How the Grinch Failed To Steal Christ From Christmas, 2022 Edition

It just wouldn’t be Christmas without sleigh bells ringing and atheists whining that Christ is still part of Christmas. Why do they care? I never see articles of atheists trying to explain away Islam or Hinduism, especially not articles timed for their holy days.

And why do they never understand the very topics that they’ve devoted their entire lives to understanding?

Why early Christians wouldn’t have found the Christmas story’s virgin birth so surprising

h ttps://theconversation.com/why-early-christians-wouldnt-have-found-the-christmas-storys-virgin-birth-so-surprising-194133

By Rodolfo Galvan Estrada III, Assistant Professor of the New Testament, Vanguard University, 15 December 2022

Pretentious names much? If Rodolfo Galvan Estrada III understood his subject of expertise well enough to believe it, then he’d be able to pray for tenure. He ain’t gonna get it on merits like this one!

Every year on Christmas, Christians celebrate the birth of their religion’s founder, Jesus from Nazareth of Galilee. Part of this celebration includes the claim that Jesus was born from a virgin mother named Mary, which is fundamental to the Christian understanding that Jesus is the divine son of God.

So far, so good. Although one can tell from the structure of the very first sentence that this is an atheist speaking. “The birth of their religion’s founder, Jesus from Nazareth”? Is there something that you’re trying to NOT profess, Professor?

The virgin birth may seem strange to a modern audience – and not just because it runs counter to the science of reproduction. Even in the Bible itself, the idea is rarely mentioned.

And off the rails we go!

Strikingly, the New Testament is relatively silent on the virgin birth except in two places. It appears only in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, written a few decades after Jesus’ death.

I don’t know about the dating of the earliest surviving manuscripts. But the reason Matthew and Luke are in the Gospels and not the apocrypha, is because their works were able to be sourced back to Matthew and Luke specifically.

Atheists love to forget that Christianity got its start while the people who had met that miracle-working Christ were still alive. If I told you that Larry the plumber from Galilee just fed five thousand people with nothing but a kid’s lunch, you’d debunk me by asking which five thousand people they were.

Christ’s life and miracles meet that burden of proof!

As a scholar of the New Testament, however, I argue that this story’s original audiences would not have been put off by the supposed “strangeness” of the virgin birth story. The story would have felt much more familiar to listeners at that time, when the ancient Mediterranean was full of tales of legendary men born of gods – and when early Christians were paying close attention to the Hebrew Bible’s prophecies.

Now the majority of early Christians outside of Judea and throughout the Roman empire did not know the Old Testament in the original Hebrew, but rather a Greek translation known as the Septuagint. When the Gospel of Matthew quotes Isaiah 7:14, it uses the Septuagint, which includes the term “parthenos,” commonly understood as “virgin.” This term differs from the Hebrew Old Testament, which uses the word “almah,” properly translated as “young woman.” The slight difference in translation between the Hebrew and the Greek may not mean much, but for early Christians who knew Greek, it provided prophetic proof for Jesus’ birth from the Virgin Mary.

What he’s saying, is that Isaiah’s correct prophecy is “a young woman will have a son”. That’s not a risky prediction, now is it? Is an old woman going to have a child? A man? This attempt to discredit Isaiah cannot explain why Isaiah would even bother to write down such an asinine sentence.

Hmm… [GQ checks] Isaiah 7:14: “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.”

Additional to that… Immanuel means ‘God with us’. How does that name make sense, in the context of a woman having a son, without some divine Daddy parentage?

Was the belief in the virgin birth based on a mistranslation? Not necessarily. Such terms were sometimes synonymous in Greek and Jewish thought. And the same Greek word, “parthenos,” is also found in Luke’s version of the story. Luke does not cite the prophecy in Isaiah 7:14. Instead, this version of the Nativity story describes the angel Gabriel announcing to Mary that she will give birth even though she is a virgin. Like in Matthew’s version of the story, Mary is told that her baby will be the “son of God.”

One point for honesty, that Rodolfo refuted his own suggestion.

Claiming that someone was divinely born was not a new concept during the first century, when Jesus was born. Many Greco-Roman heroes had divine birth stories. Take three famous figures: Perseus, Ion and Alexander the Great.

One of the oldest Greek legends affirms that Perseus, an ancient ancestor of the Greek people, was born of a virgin mother named Danaë. The story begins with Danaë imprisoned by her father, the king of Argos, who feared her because it was prophesied that his grandson would kill him. According to the legend, the Greek god Zeus transformed himself into golden rain and impregnated her.

When Danaë gave birth to Perseus, they escaped and eventually landed on an island where he grew up. He eventually became a famous hero who killed the snake-haired Medusa, and his great-grandson was Hercules, known for his strength and uncontrollable anger.

The playwright Euripides, who lived in the fifth century B.C., describes the story of Ion, whose father was the Greek god Apollo. Apollo raped Creusa, Ion’s mother, who abandoned him at birth. Ion grew up unaware of his divine father, but eventually reconciled with his Athenian mother and became known as the founder of various Greek cities in modern-day Turkey.

Lastly, legends held that Zeus was the father of Alexander the Great, the Macedonian ruler who conquered his vast empire before age 33. Alexander was supposedly conceived the night before his mother consummated her marriage with the king of Macedon, when Zeus impregnated her with a lightning bolt from heaven. Philip, the king of Macedon, raised Alexander as his son, but suspected that there was something different about his conception.

