Virginia Hughes -- that bright, lovely and suddenly quite aptly named minion of our Seed Overlords -- has asked me to write something about parthenogenesis. (That's virgin birth, for you non-Greeks.) Now, I don't know anything about biological parthenogenesis. I just suspect that my wife may have that capability, since our daughter looks like a small copy of her with Rundkvist hair. But I can tell you the story behind the Dogma of Virgin Birth.
To a scientifically minded atheist like myself, the whole idea of religious dogmata appears absurd. I have various factual beliefs about the world, not all of them well-founded, some of them almost certainly incorrect. But none of these beliefs has come to me as a dogma: something I must believe, something I cannot question, in order to be accepted by other people and count myself as a good person. All of my factual beliefs are open to revision if better evidence comes along. (My values, that's something else. My idea that I should treat people with empathy and solidarity doesn't say anything about how the world actually is, and no evidence can prove to me in the logical sense that this value judgement is wrong.)
So dogmata are strange things. And one of the strangest I've come across is the Dogma of the Virgin Birth of Christ, central to Catholic Christianity. Sacred parthenogenesis! Explains the Catholic Encyclopedia:
"The virginity of our Blessed Lady was defined under anathema in the third canon of the Lateran Council held in the time of Pope Martin I, A.D. 649. The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, as recited in the Mass, expresses belief in Christ 'incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary'; the Apostles' Creed professes that Jesus Christ 'was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary'; the older form of the same creed uses the expression: 'born of the Holy Ghost and of the Virgin Mary'. These professions show:
- That the body of Jesus Christ was not sent down from Heaven, nor taken from earth as was that of Adam, but that its matter was supplied by Mary;
- that Mary co-operated in the formation of Christ's body as every other mother co-operates in the formation of the body of her child, since otherwise Christ could not be said to be born of Mary just as Eve cannot be said to be born of Adam;
- that the germ in whose development and growth into the Infant Jesus, Mary co-operated, was fecundated not by any human action, but by the Divine power attributed to the Holy Ghost;
- that the supernatural influence of the Holy Ghost extended to the birth of Jesus Christ, not merely preserving Mary's integrity [that is, her hymen], but also causing Christ's birth or external generation to reflect his eternal birth from the Father in this, that 'the Light from Light' proceeded from his mother's womb as a light shed on the world; that the 'power of the Most High' passed through the barriers of nature without injuring them; that 'the body of the Word' formed by the Holy Ghost penetrated another body after the manner of spirits."
(I like that final clarification. A reader may wonder just how the Holy Ghost penetrated another body, and the Encyclopedia helpfully explains that it did this "after the manner of spirits". Lovely!)
Virgin Birth is an old dogma, implicit already in the Nicene creed of AD 381. That means that overturning this article of faith would undermine a lot of other important material. However, theologians quietly agree that the whole idea actually stems from a mistranslation. Wikipedia has all the details.
Evangelists Matthew and Luke state explicitly that Jesus was born to Mary despite her never having had sex. Matthew, basing his gospel on Mark's, introduces the motif and links it to something Isaiah had written in the 8th century BC, asserting that the Virgin Birth was the fulfilment of an old prophecy.
"Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: the 'almah will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel." (Isaiah 7:14)
Hebrew has a word for a girl or woman who has never had sex: betulah. But Isaiah doesn't say that the person giving birth is going to be a betulah. He calls her an 'almah, that is, just generally a girl or young woman. Nothing in Isaiah suggests that he envisioned any supernatural baby-making.
Here's where the mistranslation comes in. You see, Matthew isn't using the original Hebrew text of Isaiah. Writing his gospel in Greek, he quotes the Septuagint Greek translation of the Old Testament. And for 'almah, the Septuagint has parthenos, a word implying sexual virginity. Thus the supernatural birth-story of Jesus of Nazareth, and thus the dogma of sacred parthenogenesis.
