Virgin Mary... Miracle or Misunderstanding? (feat. Digital Hammurabi)

Mary's virgin birth is now as synonymous with Christianity as the cross, but was it always this way? The earliest-written books of the Bible don't know about this miracle... but more importantly, is the prophecy that the immaculate conception is said to fulfill actually a prophecy? Or merely something else the religion has lost in translation?

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[Paulogia]

ERRATA -
- the immaculate conception doesn't refer to Jesus
- apologies on sound inconsistencies

[PeterSchmuttermaier]

I've heard of that theory of a bad translation for the first time when I was in at the age of seven or eight in a documentary and it made totally sense to me. When I brought the idea up for discussion in the next religion lesson in school, the teacher threw me out of the class room and later called my parents. A grown up woman who studied religion wasn't able to argue an eight year old who had seen a documentary about the origin of christianity. Pathetic.

[VicedRhino]

I think the story of the Little Red Hen makes it quite clear that chickens do indeed make excellent bread.

[DigitalHammurabi]

That was so kind of you!!! Thank you for the shout out! This video is so well done!!!

[bengreen]

The more you learn about the bible, the harder it becomes to believe it's the word of a god.
In fact it's....wait for VIRGIN' on the impossible.
oh man I am so sorry.
excellent video as always.

[mrbearbear]

Christianity: one teenagers white lie that got way out of hand

[tranceman]

I'll go with the third option... MYTH!

[ThatTheologyTeacher]

I almost got fired from a Catholic High School for even hinting about this regarding Mary years ago.

[timhallas]

As a skeptical child, I was more than a bit suspicious of the virgin giving birth story. Perhaps, I thought, this might have been an exaggeration of the facts. Even without a complete knowledge of biology, I was fairly certain that at least one sperm was necessary for a human egg to become a child. Many years later, as I studied the events depicted in the bible, I came to a modest conclusion that it was far more likely that an error had occurred in the translation, than the boy named Jesus was a clone of his mother. No Y, no boy.

[JuliaAllenHesse]

This was one of the things that always bugged me, even during my heart-on-fire-for-Jesus years. One pastor I had just straight up lied to me, rather than deal with the linguistic anomalies.

[billyjacobs]

Jesus riding in on 2 donkeys is my favorite part of the bible. I want a tattoo of the illustration.

[condorboss]

Early christians, particularly the author Matthew, did a lot of retro-fitting to make the story of Christ seem to fulfill Old Testament prophecies.
Didn't Aron-Ra do a video on a bunch of biblical prophesies that were never fulfilled?

[ShannonQ]

This was really interesting. More of this please!

[-EC-]

False dichotomy: Miracle or Misunderstanding. There is of course another explanation... It's a lot of old bollocks! LOL. Good video.

[Redhunteur]

You missed one of my favourite points about this fake prophecy; nobody in the history of ever referred to Jesus as Emmanuel. So basically the only part they got right was that a young woman got knocked up in ancient Israel. Gee, way to go out on a limb...

[gilmontaubam]

I for one find a blonde chicken who can make bread more believable than the whole Jesus story.

[Ponera-Sama]

The virgin birth could also have been inspired by the Greek story of Perseus. After Perseus' grandfather heard a prophecy saying that his grandson will one day killed him, he locked up his daughter in a tower to make sure she would never have sex with anyone and thus never bear children (a much better evidence that she was a virgin than Mary had). Despite having remained a virgin, she became pregnant and gave birth to a son anyway, leading to her father locking both of them in a barrel and throwing them into the ocean.

[DutchJoan]

So well researched, and a fabulous collab with Digital Hammurabi! I enjoyed this very much.

[theprinceofdarkness]

The real problem with citation of the so-called virgin passage in Isaiah is that it was actually about a child born during Isaiah's time and by reading the context in Hebrew preferably one could have easily seen that this was not a long term "prophecy" but a short term commentary on events of Isaiah's time
The original young woman was most definitely not a virgin when the child was born in Isaiah's time

As was typical of New Testament writers the writer of Matthew needed a plot for a birth narrative because there were no oral traditions to draw on

The writer of Matthew's only clue was Paul's short statement in Galatians about being "born" of a woman

Of course it's convenient that Isaiah citation is only a few chapters in to the book and of course the writer of Matthew decided that he had found out the "real story" by checking out what an old prophet had to say

Carelessly he "ripped it out" and copied the short statement to build his story around
When he had collected enough citations (I'm sure the readers are familiar with quote mining) he felt a strong wave of emotion because he suddenly "knew" the right story and could write it

Maybe a bit of bibliomancy was at play but he eventually teased out the story from the prophets

Of course if Isaiah "foretold" the story it must be true

And so the writer of Matthew invented the whole story from snippets that he had gleaned

He was obviously clever at gematria and found a way to arrange the genealogy in 3 sets of 14 to say David 3 times and thereby magically transform Jesus into the son of David

So the moral of the story is randomly find some verses from the old testament and you too can write a "divinely inspired" story

[Tacklepig]

This is actually something I thought was quite commonly known.

In german, the term for virgin (Jungfrau) and for young woman (junge Frau) are literally just one letter apart, so most people over here - even believing christians - find it quite easy to believe that the immaculate conception was just a translation error.

That's how much difference language can make in understanding a concept.