Musings from an Atheist Theologian

"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

Now that I have slightly more time to devote to this blog, as teased in the post on the Book of Revelation, I'm going to examine the life of Jesus as recorded in the New Testament a little more closely, through the lens of Apocrypha, history, tradition, whatever sheds light on the subject. But, as I said, you should know everything about me, my thought process, and the means I employ to make sense of the insensible. To that end, for reference, here are some of the time-tested pieces of knowledge and methodology I apply to solve things. Like everything else on this blog, it's a little tongue-in-cheek. If you'd like explanations for any of these, please do feel free to ask in the comments, and I'll do my best to respond in a timely fashion. Occam's Razor before anything else. (Put another way, in a similar spirit but not the exact meaning, if you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. Or, if you like, the star-shaped block usually goes into the star-shaped hole, so