on water and all the rest.  And if one of the big miracles related to him turns out to be a lie, people are really going to doubt all the other stories too.

100% right on about my point up until this:


Not actually.  The principles and truths of the Bible must be true, and certain facts, such as "Jesus is the Christ" must be true.  But the historical facts that must be true are few and far between, particularly the nitty gritty details that are subject to multiple interpretations.



The problem I see with this is that falsifiability as to shaking a person's faith must be looked at in context...and let's say "inaccuracy" because "falsification" implies intentional misrepresentation or misleading, and I really don't see that at all in the Bible.

So with inaccuracy, if it is a small one about a date or an interpretation of something, or if something is figurative instead of literal, that shouldn't (again, SHOULD is the word) shake someone's faith because the Bible is not perfect and has gone through many imperfect hands and translations over the centuries.

As I said previously, part of the purpose of this life is for us to have our faith tested, to sift the truth and engage in fact-finding.  Just because God would let imperfect facts remain in the Bible is part of its beauty because we are all here to sift the truths of mortality for ourselves, and why would God make that too easy for us?  Only after great trial comes the reward, so the greater the trial, the greater the reward.  Allowing imperfections in the Bible is a way for Him to sift the wheat from the chaff, those who are really "faithful" (in the faith sort of way), and those who require proof and perfection before they will believe.

In reply to katisara (msg # 96):

I think that summarizes things fairly well, I just have a really hard time relating to the idea of being able to just over look the fact that the primary source for the religion contains a deliberate deception.  That'd be a game breaker for me, even in something much more mundane than a religious document.

Heath, we seem to be getting hung up on the "lies" part, so let's put that slightly aside for a moment.

Do you agree that IF there were deliberate lies in the gospels, and not about something small-change like a date or a place name, but about something big like a miracle, that that would be a good reason to question the credibility of the rest of the story?  Is the issue just that you don't see making up that story about the angels as a "lie," but I do, or is it that even if there are deliberate falsifications about miracles, you still think that shouldn't lessen people's trust in the sources at all?

In reply to Tycho (msg # 97):

You're making my point for me.  He also didn't show up today and say the opposite (i.e., that Mary WAS a virgin).  So that is simply a faith based story of no consequence to salvation.


Again, I said that I believe she actually "was" a virgin, and that these stories are likely true, which means they weren't lies in any event.  My point was that the fact of Mary being a virgin or not is not a principle of salvation, and therefore is irrelevant to one's salvation, regardless of the importance placed on it by individuals.

Also, talking to angels could be figurative or literal.  It all could be part of a parable, or part of a great belief of the early Christians that may or may not be accurate, but is just part of their tradition, as it is in ours.

Whether something affects other people's faith is irrelevant to my point.  What they do is relevant.  If you get maimed in a car accident tomorrow and that takes away your faith, it is the fact that you lost faith that is relevant to your salvation, not the fact of the car accident.  Thus, the point is whether the car accident "SHOULD" affect your faith.  I would say it shouldn't, and therefore is not part of God's plan of salvation.  Rather, it is a test of your faith, which you lost.

So too is the fact of Mary's virgin birth, or any other miracle.  If they are not true, that alone is irrelevant to God's plan and is not a necessary truth for salvation.  It is how people react to those truths (their showing of faith or not) that is important.  Their subjective beliefs do not alter God's plan, no matter how much they may want it to.  God's plan is what is objective, and requires certain behaviors, including faith.  If you lose faith, that is the fact which affects your salvation, not the underlying fact that tested your faith and which you were too weak to withstand.  That is simply your subjective weakness.

Under your point, God's plan can be altered by every individual based on the individual's subjective beliefs.  I am saying that God's plan is an objective reality, and our subjective weaknesses lead us to follow that plan or not.

