On 2020-12-21 7:57 AM (-4), Patrick Elliott wrote:
> On 12/19/2020 12:58 PM, Cousin Ricky wrote:

>> knew Jesus was born of a virgin until nearly a half century after he 

>> written ca. 80 CE, and the author based his claim on a "prophecy" that 

>> the virgin birth story, but it is clear from his genealogy in chapter 
>> 3 than the mythology was as yet incomplete and was still being worked 
>> out. (The author of Matthew never noticed that his genealogy totally 
>> subverted the virgin birth idea.)
>>
> Not going to address all of this, but this one is pretty much an 
> absolute "invention". The world specifically used in the original texts 
> - before it became "translated" into Roman, specifically referred to 
> "maiden", as in "young girl/woman". The language actually has a word for 
> virgin in it, which was not used at all. There are all sorts of 
> arguments, back and forth, over whether or not this was somehow an 
> accident, and they did mean virgin, but.. this just seems like its own 
> sort of special pleading to me - "It has to be an accident, because we 
> know they had to mean virgin!"

Agreed, except the translation was into Greek, not Latin.  The Greek 
word for "virgin" appears in the Septuagint translation, which was 
completed in Alexandria in the 2nd century BCE.  This apparently was the 
translation referenced by the author of Matthew, and Christians have 
been running with this ever since.  (Why was a purveyor of God's good 
news working from a translation?  And Christians wonder why Jews don't 
buy claims that Jesus fulfilled prophesy.)

> Don't even get me started on the "existence" of Jesus, as described in 
> the Bible, or the fact that only two accounts of the resurrection can 
> even be called "common to the time it happened, sort of..", one of them 
> almost copies the other verbatim, except for adding supernatural stuff 
> to it, while the "first" account included none of the elements that made 
> it a supernatural event, or implied in any way he had reappeared.

As I said, I am not a historian, so I am loath to contradict the 
historical consensus on Jesus' historicity, although I have met a 
prominent mythicist (Richard Carrier).  Not that this debate is of any 
existential concern to me.  But yes, it is clear that the Jesus of the 
gospels has been embellished to the extent that we can know nothing of 
the historical figure(s) he was based on.

And if any Christians are wondering what Patrick is talking about, the 
last 12 verses of Mark 16 were not in the original gospel.  If your 
Bible doesn't have a footnote acknowledging this, chuck it and buy an 
honest translation.

> The whole book is a mess, honestly, but the New Testament not only 
> mangles its own content, it warps and twists the OT, making claims about 
> fulfillment of prophecies that where already fulfilled in the original 
> passages, and didn't refer to the times of Jesus at all, etc. The only 
> thing more mad is the attempts to explain away all of it, by doing 
> things like copying lines out of the King of Tyr, to "invent" the Devil 
> (which is not the same as Satan at all, even if they, again, insisted on 
> conflating their new invented enemy with that prior character.

The gospel writers were using a school of scriptural interpretation 
called midrash, which would have made perfect sense to people of that 
mindset, but to everyone else--the Jewish establishment in 
particular--it just looked like they were making shit up.  Thus, a 
prophecy in Isaiah of a young woman who is pregnant *right now* being a 
sign that King Ahaz's victory is imminent can simultaneously be read as 
messianic prophecy for centuries into the future.

And yeah, the Christian Satan is clearly not the same guy as the Satan 
in the Tanakh, and the idea that the snake in the Garden of Eden was 
Satan in disguise was a straight up Christian invention.

> The only thing, honestly, sillier is the mess of gibberish added, again, 
> when the Quran was written, and, once again, half the contents where 
> "rewritten" to create even more confusion, nonsense, cosmology and 
> gibberish to explain things than this video contains. (It includes, for 
> example, Allah arguing with the Earth over whether or not it would do as 
> he commanded and actually come into existence... lol)

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXJ4dsU0oGMJ5KT5rTLYCYQOAOU4qvIDi

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