home | what's new | other sites | contact | about

  

 

Word Gems 

exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity

 

Prof. Bart D. Ehrman

Why does Matthew say that Jesus was born of a virgin? He does so because he’s very keen to show that Jesus’ life was a fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy. As such, he quotes Isaiah. However, Isaiah didn’t actually speak of a virgin birth.

 

 

return to the main-page article on "Bible"

 

 

Editor's prefatory comment:

Dr. Ehrman explains that the 5700 early copies of the New Testament – copies of copies of copies – contain hundreds of thousands of discrepancies.

Many of these are inconsequential but a significant number alter the meaning of the text in important ways. Most of these constituted mere human error in copying but some of them, it appears, were purposefully injected into the text by editorial judgment of scribes.

This entire area of scholarship is far more complex than most realize, leading the objective reviewer to understand that, in many cases, we have no knowledge of the original text of the New Testament.

In addition to Dr. Ehrman’s books, his lectures are available on youtube; for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfheSAcCsrE&t=12s

 

 

Dr. Ehrman speaks of this in "Jesus, Interrupted."

 

Editor's note: compare the following to the report by Bishop Spong.

 

“We have seen that Matthew is particularly keen to show that everything in [Jesus’ life] was a fulfillment of Scriptural prophecy. So why was he born of a virgin? It was because the Hebrew prophet Isaiah indicated that ‘a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call him Immanuel’ (Matt. 1:25, quoting Isa. 7:14).

“Actually, that’s not what Isaiah said. In the Hebrew Bible, Isaiah indicates that a ‘young woman’ will bear a son…

“When the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek, however, Isaiah’s ‘young woman’ … came to be rendered by the Greek word for ‘virgin’… and that is the [translation] of the Bible that Matthew read… So Matthew wrote that Jesus was born of a virgin because that’s what he thought Scripture” states. It doesn't."

 

 

Editor's last word: