It could be as simple as, Luke just got it wrong. Just like Matthew did not understand that the word virgin was a mistranslation of the orginal Hebrew in the Septuagint version of Isaiah 7:14 and perpetuated the virgin birth myth. In both cases they were well meaning, they just did not know any better.
Jack,
that is not a necessary position to take, and in my opinion it has some holes in it. First of all, there are two questions involved here, not just one: Was Jesus born of a virgin? And if the answer to the first question is "yes", then was Matthew correct in using Isaiah 7:14 as a reference to Jesus' virgin birth? A "no" answer to the second question doesn't imply a "no" answer to the first question, as you seem to have assumed. Jesus could very well have been born of a virgin even if Matthew was misusing that one passage. There is a whole lot more said in the NT about Jesus virgin birth than Matthew's one reference to Isaiah.
But regarding Matthew's treatment of the OT, you might check Alfred Edersheim's book, _The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah_. Edersheim discussed the Talmud and the historic setting of 1st century Palestine and claims very persuasively (IMO) that Matthew was treating the OT according to the norms of his day. Matthew wanted to show that Jesus fulfills the Messianic expectations of the Jews in that era. When Matthew refers to Rachel weeping, for example, the Jews of the 1st century fully understood that this was a reference to the Jews going into the Captivity under Nebuchadnezzar, and so presumably Matthew understood this, too. (It's quite arrogant for us, 2000 years later, to think Matthew was ignorant of his own culture.) And yet Matthew applies this to the slaughter of the infants in Bethlehem. Was he wrong in doing that? Well, Edersheim showed that the Jews of that day were teaching that "All the prophets prophesied not but of the days of the Messiah" (Sanh. 99 a., as cited by Edersheim), and "The world was not created but only for the Messiah" (Sanh. 98 b., as cited by Edersheim). So they were using all of the OT beyond the strictly literal sense in order to create allusions and allegories and typologies for the Messiah. This wasn't something that Matthew himself did in a vacuum. Matthew was simply following the standard practice of his own day, using the OT the way that his 1st century Jewish culture did, in order persuade his nation that Jesus fulfilled their own expectations of a Messiah. This is in no way an error on the part of Matthew, and in no way does this bring into question any of the factual events of Jesus' life. It was Matthew acting as a missionary to speak the "language" of his own culture.
So, to apply this to Isaiah 7:14, even if Matthew was not justified in using this verse for a virgin birth in its literal sense, yet it was purely in the mainstream of using the OT as allegorical for the Messiah. It would have been correct for Matthew to take an event in Jesus' life and reflect it back into an allusion in the OT as an apologetic method in that day. It says nothing about Matthew's or his countrymen's understanding of the literal sense of the text, nor of Matthew's understanding of the events of Jesus' life.
But even more specifically we can argue that Isaiah 7:14 was not being used merely in a non-literal sense by Matthew, because nobody has a clear understanding of what Isaiah meant by this maiden (or virgin). Was the infant's father to be King Ahaz? Or was it to be Isaiah? The text is so unclear that we cannot say. If we lived in Ahaz's court then we probably would have known what Isaiah was talking about, but Isaiah did not give us enough information and history did not preserve the context for us. So we can't really be sure that we know better than Matthew what Isaiah was talking about. And we know that Isaiah was prophesying of some things that he himself probably did not understand.
Furthermore, we can argue that "virgin" was within the valid range of translations for the Septuagint because if it wasn't then the scholars who did that translation wouldn't have used that word. Maybe "virgin" wasn't the primary meaning of the word, but certainly they knew much better than we ever can the range of meanings possible for that word. (Again, it is arrogance for us to think we know better than the scholars who actually lived in that culture, when we are working with a limited set of data and they had the entire culture at their fingertips.)
Edersheim cites Steinmeyer's argument, that Isaiah 7:14 could not have led the Ancient Synagogue into any mythology of a virgin birth, because the records show that they didn't _have_ any beliefs about a virgin birth for the Messiah. Edersheim asks, then when did this belief in a virgin birth actually begin? Well, I don't know exactly what Edersheim was driving at, but it seems to me that it probably began when Jesus was born of a virgin. This led Matthew to look back into the OT and find Isaiah 7:14. The Septuagint translation certainly supported his belief that it was a reference to a virgin birth, but Matthew, being an Aramaic speaker rather than a Greek, probably wasn't using the Septuagint as his primary source at all. Instead, Matthew's citation of Isaiah 7:14 was probably converted to the Septuagint's translation at the same time that all of Matthew's text was translated into Greek.
Phil
-----Original Message-----
From: Jack <drsyme@cablespeed.com>
To: Dick Fischer <dickfischer@verizon.net>; ASA <asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Mon, 24 Dec 2007 11:04 pm
Subject: Re: [asa] Luke 3 Geneology of Jesus
Yea dont forget those scribes have been there since antiquity so there is no reason to doubt the truthfulness of the genealogies.
It could be as simple as, Luke just got it wrong. Just like Matthew did not understand that the word virgin was a mistranslation of the orginal Hebrew in the Septuagint version of Isaiah 7:14 and perpetuated the virgin birth myth. In both cases they were well meaning, they just did not know any better.
Merry Christmas!
----- Original Message -----
From: Dick Fischer
To: ASA
Sent: Monday, December 24, 2007 12:17 PM
Subject: RE: [asa] Luke 3 Geneology of Jesus
Hi David:
Well first you have to assign some degree of credibility to the genealogies. Some feel the need to drive Adam back into antiquity and therefore need to discount the genealogies as a strict line of descent. Those who think Adam was some type of theological construct have to mediate Scripture to some degree so they can at least believe the parts dealing with Christ. Luke didn’t need to interview a host of Jews to get his historical facts right. The genealogy of every Hebrew was in the temple at Jerusalem. Scribes carefully recorded every birth so they would know to which of the twelve tribes each person belonged. All Luke had to do was trot down to the temple and look up the records. He could have looked up the pedigree of anyone if he had any interest.
As to the “special creation” of Adam, we have an example in Genesis One where God “created” the great sea creatures (“whales” in the KJV), although we pretty much know that the mode of creation was through the natural process of evolution from earlier creatures. This gives us a means to explain Adam’s creation through the same mode and still stay roughly within the bounds of Scripture. I think the “special creation” of Adam could have been a de nouveau creation event as it would explain the longevity of the Adamites. Gradually dilution through intermarriage brought their life spans down to more normal proportions after Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
Dick Fischer
Dick Fischer, Genesis Proclaimed Association
Finding Harmony in Bible, Science, and History
www.genesisproclaimed.org
-----Original Message-----
From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu] On Behalf Of David Opderbeck
Sent: Sunday, December 23, 2007 4:54 PM
To: asA
Subject: [asa] Luke 3 Geneology of Jesus
Why doesn't the geneology in Luke 3, tracing Joseph back to Adam "the son of God," falsify any claim that (a) Adam wasn't a real person; and (b) Adam wasn't specially created by God?
________________________________________________________________________
More new features than ever. Check out the new AOL Mail ! - http://webmail.aol.com
To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Tue Dec 25 13:40:16 2007
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Tue Dec 25 2007 - 13:40:16 EST