The Bible versus the KoranFollow

That's what I thought. You want to study the Koran, you get it in Arabic. You want to believe in the Koran, you pick up a copy in English, pray five times a day and visit Mecca.

Paulsol should be bant from all religious threads for being so fucking boring.

I personally think he's been brainwashed to hate the Pope.

I hope this was some sort of failed joke. Debate on the intended meaning of almah in Isaiah goes back to the dawn of Christianity.

Edited, May 19th 2009 12:46am by Jophiel

Stop trying to control him and what he says with your religion, Anna.

So it's all rubbish then? Well at least we have a definitive answer now, thanks for clearing that up.

And vice versa

Don't you know,I just want to infect him with the blood of Jesus? I want to give him Jesus-Aids. But hey man, he's way too much of a critical thinker to ever fall for my shenanigans. Zounds and Gazooks.



Edited, May 19th 2009 6:58am by Annabella

Anna's sock says what?

My socks would only use Fahrenheit because I'm American. FUck yeah!

My understanding (and I'm no Hebrew scholar) is that "bethulah" straight up means "virgin" whereas "almah" is more of a dual-purpose word like "maiden".

If I was to make an off the cuff defense for almah potentially meaning virgin in context, I'd note that Luke was probably written around 100 AD. If the story was presented that Jesus was born of a virgin, it would be because the Jewish people who were the primary early converts to Christianity expected a Messiah who was born of a virgin, especially since they were relying on prophetic scripture to support Jesus' claims. Otherwise, you'd have a case where someone was saying "He was born of a virgin just like it claimed he would be here!" and a bunch of potential converts saying "That's not what it says, dipshit."

Matthew was probably written a few decades before Luke and, while not as explicit, makes mention that Mary became pregnant by the Holy Spirit and Joseph first thought to divorce her for adultry presumably because she was supposed to be a virgin (it says he had not yet laid with her). It directly presents the passage in Isaiah as evidence of Jesus' divine origins. So it seems apparent that, from the start, Christianity's initial audience was intended to be Jews who expected a virgin birth. Not all Jews agreed with that meaning of the word but a substantial enough number of them did to sign onto the Annunciation theology.

If you accept the notion that both Luke and Matthew derive from a common Q gospel, the case goes even deeper than that. In any event, both authors likely wrote what was already commonly held as doctrine (that Jesus was born of a virgin) rather than creating new doctrine out of whole cloth.

Edited, May 19th 2009 10:30am by Jophiel