Post #9 revisited:
Isaiah 7:14
Two of you have already cited Isa 7:14 as a prophecy of the virgin birth. And if I follow my own rules, step 4 comes into play here:
4) Suspect material must be analyzed using both the Old Testament and Paul’s epistles to look for evidence that either confirms the passage or serves to help disprove it.
And Isa 7:14 surely is a verse to be reckoned with:
"Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign: Behold, a virgin will be with child and bear a son, and she will call His name Immanuel.” (Isa 7:14 NAU)
Case closed? Drop this thought from your head and move onto some other twisted idea? I may have done so, if not were for something I remembered from research I did 15 years ago.
Justin Martyr and Trypho
Justin Martyr was a second century apologist (dying around the year 165) and many of his manuscripts have been retained. By this time, all four gospels were being used as references, and Justin Martyr was a firm believer in the Virgin Birth, having inherited that teaching from his predecessor Ignatius (and of course from the texts he revered as gospels). The miraculous birth of Jesus was very much a part of the Christian dogma by that time.
“Dialogue with Trypho” was an interesting read to me. Trypho was a Jew and he and Justin had quite a debate going on in written form. (It was like a slow motion version of this forum.)
At the time I was reading this material, I had no reason to question the virgin birth: I was doing my research that resulted in my “Heaven and Hellenism” material (posted on this forum). But this passage caught my attention nonetheless:
Trypho: "The Scripture has not, ‘Behold, the virgin shall conceive, and bear a son,' but, ‘Behold, the young woman shall conceive, and bear a son,' and so on, as you quoted. But the whole prophecy refers to Hezekiah, and it is proved that it was fulfilled in him, according to the terms of this prophecy. Moreover, in the fables of those who are called Greeks, it is written that Perseus was begotten of Danae, who was a virgin; he who was called among them Zeus having descended on her in the form of a golden shower. And you ought to feel ashamed when you make assertions similar to theirs, and rather [should] say that this Jesus was born man of men. And if you prove from the Scriptures that He is the Christ, and that on account of having led a life conformed to the law, and perfect, He deserved the honour of being elected to be Christ, [it is well]; but do not venture to tell monstrous phenomena, lest you be convicted of talking foolishly like the Greeks."
Trypho suggested that the Septuagint was to blame for the introduction of this doctrine, for the Septuagint was a Greek translation of the original Hebrew texts, and he blamed the Greeks for introducing their own mythology into the text (a process we call “Hellenism”).
My recent research confirms that what Trypho stated in this case was correct. Go to any reliable source (I now use BibleWorks) and his assertion holds up: the word translated as “virgin” is an inaccurate translation.
Unfortunately, the author of the gospel we call Matthew quoted from the Septuagint in 1:23, in an attempt to show that Jesus fulfilled this prophecy.
Here I see both the origin of the Virgin Birth assertion and the reason for its rapid acceptance. It all boiled down to a bad translation being used at a time when the Christians were busy poring over the texts looking for any and all prophecies supporting Jesus as the promised Messiah.
And if we take Trypho at his word, he may have been convinced that Jesus was the Messiah if not for this crucial point.
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Timotheist[/quote]
Shame on me, I admit to being lazy and failing to pay attention. I even missed the golden showers. Ask Zeek, he'll tell you that's not like me ... and Ohio too, prolly. They're Christian prudish ... 
.
Anyway, I saw the opening line, Isaiah 7:14 and skipped the rest, cuz I've harped on Isa 7:14 before ... to deaf ears. I was thinking to perchance catch it on the blowback responses, if any, on up the line.
For those reasons I don't seem to have much gumption for all this stuff. But I'll take up my cross and press on.
For brevity I'll pick on just one point:
That would be Trypho and his remarks.
Trypho is right about Isa 7:14. It does not mention "virgin." What he can't tell us is why Matthew made such a mistake, if it was one. Surely Matthew could have worked from the Masoretic Text, instead of the LXX. But he didn't. At any rate, if he knew about the difference he decided to quote from the LXX.
Was he so gong-ho to reach his fellow Hebrews, and convince them that Jesus was the Messiah they were looking for, that, he had a blind spot?
Or was he so Hellenized that he didn't even refer to the Masoretic Text, to find the error in the LXX? I realize the Jews of his day were Hellenized. But surely those he was trying to reach with his message of the Messiah would have caught it, at least some of the more devote Jews, still using the Masoretic Text, would have caught it. Maybe that's why the Ebionites rejected the virgin birth, those the early church fathers castigated as the heretical Judaizers, and why the Jewish Nazarenes, and Ebionites, rejected the canonical gospels for the Aramaic Gospel of the Hebrews. Who knows? There's skimpy documentation on both ... most from the post-apostolic church fathers ... who were behind Paul and the gentiles, who unquestionably were Hellenized; pagans actually.
Trypho's remark about "talking foolishly like the Greeks" is revealing. It reveals the common currency of the Greek myths in his day, that contain many miraculous births like the virgin birth. If Matthew was trying to reach them his virgin birth story would have resonated with them.
The bottom line is that if Matthew was trying to convince the Jews with a link to prophecy in the O.T., that Jesus was the Messiah, he failed big time to convince them.
Paul, who didn't mention a virgin birth, the antinomian, won the day. He prolly, and this is just my conjecture, didn't want to soil Jesus with pagan myths.