[More blog entries about skepticism, christianity, catholicism, jesus, parthenogenesis; skepticism, skepsis, kristendom, katolicism, jesus, jungfrufödsel.]
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That's just silly, in a variety of ways. Your position has no use, as it has no implications of any kind, and you're ignoring the mechanism by which you acquired your 'values', in which your adoption of the position was the result of a solution-seeking process.
The idea that your values aren't subject to objective analysis is just a lie you use to avoid having to analyze them, and to prevent others from analyzing them as well.
Hello, Martin!
Thanks for a good blog entry, it is always interesting to hear a secular humanist view on Christian doctrine. Just a few remarks:
That theologians silently agree that the mistranslation was a major factor in the formation of doctrine is, to be fair, a misrepresentation. Perhaps there may be some Lutheran relativist theologians (certainly not philologists!) holding this position - in some circles they may even be in majority - but in a larger geographical and historical perspective, this hypothesis is certainly relegated to the sidelines of theology and church history, especially in the light of Luk. I:34: "εἶÏεν δὲ μαÏιὰμ ÏÏá½¸Ï Ïὸν á¼Î³Î³ÎµÎ»Î¿Î½, Ïá¿¶Ï á¼ÏÏαι ÏοῦÏο, á¼Ïεὶ á¼Î½Î´Ïα οὠγινÏÏκÏ" (cf. also passages in the other Gospels with Gabriel?s message to Joseph, equally problematic to the mistranslation theory).
You are right that 'betula' and 'alma' are not equivalent: the latter signifies in the literature a young girl, generally too young to be fertile or married: see for example Deut XXII:20, where the two are linked so that one could always rightly expect the marks of the betula on the alma. This and other passages suggest that alma was in the context of civil status a narrower definition than betula (which could mean a virgin or childless woman of any age - in the latter case, for example Sarai in the Old Testament and Elizabeth in the Gospels).
One also do well to keep in mind that the Septuagint was conceived in a truly bilingual culture and existed alongside the proto-Masoretic text for centuries, allowing for careful adjustments of the Greek text (there is a rich secondary literature pertaining to this documentation). Likewise it differs very little from sources like the Quamran, which is bad news for the favourite enlightenment conspiracy theory that the early church fathers had altered the texts vis-à¶is pre-existent Jewish tradition.
Incidentally, the questioning of the parthenogenesis has traditionally not so much concerned the lack of a carnal father, but the existence of a carnal mother, since the most popular heresies of the first three hundred years of Christianity were (like today) of monophysitic christology.
Take care, hope to see you out in Fisksä´²a again soon,
/ Mattias
I can´t refrain from pointing out that we're quite a few people calling ourselves Christians, who don't subscribe to either the virgin birth or most other so called dogmata. Check out for instance the numerous books by John Shelby Spong or any number of feminist theological works, with Jane Schaberg's The Illegitimacy of Jesus being the most prominent example.
Best wishes,
/P
Peter
Yay, Peter! Haven't heard from you in ages!
Mattias, I don't deny that the Septuagint translator who chose the word parthenos may well have believed in Virgin Birth. But that says nothing about what Isaiah was thinking four centuries previously.
More generally, the gospel writers' attempts to depict the life of Jesus from Nazareth as fulfilment of Old Testament prophecies is extremely strained. The Immanuel prophecy is IMHO a particularly unconvincing example.
Oops, seems like the html-code does not support the greek alphabet (nor umlaute)- well you can find the passage in the Septuaginta yourself and I will write Fiskis from now on. :-)
Well, Martin, belief in prophesies is a different matter altogether, belonging distinctly to the field of metaphysics. I only replied to the philological questions raised in your blog entry and these we are actually able to address with some certainity. From the use of the two words in Deut. XXII:20 follows that what is described in Isiah would either be supernatural or a great scandal.
As you make clear you do not believe in the possibility of prophesies, and therefore their contents must be irrelevant in these matters. Or do you really mean that if the Immanuel prophesy had been more convincing, you would have thought it more plausible?