In reply to Tycho (msg # 100):

I think you're too hung up on the truth or falsity of facts.  Whether they are true or false is irrelevant.  God's plan is objective and independent of 99% of the facts in the Bible.  Those are faith based stories to help us and lift us up.  They are possibly factually true, or figurative, or whatever.  I am not concerned about that, but about the principles espoused and the few facts that are ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL to salvation (ordinances, whether Jesus is the Christ, the code of behaviors, etc.).  Everything else (miracles, etc.) is just fluff.

Where does it end though Heath?

If I was to claim that 100% of the Book of Mormon is false, I assume that would be too much 'falsity' to maintain faith, but perhaps I am wrong.

How do you, personally, decide where that line is?

I repeat:  the important things are the ordinances (like baptism), the key doctrinal points (like whether Jesus was the Christ), the code of behaviors (10 Commandments, Sermon the Mount, etc.), and similar principles.

We have a saying in the LDS church that even if every scripture was gone tomorrow, it would not affect our faith one bit because we have a living prophet of God.  That statement is a principle statement of fact because it requires belief AND completely affects one's behavior toward salvation.

To reverse your point, where do we stop the other way?  Do we say that if Methuselah really lived to be 970 years old and not 969 years old, that the Bible is false and we should abandon all faith?  Do we say that every single fact in the Bible must be true 100% factually and literally or we must throw out the baby with the bathwater?

No.  This is why, as I said, one of the purposes of this mortality is to ourselves do the work of sifting truths and determining what are essential to our salvations.  By doing this work, we strengthen faith instead of just blindly believing (which is also the kind of faith that fails upon one inconvenient truth).

Heath, you seem to be starting with the assumption that God exist, Jesus was his Son, died for sin, etc.  You're taking that stuff as given, and saying "okay, since all that's true, what is the minimal set of other stuff you need to believe?"  Whereas I'm not taking all that stuff as granted.  I'm saying that people need a reason to conclude all that stuff is true.  For most people who believe, that reason is the stories in the bible.  Tell them that the bible contains lies, and they're not going to trust the bible, and they're not going to believe all the stuff that you're taking as given.

And, I would stress, that it's entirely reasonable and rational for them to do so.  We should change our beliefs if the evidence that led to them turns out to be false.  Like katisara said, falsifiability isn't a bad thing!

Your argument seems to be that people shouldn't change their beliefs if the evidence their faith rests on turns out not to be credible.  You're saying that all that other stuff isn't what gets them into heaven, so they shouldn't be hung up on it.  Which is fine IF they already believe all the stuff that does get them into heaven for some completely independent reason, and can still go on believing it when the evidence turns out to be false.  But many christians consider the bible to be the only source of evidence.  If it's not credible, then they've got no reason keep believing all the stuff that you say is important.

I'll try to use your terms, so forgive me if I get them garbled here:  believing the "facts" doesn't get you salvation, but the "facts" are why people believe/follow the "principles" which do get them salvation.  The facts are what led them to the principles.  Take them away, and they won't trust the principles either.  Whether they "should" or not depends on what we mean by "should."  You mean it in the sense of "will they be better off if they do?" (and are assuming that your religion is true).  I'm meaning it in the sense of "is it the correct logical conclusion based on the facts they have?" (and leaving the question of whether the religion is actually true or not as an unknown).

Think of it this way:  say your friend is getting older, and his eyesight is going bad, and you've noticed his driving getting steadily worse.  He gets up to leave, and you consider saying "lets call you a cab, rather than you driving, eh?  I just don't think it's safe for you to be driving right now, you might kill someone!"  Now, what "should" the friend do?  Drive himself, or call a cab.  My argument is that we don't know for certain whether he'll crash his car and hurt someone, so he should do the safe thing and get a cab.  Your argument is more along the lines of "well, lets assume we know for certain that he won't crash.  Therefore, he 'should' drive himself because that will save some money."  One is talking about the rational thing to do in the face of uncertainty, the other is talking about the most beneficial under an assumed knowledge of the outcome.  Does that make sense?

Heath,

Thanks for clarifying.  I can see why you hold the opinion you do, even though I cannot hold that view myself.  What you find irrational (that all facts must be important), I find totally necessary.

