Now I could go into a detailed examination of the use of the words parthenos, neanis, almah, betulah, and na’arah (also- young woman). The manner in which this is done is to use Hebrew and Greek grammar textbooks, and, most importantly, lexicons and concordances. These are sources that are readily available to Biblical and theological students, and students are expected to conduct such examinations as a large part of answering such questions. For instance, I would like to know how many times the word almah is used in the Hebrew text. That is easy to determine. I can then go and see which Greek words, in all instances, were used to translate almah. I can find out how many times the Greek word parthenos appears, and what Hebrew words in the relevant passages correspond to it. Sometimes this can result in a pattern, or what I will call a clustering of word use in the corresponding texts. I will then find various uses of these words that are all over the map. I may reach my conclusion on what the Greek word XXX means in the Septuagint, based on its use in, hypothetically, Lev. 5:2; Esther 1:4; Micah 6:1; and Gen 21:21. And that’s what will happen today…that is standard procedure. But I see an anachronism here…one that is too large to ignore. What grammar books and, even more important, lexicons and concordances were available to Biblical translators in the ancient world? If I were translating the book of Ezekiel into Greek, how would I find out how many times na’ar (young man) is used in the Hebrew scriptures overall? Even if I got my hands on an entire Hebrew Bible, could I locate all the occurrences of na’ar? If right now I wanted to do that, I couldn’t do it without a lexicon…which sits on my desk. And the Septuagint was translated over centuries. If I were translating Micah, but Esther hadn’t been translated yet…I couldn’t know about Esther 1:4. I can now…it’s easy. And where would a translator go to get all of this data? I believe…it’s impossible. He would go by his knowledge of the donor language, knowledge of the recipient language, his ability to correlate the two, the extent of his word-knowledge, and above all else…context. And he might be a strict literalist…or he might be inclined toward interpretative translation. Shortly, I will discuss, briefly, a possible explanation for the use of parthenos in Isa. 7:14. And it may be, with a book like Isaiah, that different translators translated different parts. If there were 3 translators, then these problems are trebled. For the most part, these lexigraphical studies are essential and overall, very useful. But this is really applicable to finding patterns, and quite possibly, words that have very technical meanings.

A related problem is when a language, as all do, have multiple words that are applicable in multiple contexts, but their use overlaps, and the ability to achieve the pure meaning of the words, and thereby be able to say…it must be this, simply isn’t there. Example:

ishah- woman

almah- young woman

na’arah- young female

betulah- virgin

The ability to authoritatively obtain a definition so precise that each word can be distinguished absolutely from the other words, I don’t believe, can be done. Betulah is used in contexts that imply a literal virgin…a young woman (presumably, but not necessarily) with an intact hymen because she has not been involved in penetrative sex. But while that is true in many instances, particularly where this level of precision is required, there are instances where betulah is used of a woman where this isn’t the case..and thus a cultural or ideological use is encountered. An example would be the story of Dinah, the daughter of Jacob and Leah.

A man name Shechem raped Dinah. Then we are told that he fell in love with the young woman…the Hebrew word used is betulah. But we know that she has had penetrative intercourse, we were just told that she was raped, so technically, she wasn’t a virgin anymore. Does that undermine the basic meaning of betulah? Yes, technically, but no…culturally. I could interpret this as bolstering the idea that betulah doesn’t always mean a virgin. Or, I could interpret this as indicating that because Dinah was a virgin before Shechem got his hands on her, because the penetrative intercourse that ended a technical state of being a betulah was against her will, it does not ultimately change her status. In other words, her being raped, because it’s rape, doesn’t define who she is…and so she remains a betulah.

The best example of how difficult the lexigraphical situation is can be seen in the story of Rachel at the Well…Genesis 24.

We are told that Rachel is a betulah, a virgin. But then she is also called an almah, and a na’arah. So, are all of these words the same? Maybe yes…but no. In this ancient culture, the Cultural Expectation is that young women who are not married currently and have never been married in the past…are technically virgins. That is the sexual ethic. That is a common sexual ethic, more so the further back you go in time. It certainly was in the Massachusetts Bay colony, founded and run by Puritans. But the same colony had a significant problem with illegitimate children. So, the Cultural Expectation is not always the reality. And then there is the ability to adequately diagnosis. If I sit near the well, and a bunch of young women appear to fill water pitchers…I don’t know how many are married, and I can’t tell how many have intact hymens. I can’t really say how old each one is. They look like a bunch of young females of different ages, and probably of different marital statuses, and some will be virgins, and some who, culturally speaking, should be virgins, are not. I believe that Cultural Expectation not being the Actual Reality is most prevalent in matters of sex, and this is one area where the failure to live up to the Cultural Expectation can be hard for others to know.

The problem in Isaiah 7:14 is that if Matthew’s understanding of parthenos in that passage is that of a technical virgin, then Immanuel, who was not Jesus, was born of a virgin over 730 years before Jesus was. The point of the sign offered by Isaiah was not a miracle…the sign was the eminent birth of the child, and while an infant,

Tukulti-Apil-Esharra III of Assyria would end the attack of Rezin and Pekah. The Assyrians attacked, defeated and executed Rezin in 732 B.C. They also attacked Pekah, and devasted his kingdom. Pekah himself was assassinated by Hoshea, but the Assyrian records indicate that this was done with the backing of the Assyrian king, who claims that he was Hoshea’s overlord and received tribute from him. However, now the considerations become that of chronology, which I will address shortly.

There is another point that merits discussion that wreaks havoc with the idea that Immanuel’s birth was to be a Virgin Birth. If it was, and that’s what Isaiah intended, then the whole Virgin Birth thing was purely accidental. After telling Ahaz that he should continue to resist Pekah and Rezin, and that they would be defeated…

Ask for a sign for yourself from Yahweh your God! Ask it either in the depth below or in the height above.

If you think about that for a moment, the clear implication is that Isaiah arrived at this encounter without a sign for Ahaz. Ahaz was given the option of choosing any sign he wanted! And it would not have been…I’d like to see a Virgin Birth. It would probably be more like…I’d like to see the Angel of Yahweh fly over the enemy troops, wiping them out as he goes along. Isaiah’s anticipation was that he would tell Ahaz to ask for a sign, then Ahaz would ask for a sign, and Isaiah would assure Ahaz that God would bring it about. But that is not what happened.

But Ahaz said…I will not ask, nor will I test Yahweh.

This is a surprise response. According the Deuteronomic History (Joshua – 2 Kings), Ahaz was one of the worst religious offenders of the entire line of Davidic kings. Yet, here, he baulked. His piety will not let him test Yahweh! Isaiah did not expect this, unless Isaiah knew that the Deuteronomists were wrong, and that the king so roundly denounced as horrid would suddenly grow a pious backbone. Isaiah didn’t expect this, and he became angry about it…

Then Isaiah said…hear now, O house of David! Is it a small thing for you to weary men, but will you weary my God as well?

In other words, Ahaz was so supposed to ask for his own sign, that in not doing so, he made God weary…he has upset Yahweh. This dialogue clearly indicates that Isaiah anticipated simply confirming whatever sign Ahaz would choose. But Ahaz refused to choose, and Isaiah rebuked him for this. So why not a miracle? The answer is obvious…it wouldn’t mean anything. Given the period of history we are in, and whose period of history it is, no one would doubt the power of Yahweh…or that of any other deity. It’s not a matter of what Yahweh could do…it was a matter of what Yahweh was willing to do for Ahaz. You might want a miracle if you had doubts about Isaiah’s status as a true prophet. There is never any indication that Ahaz had doubts about this…as is clear from his response. Ahaz’s response is, perhaps, indicative of something else. There is found in various parts of the Old Testament the statement that one is not to…test Yahweh. But that doesn’t mean that Yahweh can’t test you! The substance of Ahaz’s response seems to indicate that he believed that Isaiah was attempting to test whether, given the opportunity, he would test Yahweh. If so…then his response to Isaiah was dead-on. Some guys can never win. But Isaiah, having rebuked Ahaz for his piety, decides to wing it:

Therefore, Yahweh himself will give you a sign…behold, the almah has conceived and will bear a son! And his name will be Immanuel. Curds and honey he shall eat, that he may know to refuse evil and choose good. For before the child knows to refuse evil, the land that you dread will be forsaken by both her kings.

And so now we get the almah and Immanuel deal…but only because Ahaz refused to choose a sign. Isaiah didn’t make his declaration and then give Ahaz the sign he chose and had brought with him. So, if this is really Virgin Birth Mock 1, it is a totally accidental one caused only by the fact that Ahaz was suddenly too pious to do what the prophet had specifically told him to do. This means that Isaiah had to wing it…and he knew the king’s father-in-law and knew that Ahaz’s wife was pregnant (or soon to be pregnant- see below) and would give birth to a son, this sign…sign…sign…not miracle…sign…would work just as well as any other. So, Immanuel’s Virgin Birth, and subsequently Jesus’s Virgin Birth…Mock 2…734 years later, happened by chance, and owes just as much to a surprisingly pious King Ahaz as it does to Isaiah’s sudden choice of the…not miracle…but rather…sign.

Carrying out the type of lexigraphical study discussed earlier reveals a pattern…betulah is Hebrew for a technical virgin. Parthenos is used the same way…as a pattern. Certainly, Jewish tradition upholds this idea of betulah, and Greek culture supports the idea that parthenos has the same meaning. The concept of Athena Parthenos…Athena the Virgin, and yes, Perpetual Virgin, goddess, must be relevant. Athena Parthenos…enshrined in her great temple…the Parthenon…the Temple of the Virgin.

That is her gigantic statue, made by Phidias, reconstructed. The virginity of Athena was so important, that a strange story had to be concocted to allow Athena to be the mother of the early Athenian king Erichthonius, yet still be a virgin. The story claims that Athena, wanting some more weapons of mass destruction, visited Hephaestus, the Craftsman God, to get them.

You’d think that if Hephaestus was going to wear an apron that he might throw on some pants to boot. Still…he became so smitten with her that he attempted to seduce her. She fled, but Hephaestus caught up with her and attempted to rape her. But unlike the hapless Dinah, who nonetheless retained the status of virgin after being raped, the worst that happened was that Hephaestus’s sperm fell on her thigh. She brushed it off, and it fell to the ground. Erichthonius sprang up out of the earth. This allows Athena to be what the Athenians considered her be…a Virgin Mother…a Divine Mother who nonetheless retained her status of Virgin. So while it has to be admitted that parthenos appears in the Septuagint as a translation for words other than betulah, the translator did not have the tools available to him to conduct the same kind of vocabulary analysis that countless people with these tools have done themselves, the word parthenos would nonetheless have brought the image of virgin to mind most readily, and this would have engendered considerable confusion, as it has undeniably done.

It has been pointed out that the Septuagint translation is not a translation of the Massoretic Hebrew text which is so highly thought of and widely used today. That is undeniable. But not really relevant. We know that various Hebrew texts floated around the Jewish world prior to the relatively late Massoretic text. This would have been true of Greek texts too, of varying extent and quality. In fact, Jerome made an interesting claim about…

…Origen. Jerome, one of Christianity’s greatest textual experts, a distinction he shares with Origen, said that Origen went around “finding” ancient texts…such as one he said he happened upon in a wine jar. See below for the bizarre claim about Juliana and the Mysterious Library of Symmachus. Perhaps some doubted Origen’s manuscript-oriented claims. But Jerome didn’t know about the Dead Sea Scrolls found 1,500 years later, at Qumran, and, at least hypothetically, if you went around Palestine peering in to caves and tipping over wine jars long enough, one or two manuscripts were bound to turn up! The Masoretes simply froze the Hebrew text. Going forward, no changes were to be made to the actual text, except the addition of vowel points and other sigla. Since the Hebrew version of Isaiah that underlies the Septuagint translation is not that which underlies the text, or texts, used by the Masoretes, whether found in wine jars or not, it has been suggested that the Hebrew text relevant to the Septuagint did not have the word almah in Isaiah 7:14. This is possibly a necessary position taken by those who do not, quite rightly, wish to give parthenos any other meaning than…virgin. So, the Hebrew text underlying it can’t have had the word almah, or na’arah, in it. This would suggest that, if you want to uphold a virgin birth in the sense of… parthenos, you need to hold on to parthenos, but swap out almah for betulah. This is the only way to resolve the dichotomy. This is wrong. In the first place, it is an argument from silence. There are no known Hebrew texts that have any other reading than almah…none have betulah. And seeing how impossible a virgin birth is in the relevant material, it isn’t surprising, and I venture to say that most Virgin-Birthers would feel quite vexed by two accidental Virgin Births. The argument from silence then creates daunting problems. First, there is no history of Jewish scholars ever believing in a virgin birth. If Rabbinical scholars knew of a text of Isaiah with betulah, then surely they would have believed in a Virgin Birth for Immanuel; it would simply be in the text. If the theology is driven by the text, then the Jewish world has it’s…betulah. But! We have no texts with this reading, all have the word…almah. That would indicate, not variant readings, but the idea, which has been proposed by some proponents, that the Jewish textual experts consciously changed the word betulah so as to read almah. In so doing, they negated a Virgin Birth that stared up at them from the Hebrew text and made it a Not Virgin Birth. It’s an important point. Even if the reading of the Hebrew text underlying the Septuagint translation was not the Massoretic text, we don’t know the relationship of that Hebrew text relative to the one underlying the Septuagint translation…but that doesn’t really matter. If the meaning of Isaiah 7:14, in precursor manuscripts to that used for the Greek translation, indicated a virgin birth, then a virgin birth was simply a prophecy spoken directly by one of the greatest Hebrew prophets of all time. And that means that the Hebrew tradition had a Virgin Birth for…

