Boro Nut

If a woman is described as a woman in a fairytale instead of a wife, spinster, widow or witch, her status as anything other than biologically female is clearly irrelevant to the plot. If the original author of Isiah didn't deem it the slightest bit necessary to use the clear and specific unambiguous internationally recognised word for a virgin, he clearly attached absolutely no significance whatsoever to the state of her hymen. Given that she was already heavilly pregnant at the time I can see his point. That fact alone blows any virgin birth myth out of the water. If her very virginity was not the central and paramount theme of the whole fable, there is no fable.

Boro Nut

Clouseau

Which was?

spin

BTWLH, eg Lev 21:14. Hard to miss.


spin

Amaleq13

One would think it rather obvious that Paul's effort to convince others that the Messiah had come despite the fact he had been crucified might be helped by claims of a magical birth.

Certainly subsequent Christian authors thought so.

Clouseau

But Paul was not trying to convince his readers of that.

judge

But Matthew and Luke are part of the bible. You can argue that their speculation might be wrong. However you can't make much of a case that the bible doesn't present Jesus as being born of a virgin.

As far as Matthean speculation goes, it is irrelevant as to whether the HB indicates that the woman is a virgin or merely nubile.

Look at how Matthew uses the HB. There is no attempt to make it fit exactly when he uses it. He uses it typologically. Look for example how he uses Hosea. "Out of Israel I called my son".

Sure, some fundmentalists might argue this, (they might argue that the HB does say virgin) but so what?

Why should a fundamentalist skew be the staring point?

Otherwise all we end up with is a reaction against fundametalism.

Amaleq13

They didn't always believe the Messiah could be crucified and resurrected, did they?

Hard to imagine how it would only be used to convince converts.

Harder still to imagine it not becoming incorporated into any summary statement about Paul offers about his beliefs.

And simply absurd to suggest that he wouldn't have said "born of a virgin, born under the law" if he held such a belief.

Tangent

I don't believe they are arguing that the Gospels do not present a virgin birth, just that the prophecies of Isaiah which it supposedly fulfilled do not mention a virgin at all.

The result being that the prophecies of Isaiah are not about Jesus at all.

Now let's just hope Isaiah really saw a chariot of asses or else it could get REALLY embarrassing for Jesus.

spin

There is another issue as well: the bible is a complex collection of documents (written at diverse points in time). One cannot judge the whole by one of its components. However, this is what one does when one proclaims that the bible says this or that. It implies a uniformity which needs to be demonstrated not assumed, otherwise the statement has no validity whatsoever. Any claims that the bible says something opens the door for the claimant to attempt to fiddle one text to fit another.

So, when username attempted to claim "the bible as a whole" supports virgin birth, s/he is attempting to taint Isaiah (because it is a part of the bible) with Matthew (another part of the bible), so as to force Isaiah to say something that is not contained within the text. It is true that Matthew supports virgin birth, but it is not representative of some unified vision, as Isaiah clearly doesn't support such a vision. The claim therefore that "the bible as a whole presents a virgin birth scenario" is an overgeneralization aimed at perverting the content of the bible for pious christian purposes.

(Much of the bible has nothing directly to do with christianity. Monumental declarations about biblical content by christians seems to me to be active support for cultural theft -- here of Jewish literature by people claiming to have superseded the religion of the Jews, a fact not accepted by the representatives of the culture which produced the documents, ie the Jews. And if anyone has any doubts about this claimed supersession, just think of the christian literature's Jewish killers of their founder and all the other anti-Jewish and anti-Pharisaic sentiment of the christian literature while using the Hebrew bible is incorporated in the christian book as something called "the old testament".)


spin

dog-on

The Torah was grafted onto a form of "Christianity", probably in the second century, (or later).