Overall, divine conception stories were familiar in the ancient Mediterranean world.

The problem with all that is that those were legends. Fables. They were morality tales and accepted as such.

We Christians claim that Jesus of Nazareth, a man known to physically exist, had God as a father… also, that Christ demonstrated Godlike abilities on numerous public occasions. There’s the difference. Perseus never walked into a temple and healed the cripples.

Alexander the Great existed but didn’t do miracles. He was simply an amazing general… and I’m not aware of his ever claiming divinity.

[Ideas about a virgin birth] became even more important during the second century, when some Christians were debating Jesus’ origins: Was he simply born a human being but became the Son of God after being baptized? Was he a semi-divine being, not really human? Or was he both fully divine and fully human?

Why did these debates begin in the second century instead of the first? Because in the first century, THE EYEWITNESSES WERE STILL ALIVE. Satan couldn’t discredit Christ’s existence while everybody from the Apostles to Christ’s human cousins were still alive with firsthand knowledge.

The last idea, symbolized by the virgin birth, was most accepted – and is now standard Christian belief. But the relative silence about it in the first few decades of Christianity does not necessarily suggest that early Christians did not believe it. Instead, as biblical scholar Raymond Brown also noted, the virgin birth was likely not a major concern for first-century Christians. They affirmed that Jesus was the divine Son of God who became a human being, without trying to explain exactly how this happened.

A quick Wikipedia quote will unmask Raymond Brown.

h ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_E._Brown

Segue

In 1943, reversing the approach that had existed since Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Providentissimus Deus fifty years earlier, Pope Pius XII’s encyclical Divino afflante Spiritu expressed approval of historical-critical methods. For Brown, this was a “Magna Carta for biblical progress.” In 1965, at the Second Vatican Council, the Church moved further in this direction, adopting the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation Dei verbum, instead of the conservative schema “On the Sources of Revelation” that originally had been submitted. While it stated that Scripture teaches “solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation,” Brown points out the ambiguity of this statement, which opened the way for a new interpretation of inerrancy by shifting from a literal interpretation of the text towards a focus on “the extent to which it conforms to the salvific purpose of God.” He saw this as the Church “turning the corner” on inerrancy: “the Roman Catholic Church does not change her official stance in a blunt way. Past statements are not rejected but are requoted with praise and then reinterpreted at the same time. … What was really going on was an attempt gracefully to retain what was salvageable from the past and to move in a new direction at the same time.”

In a detailed 1965 article in the journal Theological Studies examining whether Jesus was ever called “God” in the New Testament, Brown concluded that “Even the fourth Gospel never portrays Jesus as saying specifically that he is God” and “there is no reason to think that Jesus was called God in the earliest layers of New Testament tradition.”

Brown gonna be sadfaced at Judgment Day. He died in ’98 as an unrepentant blasphemer against Christ. Today, we see his work be cited by Current Year atheists attempting to discredit what they themselves claim to be experts in, via arguments that would not impress a child.

Atheism always begins at “there is no God” and ends at “we must kill Him again”.

End segue

Meanwhile, humanity being condemned to a state of sin, how Jesus managed to not be affected by that universal state IS an important question. Enough so that He had two different genealogies recorded. “The Bible rarely mentioned the virgin birth”, oh come on. Word count has nothing to do with doctrinal importance.

Overall, divine conception stories were familiar in the ancient Mediterranean world. By the second century A.D., Justin Martyr, a Christian theologian who defended Christianity, recognized this point: that virgin birth would not have been considered as “extraordinary” in societies familiar with Greco-Roman deities. In fact, in an address to the Roman emperor Antoninus Pius and philosophers, Justin argued that they should tolerate Christian belief in the virgin birth just as they did belief in the stories of Perseus.

As in, as a fairy tale for adults that nobody should take literally.

The idea of the divine participating in the conception of a child destined for greatness wouldn’t have seemed so unusual to an ancient audience. Even more, early Christians’ interpretation of the prophecy in Isaiah 7:14 from the Septuagint supported their belief that Jesus’ origin was not only divine, but foretold in their prophetic scriptures.

Aaand, we walk back that one awarded point for honesty, because believers made no such claims of greatness until after Christ was dead. He lived quietly as a carpenter; when He went traveling, He refused all offers of worldly success; and after His execution, His followers abandoned Him. Peter didn’t even wait that long.

That’s not the story of a Perseus or Alexander the Great.

We Christians do not follow cleverly invented stories and refurbished pagan mythologies. Did Alexander’s mother claim that Zeus beat Hubby into her ass by an hour? Who cares, because no witnesses. No documentation. No prophecies, signs or nuthin’.

The facts of Christ’s birth was documented not just by his immediate family, but by the neighbors, the clergy, the Three Wise Men, and by extension, the local government, who believed the claims of Christ’s divinity well enough to order a massacre of all infants in hopes that He’d be one of them. That isn’t the sort of stuff a wise guy can invent out of nothing.

That’s why the “are you suuure this happened literally, as told?” doubters only appeared in the second century. Those meddlesome eyewitnesses!

When Christ  was born, He broke the curse & chain of sin that had enslaved humanity ever since the Fall. This Rodolfo “expert” in the Bible refuses to admit the importance of that. But we who know the truth of the Bible, we celebrate God’s birthday because… HE HAS ONE.

Happy Birthday, Christ Our Savior and Son Of God!