this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2025
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As I recall Jesus was not born to a virgin but rather a young mother. The Greek word used in the Septuagint was initially correctly translated but the Greek word used changed it’s meaning over time to mean virgin. The author of Mark did not understand this change and asserted she was a virgin because he incorrectly believed the promised Messiah in Issac was supposed to be born to a virgin.
Bart Erman just covered this recently on his “Misquoting Jesus” podcast.
Isn't God the author of the whole Bible? Like isn't that the point? If you accept it's written by fallible men, how can you accept anything written at face value?
No, the books of the New Testament were written by people. I don't believe anyone mainstream maintains anything different. There could be a cult with dozens of followers who suggest this but no significant group holds the NT as being written by God directly.
Almost all Christian denominations do not hold a literal belief in the Bible as no Jewish sect maintains a literal view of their text eg everyone gets that Job is an allegory.
A literal take on the Bible is very much a recent creation of backwater folks in America. It isn’t common despite what the internet maintains. Roman Catholics still make up the vast majority of believers and they don’t hold this view.
I don't mean biblical literalism, but rather the belief that the Bible is divinely inspired and "true" in whichever context they deem important (pretty sure Catholics say it's true in matters of spirit or something like that).
Erman is a terrible scholar, for one. The other thing is that, for centuries, the Septuagint was used as the Bible. It wasn’t treated like a translation the way we do. It’s that, for a long time, the Bible was Greek. It had been Hebrew, then it was Greek, then around the 600s or so it was Hebrew again. That later Hebrew Bible is called the Masoretic Text and was the one chosen by Protestants for the Old Testament because, in their thinking, the Hebrew was older than the Greek. But they didn’t really consider the fact that the Masoretic Text is over a thousand years newer than the Septuagint (it being a reconstruction of the Hebrew Bible based on re-translating the Greek with the aid of the Samaritan Pentateuch, etc.). So the Septuagint used the Greek term for “virgin” which is the only reading the gospel writers would have known. The Masoretic Text translates the relevant Isaiah passage with a Hebrew word that means “maiden.” And there’s some argument out there that they did so in opposition to the Christian reading of the passage. There’s a really great book about this entitled When God Spoke Greek.
TL;DR, The “virgin” reading is accurate to the ancient understanding of the Isaiah passage because that was the only one they had at the time. The “maiden” reading is known to us from a Hebrew text that is at least 600 years more recent than the time of Jesus.
So my instinct to doubt Ehrman was correct
Sounds like another "Jesus Mythicism" or "Copied Osiris" myth that's been debunked 300 times
200 years ago “cool” only referred to temperature or people who were unfriendly. The definitions if words can change over time and unless you understand the context they are used within you can misinterpret what the original text meant. What seems to have happened is something like this based partly on the fact that Jewish experts do not actually believe their messiah needs to be born to a virgin.
The person who wrote the Gospel made a mistake. This is one if the many reasons why most Christian denominations do not hold literal views on all aspect of the Bible.
The Gospel of HugeNerd 2:99 it's means it is