OVER 700 YEARS

...before any theological boxing match broke out between Christians and Jewish rabbis.

That means the belief in this concept of the Virgin Birth would have been a thoroughly Jewish one. Take the concept of the Messiah. Christians believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the one undeniably predicted in the Old Testament. They ran around saying that the Nazarene was the Messiah, and that he fulfills whatever passages in the Old Testament you believe are Messianic. Did the Jews get rid of the concept of the Messiah because the Christians claimed it was Jesus? One of the rumors in Galilee was that Jesus was really Elijah, the prophet who never really died…according to the Old Testament. Did the Jews get rid of Elijah because of this? No. Who were the Christians? Who were the followers of the Nazarene? I mean, from a theoretical Rabbinical concept at the time. Answer…Jewish heretics and heathen goyim. The Jews were not going to start re-writing everything because heretics and pagans were misunderstanding and misapplying the Hebrew scriptural traditions. In fact, in all of these examples, the perceived issue would not be the time-tested traditions. No…it would be one of identification.

Messiah:  Christians- Jesus is the Messiah; Jews- no he’s not

Elijah:   Some of Jesus’s followers- Jesus is Elijah; Jews- no he’s not

Born of a Virgin:   Christians- that’s Jesus; Jews- no he’s not

Perhaps the best example is the one that the Talmud cites, involving fleeting, though not serious, attempts to overlap 2 people…Yeshu ben Stada, discussed in this essay thread, and Jesus of Nazareth. During the reign of Alexander Jannaeus, an apostate Jew named Yeshu formed his own movement, complete with 5 disciples. The movement was suppressed and Yeshu and his disciples were all executed. The point? It didn’t matter what Yeshu said about himself, or what his disciples said about him, or some fishermen in Galilee said about him…Jewish religious authorities declared him to be a heretic; they did not start rewriting ancient concepts because of him. Jewish authorities did attempt, at first, to stamp out the Jewish Jesus Movement. It didn’t really work...ask Saul…I mean…Paul. But I doubt that Judaism ever really felt threatened by Christianity. Jewish Christians groups continued to exist for a while…the Ebionites and Nazarenes, for example. Paul clashed with Peter and James about the role of Jewish traditions among Christians. However, Christianity would ultimately become a religion embraced by heathen goyim. And while I know that the Christians wanted to convert anyone they could get their hands on, I am not aware of any real parallel imperative to convert goyim on the part of Judaism. I think that Christians are looking at Jews as if they were Christians behaving as they did. That is wrong. The Roman government made numerous concessions to Jewish sensibilities. They did this because it increased the likelihood that guerilla-warfare type insurrections would be avoided. But Jews lived according to their ways, and in their own communities. The Roman government took a very different view of Christians, who wished to live according to their ways and in their communities. Why the difference? I think it may have had something to do with the fact that Christians, while insisting that their beliefs be tolerated, were very intolerant of the beliefs of pagans. You could just ignore them. But if what you want to do is convert them, you must do what I don’t think Jewish people would have done…convince them that there was an inherent problem with their deities. What is that…they didn’t exist? No. They did exist…they were just demons…horrible, evil entities. Perhaps some found this to be good enough to prompt their conversion. I think many felt decidedly offended.

Few significant people in history have been more misunderstood or misinterpreted than the Emperor Gaius, known by the nick-name, one he didn’t like…Caligula. The popular view of him as insane is, I believe, decidedly wrong. In the town of Jamnia, one the most populous in Judea, the population was mixed…Jews and non-Jews. There was an imperial estate there that had been given to the imperial family by the sister of Herod the Great. The non-Jewish population in the town erected an altar to the emperor…a rather common thing to do. Jewish zealots destroyed this altar, and when news reached the emperor, he ordered that a giant statue of himself be set up in the temple in Jerusalem. Why? It’s obvious. The Roman government had made concessions to Jewish religious sensibilities. Should that not be reciprocated? It was a question of reciprocation…and the statue of Caligula was never put in the temple, nor do I believe he ever intended it to be. He was making a point. Religious groups who made trouble by their intolerance would feel the wrath of Imperial Rome. You can destroy an altar, or you can tell others that their gods are just demons. In either case, you will invite retaliation. This leads to violence and upheaval, and that leads to another problem…one that would vex Rome more than any other…the most important thing to the Romans was the possibility of the disruption of the orderly flow of taxes…and that would never be tolerated. The Romans were essentially a bunch of thugs intent on stealing other people’s stuff. Still, Christianity was never a serious threat to Judaism…certainly not one that would prompt Jewish religious authorities to start re-writing scripture and dispensing with concepts handed down from the ancient prophets. Why do this? What purpose would this serve? It would be a conscious negating of an earth-shattering concept handed down to Jews directly from the prophet Isaiah. It would also involve misleading generations of Jewish scholars, and, in fact, Jews in general. And herein lies what I consider to be an anti-Semitic position that is crazy in the extreme. The Hebrew text was altered to remove betulah and replace it with almah because Christians were using the reading to support their idea of the Virgin Birth of Jesus of Nazareth. This is incredible. The Jews so hated Christianity that they altered their own text to remove a betulah-based miracle handed down from Isaiah in order to poke their thumb in the eye of early Christianity? Why would they care? If this view had any merit…this substitution did not accomplish its goal! Early Christianity, eventually aware of this issue, and as late as 130 AD, but no doubt earlier, simply disregarded the word almah. And the almost total lack of any Rabbinical authorities wasting any time on attempting to defeat the idea of the Virgin Birth per se, suggests what anyone would expect…they didn’t care. The Christians, once a Jewish movement, had been turned into a gentile movement. That meant…pagan…goyim. They turned a man into God and used a Greek Bible that confounded his birth with a pagan-type myth. Were these Textual Sleight of Handers thinking that attacking the Virgin Birth would end Christianity? Would it bring converts to Judaism? I think the answer to those questions is…no. Hey Christians! They really didn’t care about you, and the pattern of the references to Jesus, either Yeshua the Nazarene or his confounding with Yeshu ben Stada, are simply instances of mocking Jesus. The simple fact of the matter is that the Jews have no motive for changing the textual reading in Isaiah 7:14. But this isn’t the only instance of Christians accusing Jews of being the persecutors, rather than the persecuted. And motive? Could there be one? Yes! The only viable motive is one that can be attributed to…Christians.

I believe that a serious problem confronted, not Judaism, but early Christianity. Judaism was Torah based and tended to be decentralized. And Moses? Thousands of years ago. Christianity was new, and Christianity was inextricably linked to the person of Jesus. And he had not been dead long before a real danger emerged, one that I think he hadn’t really anticipated. Initially, it was Jesus’s teachings that were at the core of the movement, along with the belief in the resurrection. But the religion soon showed signs of obsession with the biography of the founder. If Jesus could be discredited, then Christianity could possibly be denatured as a viable religion. A man named Celsus came forward to do just that. He was not the only one. But what threatened Christ’s credibility the most, or so I think the perception may have been, though for Modified Adoptionists this isn’t actually a problem at all…why did nobody seem to know exactly who Jesus’s father was?

According to Mark, Jesus was the son of carpenter in Nazareth. But Joseph, who never appears in the book of Mark, is never described anywhere as a carpenter. And when the people of Nazareth reject Jesus, they know Mary, and Jesus’s brothers and sisters, by name, but they don’t seem to know Jesus’s father’s name…only that he had been a carpenter. If Joseph was a carpenter…why wasn’t he called a carpenter? No occupation is ever ascribed to him. If I am right and Joseph was Mary’s second husband, perhaps wealthy enough that he did not need an occupation, then the carpenter was Mary’s first husband. He was the father of Jesus, and so Jesus learned the job of a carpenter. This carpenter died when Jesus was young, and Mary remarried. By the time Jesus was an adult, the people of Nazareth no longer remembered his real father’s name. They could name Mary, and Jesus’s brothers…but the only thing they could remember about Jesus’s father was that he was a carpenter. This, I think, can be traced back to Peter, who also knew Mary and Jesus’s brothers and sisters. He did not know about Joseph, and he only knew that Jesus’s father had been a carpenter. That is my view, not the view of early Christians. I think.

Some people believed that Jesus was the son of Joseph, and that there was no other husband of Mary. This belief prompted them to apply the genealogy of Joseph, found in Matthew chapter 1, to Jesus himself. In its original form, it was proof that Jesus was the son of Joseph, whose lineage went back to King David, and it went back through the line of the kings. This lineage allowed Jesus to be regarded as the literal Son of David, the Royal Messiah. But, the original use of this genealogy can’t be the use of it made in Matthew. I think that it wasn’t part of the Prologue. It was an even later addition to it. In the current version of Matthew, it is at odds with the Virgin Birth of the Prologue. Certainly, a Virgin Birth would allow for Jesus to be a literal Son of God. That really meant nothing, seeing how the Old Testament refers to a whole bunch of sons of God...and in important instance, The Satan just happened to be with them. But if Joseph wasn’t Jesus’s father…literal father…then he was not blood-related to him, and that meant that Jesus was not the Son of David, or Royal Messiah. It does not seem feasible that the total denial of the royal, Davidic blood-line that takes place if Jesus wasn’t related to Joseph by blood, could be overcome by simply letting Jesus have Joseph’s genealogy. I think it is possible that the idea of Jesus as the literal Davidic Messiah, meaning he must share the blood-line traced back through the kings of Judah to King David, led some Christians to believe that Jesus was the literal son of Joseph, and therefore the one who had the right to rule as the literal Son of David. In the Prologue, if the Virgin Birth story is a separate tradition, and the next vignette is Jesus’s birth being in Jerusalem, with Herod quoted as referring to him as King of the Jews, then, with no Virgin Birth story, the following vignettes, excluding the reference to Nazareth, are consistent with the belief that Jesus’s actual father was Joseph, a direct descendant of King David, through the royal line. Luke 3 includes a competing genealogy for Joseph. It suffers from one draw-back…it goes back to King David, but not through the Royal line. It claims to go back to Nathan, a brother of Solomon. That is not the royal line, and a couple of generations down the road the connection to the kings reigning in Jerusalem would have meant nothing. A desperate attempt to harmonize holds that the genealogy in Luke is actually a genealogy of Mary. Why the one in Luke? Obviously! It’s not the royal blood-line, and we need to reserve the Royal-Line Genealogy for Joseph, so he can gift it to his step-son, who, following the Virgin Birth story, has a pedigree that so surpasses any lineage from, at best, a petty, regional king from forever ago. Actually, Mathew traces Joseph back to Abraham. Luke’s genealogy does something far more clever…he traces Jesus back to Adam. Why is that so interesting? Who was Abraham’s father? Terah.

I cannot resist a short digression, which really isn’t too much of a digression seeing how the subject of whose son and what father are involved. The blood-line leading to Abraham, originally called Abram, consists of a list of names. Most of these men are simply that…names. But a Jewish Midrash involving Abraham is worth noting. Abraham’s family, the ancestors apparently having been nomads, settled in the ancient city of Ur. Genesis 11:31 describes Ur as the home of the Chaldeans. Really, Ur was one of the three most important cities in Ancient Sumeria, the others being Eridu and Uruk. I have mentioned Eridu, the first great city since Helal ben-Shohar, ruler of an empire based in Egypt, was overthrown as a result of his failure to ride his Earth-sun, the Great Pyramid of Giza, into heaven and take his place among the gods. That was around 5,000 BC, which is the date of the oldest stratum of the House of the Aquifer in Eridu. Given the way the Nile works, it’s not surprising that refugees would bring an elemental called Abzu with them when they decided to settle at a location where, despite being in the desert, fresh-water simply seeped up from the earth. Ur and Uruk would be dependent upon the invention of irrigation, diverting water from the Tigris-Euphrates into the desert. Ur would go on to be one of the most powerful Sumerian city-states, and boast an enormous ziggurat (stepped-pyramid):

At what point Abraham’s family gave up the Bedouin life-style in favor of living in such a powerful den of idolatry is not known. But according to the midrash, Terah was an idol-maker who made…idols, and sold them in his shop. One day he left the shop to run an errand, leaving Abraham to watch over the inventory which consisted of numerous small idols and one very large idol. When he returned, he found the idols that took so much skill and time to make, smashed to bits. The young Abraham was standing in the shop, and his father became very angry. Who has smashed the idols? Abraham said…I cannot tell a lie! I didn’t do it! Well, then, who did? I cannot tell a lie, though I am a clever liar…the big idol picked up a hammer and proceeded to smash all the other ones! Don’t lie to me, son! Idols can’t walk! They don’t breathe! They can’t talk…and they can’t pick-up hammers and smash their smaller colleagues. Abraham smiled..so why do we worship them if they have no life within them? I added a couple of details, but with midrash…you’re allowed to do that.

