Reply #4: no [View All]

I'm still a religious person (I've posted a few other times in this forum if you're wondering where I stand).

The virgin birth story is something that really started making the cards fall for me on the christianity thing, though. It got me interested in reading the bible critically.

The key to it is this: The virgin birth story appears in two places, Matthew and Luke. The story differs greatly in those two books.

John has no mention of the virgin birth, and neither does Mark. Mark is the earliest written of the gospel. That tells you that at one point, the story was not important and probably unknown to the gospel writer. Why would he not include something like that if it were known? Jesus bursts onto John the Baptist's scene in that one.

But why did the story begin to appear? It was because of a mistranslation of a prophecy in Isaiah. The word translates from Hebrew as "young woman". But when they translated the OT from Hebrew to Greek, they chose a Greek word that *could* mean virgin. Therefore, when Gospel writers later on were trying to prove something about Jesus in regards to prophecy, they found this obscure reference to a "virgin", which doesn't exist in the original Hebrew, mind you, and if you read the actual prophecy has nothing to do with anything except for a unique situation happening during Isaiah's lifetime - they decided to just make Jesus mom into a virgin in order to prove something and to appeal to Greeks and pagans who would have found that story nice and interesting and believable.

I guess the main point of that is to say that there were very early Christians who completely believed everything there was to believe about Jesus, but did not believe in this story, because this story didn't even come about until a good 40 years after Jesus died.

Wise men visiting baby man-gods has great appeal to people for some reason - Buddha was visited by a wise man as a baby. It's probably happened elsewhere too. Not sure why - I consider myself pretty wise, but it never occurred to me to travel around looking for man-god babies. Not wise enough, I guess.

This is actually a topic that greatly interested me, but I feel that I can not do it justice. General Discussion wiped me out, what with the Wikileaks. I'll regroup and come back here tomorrow and see if anyone said anything interesting...