Wise Men

We three Kings of the Orient are
Bringing gifts we travel so far
All on Camels following a star !

Does anyone on here believe this ? I mean REALLY believe it ??

And welcome to DU.

Went to talk to Herrod. They fed him false info. And unlike Bachmanns deathpanel census, it really was.

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...

1) Only Matthew seems all that concerned with fulfilling the Old Testament prophecies (you're correct that the Virgin birth is a mistranslation and probably misunderstood by the author of Matthew). Luke doesn't seem all that concerned with fulfilling the old prophecies and probably came up with the Virgin birth as a means of demonstrating that Jesus was the Son of God, rather than as a means to fulfill a prophecy. There's no indication that they came up with this to make the story palatable to pagans, but rather, they were both likely attempting to make theological points and spun their stories the way they did for that reason.

2) The Buddha reference is not as enlightening as it first appears. The "wise men" you're referring to did not prophesize his birth and travel to worship him. The first, Asita, was invited by Buddha's father (a King) who then invited Brahmins (priests) to come and see him. Asita, after seeing Buddha, prophesied that Buddha would be either a king or a religious leader. So, while there is some similarity in the stories, they are still pretty different and make very different theological/legendary claims.

It's true that Matthew is concerned about prophecy in a way that the other gospels aren't - not just in this story, but throughout the book. But I still do think that Luke was at least interested in the prophecy - there's no real reason to include the story if not. Jesus being the "adopted" Son of God was a belief held by early Christians that needed no miracle birth story. Luke was not writing to Jews, though, so it wasn't to his benefit to necessarily play up the prophetic end of it. Isaiah is quoted in Acts, thought to be written by the same author - so he was certainly familiar with the book and its Christological interpretations. My argument that they include the Virgin Birth to appeal to pagans is based on the idea that Jews would be less likely to believe in Jesus based on the Virgin Birth, and more likely to believe in Adoptionism, in that period of time where the Jerusalem Christians were more important than gentile Christians. The idea of a man-god has a much bigger role within Greek mythology than in Judaism....in which it has none that I'm aware of.

I admit to not knowing that much about the Buddha. My studies lie with the Hebrew and Christian Bible. I just happened to listen to a lecture on Buddha *once* and thought that this story was similar enough to the Nativity, and as unlikely to have actually happened, that it would be worth mentioning - the theologies are different of course.