You write: "All of my factual beliefs are open to revision if better evidence comes along." and the same holds true also of myself and all Catholics, Anglicans and traditional Lutherans I know. If better evidence comes along I cease being a christian, I do not seek to alter christianity (nor count myself, as you have it, as a bad person). This is the function of dogma. Any christians of unorthodox doctrine who finds this harsch may still wish to express gratitude to this , since it is the sole reason that we have received christianity in a form that has with few exceptions, been problematic with current ethe of the world (this protection from deviance was of course especially important in a less globalised world than ours, relying heavily on information transmitted orally by persons of great personal authority). A similar protective rule pertaining to plainchant enabled polyphony to rise in the frankish empire, but can discuss that another time.
When it comes to the matters of knowledge and values I disagree strongly with your view that they could or should be separated.
Peter - do you mean that you do not subscribe to christian doctrine as dogmata or that you do not subscribe to them at all? These two positions are very often getting mixed up, for example in the case of archbishop emeritus Karl Gustav Hammar of the Lutheran Church of Sweden. He questioned the dogmatic status of some fundamental doctrinal matters which in secularised swedish media was interpreted as if he had personally, or even in the capacity of bishop, questioned the very doctrinal matters themselves.
/ Mattias
I would not be more inclined to believe in prophecies had the gospel writers done a better job of fulfilling them. But I'm a little surprised that so many intelligent Christians through the ages have found them convincing. I think they must have done so mainly for social reasons. Most people internalise religious dogmata long before they have a chance to study the scriptures on which the dogmata rest.
If better evidence comes along I cease being a christian
You mean like theodicy? (-;
He he he, yes, maybe :-)
Well, strictly speaking, the discipline of theodicy has certainly been an important branch of theology, but the 'problem' of theos dike rests firmly with those of anthropocentric and/or pantheistic outlook. Traditional christian doctrine teaches that man has a free will and that God is transcendent. In a pantheistic world (where God would exist fully within the universe itself) an omniscient, omnibenevolent and omnipotent God would mean that there could be no such thing as free will, or indeed humans at all. In an anthropocentric world, especially a largely eudaimonistic one like our present, we assume a priori the axiom of our qualified absolute judgement of knowledge, benevolence and potency. The ultimate (and, as it turns out, rather common) consequence of assigning these capacities to mankind is to assign them also on the individual level, to the 'self' of each person (something that requires the relativism so typical of modern epistemologies). I advocate a more cautious epistemology, where these matters are treated within the boundaries of classical metaphysics.
My free will entails that if some logic or empiricism would be problematic to Christian doctrine, I would go astray therefrom. I am, however, not an eudaemonist of any kind (here our positions probably differ greatly).
On the whole, just as the knowledge of christian doctrine has seriously deteroriated during the last twohundred years, so has the criticism of the same doctrine often been reduced to a highly uninformed state (this is partly connected with the declining knowledge of classical and semitic languages but also with a manifest lack of interest in philosophical matters altogether) - yourself and a good few others excluded, I must say, since your interest seems genuine.
"Most people internalise religious dogmata long before they have a chance to study the scriptures on which the dogmata rest".
I think the case is more frequently quite the reverse - most modern christians care very little for dogmata (and know, as was said, very little about them) and rest entirely on spiritual empiricism, which accounts for the great doctrinal laxity in modern christianity.
Sorry to drift from the topic, but you provoked this boring rant yourself :-) I hope that I did not misunderstand you or that I have caused any offence. Let me tell you once more how much I appreciate your blog.
Perhaps this discussion could continue over a cup of tea at my place? Pick a day or just pop by - we are home most weeknights.
/ Mattias
I'm not sure I understand your vocabulary, but I take it you're arguing that theodicy isn't really a problem because humans can't judge whether God's actions are all for the best or not? Err... That's not a very human-friendly perspective. If I'm drowning, and I believe in a benevolent and powerful god, then I expect him to fish me out, i.e. to be good to me.