Well, that’s not the best illustration, seeing how the idols don’t really look Sumerian at all, and I never thought of Abraham as a blonde. These are Sumerian idols…

I bet I know which one is the culprit!

So Matthew’s genealogy goes back to Abraham, avoiding Terah…and remember that midrash is story-telling based on a Biblical character, so the tale I just told about Terah is simply fiction. But Luke is so much more clever! He blasts right past Terah and doesn’t stop until he gets to Adam. Here is the clever bit…who was Adam’s father? Oh, right…he didn’t have one…he was a direct creation of God, and Luke says it this way…the son of Adam…the son of God. That’s really quite good! Jesus was the Son of God, and Adam was the son of God. And think about the Adam part! Was Adam the Messiah? No. Was Adam the result of a virgin birth? Again…no. But he was the direct creation of God, making him a unique phenomenon…and no messy human birth to deal with. I almost forgot…Eve was a direct creation as well. After all, God needed to make a wife for Adam so he would have someone to blame! I cannot tell a lie! It’s my wife’s fault! But for Luke, the genealogy begins with a son of God, and ends with the Son of God. As for me, I would dispense with the earthly genealogy and stick to…Son of God…the literal Son of God. But Mary is out…the genealogy in Luke specifically claims to be that of Joseph. This means two contradictory genealogies. Which is the right one? Which is Joseph’s actual genealogy? The one in Luke. Why? Purpose. Why have a genealogy that goes back through the royal line to David through Solomon, while the other one goes back to David, and does not represent the royal blood-line? The one in Matthew is an alteration of the one in Luke. Jesus is the son of Joseph. And he has a lineage going back to David…but not the royal line. If your genealogy actually went back through the royal line, why have one that doesn’t? The second one serves no purpose other than altering the first one. In other words, a genealogy that goes back to David is a highly significant one. But if a person who possesses a genealogy that goes back to David through Nathan is confronted by a person who possesses a genealogy that goes back to David through Solomon, then the Nathanite will have to give his claim to be the Messiah to the Solomonite. So, if you change the blood-line from Nathan to Solomon…you have the best possible claim to be accepted as the Royal Messiah. Thus one is actual, and the other is contrived. The original “impressive” genealogy was replaced with an impeccable one in case someone showed up with a Matthew-type genealogy vs. a Luke-type genealogy. Looking at this from the perspective of the Royal Son of David, Jesus could be bumped from his position as Messiah. I doubt that anyone could appear with a better lineage than that contained within the genealogy in Matthew, and so Jesus, Son of David and Royal Messiah, would not face viable competition. The altered one was used in Matthew, but the other one came into the position of Luke, and despite the difference, it was regarded as the valid tradition, and so it was used. I am not saying that Matthew took Luke’s genealogy, swapped out Solomon for Nathan, and went from there. I believe that while collecting traditions about Jesus, one tradition was found with a genealogy like the one found in Matthew. The redactors of Luke found a tradition that reflected the son of God vs. Son of God genealogy showing Joseph to be a Solomonite. The Matthew guys used the one they found, and the Luke guys used the one they found.

I would make a few more comments here. First, I noted in the first part of this essay stream that Luke essentially wrote Joseph out of the story. He’s there, but he’s not important. In Luke, it is Mary who is the important parent. Joseph is not seen to be driving any of the events. One concern with Joseph might have been the role of Joseph in the Virgin Birth story as found in the Prolog of Matthew…believing that Mary was pregnant by another man while still betrothed to him…Luke will not tolerate this, and it is clear that Luke is moving toward Marianism, and Matthew’s Joseph was a problem. But the genealogy does something else…it proves something different. For Matthew, the use of the royal-line genealogy proves something very important…Jesus was the legitimate King of Israel and Judah. He was the final, and ultimate, manifestation of the Davidic Messianic King. The only way for the genealogy in Matthew could be pre-empted would be, since Jesus, in that genealogy, stands in the direct royal blood-line, would be for a brother of Joseph to appear, whose son wished to make a rival claim to the title of Messianic King. As it is, Joseph did have a brother, and his brother had a son. That son would not claim the Messianic Kingship…but he would claim apostolic succession to the leadership of the Jewish Christians in Jerusalem following the execution of James. Or, a brother of Jesus could make a claim. This, of course, didn’t happen.

I also noted that in the Prolog, the Joseph-Mary family is presented as a Jerusalem family. They are not a Nazareth family…at least, originally. They only end-up in Nazareth after God called them back from Egypt, only to realized that He jumped the gun following the death of Herod the Great. So it is that Matthew does not need any reason or invention to explain the fact that Jesus was born in Jerusalem. Jerusalem-Bethlehem were purely Davidic, Joseph was, initially, the true heir of David’s title and kingdom. Matthew did, however, need a reason for why Jesus was called Jesus of Nazareth…and his interpretation of things is not particularly flattering to God. But! Luke’s problem is different. There is no need to find a reason why Joseph’s family lived in Nazareth, because that’s where they lived…

In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. 

(This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) 

And everyone went to his own town to register. 

So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David.

So what Matthew did to get Jesus to Nazareth is somewhat similar to what Luke did to get Jesus to Jerusalem. In the case of Luke, he took a historical event and turned it into something that it was not. The Romans did carry-out censuses, but in no case did that involve the claim that everyone had to go to his ancestral home. There had been serious movement of peoples throughout the empire over the long years. It would have been, to put it simply, totally impossible to suddenly move millions to perhaps tens of millions of people around the empire for a census. And why do it? Well, a census is, of course, carried out to count people. Why did the Romans want to count people?

