“Just because you're taught that something's right and everyone believes it's right,
it don't make it right.”
Mark Twain
Tis the season to celebrate how easy it is for truth to be whatever you simply choose to believe it is, allowing one person’s mistranslation to become another person’s miracle of a virgin birth. More than the result of divine intercession, however, such a “miracle” is the result of a need to pretend to know the mind of an omnipotent intelligence better than any rudimentary understanding of linguistics, let alone the problems that arise from playing the telephone game. Ironic, yes, but not surprising in the least, given the history with which Christians have chosen to label those they feared for being different as “heretics” and “witches.” The question is why.
To answer this question, we have to return to the third century BCE, when the confusion all began. At that time, the Hebrew Bible was being translated into the Greek Septuagint. In the process, a word found in the book of Isaiah was translated from one meaning to another, and later used by the author of the Gospel of Matthew to make Jesus Christ look like Julius Caesar. But more on that in a moment. First, in Isaiah 7:14, Isaiah assures king Ahaz of Judah that God will destroy the king's enemies before a “child born to an almah” is weaned. As it says in Isaiah 7:16, “desolation will come upon the land of the two kings before whom you (Ahaz) now cower … before the child knows to reject the bad and choose the good.” As scholars agree, the “sign” was not the birth of the child itself, let alone how the child was conceived, but how long Ahaz would have to wait before the war he was fighting would be won.
Almah, which appeared in the original Hebrew text written some 700 years earlier, actually translates into “a young woman of childbearing age who had not yet given birth.” Such a “young woman,” as a result, may or may not be a virgin. In contrast, the Greek phrase for “young woman” is “néa gynaíka,” which the translator of the Septuagint could have used for a more accurate translation. Instead, the Greek word “parthenos” was used, meaning specifically “virgin,” stripping the “young woman” of her sexuality, and thus her humanity, and reducing her instead to merely a vessel – unblemished by the sexual desires of mere mortal (and other) men.
A look at the context of Isaiah 7:14-16 quickly reveals that the woman that Isaiah was referring to was most likely already pregnant, however, which explains why Isaiah used the word 'almah’ instead of the Hebrew word for virgin: betulah. Although almah can include the idea of virginity, it does not mean virginity outside of the context of a young woman any more than calling someone a “young woman” suggests they must therefore be a virgin. In a number of other places in the Book of Isaiah, for example, the writer does in fact use the specific Hebrew word “betulah” to denote virginity, rather than the more general word almah. Nor is the use of the word 'virgin' in any way germane in Isaiah's prophecy, because the 'sign' was the “weaning” process after the child’s birth, which defined how long Ahaz would have to wait to see his enemies “desolated.” What makes this even more obvious is the fact that, in the days of Isaiah, an unborn fetus was only considered to be a “child” at birth, not at conception.
The question, then, is why might the Greek speaking transcriber, who would have seen Greek as the lingua franca of the known world at that time, reinterpret a word that means “young woman” in Hebrew as a word that means “virgin” in Greek? The answer may be found in understanding what the Roman Catholic Church claims to be at least as sacred as the bible itself: tradition. Although one reason appears to do with a traditional disdain for flesh in general and sex in particular, which was introduced into Roman Catholicism largely because St. Augustine bemoaned the problems he had with his own “shameful lust” in his Confessions, a more important reason has to do with the pedigree of virgin births, especially of the man who was the first to graduate from being a mere mortal to become a god, and another who was seen as not only the son of the greatest of all Greek gods, but who single handedly Hellenized the known world into speaking Greek in the first place: Julius Caesar was the one, and Alexander the Great the other.
A long tradition of ascribing virgin births to both gods and great men was a mainstay of the ancient world. Gods who were alleged to have been the product of virgin births include Horus (3000 BCE), Mitha (1200 BCE), Krishna (900 BCE), and Dionysus (500 BCE). In addition to gods, divine messengers could also be downloaded from heaven to earth through the conduit of a virgin womb. Those messengers included a number of special men (but never women), most of whom were sons of one god or another, all of whom were said to be the product of virgin birth. Notable examples include the founders of Rome itself, Romulus and Remus, twin boys born to a vestal virgin named Rhea Silvia. Their father was the fierce Roman god of war, Mars (which is why the former eventually murdered the latter, prefiguring Cain and Abel). Likewise, out of reverence for a “belief” in his own virgin birth, the Phrygo-Roman god, Attis castrated himself and invited others to do the same, initiating a priestly class composed of eunuchs. Like Attis, even Matthew 19:12, which invites men to “make themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven,” led Saint Origen to castrate himself in part to show deference to God’s ability to prefer virgin birth for His most important of messengers. While historians have debated the veracity of claims about Origen’s autocastration, in general, such an act conformed to early Christian ascetic rejection of traditional marriage and sexual union, since the flesh was seen as fallen and sinful. As such, a virgin birth was therefore seen as the divine ideal.