Eudaimonism apparently means "a philosophy that defines right action as that which leads to 'well being'." I'm not sure what this has to do with theodicy. It sounds like it might be close to epicureanism, which I subscribe to.
Many thanks for your kind invitation!
Hi again, thanks for your answer!
To clarify:
Hypothetic scenario I: there exists a transcendent God (that is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent) and humans with free will: lack of potency, knowledge and evil will persist among humans and in the universe as a whole.
Hypothetic scenario II: there exists a transcendent God (that is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent) and humans without free will: mankind as we know her cannot exist, since she operates fully in accordance with God's will. If there exists such a God, it is playing with its puppets and has not created anything outside itself.
Most (nearly all) post-enlightenment theodicy deals exclusively with the second scenario. This is of course due to the fact that providential determinism was central in early modern philosophy (Descartes, Hobbes, Kant, Spinoza et al) and still is, to a large extent. It also reflects the eudaimonism that is completely foreign to semitic thought (such as christianity). While universal eudaimonism would possibly be (if achievable) commendable, the much more commonly found eudaimonism on the level of the individual or a group of individuals has historically had disastrous effects for mankind.
Catholic doctrine deals exclusively with the first scenario and can therefore contribute nothing to modern theodicy. Some influential protestant scholars, such as Melanchthon and Luther, however, were determinists and some aspects of their theology are thus complicated by theodicy arguments. I would recommend all modern Lutherans to read Feuerbach's 'Gottheit, Freiheit und Unsterblichkeit von Standpunkte der Anthropologie' (Leipzig: Wiegend, 1866) and all modern secular humanists to read Melanchthon's 'Loci communes' (Wittenberg, 1521), both available in good modern editions.
/ Mattias
We seem to be arguing past each other. Please speak simple English with me on these unfamiliar matters.
My perspective on theodicy, or "the problem of evil", is that the existence of evil in the world disproves the notion of a god that is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent. If (as I do not) one believes in a god, then experience shows that he either can't do anything about evil, doesn't realise that any evil is going on, or doesn't care that it's going on. Free will needn't enter into the equation, as a lot of evil isn't a consequence of human decisions.
I don't subscribe to Christian doctrines but I quite enjoy using them as argumentative tools...
Martin, in your drowning example, I believe the Christian get-out is that though you may think it good to be saved from drowning, the alleged God may have fuller knowledge and know that you will be better off in the eternal term dying then and there. The God being omniscient has very difficult implications for the assessment of His benevolence. This is also the answer, albeit an unsatisfactory one, to the `problem of evil'. The real issue there is what good it can do someone to be sent to Hell for not believing...
The Mothergoddess in Catal Huyuk (seen in the excavation newly) gives birth to her son who just died before,or her lover, going into her body to die, or they let a bull be sacrified instead. It´s like Maria giving birth to her son Jesus in a stable, and she became pregnant by God and Jesus is God, he dies and is reborn...Same as The year's old man and infant as the same. Called in literature as the "Paredros" of the goddess of fertility...
Or the caves of the stoneagehunters with all the animals especially bisonbulls painted on the walls and the "animaldressed man" or maybe shaman also painted, maybe making love to an animalwoman, or a cow...
There are thousands of examples of this in the world, among different peoples, it is not every time religious, it is also an explanation af life and dead.
OK, Jonathan, what about non-lethal evil?
Martin, I believe we are indeed discussing the same thing, only that our viewpoints differ greatly. I also think my english is as simple as yours (only less eloquent), but I shall try to make myself clearer in the future.
Would you grant that a universe that had the same qualities as its alleged creator (omnipotence, omnibenevolence and omniscience) would be pantheistic, that is, part of God itself? This pertains directly to your stated perspective on theodicy as this condition is a prerequisite for evil being problematic.
/ Mattias
I'm sorry, I am unable to imagine a sentient universe.