No...that’s not the reason. Wait, I remember! The assessment of taxes. The Roman Imperial Government was, at its heart, a tax-farming mafia. And you only counted Roman citizens. So! If you moved citizens around the empire because of their ancestral homes, then you would not only do something completely impossible, you completely ruin the whole point of counting people to begin with…taxes, which are assessed on provinces and are payable by the governors of those provinces. That means that you just moved people from one province to one that their great-grandparents lived in, counted them there, and they returned back to the province they currently lived in. So, e.g., a Roman citizen moved to Syria after the conquests of Pompey. He worked for the provincial administration. His ancestors were from Gaul. So you send this citizen back to Gaul to count him, and then you add him to the number of citizens that the…

ROMAN GOVERNOR OF GAUL

…must pay taxes on! But he returns to his job in Syria…the governor of Syria passed off the taxation consequences of this Roman citizen to the Governor of Gaul. No doubt, the Governor of Syria will be pleased, until he learns that he must pay taxes for a Roman citizen who lives in Lower Germany, whose great-grandfather was born in Syria. Take the federal census that occurs every 10 years in the United States. One of its most important functions is to determine how many members of the House of Representatives each state will elect. Every state gets 2 senators…that’s easy. The number of representatives is pegged to population. Imagine the sheer and utter chaos of the federal government if, as part of the census, everybody went to other states to get counted, the number of representatives thus determined, only to go back to where they lived before this impossible exercise of sheer stupidity started. Wait! We have utter chaos in the federal governor without moving the entire population around to count them…

Still, I think the matter at…

But I…

If you’d only…

Whatever. It should also be remembered that being a provincial governor in the Roman system was a very difficult, and indeed, dangerous appointment. Of all the things the governors did, the most important was the collection of taxes. The Imperial Government…the emperor and his economic advisors, assessed taxes…and governors had to collect them. It doesn’t take much imagination to guess at the consequences of failing to collect them. But! Take it further. The reason why men vied for these appointments was, in stock market terms, the float. They collected taxes in such a way that they would have the full payment assessed by the emperor, but funds collected beyond that as well…and that was their pay. There would be no reason whatsoever to hold this position if it weren’t so. That would mean that the emperor’s insane census would leave governors paying taxes on citizens that live in other provinces…not only would you fail to pay the emperor his assessment…good luck with that…you could end up losing a fortune...good luck with that. Thus it comes as no surprise that, although Luke refers to a census decreed by Augustus, and administered by Quirinius, he does not tell you why this census was ordered. He can’t…because it wouldn’t take you long to conclude the only thing that can be concluded…it makes no sense whatsoever. So, he conveniently leaves out the reason for the census. Matthew needed a way to get a Jerusalem family to Nazareth, while Luke needed a way to get a Nazareth family to Jerusalem. There was no doubt a census was held under the administration of Quirinius…Publius Sulpicius Quirinus…

The implementation of this census prompted the violent revolt led by Judas the Galilean and Zadok the Pharisee. In 7 AD, Augustus decided that regional rulers in Judea were such a pain, he implemented direct rule by Rome. Most of the empire was organized on the basis of provinces. I’ve noted elsewhere that a few entities called…Client Kingdoms…were also part of the system. Armenia and Judea are great examples. But Rome made less money from Client Kingdoms than provinces. Client Kingdoms were ruled by the local king. You couldn’t tax a local king…you collected tribute from him. A province was ruled directly by Rome through the governor…so every province guaranteed a direct flow of taxes to the emperor. Client Kingdoms existed where exceptional situations existed…Trouble Spots. In provinces, the emperor was on the hook for everything military…and it was an expensive hook. In a Client Kingdom…the local king bore much of this burden. Under Herod, Judea was under control. Armenia, on the other hand, was never under control. Still, a province means more money to Rome. So once the region was put under Quirinius, the governor would take a census. But the same considerations apply. What Luke did was hit upon the census as a means of getting a Nazareth-Joseph to Jerusalem, something that Matthew had no trouble with seeing how he converted a Nazareth-Joseph into a Jerusalem-Joseph, leaving him with the problem of how turn him back into a Nazareth-Joseph. But when was Quirinus made governor of Syria? Yes…7 AD, following in the banishment of Herod Archelaus. But according to Matthew, Herod was still king at the time of the Jesus’s birth. Many have been afflicted with the disorder known as Fundamentalism, a doctrine which hold that it is so important that the Bible be literally historical in each and everything it records that the suffers from this malady will stop at nothing to destroy verifiable history. So, you might resolve this probably with stating that Quirinius was governor…twice! Of course, Quirinius served as consul in Rome in 12 BC. When his year was over, he was appointed governor of Galatia and Paphlagonia, where he conducted the Roman war against the Homonadensians. He then became governor of Asia. In approximately 1 AD, Augustus, who came to think highly of Quirinius, appointed him to be the tutor of his grandson…Gaius Caesar, who, along with Lucius Caesar, was the son of Augustus’s daughter Julia and Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa. Gaius died in approximately 3 AD, and later, Quirinius was appointed governor of Syria. So there is no room at the inn, I mean…in Syria until the time he was actually made governor in spite of the fact the name of the governor of Syria during the years 4 BC – 1 BC is currently not known, Varus having left in 4 BC, and Gaius Caesar being appointed in 1 BC. Luke knew about the census taken when Augustus implemented direct rule. But Luke leaves out the entire Herod narrative. So he either knew nothing about it, which would mean that he hadn’t read Matthew or his use of the census as the means of getting Joseph to Bethlehem pre-dates the addition of the Prolog to the Primitive Gospel of Matthew, which originally began with Chapter 3….or he knew about the New Beginning to Matthew, and did not accept it as genuine. There was no census under Herod, who was a client king.

I noted that Matthew’s genealogy stopped with Abraham, the boy who put his father out of the idol-making business. Abraham was the father of the Hebrew nation, David was its king, and his direct descendant through the royal blood-line would be its Messiah. That is the point of the genealogy. But Luke writes Joseph out of the narratives. Why? For Luke, Mary is the thing, and the Gospel of James would appear shortly to further the Religion of Mary by maintaining that Mary was a virgin before giving birth, and then was a virgin after giving birth…her vagina closing up again, and, in what some might regard as a horrifying twist on Thomas the Doubter, a woman is present at the birth of Jesus who decides that she too would use a finger to carry out a test, but, and I will leave it at this, it wasn’t a hole in the hand that she would make the object of her testing. So the Roman church would find much to like in the notion, present in the Gospel of James, that clearly lead to the Perpetual Virginity of Mary, although I’m sure the finger test would have to go. Most modern readers would probably find this part of the Gospel to be objectionable in the extreme. But there can be no doubt that the writers of James did not intend it to be that way at all. I think that the Testing of Mary was intended to simply offer proof that Mary remained a virgin after the birth of Jesus…incontrovertible proof. This is essentially what the Finger Test involving Thomas did as well.