Just a difference in how we view the world.

So for example Heath (and I'm only speaking of total hypotheticals here), if in historical fact, Jesus was a Libyan woman, but still shared God's core message that we read, and was still died and was resurrected for our sins, you would be able to maintain your same, strong faith in God and Jesus, correct? Since we're hitting the basic points of Jesus being a historical person and the same principles.

(I'm not trying to test what you're saying, just verifying I'm understanding correctly.)

Tycho, I think your example is a little unfair. For one, it's playing on human inabilities to see our own failures.

If I may, I think a closer example would be thus; you have a friend who has a great credit rating. You know this. You guys get really close, you spend time together, and he establishes a rapport as you as being tremendously honest, friendly, dependable, and self-sacrificing. This is a guy who always puts others before himself.

The guy hits a financial rough spot. He comes to you and asks to borrow ten thousand dollars. It's a lot of money, but he's investing it such-and-such, and he gives his personal guarantee he'll repay you plus interest. The only reason he's asking is because the bank won't extend him credit (perhaps because he's God and doesn't carry ID ;P )

The evidence suggesting his financial trustworthiness is now gone, but you have a relationship and a history to build off of, which is its own evidence.

Tycho:  The "assumptions" I made were only in things that are essential to salvation and thus necessary to argue the rest of the points (i.e., the premises).  If God doesn't exist, then none of the other stuff matters...period.  I am laying a framework, not stating absolute facts.  You could say the same thing about Buddhism or any religion.  What are the essential facts for that religion's salvation?  Okay, now what are the non-essential facts?  What happens if some of the non-essential facts are not true?  SHOULD (and I keep emphasizing the word SHOULD) a person lose faith if non-essential facts are simply errors, mistranslations, or figurative speech?  I doubt it.


In reply to katisara (msg # 108):
I don't think you've exactly got it, but it makes a good launching point.  Those facts are not relevant to salvation.

Would it affect my faith?  It would probably test it, but those facts alone would not alter my behavior because they are not codes of conduct, ordinances, or other commands from God necessary for salvation.  So then the only question is whether I could survive the test of faith.  That question is completely separate and apart from the factual statements you make.  So, yes, those facts are irrelevant.



Wrong facts that are not essential are like tree branches that have grown at a bad angle.  You simply cut them off and the tree lives on.  If the fact is critical to salvation, it is like a disease in the roots or trunk.  You then would have to cut down the whole tree.  If you cut down the whole tree because one small branch was diseased, that wouldn't make any sense to me.  The same is true of religions.

But why would you trust a god that lies to you about what it takes to be saved?

I think Heath's point is:
1) You wouldn't trust a god that lies about the requirements to salvation; that's a critical principal, so grounds for invalidating faith; and
2) The state of Mary's maidenhood is not a point regarding salvation.

That's not what I'm understanding his argument to be, which would seem more like:

a) God can lie all he wants, because it doesn't effect the route to salvation.
b) Mary was probably a virgin prior to God getting horizontal with her, so the point is moot.

Yes, exactly.  The key, though, is that we don't know whether God exists.  It's an open question that people need to reach some conclusion on in order to even worry about the salvation stuff.  So anything that makes a person doubt that God exists is a "salvation" issue, because it may cause them to abandon the stuff that is essential for salvation if God is real.


I think there are two issues that are tripping us up here:
1.  You're focussing exclusively on "non-essenial" that are "simply errors, mistranslations, or figurative speech."  I think we can largely agree on those.  The question is about out-and-out lies?  I know you don't feel someone making up a story about conversations with angels qualifies as a lie, but many others do.  We might not get much further on changing each others mind about the specific example, but it would be useful to at least hear your position on cases if they really were straight-up lies.  Then we'd at least be at the point where we could both say "okay, we disagree that this is a lie, but if someone changed our mind on that, we could agree with the rest of what the other person says."  So, if there were intentional deceptions (not just honest mistakes or mistranslations, etc) in the bible related to Jesus' miracles, would you agree that it would be rational for a person to doubt other claims it makes??
2.  I think the word "should" is being used in two different ways here.  I think you're using it in the "given that we believe God exists and that faith is the key to salvation, will they be better off making this decision?" sense.  And under those assumptions, the answer is indeed that they should keep the faith.  But I'm using "should" in the sense of meaning "is this the best decision given the limited information they have available to them?"  Does that sound about right?  You're talking about the costs/benefits of a decision, whereas I'm talking about making a decision based on limited evidence?  I think we're getting tripped up on this because you're saying they "should" keep on believing as they do (because that belief is critical for getting into heaven), whereas I'm saying they "should" change their minds (because they no longer have good evidence that heaven actually exists).  We're both using the same word ("should"), but meaning slightly different things by it.  We seem to be talking about different aspects of the question, with me focussed on making a rational decision with limited data, and you focussed on obtaining salvation.


But IF you didn't "survive" your test of faith, wouldn't your actions change?  Would you still make covenants with a God if you didn't believe He existed?


I think this is a fundamental difference in how you view the question of religion and how I (and possibly katisara) do.  I tend to ask "do I have good reason to believe that the supernatural claims of this religion are true?  Does its afterlife actually exist?  Will following their instructions actually lead me to that afterlife, etc?"  The very first thing is to figure out if I believe it or not.  So anything that calls into doubt the credibility of those making claims about the religion is a pretty big deal.  Because if someone lies to me about the little stuff, I'm not going to believe their claims about the big stuff.

In your analogy, all I can see are the branches of the tree (or, perhaps just the leaves), and someone is telling me about how great the leaves are because the trunk is so great.  I can't actually see the trunk myself, I just have to listen to this person's stories about this amazing trunk, and look at the leaves.  But if I see that the leaves are diseased, and not at all like what the person told me the leaves were like, I'm really not going to believe them when they tell me that the trunk is great.  It's not that I'm saying "an amazing trunk is fine, but I won't take an amazing trunk with bad leaves!"  Rather, I'm saying, "this guy lied about the leaves, he's probably lying about the trunk too.  I'm guessing it's diseased all the way down to the roots based on what I can see."

On the other hand, you seem to be taking the trunk as given.  In your analogy you can see the whole tree, from roots to trunk, to branch, to leaves.  You feel like you've inspected the trunk, and know that it's sound.  So you can prune a few bad branches and still not be worried about the overall health of the tree.

Basically, you consider the whole tree to be "visible," where I consider the majority of the tree to be hidden from sight.  How one reacts to bad leaves in those two cases would be different.

Just thought of another way to highlight the "should" issue.

In the story of jack and the beanstock Jack sells the family cow for a handful of magic beans.  His poor mother is pretty disappointed with this, calls him a fool, and throws the beans out the window.  Overnight a beanstock grows into the sky, Jack climbs it the next day, gets a goose that lays golden eggs or something, and eventually lives happily ever after.

We can look at the decision jack made to sell the cow for magic beans in two ways:
1.  did he end up living "happily ever after" because of it?  Yes?  Well, then it was a good decision and he "should" have done just what he did.
2.  would a rational person expect a good outcome from the decision?  No?  Well, then it was bad decision and he "shouldn't" have done what he did.

#1 is more like what Heath is saying, #2 is more like what I'm saying.  Both are valid uses of the word "should," but they mean slightly different things in each context.

Again, that's not what I am saying.  What I am saying is to remove the individual out of the picture completely, okay?  This will remove all subjectiveness and indirect influence.

Now, looking at the doctrine of a religion, each has a "path" to salvation (tenets of the faith that are necessary, codes of conduct, rites, etc.)  Everything the religion says is necessary on that path is what I am referring to.  It is pure dogma without individual prejudism or subjectiveness.