Ja, det är underligt plötsligt. Jag brukar sova gott på nätterna och drömma trevliga drömmar, men inte nu. En vän till mig skrev att han skulle sluta med historia och arkeologi innan det var för sent och horisonten hade slutit sig.
Och jag ser det också, att horisonten håller på att stänga sig för mig om jag inte slutar att intressera mig för den "sexuella paradoxen" som mänsklighetens historia erbjuder. En TOKparadox. Barbara Tuckman skrev när hon lämnade livet som nunna, att människorna alltid varit religiösa av tvång och rädsla för att leva, att vi skapar oss gud/ar.
Ja, det gör vi. Datorn är också en gud, den har nummer 42.
Nu ska jag ge Oden och Asarna och vanerna och allt vad de heter en välförtjänt spark i baken och hela kristendomen och alla gamla och nya religiösa bruk.
Vi syns inget mer!
Ha det bra och rädda dig!
Excuse an amateur christian here,
but i've heard that the Dead Sea Scrolls (found in the 1940ies?), which date back to the time of the years of Jesus on earth,
give much more support for the virgin birth prophecy than the source that you quote in the post.
Also the Septuagint is much older than the Masoretic text, thousand years older. I might even be more accurately showing what Isaiah acually wrote.
I don't think scholars automatically believe that greek=new an changed and hebrew=old and true.
Was the Masoretic the one quoted in this blog post?
Besides,
the New Testament can stand for it self. ;)
Well, whatever the Dead Sea Scrolls say, it isn't something the Catholic Church is likely to endorse. Quite the contrary, they have tried to keep the lid on those scrolls.
You've got it backwards with the Septuagint, it's a translation of the Masoretic Text. Believing otherwise is in the realm of the flying saucers.
well, not quite like a flying saucer....;):
Septuagint is a translation from the old scriptures to greek, made by "the 70 eldest" hard working intellectual jews back in the two centuries before Christ.
Wikipedia about Septuagint:
"....collection of Jewish scriptures, largely the Hebrew Bible, in Koine Greek, translated in stages between the 3rd and 1st centuries BCE in Alexandria"
If that much thinking led to the translation word "virgin", in Septuagint, i cannot immediately say it's a flying saucer statement, mind you.
Wikipedia on Masoretics:
"The MT was primarily copied, edited and distributed by a group of Jews known as the Masoretes between the seventh and tenth centuries CE."
Septuagint was made by jews, keep in mind. ;)
Whoops, thanks for correcting me!
....didn't mean to be rude, just that i'm tired of when people think that everything related to the greek langue is "new, christian, and altered" not like hebrew, which is "the oldest, and the most untouched", like a virgin ;)
It's pretty funny that while so many of y'all Europeans say y'all got the God monkey off your backs, whenever you write about this stuff it elicits way more comment than a straight archy story. Kind o like sex, eh?
Just you wait, one day Europe will discover sex too!
Regarding Isiah:
(i) We were (at least I was) talking about the proto-masoretic texts, which are of course older than the Septuagint.
(ii) The Septuagint originally included only the Pentateuch - poetic books, chronicles, prophetic books and apocryphae were translated only later.
Regarding the Quamran sources:
Alongside the Isiah scroll of 1Q (among the first found), the roll 4QP (found in the fourth cave in 1954) connects in many ways with Isiah XI:1, 4 and XXXIII:18, mentioning for example the 'branch of David standing forth' in a far future (this turn of phrase had prior to the excavations become popular in latin and vernacular poetry of the Western Church) The word "mechalalot" ('wound') is used in the same Messianic context.
Please, my friends, there was never any secrecy surrounding the Quamran. The facts from which this myth grew are that the scrolls of the last two caves were found after the division of the Palestine and that the important 4Q set came into the holdings of Jordanian-controlled Rockefeller museum in east Jerusalem whereas the complementary sources from the first cave was kept at the Israeli Museum in the western territory (a rather sensitive political situation for scholars at that moment). It was not until after Israel's invasion of east Jerusalem in the six days war (1967) that the 4Q scrolls could be compared to the sources previously found.
