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This "suppose" is not good linguistics. parQenos fundamentally means "virgin" and other uses are derivative and need to be understood for their particular usage. You start with the basic significance of a word and discount that on any available evidence to the contrary. There doesn't seem to be such evidence so we are stuck with the basic significance.

First, think about the genealogy of Jesus in Mt. From Abraham through David and on to Joseph, but suddenly it is interrupted by the introduction of Mary who has nothing to do with the preceding genealogical line and the text says that Jesus was born of her without tying Jesus to the genealogy at all. What's going on here? The genealogy hasn't been added after the Mary stuff; it would be a totally unjustifiable addition. The most probable analysis is that the genealogy was part of the text prior to the part about Mary derailing the genealogy. This is also the case with Lk which supplies an analogous genealogy which has been rendered useless by the insertion of a phrase equivalent to "as was thought" in Lk 3:23 and the addition of the birth narrative. In both cases the royal descent has been passed over for a theological development from "son of David" to "son of god". So, on that score I doubt that we are dealing with response to the writings of Celsus.

The Celsus story dealing with a Roman soldier called "PanQera" has the hallmark of a word play on "parQenos", the sort of word play found in Jewish discourse of the era, though Celsus doesn't seem interested in the word play at all. The accusation of being a bastard is a typical sort of accusation -- which in this case is most likely seen in itself as a response to Jesus being called "son of god", blasphemy of sorts to Jews. Behind the accusations in Celsus we see the hands of an early Jewish response to claims about Jesus. This is supported by a rabbinical story which tells of the bastard son of Pandera.

I'd therefore say that the process was long via Mt to Jewish thought and then on to Celsus.


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lpetrich

I'm reminded of Livy's History of Rome, 1.3 - 1.4 (online here):

Chili

Yes and the "as was thought" of Luke 3:23 must be placed opposite to "as was recorded" in Mt.1:1 to make sure that the reader is not left with a headbanger but with the assurance that the Virgin delivered.

The question now becomes: who is Mary and who was Jesus if Mary gave birth to Christ -- and I doubt very much that Verhoeven will give us the answer.

Newton's Cat

Read Mark 6, 1-3

... which finishes with:

..., and they were offended at him.

Why?

Now read Mark 3, 31-35

'And they were offended at him' follows this - then read Mark 3, 30

'Because they said he has an unclean spirit'

This story of Jesus' visit to his hometown seems to have been deliberately split up ... in order to disguise something about the nature of Jesus' father.

Clue - why were Jesus' sisters in the synagogue but not his mother and brothers? Why did they call from outside instead of coming in?

Perhaps male offspring of a Jewish mother and non-Jewish father were not accounted to be Jews then ... but female offspring were?

(Mark 3,30 is obviously totally out of context with the preceeding text)

Petergdi

I don't claim to know much about linguistics, but it seems to me that if a writer and his primary audience have a shared understanding of the meaning of a word then the word has that meaning in that context even if a different meaning applies everywhere else.

The translator of LXX Isaiah intended "parthenos" to mean "young woman." Greek speaking Jews understood it in the sense of "young woman." The fact that it normally denotes a virgin woman does not change the fact that this shared understanding by Jewish readers of the Septuagint existed. Do you think it is possible to seriously dispute that Greek speaking Jews understood "parthenos" in Isaiah to have no implication of virginity?

Even if "parthenos" meant virgin everywhere else, one should still take seriously the idea that Matthew may have been entirely oblivious to the fact that "parthenos" normally means "virgin."

What seems to be going on is based on Matthew's understanding of Halakhah. Matthew is arguing that Jesus is Joseph's son and thus of the House of David in his understanding of Jewish (or perhaps Jewish-Christian) law despite the accusation that Joseph isn't the biological father of Jesus. That's why it is vital that Joseph did not divorce Mary.


Are you arguing that the geneology is a kind of vestigial organ in the evolution of the text and that it somehow escaped Matthew's notice? I must say that I have a very different opinion of Matthew. Whenever Matthew seems really stupid, I try to figure out what I am missing. (Matthew really does get Zechariah son of Berachiah and Zechariah son of Jehoiada mixed up, but as J. A. T. Robinson has pointed out, rabbis have been known to make that mistake too.)

One of the points of Luke's geneology is that we are all children of God in one sense. This is very similar to the point made by Jesus at Hanukkah in the Gospel of John when he quotes Psalm 82.

Jesus being son of David is probably less important to Luke than it is to Matthew, but being son of God for both of them is more a matter of obedience and faith then it is a matter of descent - although in Luke we are all children of God by descent.

It isn't the writings of Celsus of course, but the same story that Celsus was told by a Jew which I argue had been in circulation prior to the writing of the Gospel of Matthew and which was known all too well by Matthew's original audience. There is a coincidence that both words start with pi-alpha and have a theta, rho and nu somewhere or other. I'm unconvinced by this, especailly since my solution gives a reasonable explanation for many features of the nativity story in Matthew which are often found difficult to account for.


Yes, but "son of God" in the NT and amongst Jewish Christians wasn't connected to the birth stories particularly. It is featured prominently in Mark which has no birth story of any kind. The Jews were vastly more interested in Jewish Chrisitans who were counted as min, then the were with gentile Christians were largely irrelevant to them pre-Constantine.

Peter.

spin

Shoddy translation is not infrequent, so it's no big deal that (LMH ("almah") got translated as parQenos. Interestingly though, people not aware of the original language get shaped by the translation (as is often seen today when people try to make more out of the English than is allowed by the original biblical languages). It is possible of course that the writer of Mt didn't assume "virgin", but it certainly follows from the negation of Joseph as father (twice) and the claim that that which is conceived in Mary was from the holy spirit.