You are looking at the individual independently from the religious dogma. This is why we have problems of "SHOULD."  According to the religious dogma (not the individual's beliefs), SHOULD a person be affected by A, B, or C?  If not, it is not necessary to salvation.

This is not "outcome oriented," as you suggest.  It is ideologically oriented based on the path set forth by the religion.

So, for example, if you took out every reference in the Bible of Mary being a virgin (and it didn't say anything one way or the other), would the Bible still be enough to lead a person to salvation?  If not, then it is an "essential" fact.  If not, then it is not "essential."

This is why we look at core concepts that drive behavior in the religion, including the ordinances, codes of conduct, etc.

If you think of the following question, you will understand exactly my point:

"If the Bible did not reference the mother of Jesus in any way, shape or form, would it still be sufficient to lead one to salvation?"

I think I see what you're saying, Heath, it just doesn't seem to have much point to me.  "Removing the individual" takes away the whole part that's of any interest to me.  I think that's really why we're talking past each other.  You're looking at it from the point of a view of the religion, I'm looking at it from the point of view of the individual following the religion (or deciding not to follow it).

From my point of view, this all started when you said that people were wrong to care whether or not Mary was a virgin.  For me, you can't take the individual out of it once you make that claim.  The claim is fundamentally about individuals, and what they should or shouldn't do.

I understand that if faith in Jesus is the key to salvation, then someone could believe Mary was or wasn't a virgin, and it wouldn't impact their salvation at all.  I get that, and I can agree with it.  I think for me, though, is going from that to "someone is wrong if their faith requires Mary to be a virgin."  Because I think it's entirely rationally for someone to distrust sources that lie to them.

For your quote, I could totally agree that if the bible never said anything about Mary, that wouldn't be a problem for the religion.  But saying nothing, and containing falsehoods are very different situations.  Perhaps not for what you're looking at, but absolutely for what I'm looking at.

I guess the way I'd summarize what I'm saying in one line would be:
"if Jesus didn't actually rise from the dead, didn't actually perform any miracles, and didn't actually claim to be the son of God, would you still trust the bible enough to follow it's path to salvation?"  [note, for clarity, it could still be the case that Jesus died for your sins in this hypothetical, the question is whether you'd actually believe he did without all the miracles]

That only makes sense if the Salvation process (Step 1 + Step 2 + Step 3) is assumed to be true whether any of the other things are true.

I actually agree with you Heath, that if there is some sort of Objective Salvation Process that exists, independant of any facts, then those facts are non-important.

But the existence of that Objective Salvation Process can only be taken on faith if you don't care about the importance of the facts.  It is an assumption that must be held first in order to neglect the importance of the facts like you do.

So, yes, you could be right.  There could be an Objective Salvation Process that exists that will always exists regardless of all sorts of other non-Salvation important facts.  The problem is most people are not willing to hold that assumption without some facts to first lead them there, and keep them there.

You can if you want to be objective as to the requirements for salvation of a religion.  If you want to stick to the subjective, then it would be just as easy to say that any true religion must stone adulterers because that's what it says in the Bible. But again, that would be a misunderstanding of the Bible, and not objective or reasonable.  So also are those who claim that Mary must be a virgin for the religion to be true, even though Isaiah simply prophecies that she would be a young woman.

So if you accept any individual's interpretation of the writings, no matter how different they vary from what was intended, then we are no longer talking about a "religion," but about a "person."

Again, this focuses on the "person," not the "religion," and is entirely subjective.  If you believe that Methusalah lived exactly the number of days stated in the Bible or else your entire religion is wrong, then that is the "individual," and it only affects THAT INDIVIDUAL'S salvation.  What I am talking about are the things in the religion that are critical to EVERY PERSON'S salvation.

I agree with you Heath, but that's only true if you assume that the religion is true before you look at the facts.

That's pretty much backwards to the way most people interact with the world.

In reply to Doulos (msg # 120):

Not necessarily.  I can do the analysis under Buddhism or any religion without actually "believing" it.  It's just dissecting the tenets of the faith.