In spite of popular myth, none of the scrolls have ever been kept in the Vatican (please be very careful with Wikipedia and similar resources if you have to use them at all - the current Quamran article have many lacunae and does not engage with the most important literature available in this research field). It is another matter that many Catholic scholars have been involved in Quamran research, especially Dominicans which have a very strong tradition of Hebrew and Aramaic philology. There have been plans to re-collate the entire Quamran corpus in one easily accessible location, but many museums claim their own supremacy (as always) and so far no agreement has been reached. The international committee preparing (in liaison with Oxford Univ. Press and the Jordanian government) the critical edition of the texts has been criticised from the outset for working too slow (which certainly also have contributed to the conspiracy theory about secrecy) and as a consequence of that Profs. Eisenman (California State Univ.), Robinson (Claremont Univ.) and Wise (Univ. of Chicago), understandably bitter for not being involved in the committee, began a separate enterprise, aiming at making available all the plates in annotated facsimile. I recommend consulting both editions: Eisenman and Wise are slightly eccentric scholars but have done great work on the 4Q and offer a slightly different viewpoint than the 'official' edition, questioning the essenic hypothesis proposed by the committee scholars.
I am not an archaeologist, but since the Quamran rolls corroborate sources that affects the personal outlook for more than two billions of the world's present population (and the same sources are one of the most contributing factors of the present culture of another two billions) they must surely be regarded as one of the most important finds ever, right up there with the Phaistos disc and the Rosetta stone. It has important repercussions in the study of these texts: in the age of the enlightenment, for example, there were several scholars building their entire careers (politically as well as academically) on the hypothesis that the early Church fathers had altered the Old Testament texts in order to fit the New Testament sources and the early history of the Church. The Kairogenezian, Quamran and Damascus finds has offered an older Urtext (sometimes more than a millenium older than previously known extant sources) for the Old Testament and thus completely supersedes many philological hypotheses proposed in the last three hundred years (this is why the timing of people like Baigent, Leigh and Brown is so unfortunate - had they published their novels before 1947, their books would possibly had been taken much more seriously).
Regarding theodicy:
Martin - neither of the two mentioned scenaria propose of its own accord a sentient universe, if that is taken to mean a universe acting as one big organism. However, the idea of a pantheistic universe often involves some elements of animism in non-organic matter. You make clear that you (like me and many others) cannot imagine such a thing. Yet, such a notion is a premise for evil being problematic and a solution to a proposed problem generally takes account of its premises. I do not wish to force you into imagining something that you cannot imagine, but it was you who raised theodicy as a problem.
Long post again, sorry to waste your server space but thanks for a good discussion.
Mattias
"We were (at least I was) talking about the proto-masoretic texts, which are of course older than the Septuagint."
Pleas write down any quote from a resource which i can check, which supports the claim that the masoretic texts are older than the septuagint. Thank you in advance.
Enkla Z,
The masoretic texts are younger than the Septuagint. 'Proto-masoretic texts' is an established term meaning 'all Hebrew Tanakh sources written down before the masoretic text'.
Sorry if I was unclear,
/ Mattias
Mattias
I understand what proto-masoretic means :)
Just that proto-anno domini 1100 does not necessarily mean proto-septuagint
The septuagint was written by jews (translated from hebrew tanakh) back in the three cenuties B.C!
;)
Enkla Z, you're getting "pre-" and "proto-" mixed up. "Pre-" just means "before". But "proto-" means that something is actually an ancestor of something else. Cf. "prototype", where e.g. a test model of a car is not just earlier than the car that ships to customers, but is actually a version of the same car.
Enkla Z,
Nobody has disagreed with what you say and nobody has stated that all Hebrew texts prior to the edition of the Masoretes are older than the Septuagint, only that they are older than the Masoretic text itself.
To claim that the Septuagint was recited in the second Temple would be audacious, I assume you do not mean to argue this. :-)
/ Mattias