Ehrman's "evidence" against the virgin birth

By -
I found the CD with Bart Ehrman's lecture on the virgin birth. The reason he says that "almost surely" it did not happen?

"There's only one way to conceive a child and that's through sexual intercourse."

There you have it Ken B. Miracles don't happen, because it would be miraculous if they did!



Comments

  1. Prateek7:36 AM

    He also mentions in his writings and articles that:

    1. Jesus was meant to be the Messiah, and the meaning of Messiah is King of Israel, implying some belief of early Christians in him being a descendant of David.

    2. The king of Israel or Messiah is often informally called Son of God, but does not imply literally being Son of God.

    3. Paul of Tarsus said, "τοῦ γενομένου ἐκ σπέρματος Δαυὶδ κατὰ σάρκα" or "born from the seed of David according to the flesh", which implies that even Paul strongly believed Jesus had a natural human birth.

    4. In the Greek Septuagint, there is a passage that was used by early Christians to imply the prophecy of Jesus' birth. It is "herefore, the Lord himself will give you a sign: behold, a virgin will conceive in the womb, and will bring forth a son, and you will call his name Emmanuel ...” (Isaiah 7:14)". This passage is assumed by various Catholic scholars to be just a prophecy of Hezekiah's birth, not that of Jesus.

    5. Even then, the word virgin in Isaiah, or "almah" in Hebrew or "parthenos" in Koine, really just means "young woman" and not necessarily or always "virgin". However, parthenos tends to be a bit closer to virgin, and the Jewish Christians who read this part of Isaiah before writing Matthew could have simply attached the virgin meaning to be a prophecy of Jesus' virgin birth.

    But of course, you chose to be cheeky and imply that Ehrman used very weak evidence against the virgin birth theory.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Jesús P. Zamora Bonilla10:00 AM

    What is your evidence that this comment has arrived to you through a miraculous process, and is not just written by a mere human?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more