Today, we will pick up where we last finished, at the Christmas scene. In our last post (Part 6), we examined the predictions of a future king who would change the world and how Jesus fulfilled these promises. Today, I would like to hone in on one of the predictions of the coming king – that he would be born of a virgin. The books I used to research this article are ‘The Prophesy of Isaiah’ (by Alec Moyter), ‘Vintage Jesus’ (by Mark Driscoll), Isaiah 1-32 (by John Calvin volume 7), ‘The New Bible Dictionary’ – see Virgin Birth, and ‘The Message of Matthew’ (by Matthew Green).
Let’s kick this off with a simple question: Scientifically speaking, can someone be conventionally conceived without a biological father? The answer is a firm NO! Go back two thousand years, where farming was done with heavy duty farm animals and carpentry was done with hand tools, how on earth could someone be born of a virgin?
Many people have tried to answer or give a rational explanation for this question. Here are a few:
- Jesus mother Mary, was raped by a Roman soldier. To cover it up and conceal the shame of a bastard child, Mary and her family came out with the lie that an angel had visited her and explained that she would give birth to the Messiah (King of the World),
- Mary was engaged to a man named Joseph. Young and ‘energetic’, Joseph and Mary could not wait until they were married to have sex, and the product of the union was Jesus,
- Mary, Joseph and Jesus did not exist, so the entire account of a baby born of a virgin is completely made up and a myth,
- The whole account of Jesus born of a virgin was borrowed from other pagan religions of that time. Some will argue that there have been countless half god, half man stories, who were even born of a virgin. It is simply ancient video piracy! The problems with this view are countless. To name one problem – ancient accounts of half god half man births were a result of a god having sex with a woman. It isn't virgin birth, making it totally different to the bibles claims of Mary conceiving without sex.
In both gospels, we are informed that a young woman named Mary was pledged to marry a man named Joseph. Now, in those days, to have sex before marriage was seen as a crime punishable by death. We therefore can confidently assume that both Mary and Joseph were sexually pure.
During the engagement of Mary and Joseph, Mary was visited by an angel named Gabriel, who explained that she was going to conceive a son. Confused and alarmed for her life, Mary enquired of the angel, “How can this be, I am a virgin”, to which the angel responded, God will work a miracle in you and he will be the king of the world – God incarnate (Luke 1:34-35).
Alright, so why should we believe this? Remembering back to arguments against, weren’t there similar stories like this? Maybe early Christians just copied them to justify themselves! According to the Gospel of Matthew, this very event was predicted 700 years before Jesus would even be born.
All this took place to fulfil what the Lord had spoken by the prophet [Isaiah 7:14]:"Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel" (which means, God with us) (Matthew 1:22-23)
Before any stories that are remotely similar to Jesus could be made up, Jesus birth and divinity had firmly been predicted.
A common argument against the prediction of Jesus’ birth has arisen in both Jewish and secular scholarship. It does get rather complicated at this point but here we go. The prediction of Jesus’ alleged birth comes from Chapter 7 of a book in the Old Testament (section in the bible written before Jesus birth) called Isaiah. This chapter discusses the future of the current king reigning in Jerusalem of that time. The account goes on to predict the birth of a child who would become king of the world. The Hebrew (language the Old Testament was originally written in) word used to describe the woman who gives birth to this child is alma – literally meaning young woman. Jewish scholars argue that the Christian gospels mistranslate the Hebrew word alma as parthenos, which is Greek (language the New Testament was originally written in) for virgin and then wrongly apply it to Mary. They continue by saying that Isaiah chapter 7 was not predicting a future king born of a virgin but a king who would be naturally born of a married woman. Ok, you then might ask so what? Well, if so, a serious case can be made for the falsity of the Christian bible and the inaccuracy of the Gospels.
Ok, let’s back track for a bit. Jesus was Jewish man and the Jewish people of Jesus’ time were waiting for this future king who would fix the world. Was Jesus that man according to the gospels? Had the gospel authors Matthew and Luke wrongly misunderstood Isaiah 7? It now gets even more complex as we investigate deeper into the meaning of the Hebrew word alma. Can the Hebrew word alma mean virgin in English? The literal word for virgin in the Hebrew is actually betula. So that’s it right - case closed - Christianity is false? No, see alma is a collective term that encapsulates virginity.
There is an account way back at the beginning of the bible in Genesis, about a young woman named Rebekah who would marry a man named Isaac. She is described in this account as a woman of marriageable age (the word used is naara) and who is a virgin (the word used is betula). Towards the end of this passage, the word used to describe Rebekah as a women perfect for marriage and a virgin is alma (Genesis 24:14, 16-17, 43). Additionally, a few hundred years before the birth of Jesus, the Hebrew Old Testament was translated into Greek (the dominate language of that time). The men who did this were Jewish in origin and totally unknowledgeable of the future arising of Christianity. When they translated the Isaiah 7 passage, explicitly the Hebrew word alma into Greek, they used the Greek word parthenos, which means virgin in English. This was the exact same word used by the gospel writers, Matthew and Luke. Therefore, the Jews before the birth of Jesus were waiting for a virgin woman (an alma) who would give birth to the divine king of the world.
