Beth Phillips

No, please don't. Chris has had a great deal of hostility for me for some time now, and unless he needs you to come to his rescue or defense, then you needn't bother getting in the middle of it. Even if he does need you to fight his battles for him, I am going to try to ignore him from now on anyway...

~Beth

Chris Weimer

You obviously missed the entire discussion. Not only does the semantic range of parthenos means virgin, that's it's primary meaning! Perhaps you are confused and meant to say that the semantic range of almah means virgin? If this were the case, then translating almah as parthenos in Isaiah wasn't so terrible after all, and delivers yet another crushing blow to this pathetic argument.

Regards

Phlox Pyros

Fancy but meaningless rhetoric.

Chris Weimer

Absolutely. Of course, anything is meaningless when you ignore the rest of the evidence.

Phlox Pyros

Chris, I still don't understand why you seem so upset. Does this really threaten your views so much? This case is as strong or stronger than the case made with respect to Josephus' writings. Anyways, I dealt with all of the evidence presented. It is all mostly irrelevant. If you feel there's something I've truly ignored, then present it and I'll link to the post where I've already dealt with it.

The Bishop

No need to take exception, I simply misspoke. Apologies.

The "evidence" that some pre-30 CE Jews thought that the messiah would be the result of a virgin birth is, well, that Matthew made a big deal of it, reported the virgin birth story and then justified it by reference to Scripture. And if he made up the virgin birth story, he must have done so only to fulfill the scripture, which consequently must have had even greater importance amongst the Messianic set that Matthew felt was his audience.

I for one don't believe that parthenos was a translation of bethulah. I have a copy of the mid-19th Century edition of the Septugint by L.L.C. Brenton, and even in this undoubtedly Christian-centred edition, in the introduction it highlights Isaiah as the very worst-translated book in the whole of the Greek.

That there is no other documentary evidence in favour of the hypothesis is certainly a major blow to it, but in a way the hypothesis was only created to explain why Matthew wrote what he did. Without that, you have to find some other explanation for Matthew making a big deal about parthenos in his Greek Scriptures and tying it into a story about Jesus's birth being, forgive me, parthenogenetic.

Incidentally, it's certainly not necessary for the whole of Jewry, the whole of Greek speaking Jewry or even the whole of Messianic, Greek-speaking Jewry to have believed in the necessity for a Messiah to have a virgin birth.

Except the entire Christian movement being founded on that very concept. No, it doesn't make good sense, Diogenes. We're dealing with religionists here, rationality doesn't really enter into it!

The Bishop

Addendum:I agree with this 100%. I'm not myself sure how the Hebrew reads, tense-wise, but it struck me one day that, again read within the context that Isaiah is talking about something that is going to happen, and not about something that isn't going to "happen" for 740 years, why would he say virgin? Well, everybody's a virgin once. He says (in English translation) "The virgin will conceive". She's a virgin now and she will conceive. It is certainly more likely, however, that to signify this marriageable girl he would use almah than bethulah.

Phlox Pyros

You don't believe that parthenos was a translation of bethulah?? Did you mean to say that you don't believe that parthenos, specifically in Isaiah 7:14, was a translation of bethulah? Otherwise, you are dead wrong.

I don't see why this is supposedly so devastating? In fact, I think it is misleading, especially in light of the fact that there were likely different versions of Isaiah circulating when the LXX was translated.

Even if it is the "worst-translated" book, that doesn't mean that there wasn't internal consistency with respect to how certain words were translated.

I wouldn't say "blow", but I would say that this is likely the most significant problem with the theory. However, the process is called emendation and is performed by textual critics occasionally.

The fact that Matthew and others of that era understood parthenos to mean virgin (and why the text was likely emended in the Rabbinic recensions to read neanis instead) is certainly a part of this hyposthesis, but it is also to explain the reading parthenos in the LXX rather than the more expected neanis, especially in the light that the translator only used parthenos to translate bethulah elsewhere in his book.

Exactly. Certain sects took sections of the bible and applied them to events in their own day. I do not understand how anyone can argue against this. This very thing is manifested in the DSS Habbakuk pesher.

Gamera

I haven't missed the argument at all, which has centered around the semantic range of parthenos and almah, both of which include the concept of virginity, perhaps parthenos more than almah. While it's possible, accoring to some of the links provided in this thread, that parthenos could mean something other than virgin (just as our word "maiden" can mean both virgin and just young lady), there is no doubt whatsoever that parthenos includes the concept in its semantic range.

Circling back to the issue, this is evidence that the Jewish translators of the Septuagint possibly, perhaps very likely, understood the Isaiah passage to invovle a prophesy about a virgin birth.

That's the threshold that has to be met to discuss whether 1st century messainic Jews would have possibly had this concept in mind, informing early Christianity.

If so, that rebuts at least some of the arguments made in reponse to the topic thread concerning the meaning of the pertinent passage in Isaiah

Gamera

No, no, that's orthographic range!