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@Tradesecret
No abuse. No derogatory language. No trolling or abuse.
You got it. 👍
Some scholars indicate rightly that the Hebrew word in Isaiah means young woman not virgin. No one says it is impossible to translate it virgin. The Septuagint - an OT Greek translation by Jewish scholars pre Jesus, did translate the word virgin.
No, the Septuagint translated the word as parthenos -- which originally meant "young woman" but eventually came to mean "virgin." This left some ambiguity in its meaning, and that ambiguity is the source of all this confusion. So it may be more useful to say the Septuagint translated the word as maiden, since that has a similar ambiguity.
Matthew then interpreted parthenos as "virgin," and I don't really blame him. I mean, the Parthenon is named for Athena, the virgin goddess.
But the original Hebrew word, almah, had no such ambiguity that scholars can find evidence of. It meant young woman, not virgin.
Some scholars indicate that there are better words for virgin if that meant to be the point.
Indeed. If Isaiah had meant "virgin," he would have used the Hebrew word bethulah.
NT Christian scholars would indicate that the translation of the word in the NT from the OT is confirmed firstly, by the inspiration of the Spirit of God who breathed it out and confirmed its meaning.
Critical historians and scholars cannot accept divine inspiration as an argument because it would mean they have to accept the veracity of all religious texts, i.e. we would also have to accept the Iliad as history because Homer claimed to have been divinely inspired by the muses.
Secondly that the Septuagint which was commonly used at that time by Jews and the Christians, including Paul, translated it that way.
The translators of the Septuagint simply made the mistake of using an ambiguous word.
thirdly, that the context in the gospels of Matthew and Luke clearly understood it to mean virgin.
We have no evidence that Luke understood it to mean virgin because he makes no reference to Isaiah 7:14.
Matthew certainly understood it to mean virgin, but Matthew could not read Hebrew, and Matthew made an interpretive error reading a translated manuscript.
Fourthly, though it is acknowledged it may well have other meanings and moreover virgin is not its primary meaning, it is not impossible for it to mean virgin since indeed Jewish scholars have translated it that way.
I see Christians using "not impossible" a lot in their apologetics, and here's the thing -- history and scholarship are not concerned with what is not impossible. They are concerned with what is plausible, probable, and most accurate. "Not impossible" is not enough.
It is not plausible, probable, or most accurate to say that almah meant virgin. If there had been any use of almah to mean virgin, you would not see such scholarly consensus on what that word means. Basically, nerds don't agree about anything there is room for disagreement about, and the nerds all agree on this.
So what you are essentially saying here is that the Septuagint has more divine authority than the Hebrew Bible. I don't really understand this position, since the Hebrew Bible came first.