I'm not a great believer in the writer's understanding of halakhah. Mt seems to me to be only slavishly Jewish in content. But I would argue that the text of Mt has had more than one redaction...

This doesn't seem to deal with the basic problem I tried to outline. If Jesus was not the son of Joseph then the genealogies are less than worthless. Their post hoc addition would be useless, because they would serve no purpose: Jesus wasn't the son of Joseph. The only explanation I can see for their existence was that they were already in place in their respective texts when the theological development of the birth without human father reached them. I'd be happy for a better explanation. However, I can show evidence in both Mt and Lk of reworking of earlier forms of their texts.

But the genealogy is no longer related to Jesus. It has become inconsequential. Can you see the problem?

What has happened is a type of metathesis of consonants, PRQN -> PNQR. All the letters are there so you can't mistake the relationship if you had a Jewish background. (Even the word gematria was formed through a Hebrew metathesis of the Greek word grammateia! Ps 119 is full of examples.)


"The holy spirit will come upon you and the power of the most high will overshadow you"? Can the writer of Lk get much more explicit without exposing himself to charge of blasphemy for mentioning the divine name with the implication of copulating with her? Even Mt has the fact that her conception is of the holy spirit, not by Joseph and not through anyone else

Christians become sons of god by adoption. Jesus was adopted in Mk as well, but the theology evolved after that effort and in both Mt and Lk Jesus became the sired son of god. Joseph has been cut out of the picture implied by the genealogies and Jesus is no longer of the Davidic bloodline. These genealogies are a smoking gun.


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Petergdi

The negation of Joseph as biological father is true of my reading too. Being of the Holy Spirit does not exclude human participation. Nothing happens without God, but that does not mean that there are no human actions.

I do note that Eusebius in Book 3, chapter 27 of Ecclesiastical History says that the stricter sort of Ebionites held that Jesus "was the fruit of the intercourse of a man with Mary." And while it might be unsafe to hang too much on this, the oddity of "a man" rather than "Joseph" is at least suggestive of there being an Ebionite tradition of a man other than Joseph being the biological father of Jesus. If we take the nativity story in Matthew as an early Ebionite story (which follows from my interpretation) the fact that the Ebionites had their own Oral Torah is quite significant.


That would only be true if there could be no distinction between legal and biological fatherhood. I don't think this is a given at all. Even with the virgin birth interpretation a legal fatherhood by Joseph is implied. The slander makes a point of talking about the messy divorce. Matthew makes a point about there not being a divorce. No matter which came first, the divorce or lack thereof is clearly an important point for both sides.


I'm certainly no linguist, but surely all you can say is that the metathesis is plausible. There does exist a soldiers' name of Pantera. Origen has Panthera with a theta (I checked the Greek text) and the Jewish tradition has Pandera. These are all clearly forms of the same name. On what basis can you exclude the possibility that this is a real name which is only accidentally similar to parthenos?

The number of things in the text of Matthew which suggest that the story is a response to the slander seem to me to give a pretty strong case. Is a mere coincidence between Panthera and parthenos so unlikely that it outweighs the number of features better explained by the slander coming first?


You are assuming your conclusion. If you bracket out your interpretation of the meaning of the birth narratives, this evolution does not exist. Luke even says that Jesus grew in wisdom and in favour with God.

If you are suggesting that it was no longer important to Matthew and Luke and their audiences that Jesus was the Christ, I think you are seriously mistaken. (It is possible that it wasn't really all that important to Jesus, but that is another matter entirely.)

Peter.

andrewcriddle

See Irenaeus Against Heresies book 1 (which is probably Eusebius' source)
http://www.tertullian.org/fathers2/A...#P6155_1380364 Andrew Criddle

spin

But then the text doesn't exclude artificial insemination or spontaneous pregnancy. However, if you read the text for what it states, it doesn't give you license to contemplate any option other than that there was no human father, as none were provided or suggested and the only candidate was excluded. Eisegesis is not a useful tool in trying to understand text.

If you can find any question of mamzer claims in Ebionite tradition, I'd be happy to hear about it, but I strongly doubt it. An earlier Mt could easily have been close to Ebionite views in my view.

Jesus would have been a mamzer -- unless of course you're proposing the eisegetical notion that Jesus was from a previous marriage... but then again Mary is accepted as not having indulged in any umm, naughtiness.

Yes, that metathesis is plausible is what I can definitely say. However, knowing the source is almost certainly Jewish, the connection is inevitable.

There's no theta in Hebrew, so when the story arrived from Greek speaking Jews, the theta would become voiced as a DALETH after a nu/NUN.

No, the metathesis is merely a finger to who wrote the slander. The things you have to dismiss include the insuperable two separate genealogies which point to two traditions which accepted Jesus as the son of David, not as a mamzer. Adoption was for children of dead fathers, not no fathers. The text doesn't allow you to think of other fathers. This is a modern rationalization especially among the historical Jesus crowd who want to explain away anything supernatural so they can reclaim what's left, like a vegetarian trying to find sustenance at a steak house, picking out what they can eat.

(I don't believe so.)

This doesn't lessen anything I've said. Sons can grow in wisdom and favor. You don't seem to understand the problem involved in the presence of the genealogies. As I pointed out, there is no reason to add them if Joseph is not the father and Jesus's birth is questionable. The genealogies negate that possibility They strongly indicate a later theological development and they're a repudiation of the Jewish slander cited in Celsus.

Hello! The goal posts for the notion of christ were moved. Remember, David is supposed to have said of Jesus in Ps 110, "the lord said to my lord", putting Jesus out of David's league. Not a very Jewish notion and perhaps just the sort of thing that would have divided the more traditionally Jewish oriented Ebionites from these pagan innovators.


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