On Apr 8, 2005, at 12:55 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
On Apr 7, 2005, at 10:10 PM, Warren Ockrassa wrote:
And hardly remarkable. Young women conceive pretty regularly. Embedding
such a phrase in a prophecy is a little like predicting rain in Seattle.
I think your "lay scholarship" isn't serving you too well here.
:D
The prophecy in question is not just that "a young woman shall conceive,"
which, as you point out, is hardly news. I think the message of the
prophecy is something like "There will be this young woman, see, and
she'll conceive and bear a Son, who will be..." and it goes on from there.
The point isn't that a young woman will conceive (well, duh), but that a
particular young woman will conceive a particular son, who will be ...
special.
It's just a way of telling a story, that's all.
Yes -- but then, as Dan points out, the people living in the time of Iasus would be familiar with the Isaiah scriptural reference. So really the claim could have been made about *any* particular man.
The other thing, of course, is the Gospels' non-contemporary authorship. They were not eyewitness accounts, which makes it *feasible* at least that the Gospel stories were written with deification, or at least exaltation, in mind.
That is, the authors said in essence "This guy was a really great teacher -- maybe he was the one mentioned in Isaiah -- hmm, well..." And so the "maiden's conception", which could have proved applicable to any extraordinary individual born any time after Isaiah's claims, was attached to the Iasus story.
To bring it back to the Seattle thing -- "Behold, on the day that it raineth in the northern city of the high tower, there shall be a salmon flung that is unlike any other; and he who eateth it will find it to be delightful, yea, great shall be his delight in it, and he shall declare that the salmon verily is the product of a most divine source."
There's really nothing extraordinary being claimed in that prediction. And that's what guarantees that eventually it will be true -- every circumstance I've described (vaguely) will be fulfilled. Does that mean the fish is literally the product of a god, and that I have the gift of prophecy?
That's the problem I have with the story in Isaiah.
-- Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books http://books.nightwares.com/ Current work in progress "The Seven-Year Mirror" http://www.nightwares.com/books/ockrassa/Flat_Out.pdf
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