jfro18 wrote: ↑Thu Dec 21, 2023 6:56 am
Bart Ehrman goes through how the 'virgin' idea got into the Bible, why it's based on a mistranslation, and then talks a bit about how it's really nowhere else in the Bible and is actually contradicted by Mark/John and I believe he covers briefly that the birth story in Luke is likely a late addition.
It's a fairly quick listen esp at 1.5-2x.
Thanks! I'll see if I get a chance to listen to it.
It sounds consistent with what I've long read from a variety of scholars.
I presume the mistranslation is in Isaiah 7:14, which is hardly the only problem with that passage. It's one of the biggest prooftexts ever. A big example of cherry-picking one little bit in spite of everything around it to prove a desired point. Decades ago when I was really studying Mormonism, I happened to look up that scripture. Claiming that verse proves the divinity of Jesus is a huge stretch. (Orders of magnitude more than the verses to prove god hates gays, which is really saying something.) If you forget about Luke and read the whole paragraph, you'll come away wondering how it has anything to do with Jesus of Nazareth. And keep in mind, that was the way that Luke and his initial readers would've read it. It wasn't broken into the chapters and versus we assume today are god-breathed until hundreds of years later. I just read some Christian scholar's attempt to rescue it by saying how wonderful it is, because it was fulfilled twice, once in Isaiah's day and later at Jesus's birth. If you ignore Luke's unsupported claim and just read the passage from Isaiah, there's really nothing to connect it with Jesus. Once you read that, you realize Luke is a very unreliable narrator.
The ancient world in which Luke and his initial readers lived were awash in stories of virgin births. There was nothing particularly notable in the idea that Jesus needed one. It was practically de rigueur that any religious leader needed one. Virgin birth stories existed in Greek, Roman, and many other religious traditions of the day. Part of the claim by Julius to his right to rule Rome came from his ancestral claim to Aeneas, who was born of Venus. Virgin birth was particularly notable in Zoroastrianism, which early Christianity borrowed from heavily.
From a pragmatic perspective, claiming a virgin birth must have been an enticing option to an unmarried woman discovered large with child. If there was no man to claim her and her unborn child, a virgin birth story may have been appealing and there was no ready way to disprove it in societies where examples were common in shared stories. I'm not saying this was the case with Mary, though, as the opposite seems to be the case. If Jesus really existed (which I'm slightly inclined to believe), the context suggests that Jesus was known as Joseph's son.
What I find more intriguing actually, is how little the virgin birth is mentioned in the earliest texts, including those that have been accepted into what we know as The Bible. Of the "Four Gospels", only Luke mentions it. It is not part of the aggregated Pauline gospel. It is mostly missing from other early writings.
Over the centuries since the rise of Christianity, there have been dueling claims about the divinity of Jesus vs. his humanity. This is notably visible in religious art (which was the only acceptable, sponsored type of art in Christian Europe when the Church controlled everything, up until the Enlightenment). At times it was considered essential that art heavily emphasized the divinity of Jesus. In other periods, artists were required to depict his humanity and ignore any allusions to divinity. This is also shown in writings and other Christian media.
The earliest Christian writings have little interest in Jesus's divinity. Indeed, the first Council of Nicaea (325 CE), was primarily convened to answer this controversy once and for all. The Council placed its authoritative stamp on Jesus's divinity, though, of course, there is dispute about its authority to do so. (Its authority mostly derives from the Roman Emperor Constantine, and its decision, which was reached by consensus.) Some branches of Christianity, most notably here, Mormonism, don't accept the authority or results of the Nicene Councils or their Creeds. Yet, their claims were highly formative in establishing what Christianity is and is not.
Indeed, one of the main reasons why many Christians claim Mormons are not Christian is because of their rejection of the Nicene Creed. The BoM is highly consistent with the Nicene Creed, but Joseph and the Church later veered from it. The BoM neatly side-steps the issue of Jesus's divinity by having him appear in flesh and blood in dramatic, divine fashion, much like a deus ex machina. By Joseph Smith's time period, the divinity of Jesus had become commonly accepted, something that took centuries to establish in Christian history. One of the reasons for the claim that the BoM is the most correct book is that it easily resolves controversies it took Christianity centuries, in ways that were well established and commonly understood in the time period when Joseph wrote it. It's also one of the major illustrations of the non-divine origins of the BoM.