Gamera

You may or may not be rigtht. I was just reponding to the use of the story to rebut the scholarly conclusion that Judea was trilingual. If you're saying the passage is irrelevant to the issue of the predominance of Greek being spoke in Judea, I believe you. That helps my point.

Dina Noun

I once believed, but then I got an education.

My choice is probably "other". That, like so many other things in the Bible, it's a contradiction. Read one book in the Bible, you're told one thing: read a different book in the Bible, you're told the opposite.

Amaleq13

Paul doesn't describe a virgin birth and I have no idea how you obtained the above from what I wrote.

I understand you wish to avoid acknowledging you have no evidence to support your original assertion but I have no idea what assertion you are trying to force me to defend here.

No, our disagreement turns on your unwillingness to admit you have no evidence to support your assertion.

I agree with this assertion but would note that Paul offers no evidence to support your original assertion.

Good thing I didn't make it, then. I've been talking about the Gospel story as not being evident in "early Christianity. I've been talking about it because your assertion claimed otherwise despite the absence of any evidence to support it.

You rebutted a straw man. I said "miraculous births".

That is simply false. You have not offered a single piece of evidence establishing that pre-Christian, messianic Jews expected the Messiah to be born of a virgin.

Gamera

That's OK with me. That's not the topic of this thread.



Since I don't think Christianity is based on beleif in factual assertions the historicity of which are at issue, but rather that Christianity is based on the gospel message [the Karegma of the gospel], which is not factual in nature, I'm not going to argue this point, which should probably be on a different thread.

Gamera

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Paul doesn't. Luke does. Luke was a confidant and traveling companion of Paul's. So I think the point stands. Early Christianity had the virgin birth story, raising two possibilities --that it popped out of nowhere or that it was in the air of messianic Jewish thought in the 1st century. Take your pick.

You seem to want to win by using definitions, defining what you determine is evidence and then claiming there is no evidence along the lines of your definition. That's a logical no-no. I provided the evidence. You can say it's inadequate, but evidence it is, nonetheless.

Nope, the disagreement turns on our definitions of evidence. I'll stand on mine. Inference from existing historical facts is an argument from evidence.

I should hope Paul isn't offering evidence to support my views. Indeed, since Paul makes no factual apodictic claims, I don't expect him to provide evidence. You're barking up the wrong tree. We can discuss historical evidence of some of the factual backgrounds to Paul's letters, but that's it. Paul isn't writing history, but a spiritual handbook.

The gospel story includes a virgin birth in some version, in others not. No version contradicts a virgin birth. Thus your problem remains: where did it come from.

I rebutted the relevancy of miraculous births to a discussion of virgin births. They are not coterminous. The examples you give are not virgin births and hence are a frail explanation of the provenance of the gospel story.
I have, pointing out the fact that the virgin birth story is at least implied in the Septuagint translation of Isaiah. You haven't rebutted that, and I don't think you can. That's evidence of messianic Jewish notions of a virgin birth, out of which the gospel stories took form. Not the strongest evidence, but evidence nonetheless.

Amaleq13

So you meant Luke's author but wrote "Paul"? How odd. What the author of Luke wrote is no more relevant to your original assertion than what the author of Matthew wrote. Both represent late 1st century Christian beliefs while your assertion concerned the beliefs of pre-Christian, messianic Jews.

That this same man wrote the Gospel attributed to him is, of course, arguable but ultimately irrelevant since it is obviously disingenuous to refer to that Gospel as though it were the same as something written by Paul. Your point can't even get off the ground let alone stand. I still have no idea how you launched into this particularly confusing tangent. It certainly wasn't inspired by anything I wrote. At least not anything that is understood correctly.

Since there is no evidence that pre-Christian messianic Jews held such a belief, I'll pick "C. We cannot determine the specific origin of this belief and we cannot date it any earlier than late 1st century Christianity."