The Gospel of James, as an aside, does provide another detail that shows just how much confusion, or, at least, disagreement existed within primitive Christianity about the origins of Jesus. According to the Gospel of James, Mary gave birth in a cave. And! According to Muslim tradition, as found in the Qur’an, Mary gave birth under a tree. So in James, the circumstances of Jesus’s birth are significantly different. However, it shares with Luke a connection to a census, and it also shares with Luke a keen focus on the person of Mary. It is more than tempting to believe that the story of Jesus’s birth in a cave was one tradition to be found in the Gospel of the Young Jesus, and despite the fact that Matthew and Luke passed over it in favor of other details, the writers of James passed over the details chosen by Matthew and Luke, clearly indicating that among one group of Christians, Jesus was born in a cave. I would caution against simply disregarding what is in James in favor of Matthew and Luke. The writing of James may have been approximate to the writing of Luke, and quite possibly, the production of the Prolog to Matthew and it’s addition to the Primitive Gospel of Mark.

True, Luke acknowledges that Jesus is a son of Joseph who

…belonged to the house and line of David…

His genealogy seems to take away a superior claim on the part of Jesus to be what appears so prominently in the Prolog of Matthew…the Royal Messianic King. The genealogy leaves open a good basis for someone to make a far better claim than Jesus. The genealogy with the Almost-Exiling of Joseph shows that the concern in the narrative at the beginning of Luke is Jesus as the…Son of God. So he takes the genealogy back to Adam…another metaphorical son of God…bookends…begin with a son of God and end with the Son of God. Then…Mary! Bye-bye Joseph. So why such a different assessment of importance? That may be due to the context at the time. The claim that your founder was the Royal, Davidic Messiah…the one prophesied of for a thousand years…was rooted in a concept that was certainly a Jewish one. Why a problem? Paul would be the one who kept Christianity alive; indeed, he decided to take what began as a Jewish Messianic Movement and turn it into a religion for pagan, non-Jews. It would have been easy to attack the new religion by pointing out that Jesus never held political power…he was tried and executed. The goyim Christians did not have the knowledge of the Old Testament that the Rabbis had…or rank-and-file Jews for that matter. So, having learned about the image applied to Jesus, they would not have understood what Rabbis would have been all-to-willing to point out…Jesus couldn’t have been the Royal Davidic Messiah when he never reigned, and was killed by a low-ranking Roman government flunkey. Perhaps Jesus as the Son of God was most important…not a man of the royal blood-line that gave him the rightful claim to the Messianic Throne, whose ancestor David was perhaps less important than the very beginning of the genealogy. Yes, Adam…a son of God.

I would make another point, hopefully, I’m sure you’ll agree, the last one I will make about this subject. Isn’t there a contradiction in the Prolog to Matthew? My answer is…yes…a big one. The Prologuers took narratives from the Gospel of the Young Jesus and used them to create a biography of Jesus’s life before he appeared at the Jordan. There is a complete lack of this in the Gospel of Mark and in the Primitive Gospel of Matthew. Just ask the Ebionites! Luke was an excellent teller of stories…Matthew was not. What the Gospel of the Young Jesus offered was a collection of stories…and he/they could take whichever ones they wanted. So he took the tradition of the Miraculous Conception. Then gives us the story about the birth of the Messianic King in Jerusalem. The Adoration of the Magi and the…

 
...Massacre of the Innocents were used to prove the Messianic idea further, and, at the same time, presents Herod as a bungling incompetent whose family cannot make any serious competing claim. He also picked the tradition about Jesus’s life in Egypt and connects this with Nazareth…thus we get the biographical back-fill that presents the life of Jesus from his conception to his life in Nazareth. Biography and prophecy-fulfillment…these were his concerns. I don’t think he looked beyond the cool stories and thus he did not realize that the Miraculous Conception and Virgin Birth are not consistent with the other vignettes. The former is a contradiction to the belief that Jesus was the actual, literal son of Joseph who came into the world in the normal way…No! This concept has inherent in it what the group of Christians who formulated it knew…Jesus was not Joseph’s son. The remaining stories in the Prolog have inherent in them that Jesus was the actual son of Joseph…so Jesus could inherent Joseph’s genealogy. That genealogy gave Jesus the best possible, short of a brother or cousin, claim to the Davidic, Messianic Kingship. These are absolutely contradictory. But as Luke realized, Jesus’s earthly life fell far short of the beliefs about the Messiah inherent in the context from which they came…a Jewish one. So, Matthew’s concept exposed Gentile Christians to overwhelming refutations on the part of Jews. The genealogy in Luke pushes Jesus out of the direct blood-line of the Hebrew kings by pushing Joseph out of the way. The result is a unique concept of the Son of God, when read in light of the Miraculous Conception and Virgin Birth. For Matthew, that simply fulfilled prophecy. For the Luke-group, it was directly at the very center of how they believed that Gentile Christians should envision Jesus.   

The Virgin Birth story in Matthew is one that, in its current form, has a distinctly surprising form. It begins with Mary, betrothed to Joseph, is suddenly…

Found with child of the Holy Spirit

Joseph then decided to do what any one of us would do…well not everyone. But, not being married, and therefore not having been intimate with Mary, he naturally believes that she had been messing around with another man. So he decides to end the betrothal, and, presumably, plans to find a virtuous Jewish woman to marry. This is rather absurd. We are not told when Mary discovered that she was pregnant, or how. An angel did, finally, tell Joseph what had happened. So did an angel tell Mary? Surely Jewish women in Nazareth could tell when a woman was pregnant. What did Mary think? Here’s she pregnant, and we don’t know how she found out, or when. I certainly hope she didn’t find out from Joseph! No. And Joseph isn’t told by an angel that Mary is pregnant. He is told by the angel not to get rid of her, i.e. he finds out well after the fact, and then the angel explains why. So:

1. Mary is suddenly pregnant

2. Mary knows that she is pregnant

3. If Mary is a virgin, then she knows that she is a Pregnant Virgin?

4.  Mary may or may not know why she is a Pregnant Virgin.

5.  At some point, Joseph learns that Mary is pregnant But! Think about it. He knows she’s pregnant. He believes that she has been sexually active with another man. So…

