On Oct 30, 2005, at 7:28 PM, Dan Minette wrote:
----- Original Message -----
From: "Julia Thompson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Dave Land wrote:
Dave "'Virgin' birth possibly just a mistranslation" Land
My understanding is that the Greek word used means "young woman".
No, the Hebrew Scripture uses "young woman", the Greek has the
specific
word for virgin in the translation of Isaiah in LXX, as well as the
Nativity stories.
Righto. This would be the mistranslation that I referred to. Spong
writes
about this in his "Born of a Woman", which I have not read, but
which, on
page 76 says:
Second, and far more damaging to the literalist's view, it must
be stated that the concept of virginity existed in this text
only in the Greek translation of the Hebrew. Virginity was not
present in the Hebrew original. In 1952 when the Revised
Standard Version of the Bible was released, its translators
rendered Isaiah 7:14 correctly from the Hebrew text to read,
"Behold a young woman shall conceive". The translators were not
being inconsistent, they were translating accurately the text in
front of them -- Hebrew in the original text of Isaiah, Greek in
the original text of Matthew.
It goes on from there to discuss the Hebrew words used in Isaiah and
elsewhere for "virgin" and "young woman" and how it was the LXX
translators who layered the concept of virginity onto the Matthew
passage using their interpretation of the Isaiah text.
If you're interested in the passage, but don't want to purchase the
book, you can read it at:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0060675233/
ref=sib_vae_pg_76/102-5950953-9022521?%
5Fencoding=UTF8&keywords=translation&p=S02R&twc=2&checkSum=df%
2Fd033WObGP2HmppfrW2doy451kIlkG8SCJvsJ%2Bjk8%3D#reader-page
http://makeashorterlink.com/?B2F55541C
http://tinyurl.com/8gy6z
http://url123.com/uuyww
I came across Spong's (not altogether universally-accepted) ideas
right at the beginning of "Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism",
in which on this topic he says:
When I became aware that neither the word virgin nor the concept
of virginity appears in the Hebrew text of Isaiah that Matthew
quoted to undergird his account of Jesus' virgin birth, I became
newly aware of the fragile nature of biblical fundamentalism.
... I had to face early on in my priestly career the startling
possibility that the virgin tradition so deep in Christianity
may well rest on something as fragile as the weak reed of a
mistranslation.
This appears on page 16 of that book:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0060675187/
ref=sib_vae_pg_16/102-5950953-9022521?%5Fencoding=UTF8&keywords=virgin
%
20translation&p=S00X&twc=1&checkSum=QDV875Z4bzaXBbQ8iBXrSFwHUHIupTIsZj1d
gfznf2o%3D#reader-page
http://makeashorterlink.com/?L1265241C
http://tinyurl.com/a7xr5
http://url123.com/uuudz
Dave
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