The problem is the converse of what you are stating.  People become so ingrained in their own religion that they can't see the forest for the trees and dissect their own faith, or accept anything might be open to discussion.

So my analysis works best when you "don't" believe in the religion and can dissect its elements without bias.

I'm not sure I understand.  I agree that what you claim is a problem (regarding people becoming ingrained in their own religion abnd struggling to see other perspectives), but I'm not sure how first assuming a position of salvation helps that.

You dissect the religion.  What does the religion say is required for salvation?  What other codes of conduct are required?  Etc.  Anything that is outside of these codes is simply fluff.  You don't have to believe anything to make this analysis.  And belief might actually obscure the analysis due to personal bias.

So Religion A says that the road to Salvation requires one to take 100 steps in a row to the East.

It also says that the prophet Eastman could shoot lasers out of his eyes and was the one who said that walking East would bring salvation.

We find out that the prophet Eastman could never shoot lasers out of his eyes, but in your mind that's not important to the Salvation process because it's only a fact, while all that is important is that walking 100 steps to the East is the point?

Does that sound correct?

Yes, that is correct.  Because if the religion itself holds out to be true in the endgame, the other facts will not have mattered.  All that will have mattered is if you took the 100 steps according to the salvation dictates of that religion.

In reply to Heath (msg # 125):

The wrinkle to your example is if the religion also said something like, "In order to be saved, you must also believe that Eastman shoots lasers out of his eyes."  Then it becomes a principle of salvation and an essential fact.

I am aware of no commandment requiring such an acceptance of Mary as a virgin in order for an individual to receive salvation.

In other words, if a person believes everything in the Bible to be true except the Mary is a virgin part, would that person be damned according to Christian beliefs?  If not, then it is not essential to salvation.

Fair enough.  In this case you are using the religion (or the texts that speak about it) as the basis for deciding what is essential or not, but if those same texts can't be trusted on basic facts about things like virgin birth, then why should they be used as the standard for what is essential for salvation?

Religious Text A says the way to salvation is through 100 steps.
Religious Text A says Eastman shoots lasers out of his eyes.
Religious Text A says Eastman is the one who says salvation is through the 100 steps.

We find out Religious Text A is historically wrong about the lasers.

That should erode our confidence in both of the other points in my view (it does not have to eliminate confidence for sure, but just erode it), but not in your view.

It's a fundamental difference in how we view evidence.

When you add on the fact that many people believe the Religious Text itself claims it is 100% without error it becomes even more fantastically critical that not just most facts, but every fact, is 100% true.

I don't think the Bible necessarily spells out Mary's virginal status after Jesus was conceived.

In the LDS faith, in the Book of Mormon, Alma (Alma 7:10) says that Mary would be a virgin, that she would conceive and bear a son.  After that moment of conception, however, while she was bearing that son, was she still a virgin from our modern day point of view?  How exactly was she "overshadowed" to conceive Jesus?

I think everyone can agree on one thing, that Mary was likely a virgin before Jesus was conceived.  Given the social climate of the times, it's quite likely that any given young woman would still be a virgin when it came time for her to be married.  Women were married young, premarital sex was really frowned on, and kids (girls especially) just didn't get time off to themselves in mixed company.  There was usually always some sort of chaperon or guardian, because people wanted to guard against a daughter becoming "spoiled" before marriage.  Wouldn't most women have still been virgins?

How long did she remain a virgin, however?  She was married to Joseph and sex during pregnancy isn't forbidden, and is encouraged, as I understand it.  While she may have abstained from sex with Joseph before Jesus was born, was she still technically a virgin anyway?

Heck if I know.  I don't think it's a very important part of the Bible, however, whether she had sex with Joseph before Jesus' birth, or if she was technically not a virgin anymore after Jesus' conception, that's not very important.  What is important is that she lived a morally clean sex-free life before Jesus conception.