Other virgin births extend back to before Rome. In ancient Greece, Dionysus was the son of either the virgin Semele or the virgin Persephone, who was also the virgin mother of another son, Jason. Even Plato’s mother, Perictione, was said to be a virgin, impregnated by Apollo. In ancient Egypt, Ra (the Sun) was born of a virgin mother, Net; and Horus was the son of the virgin Isis. In fact, as author and activist Garret S. Griffin writes, other virgin or miracle offspring include:
Some followers of Buddha Gautama decided he was born to the virgin Maya by divine decree. Genghis Khan was supposedly born to a virgin seeded by a great miraculous light. The founder of the Chinese Empire, Fo-Hi, was born after a woman (not necessarily a virgin) ate a flower or red fruit. The river Ho (Korea) gave birth to a son when seeded by the sun. … Krishna was born to the virgin Devaka. In Rome, Mercury was born to the virgin Maia.[1]
So, why might the Greek speaking author of the gospel of Matthew wish to provide the character of Jesus with a pedigree of virgin birth? For two reasons: the traditional understanding of the meaning of virgin births, and the famous Greek writer named Plutarch.
As tradition would have it, the “virgin birth” idea was used as a metaphoric technique that tied one’s birth (and not their conception) into this life to their ability to ascend into heaven after they died. Divine messengers could only come from heaven, after all, to which they were expected to return to live out their immortality for a job well done. Prior to Judaism teaching that heaven was a place that even lowly humans could ascend en masse after death, provided they were judged righteous enough to do so - an idea born sometime during the second century BCE - only those who were said to have come directly from heaven were seen as having the ability to return to it. And the mark that indicated a person’s ability to boomerang between heaven and earth in such a way was virgin birth. A virgin, in other words, was how a god downloaded themselves from the lofty realm of words to become a message in the flesh, as it says in the opening lines of the Gospel of John, and then ascend back into the realm of pure verbiage from whence such a message came.
Then there was Plutarch. A Greek Middle Platonist philosopher, historian, biographer, essayist, and priest at the Temple of Apollo, Plutarch is known primarily for his Parallel Lives, a series of biographies of illustrious Greeks and Romans. As Bart Ehrman explains in How Jesus Became God, among the most famous of Plutarch’s essays are the parallel lives of Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great, son of Zeus. Both men eventually came to be seen as gods, and both were said to have been born of virgins.
First consider Julius Caesar. Illustrating this boomerang effect, he claimed to have been the result of a virgin birth, while the Roman Senate declared him to have risen from the dead to become a god in 42 BCE: the first Roman ever honored in this way. Like the one said to have appeared over Bethlehem, a shining star appeared in the sky a year after Julius’s death. Known as Caesar's Comet or Julian Star and considered one of the brightest ever recorded, it was interpreted as signifying that Caesar had ascended to the heavens and become a god. The apparition of the comet coincided with games held by Julius Caesar's grand-nephew and heir, Octavian, his ascension seen as confirmation of his virgin birth.
Though not a virgin birth story, Griffin further points out that even Octavian, who was Julius’s nephew and adopted son and would go on to become Caesar Augustus, was supposedly the product of Apollo and a mortal woman named Atia. As Augustus, he would be called a “savior” and the “Son of God,” whose birthday was celebrated by Romans as “marking for the world the beginning of good tidings through his coming.” As a result, all three – Romulus, who was considered to be the god that created Rome, Julius, who was the first to ascend from mere manhood to become a god, and Octavian/Augustus, the “son of god” - formed a divine trinity. All of this was common knowledge during the writing of the gospel of Matthew in 85 CE, in the Greek language, during the heady days of Rome.
Then there is Alexander the Great. Alexander was said to have been the son of Zeus, and born of a virgin as well. More than anyone else, he Hellenized the known world, making Greek the language of not only the civilized but the enlightened. What makes the passage in Genesis 3:15 so interesting, of the Virgin Mary crushing the head of a serpent, is that, when Zeus was said to have seduced Alexander’s mother, he was in the form of a serpent.
By clothing Jesus in the ancient traditions of so many gods and special men before him, and with allusions to both Alexander and Julius Caesar, and even Romulus (with Jesus seen as killing his elder brother, Zeus), the author of the Gospel of Matthew is cloaking the Church of Rome with the same confidence and mantle of indestructibility that Isaiah provided King Ahaz with his revelations about the “sign” of a child born and weaned by an “almah.” We see this in Matt 16:18 KJV: “And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” And the author of Matthew, who would have been well aware of the significance of such allusions, and would likewise have known that his readers would understand the importance of his use of such allusions as well, attaches the line from Isaiah to Jesus, not in the original Hebrew text but in the Greek Septuagint, writing, "Behold, the parthenos shall be with child and shall bear a Son, and they shall call his name Immanuel" (Matthew 1:23). In Isaiah 7:14, by comparison, it reads, “therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign: the almah is with child and she will bear a son, and will call his name Immanuel.”
For Jews, such a garbled translation is clearly the result of human error or an intentional alteration, but for Christians, and Catholics in particular, it is considered to be evidence of nothing less than divine intent. And anyone who has questioned whether the “prince of peace” was indeed born of a virgin or simply an “almah” and a couple of shoddy or manipulative translators, has ended up being treated just as much like a blaspheming heretic by Christians as “true believers” treated Jesus Christ for daring to question the claims of the Sanhedrin that they alone had to power to speak “infallibly” for God. The real “miracle” in all of this is how simply “believing” the mistranslation was intentional therefore makes it true. But ‘just because you're taught that something's right and everyone believes it's right,” to paraphrase Mark Twain said, “it don't make it true.”
But don't bother telling that to a Roman Catholic because, even though most Catholics are wholly unaware of this historical mistranslation, they may try to crucify you for daring to bring it up.
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