{"id":2517,"date":"2021-12-23T19:49:55","date_gmt":"2021-12-23T19:49:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.risen.org.uk\/?p=2517"},"modified":"2021-12-23T19:49:55","modified_gmt":"2021-12-23T19:49:55","slug":"blog-december-22nd-does-the-bible-claim-that-mary-was-a-virgin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/risen.org.uk\/?p=2517","title":{"rendered":"Blog December 22nd Does the Bible Claim that Mary Was A Virgin"},"content":{"rendered":"

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http:\/\/www.risen.org.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/01-In-the-Beginning-1.m4a<\/a><\/audio>
\nIn The Beginning Was The Word from the unpublished album “His Story Live” featuring the Lord Is Truth Gospel Choir recorded and produced by Ross Gill<\/p>\n

I came across this interesting and very topical article by Karen Murdarasi which discusses the Bible\u2019s attitude to the Virgin birth. The article was from Premier Christian Media and I thought worth sharing with you.
\nAlong with Jesus\u2019s resurrection, the virgin birth is one on Christianity\u2019s wildest \u2013 and most disputed – claims. But did the Gospel accounts really tell us that Mary became pregnant before she ever had sex, or was it all just a case of misinterpreted Greek?
\n\u201dThe Virgin Mary had a baby boy\u201d the song tells us, and at this time of year (Covid regulations permitting), children up and down the country wear tinsel around their heads and act out the familiar scene: the angel Gabriel appears to Mary and announces that she is to have a miracle baby. But this is also the time of year when the claim starts to appear on social media that the Bible never really claims that Mary was a virgin, and that this outlandish idea was added by Christians later to sprinkle the fairy dust of a miracle onto a perfectly ordinary conception.
\nObviously, virgins do not get pregnant. Therefore, either the Bible is claiming that a truly astounding miracle happened, or Christians have been reading it wrong for centuries. The debate centres around the word translated \u2018virgin\u2019, and what it meant in the original language. We have two accounts of Jesus\u2019 conception in the Bible, in the Gospels of Matthew and of Luke and, on the face of it, they both seem to say that Mary was a virgin when she conceived. But do they?
\nMatthew 1:23 quotes a verse from Isaiah 7:14, saying that Jesus\u2019 birth fulfils the prophecy: \u201c’The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel\u2019 (which means \u2018God with us\u2019).\u201d That appears clear enough, until you examine the original verse from Isaiah more closely. The Hebrew word used for \u2018virgin\u2019 is almah, and while it can certainly mean virgin, it doesn\u2019t have to; it could just mean \u2018young woman of marriageable age\u2019. Also, from the way it is phrased, it is not clear whether this young woman\/virgin is going to conceive while she is still unmarried. The prophecy speaks of the future, and it could be that the virgin\/young woman in question is soon going to get married and conceive her son naturally.
\nMatthew\u2019s Gospel is written in Greek, not Hebrew, so the word he used was parthenos. Parthenos was the word used to translate almah in the Septuagint (the standard Greek version of the Jewish scriptures) and, again, it means virgin or young woman \u2013 or, to be more accurate, both. The closest parallel in English is probably maiden, which means a young woman but has unmissable connotations of virginity (a women\u2019s hymen was known as her \u2018maidenhead\u2019). Even so, it still leaves open the possibility that Mary was an \u2018unmaidenly\u2019 maiden who was already sexually active.
\nBut fixating on the word parthenos means missing the places where the Gospel writers tell us much more clearly that Mary was not sexually active. In Luke\u2019s account, when Gabriel announces to Mary that she will become pregnant, modern translations usually render Mary\u2019s question to him as something like: \u201cHow can this be, since I am a virgin?\u201d (Luke 1:34) but the Greek actually says: \u201csince I do not know a man.\u201d Mary is delicately referring to her lack of carnal knowledge, not saying she has never met a male human. Her question makes perfect sense: as someone brought up in an agricultural environment, she knows the facts of life and doesn\u2019t see how she can become pregnant without having had sex. Gabriel\u2019s answer is that the Holy Spirit will accomplish it, concluding \u201cNothing will be impossible with God.\u201d (Luke 1:37) It is clear to Mary, and should be to the reader also, that the angel is talking about a miraculous, not a natural, conception.
\nAnother look at Matthew\u2019s Gospel makes the case even clearer. Joseph\u2019s reaction to the pregnancy is to dissolve the relationship, because (it is implied) he assumes that Mary has been unfaithful. That rules out the possibility that Mary had been having sexual relations with him. Once Joseph had been assured in a dream that the unborn child was \u201cfrom the Holy Spirit\u201d, he agreed to take Mary home but not have sexual relations with her. Here, Joseph\u2019s (in)action is variously translated as \u2018he kept her a virgin\u2019 or \u2018did not consummate their marriage\u2019 until after Jesus was born (Matthew 1.25). But it\u2019s the Authorised Version that gets closest to the original Greek: \u201che did not come to know her [carnally] until she had given birth to her firstborn son.\u201d
\nNone of this is going to convince anyone who thinks the Bible is a book of fairy stories, and, as with most events in history, science can tell us very little. There were no DNA tests in first-Century Judea. But when it comes to the argument over the historical evidence, there is no wriggle room: the biblical accounts tell the reader, without any ambiguity, that Mary conceived miraculously, without ever having had sex. The Virgin Mary did indeed have a baby boy.<\/p>\n

Quote of the Week<\/strong>
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ALL AT MUSTARD SEED SONGS \u2013 THE TRUSTEES, MUSICIANS, MUSICAL DIRECTOR AND OUR WEBMASTER WISH YOU ALL A VERY HAPPY CHIRSTMAS AND PROPEROUS NEW YEAR.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In The Beginning Was The Word from the unpublished album “His Story Live” featuring the Lord Is Truth Gospel Choir recorded and produced by Ross Gill I came across this interesting and very topical article by Karen Murdarasi which discusses the Bible\u2019s attitude to the Virgin birth. The article was from Premier Christian Media and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ken-shearsmiths-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/risen.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/risen.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/risen.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/risen.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/risen.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2517"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/risen.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2517\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2521,"href":"https:\/\/risen.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2517\/revisions\/2521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/risen.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/risen.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/risen.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}