I think the hypothetical we're being asked to consider here is actually that she wasn't a virgin when Jesus was conceived (which I guess could mean that EITHER there was premaritial sex going on, OR that Jesus wasn't conceived until after they were married rather than when the bible says he was).  What Heath is saying is that it shouldn't change anyone's beliefs if it turns out that Mary got pregnant with Jesus in an entirely-non-miraculous, just-like-every-other-pregnancy, way.  Others of us are saying that that would mean the stories about angels talking to Joseph and Mary, and about Mary being a virgin would all have been made up out of nowhere by someone, and still made it into the gospels, which calls into question the reliability of the gospels as sources of information about Jesus' divinity.

It sounds like the BoM also says that Mary would be a virgin, so in addition to calling the accuracy of the bible into question, Mormons would also have reason to doubt the BoM if they accepted that Mary wasn't a virgin before Jesus was conceived.  I know that Mormons are willing to accept that there are some errors in the bible due to human mistakes over time, but am I correct in thinking that the BoM is viewed as being "revealed," and thus free from factual errors (as opposed to typos and dated wording and such)?  Would directly contradicting the BoM be a "big deal" to Mormons?
This message was last edited by the GM at 11:18, Wed 26 Mar 2014.

Tycho, I think most, if not all, Mormons understand that the Book of Mormon is not 100% accurate in every little detail and nuance of wording, particularly since some of the passages are directly from the Bible and are based on Joseph Smith's reading of the Bible and his understanding at the time he did the translation.  So there would be some translation error that carries over.

That said, without other evidence, I think we tend to accept it as true in the facts since it is part of our canonized scripture.

But my point was that it does not "have" to be true since it is not related to one's salvation.

1st Nephi 11, in the Book of Mormon, Nephi was "caught away in the Spirit of the Lord" and had some sort of vision.  Among other things, he saw a virgin.  Then the phrase "the condescension of God" was mentioned, then that "the virgin" is literally the physical mother of Jesus.  Then after "a space of time" he sees the virgin again, bearing a child.  Whether she was actually still a virgin at this point or whether Nephi was using that phrase to refer to her, since he hadn't been told her name, well I think a person could take it either way.

Everyone is a virgin up until they have sex, right? ;)  For most Israelite/Jewish people at that time, they'd marry young and wouldn't have sex until marriage, as far as we know -- it was a very patriarchal society and girls just wouldn't have that many opportunities to go have sex.  So I think the idea that Mary hadn't had sex with any other man before Joseph is probably true.  The 500 years or so in Judah before Jesus were born were a fairly devout period, as far as we can gather from archeological sources.

I've been thinking about Joseph, and he wasn't going to stone Mary to death (as he could have) but was of the mind to put her away by herself for the rest of her life.  I could easily see him not wanting to have sex with Mary while she was sort of the baby-momma for someone else.

So, if you accept that Christ is half-divine, that his literal father is God the Father, and if you go by the viewpoint that it's mortal sex that loses virginity, rather than whatever happened with Mary, then I could see an argument being made that there was a virgin birth.

Bart, our earlier discussions before you arrived was how "virgin" in Old Testament times really meant "a young woman of marrying age" and not necessarily a sexually pure person (even though that might be implied).  Thus, the prophecy of Isaiah was mistranslated into Greek as meaning sexually pure, which was the narrow definition clung to by early Christians in their writings, and then becoming an ideology that a (sexually pure) virgin became pregnant, which continues to this day.

My point was that, whether she was sexually pure or not is not the issue; Isaiah's prophecy cannot be strictly construed as having only that meaning, and the later writers, including those of the New Testament and even Nephi (who, as you will recall, quoted freely from Isaiah) probably cannot be strictly interpreted to mean virgin in the meaning we ascribe it today, and if they were, it was likely derived from the early Greek mistranslation of Isaiah, which turned almost into its own religious movement -- the "Blessed Mary," etc.

Which is not to say she wasn't a virgin in that sense.  I just do not want to be someone who redefines words to meet my own ends.  Translation accuracy and allowance for multiple reasonable interpretations is important to me.