The Hebrew word for young girl was very close to the word virgin, there was only a subtle difference in the spelling.
Sorry, but this simply isn't so.
עַלמָה -- 'almah -- is the Hebrew word for young girl in Isaiah. (The corresponding male term is עֶלֶם -- 'elem.)
בְּתוּלָה -- betulah -- is the Hebrew word for virgin. (There is no corresponding male term.)
Note that, aside from the feminine ah ending (i.e. the last consonant and the vowel under the next-to-last consonant), they don't look, or sound, alike at all and, semantically, their roots are totally different.
The new testament was written in Greek, not in Hebrew.
And yes, back then, the word virgin could actually have allegoric meaning(young/innocent/beautiful/... girl). Imagine if she was actually the first ever mammal to asexually reproduce..
It's actually more likely that Jesus as an out of wedlock child that pre-dates Joseph. Jesus was referred to as "Jesus son of Mary" not Joseph, which was the custom at the time for illegitimate children. It particularly contrasts with how his brothers were referred to (yes, he had brothers, and probably sisters).
Speaking of which, it's striking that James "the Just", brother-of-Jesus, first-patriarch-of-the-Jerusalem-Church never mentioned the virgin birth. Ever.
> It's actually more likely that Jesus as an out of wedlock child that pre-dates Joseph.
I'm not sure they would have drawn a line between the two at that point (hence why I as too lazy to look up when they wed). Shotgun weddings were not considered having children out of wedlock for western europe, and further back you see it's more of an economic agreement to father all the woman's children. In fact, it's entirely possible marriages would have been more of de-facto arrangements based around paternity for non-arranged marriages (which are economic transactions).
EDIT: it's insinuated he's upset because she's pregnant and they haven't had sex, but they had already been married. Again, at this point, it's more of a question of semantics of the time as to whether it counts as adultery or pre-marriage pregnancy. Historically, there may be other evidence to point one way or the other, but I don't think it matters much to joseph (or to christians).
18 Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise: When as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost.
19 Then Joseph her husband, being a just man, and not willing to make her a public example, was minded to put her away privily.
It is even more likely that he was just an ordinary legitimate child of Mary and Joseph, and the whole virgin-birth story developed later (after the death of Jesus) among Greek-speaking early Christians, in order to tie in to the Isiah-prophecy.
Yes, but the prophecy that Jesus fulfilled by being born of a virgin was from the Old Testament (Isaiah 7:14), not the New Testament. (the Old Testament was written in Hebrew)
Sure, but the New Testament is pretty clear about its claims that Mary hadn't had sex before conceiving. It seems clear that at least some people thought that the Old Testament prophecies involved a virgin birth.
Well, in fairness (strictly going by that article) it didn't have to mean "virgin" -- but it sometimes did:
"Almah (עלמה, plural: alamot עלמות) is a Hebrew word meaning a young woman of childbearing age who has not yet had a child, and who may be an unmarried virgin or a married young woman."
I'm not saying that Wikipedia gets the final say here, just pointing out what the quoted article says.
While the chronology of the books still leave literary misinterpretation in the bag, Matthew 1:20 explicitly states that the holy spirit impregnated Mary, so under most christian belief system's it's pretty damn clear she was a virgin. Historians, not so much.
There's quite a bit of evidence that virginity only became a "thing" after lines traced paternally—i.e. a mother is pretty damn sure a kid is hers, but the father wants stronger guarantees because even in appearance there's a lot of room for cuckolding. So, given that some early germanic culture was matrilineal (e.g. the Suebi, attested by IIRC Suetonius), it's ALSO not surprising that the word for "virgin" is actually the closest approximation.
I would have expected that to be a "thing" long before humans were writing books. Given that males provided protection and resources during child rearing, I suspect there would have been strong selective pressure for males that tried to ensure that the children they supported were their own.
> I would have expected that to be a "thing" long before humans were writing books.
I agree whole-heartedly; however, books are far from the only thing that drive language. Most of the world didn't have access to books until very recently, and language is driven by that most of the world (to some extent, it's difficult to say how much).
> Given that males provided protection and resources during child rearing, I suspect there would have been strong selective pressure for males that tried to ensure that the children they supported were their own.
Careful, you're treading into "let's speculate about how genetics and society interact" territory, which is basically impossible to do correctly without many generations of evidence. Males do provide protection in many cultures, but women provide many forms of protection and resources as well. Among other things (which vary from culture to culture), they provide men. Matrilineal societies are attested many times over, as are matriarchal societies. Given that there are no reliable signals for virginity, it's quite easy to see how men might lust after young women instead of "the first sex". Furthermore, I would (again) argue that "the first sex" is by far most valuable in patrilineal societies. In societies where resources are scarce, for instance, polyandrous societies are more common, because it's more important that individual children are given the appropriate nutrition and protection than it is to ensure that the birth rate is maximized. In these situations, who the real father is is not important, because it's one of the child's caretakers (de-facto). Furthermore, male status is tied to children, so there is more impetus to protect existing children than there is to ascertain paternity.
>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]
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.
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.
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:
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.
