Hacker News Reader

Comment by danabramov | Hacker News Reader

That's a very common argument, indeed.

See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_birth_of_Jesus

>The word "virgin" in Christian translations is disputed. The Hebrew word is "עלמה" (almah), which scholars agree means a young woman of child-bearing age, "but has nothing to do with whether she is a virgin", and the context of the passage makes it clear that Isaiah has in mind events in his and Ahaz's near future. The Greek-speaking author of Matthew, however, used the Greek translation of Isaiah, in which the word is given as "παρθένος", parthenos, meaning a virgin.[57] The Encyclopedia Judaica calls this "a two-millennium misunderstanding of Isaiah 7:14", which "indicates nothing concerning the chastity of the woman in question".[50]

View on HN

I am actually not sure that the author of Matthew wrote in Greek. While we may not know the original language in which the gospel of Matthew is written, it is written for a Jewish audience and seems to be one of the most colorful, with e.g. many dead saints coming back to life, begging the question of why no one else bothered to write about this stuff. In any event, if this did indeed happen then it's another example of something that doesn't fit our worldview today that nevertheless can take place, like black swans and freak waves.

On a related note, the Hebrew word for "wife" and "woman" are the same. And the same is true of Greek. So quotes of Jesus such as http://biblehub.com/matthew/5-28.htm are probably mistranslated, since it doesn't make sense that two unmarried people can commit adultery, so it's likely that the original word was "wife". And yet because of these translations so many young people's sexual desires were repressed so that they might not look lustfully at any woman, married or not. Whenever I ask other Christians about this kind of stuff, they never seem to have a good answer but continue to insist that it should be "woman", and that young men should still not look with lust at any woman.

But the earliest source we have for Matthew are Greek.

There are no evidence that Matthew was originally written in anything other than Greek. But Jesus probably spoke in Aramaic (not Hebrew), so the sayings in the text would be a translation, but probably translated while still an oral tradition.

Of course there is evidence that Matthew was originally written in Hebrew.

http://hebrewgospel.com/Matthew%20Two%20Gospels%20Main%20Evi...

http://hebrewgospel.com/Matthew%20Two%20Gospels%20More%20Evi...

I don't know if it is enough to in the end establish that for sure, but how do you not call it evidence?

If you are plugging in the colloquial meaning of the word lust, the sayings don't make a lot of sense because in the US in 2015, there are few public limits on lustful gazing.

It takes a classical understanding of lust for the classical interdiction to make sense:

https://www.google.com/search?site=&source=hp&ei=9aidVJHyC8O...

Note though that the ambiguity is in the translation of Isiah, the prophet in the Old Testament, NOT in the translation of the gospels where it is unambiguous that Mary was a virgin in the sense that she had not had sex with a man. However the reason the virgin birth is important for Matthew is because it is supposed to fulfill the prophecy in Isiah. Which in turn indicates that the story about the virgin birth probably originated among Greek-speaking Jews.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com