Jesus Theory #1: Speculation About an Unusual Birth (Part 1: Setting the Scene)
"Let's start at the very beginning, a fine place to start," to paraphrase The Sound of Music : the so-called virgin birth. To be more specific, we must establish some points of fact upfront that are related to the topic of this post. Isaiah's prophecy was never about a virgin birth. The whole thing came from a snafu when the Hebrew Old Testament was translated into Greek (the famous Septuagint, so called either because 70 scholars participated in its translation or the work only took 70 days from start to finish -- pick the tradition you like) for the benefit of the large Jewish population in Egypt, then the intellectual center of the known world, who no longer spoke or read Hebrew. The passage we now know as Isaiah 7:14, with the three verses following, is entirely symbolic and intended as a prophecy of Israel's future. But leaving aside its actual meaning to its intended audience as opposed to the Christian interpretation, there's another little problem. G...