The original version of the story (ie the one attributed to Mark) tells us that Jesus' family thought he was crazy. It is difficult for anyone besides an apologist to harmonize this with the angelic messages of a divine conception found in the two subsequent rewrites of the original.

Still trying to shift the burden? That you are apparently incapable of supporting your assertion does not entail an obligation on my part to offer an alternative.

This is a rather obviously specious differentiation that serves no other purpose and has no other basis than enabling you to deny the possibility of the explanation. Whether you are willing to accept it or not, Greek mythology is replete with godmen and heroes who were miraculously conceived. That such beliefs might have inspired the creativity of two authors rewriting a story about their own personal hero/godman is certainly not a unreasonable possibility.

That you and other Christians interpret the passage in this way does absolutely nothing to support your assertion that pre-Christian, messianic Jews interpreted the same.

RUmike

I have always considered that passage in Mark as certain proof that the birth stories are complete fantasy. There are some other passages which corroborate Jesus' poor situation with his family and the way he apparently loathed family ties:

- Defined kin by whoever does the will of God and not biological relations
- Told disciples they had to hate their family to follow him
- Told a man who wished to bury his father to "let the dead bury the dead"
- Allowed no one to call any man 'Father' on earth
- Said he received no honor from his family

Gamera

No it means what I said, Paul and Luke are contemporaries, hence both are part of "early Christianity" and Luke asserts the virgin birth narrative. Hence your claim that early christianity was unaware of the virgin birth narrative is rebutted.

By the way for what it's worth I found this interesting discussion.

And, for what its worth, there is some grammatical evidence indicating that Paul knew of, and alluded to, the special circumstances around Jesus' birth. Scholars recently have noticed that Paul used a special vocab to talk about Christ's birth:

"Whenever Paul speaks of the birth of Jesus Christ, he uses the verb ginomai , which has the broad meaning of "come to be." This is particularly significant in Gal 4:4, 23f. Jesus Christ "comes to be" by a woman, whereas Isaac and Ishmael, born of two women, are begotten and born, since the vb. gennao, used here, carries overtones of the father's act. Paul uses the same general word in Rom 1:3 ("came of the seed of David according to the flesh") and Phil 2:7 ("coming to be in the likeness of men"). On each occasion, Paul avoids the normal word for born, which is understandable if, as the traveling companion of Luke, he knew that Jesus was born miraculously."
(J. Stafford Wright, "Son", in Dictionary of New Test. Theology, p.661)

http://www.christian-thinktank.com/fabprof2.html


Not very arguable. Luke's historicity and authorship of his gospel seem pretty well established.

You are correct that the NT is mostly self-referential, but I have no problem with that, since that alternative (that there was a conspiracy among redacteurs to write Luke into the story in consert with Paul seems very unlikely).


Fair enough. I think there is enough evidence to pick A.

Of course your assumption that Mark's story is "original" engages in the same kind of question begging that you claim I engage in. We do know that Paul's writings predate Mark, and that Paul knew Luke (unless the forging redacteur went to work -- got evidence for that?). So to say Mark was original simply posits so many assumptions that I find dubious I reject your argument here from the start.

You shifted the burden when you claimed to have rebutting evidence, which I showed was unsupported. Focus, focus.

No, Greek mythology has no virgin births, and none that play any role like the one in the gospel narrative. Hence your cliams make no sense. If you got such a myth, provide it. But you don't. This is the kind of lax, useless comparitive religious discourse that is really a laughingstock. Using your standard, I could claim that Lincoln was the result of Greek mythology!

So you're claiming there is no connection between Judaism and Christian thought. Really?

Toto

Mythicists use that same feature of Paul's usage to show that Paul knew that Jesus was not actually born as a human, but came into being on another plane of existence.

Julian

Paul did not know Luke. If you are referring 1 Cor. 11:23 you will have do deal with a number of anachronisms, such as the Didache and the Western Non-interpolations. Good luck.

Julian