Tag Archives: Annunciation

Like a Virgin. Or Not

Posted on by
6

To arrive at the nativity story most of us grew up with and which your kids and grandkids might well be performing this Christmas (mine are), the one with a stable, shepherds and wise-men, involves some cunning sleight of hand, not to mention a liberal dollop of invention.

The biblical ‘account’ of the story is spread across two gospels, Matthew and Luke. Mark hadn’t heard of it when he wrote his gospel so you won’t find it there. In fact, Mark’s Jesus doesn’t become God’s son until his baptism. Paul, writing earlier still, thinks God adopts Jesus only at his resurrection. Paul has no knowledge either of the nativity myth. John has no time for it: his Jesus is an eternal being who has existed with God from the beginning.

For Matthew, however, Jesus comes into existence when the Holy Spirit impregnates a virgin. Luke likes the idea and so copies it into his gospel. And now we have a problem: the idea that a virgin will bear the Messiah is lifted from the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Jewish scripture, which renders Isaiah 7:14 as –

Therefore YHWH himself will give you a sign: the virgin (almah) will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.

In the Septuagint, the Hebrew word almah, meaning ‘young woman’, is translated as virgin. However, the word for virgin in Hebrew is betulah, an entirely different word. Isaiah 7:14 is not a prophecy that a virgin will bear a son: only that a young woman will do so; in other words, a commonplace event. Matthew allowed himself to be misled: in his eagerness to find prophecies of Jesus in Jewish scriptures, he alighted on a mistranslation. He wrote his story accordingly, riffing freely on the error. Luke picked up on it a decade later, adding his own embellishments.

Neither does Isaiah 7:14 suggest the child being talked about will be the Messiah, nor that he will appear hundreds of years in the future. As subsequent verses make transparently clear, a short period of time is all that is suggested; no more than a few years:

He (the child) will be eating curds and honey when he knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right, for before the boy knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right, the land of the two kings you dread will be laid waste. YHWH will bring on you and on your people and on the house of your father a time unlike any since Ephraim broke away from Judah – he will bring the king of Assyria (Isaiah 7:15-17).

These are all events contemporaneous with the writing of this part of Isaiah. All that is being said is that a young woman will become pregnant and produce a child in the near future. Even before this child properly knows right from wrong, YHWH will bring Israel’s enemies down upon it. (Because he’s such a caring God.)

None of this has anything to do with a virgin becoming pregnant, nothing to do with a Messiah, nothing to do with Jesus. It is not a prophecy about him, even if Matthew persuaded himself it was. Shamefully, almost all modern ‘translations’ of Isaiah retain ‘virgin’, when they know perfectly well it is not the word used, and that the context neither supports it’s use nor makes it necessary. They do so to maintain the lie that Isaiah 7:14 is about Jesus and to give credibility to Matthew and Luke’s ridiculous fiction that he fulfilled ‘prophecy’ by being born of a virgin. It’s a deception that will be repeated in church services around the world over the next couple of weeks.

The Anunciation: A Ghost Story for Advent

Posted on by
2

The Nativity in Matthew and Luke begins long before Jesus’ birth. Matthew introduces Mary and Joseph once the former has been impregnated with The Holy Sperm. He doesn’t go into any detail about how this happened, he just drops in, in Matt 1:18, that the deed is done. Mary has had sex with a ghost.

This isn’t good enough for Luke though, who after reading Matthew’s tall tale, decides it needs some expansion. A lot of expansion, in fact. He takes the story back to before Mary’s non-consensual encounter with the Holy Spirit and picks on Elizabeth and Zechariah, an elderly couple well past the age of having kids. All the same, they do enjoy a tumble in the sack every now and then, and the Lord – ever the voyeur – decides he’ll bless one such union with fruitfulness. (There is much wrong with the details of this unbelievable yarn, some of which I consider here; I won’t reiterate them now for fear of awakening any amateur theologians who might be lurking here in the wings.)

Suffice to say, Luke – for it is he, lest we forget, who is making this stuff up – decides that Elizabeth is a long lost cousin of Mary’s, like in one of those soaps where long lost relatives pop up all the time, usually to no good end. In this particular episode, however, all goes well and Mary visits Elizabeth, whose baby is, in a strange twist of fate, destined to be John the Baptist from the earlier two gospels. In this story his embryonic self jumps for joy inside his mother once he realises his uterine Saviour has come to visit.

But were getting ahead of ourselves. First Mary has to go through the rigmarole of getting pregnant. Obviously as a good Catholic girl she can’t have sex with her betrothed prior to their wedding and just when she’s considering when that might be, an angel appears unto her. It’s Gabriel who has quite a bit to do in the Nativity story as a whole. As angels do, he annunciates to Mary all about the pregnancy part of the plot and she acquiesces to the Lord getting her with child by magically transferring his seed into her womb. I’m guessing it was by magic. It’s possible some sort of actual rumpy-pumpy occurred but Luke delicately passes over the intimate parts. As apparently the Holy Spirit does too.

Mary is so overjoyed to be pregnant before her 13th birthday that she bursts into song on the spot and spontaneously produces a hymn based on the Psalms and the future teaching of the baby she has only just conceived. It’s hard to believe that no actual time travel was involved. It is instead, a miracle, as her impromptu ditty flourishes into the literary masterpiece now known as The Magnificat, which is not, it turns out, a feline super-hero. Fortunately, she can remember it all, word for word, decades later when Luke decides he needs to invent record it. Honestly, the whole thing puts Cole Porter to shame.

You’d think then Mary would dash off to tell her betrothed, Joseph, the wonderful news that she is pregnant without his or any other man’s assistance, but Luke makes no mention of it. Luckily, it’s covered by Matthew, where an angel drops in on Joseph, a person of great gullibility faith. On hearing what the angel has to say, he swallows the story hook, line and stinker.

Then it’s back to where we came in. Mary’s sets off down the road to see the cousin, the wonderful bearer of John. She pitches up there for three whole months, perhaps to avoid Joseph, who, it turns out, was not as gullible as she thought.

**********************************************

Honestly, this is really what happened. Would I lie to you? No, but someone would, and did. We’ll see what else he has in store in his over-worked imagination, next time.

**********************************************

PS. Don, I know you like indulging in a bit of biblical exegesis. If you’d like to borrow this totally respectful effort for your blog, get in touch and we’ll work something out.