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.)

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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.