Sauron

Yes, but your claim was different than that, and you know it.
Your original claim wasn't that prophecy existed about Babylon; your original claim was:

Ancient Babylon, for instance, is a figure for a future 'Babylon'.

I underlined the important part for you. Jer 51 doesn't prove that at all.

The skeptics have far better scholarship than you've demonstrated.

What appears to be in fashion for you, however, is substituting your guesses for actual scholarship.

No, it's translating Hebrew.

Circularity, indeed. Perhaps you need to review your favorite tactic of repeating yourself ad infinitum, but never providing any scholarship to support the claim. You might recognize some circularity there.

Sauron

That's funny; you were basing your claim on an alleged lack of contemporary Jewish refutations. Now when you suddenly realize that there almost zero records at all from that period, suddenly you loosen up the standards a little bit to try and salvage your claim.

Not if the Jews didn't care enough to be bothered. You have yet to show that Jews in diaspora had enough time or motivation to be worried about some off-shoot group. As opposed to, oh, staying alive and maintaining their identity among alien cultures where they found themselves.

Not "surely would" at all. In fact, I see no reason why this would even be the case. And *you've* certainly never provided any reason why the Jews might care enough to lift a finger to refute the apostolics.

Except the Empire had no such interest.

Nice try; no banana.

Jack the Bodiless

Given Clouseau's earlier confusion regarding the state of the discussion, maybe a "where we're at" summary would be appropriate.

The original topic concerned pre-Christian Jewish interpretations of Isaiah 7:14. This rapidly morphed into discussion of the Christian mangling of this verse by the author of "Matthew". But the original did not discuss a "virgin birth", for the following reasons:

1. The original Hebrew used "almah" (young woman) rather than "betulah" (virgin).

2. The LXX "parthenos" didn't specifically mean "virgin" at the time.

3. There is doubt that the Greek translation of Isaiah was done by Jews anyhow.

4. The context describes events 7 centuries before Jesus: attempts to apply this to the supposedly "virgin-born" Jesus are unsupportable.

5. Neither of the two plausible candidates (Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz or Hezekiah) was supposedly born of a virgin.

6. Even if the woman (and the Hebrew does indeed say THE woman, a specific woman) was a virgin when the prophecy was made, nothing in the text implies a subsequent "immaculate conception" (and, for Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz, it specifically says otherwise).

7. The apologetic notion of "dual prophecy" still has no support whatsoever. No actual examples have been forthcoming. Instead we have a failure to connect Jeremiah's failed prophecy of the destruction of ancient Babylon to Revelation's metaphorical "future Babylon", and an allusion to a (non-prophetic) remark by Jeremiah that was ripped out of context by "Matthew" to fabricate a "prophecy" of an event that was itself fabricated by "Matthew" (the massacre of the innocents).

8. We are expected to believe that the Jews of Jesus' time "could not refute" Matthew's reworking of Isaiah 7:14, despite the lack of records from this time, and despite the fact that the Gospel of Matthew would not be written for another half-century or so.

Clouseau

"I won, really." N. Bonaparte.

Jack the Bodiless

In most of his battles, he did!

I seem to be doing rather better than Napoleon so far.

Clouseau

Not the ones that counted.

RED DAVE

And you haven't won any: those that count and those that don't.

RED DAVE

Steven Avery

Toto --- So since we have a voluminous Jewish literature in Talmud and Midrash and rabbinics as well as anti-Christian polemics like Toldet Yeshu, and since we have voluminous first-century literature from Josephus and Philo, and since Christians didn't even dominate any societies for a couple of centuries after the first .. what in the world are you actually talking about as having been suppressed and censored that you claim distorts our history?

Are you conjecturing lots of other now unknown philosophers 'like Philo' or historians 'like Josephus' have vanished without a trace by some coordinated effort to suppress their histories for some ____ reason ?

Are you conjecturing that the Jews fully suppressed a lot of their own material that has now vanished without a trace, even while we have dozens of volumes of Talmud and Toldet Yeshu in many versions ?

Where is the scholarship justification for such an assertion ?

Shalom,
Steven Avery

WishboneDawn

Can I just poke in and say that the issue of Isaiah 7:14 in my very christian course on the OT was addressed by putting forward the idea that Isaiah is not fortunetelling, he's addressing a contemporary issue and dressing down a king. Saying, "Get this place in order or some woman is going to have a boy that's going to take this all from you dude."

The correct tranlation of what Isaiah said is one matter, who he was talking to is a different one.

Forgive me if you guys already covered that.

Toto

praxeus post on early documents from Jesus split off.

Expect more splits.

eta:

derail on praxeus split