6.  If Mary didn’t know why…though she certainly knew that she was pregnant, she apparently saw no need to talk to Joseph about it. Honey! I think you should know. I really am a virgin. But I am pregnant. And I know that you will find out. So I’m giving you a heads up. Mary…how did this happen? Well, it was explained to me. Really? Funny it wasn’t mentioned to me. Why did this happen? That’s obvious! To fulfill Isaiah 7:14…a virgin shall give birth. Now wait a minute! That passage says that a young woman will give birth. Well, Joseph, I was reading the Septuagint translation…That’s not Hebrew! And if you are really an almah, and not a betulah…then there’s something you haven’t told me…isn’t there? So God may have withheld knowledge of this great event from Mary. And Joseph! Or, an angel told Mary, and she didn’t tell Joseph. Perhaps it slipped her mind. Virgin Births are so common these days! Sorry, dear…I forgot to tell you. And Joseph decides to give Mary the boot. So how exactly did he find out? Who told him? If Mary, then we might expect that she would be able to explain it to him, rather than let him set out looking for a genuine betulah. No? Mary didn’t tell him, and apparently, he didn’t talk to her about it. Hey Mary and Joseph! Communication is vital for a successful marriage! Joseph found out from an unnamed angel. Luke will fix that little problem and let us know that the angel was Gabriel. In fact, Luke will fix the numerous problems in Matthew’s vignette. And Matthew loves dreams and finding out things in your sleep! Well, in Joseph’s sleep…and that of the pagan religious functionaries that showed up in Bethlehem with Christmas presents.

Then…

And she will bring forth a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for He will save his people from their sins.

So apparently this angel is not really up on his Scripture. The angel tells Joseph that he will name the child Jesus…Joshua. But then the redactor says this…

Now all of this was done that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the Lord through the prophet, Behold a virgin shall be with child, and bear a son, and they shall call His name Immanuel.

Ok..so this little vignette fulfills Isaiah 7:14, and we’re told specifically that the child will bear the name Immanuel. But the angel tells Joseph to name the child Joshua? Please! The redactor is doing a poor job. We wants to have his Virgin Birth, and we know that the Prologuers feel absolutely compelled to find an Old Testament prophecy to link to each vignette. And so here, he does…he thinks he does. And he cites it, even though there is the gigantic contradiction in the names. The explanation is obvious…he had no choice. Mary’s son was named Joshua...plain and simple. The tradition the redactors used held that Jesus was given his name…his real name…the only name he ever had…as the result of the proclamation of an angel. Matthew needed the Virgin Birth even though the incorporation of the genealogy and the story about Bethlehem actually presents a rival view about the lineage than the Virgin Birth tradition. He nonetheless uses it…it takes the biography back to Jesus’s birth, and offers defenders of Jesus the means to defend Jesus.  Then he cites an irrelevant passage from Isaiah, and doesn’t even bother to leave out the name Immanuel, a name that never ever had anything to do with Joshua. And the redactor feels no need to answer the question that immediately comes to the mind of any intelligent person…why didn’t the angel tell Joseph to name the child Immanuel? Answer…Isaiah 7:14 has nothing whatever to do with Jesus, and originally, had nothing to do with the tradition of the Virgin Birth. And whereas you can make up a non-existent prophecy about Nazareth figuring that no one will ever know it, if you want parthenos, you’re also stuck with Immanuel.

The problematic use of Old Testament material by the Prologuers is evidenced in another vignette…the one that is usually, certainly in Christmas pageants, called the Adoration of the Magi. Closely associated with it is the vignette usually called…the Massacre of the Innocents. The word Magi is usually translated as “magician” or “sorcerer,” but it can also be used as a designation of practitioner of religious practices associated with the cult of Zoroaster.

No…that is not a laminated prayer-card. The translations “wise men” and “kings” are intended to divert attention away from the fact that the Magi are pagan religious functionaries. Zoroaster was an ancient Persian religious leader, whose teachings became incorporated into the cult of Zoroastrianism. This religion became the dominant one in Persia, and he has been dated to the period that featured Cyrus II and the usurper Darius the Great, known for the starting the massive with the Greeks. Associated with this religion is what is often described as “magic” and “astrology.” Zoroaster has also been called astrothytes- star sacrificier or living star.

This is Zoroaster holding a celestial sphere…full of stars. In the Book of Acts, Peter clashes with a Christian named…

Simon Magus, or Simon the Sorcerer, who was, at some point in time, associated with Phillip. The above mosaic is based on a scene from the apocryphal Acts of Peter and Paul, where Simon, the figure in the middle, was present at Rome when Peter (left) appears before the Emperor Nero. In Acts, Simon is described as offering money to Peter to give him the power to confer the Holy Spirit on anyone he touched. This became known as simony…attempting to purchase church positions. But in the Acts of Peter, Simon performs a miracle that others, namely saints, would also perform. Here he…

Sorry…that’s St. Joseph of Cupertino. I had to catch a flight, and I suppose he was on my mind. Simon levitates, but then falls to earth…

…sort of like a Christian Icarus, or an unsuccessful Joseph of Cupertino. Simon became a bogey figure that early Christian writers blamed for any of heretical aspects. It is very difficult to fully appreciate Simon since so many polemics were generated to denigrate him. But it illustrates the ideas inherent in the term…Magus. But whereas the Bible condemns the sorcerer Simon Magus, it does not do so with the Three Magi, the effort to sanitize them lead to English versions of the Bible calling them…wise men…and kings. They were neither of these things.

According to the Prolog, the appearance of the Three Sorcerers…hey, if Simon Magus was Simon the Sorcerer, then, for the sake of consistency…

we three sorcerers of orient are; bearing gifts we traverse afar…

Where was I? Oh, yes…they fulfilled this prophecy…

But you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are not the least among the rulers of Judah. For out of you shall come a Ruler who will shepherd My people Israel.

This is puzzling in that the application of the Old Testament text, derived from Micah 5:2, is perplexing in how it has been applied. These Magi are not Jews…they are not Hebrew…they are not derived from any ethnic or religious group that could even be relevant to Micah 5:2. That quote is applicable to the Davidic Messiah. Yes, the Magi call Jesus the King of the Jews, a title born by Herod. Herod was not the Messiah. But the fact that three guys from a distant land brought Jesus presents does not make Jesus the Great Ruler who would shepherd Israel. The Messiah would have to be recognized by Jews to be the Davidic ruler. Notice that the words…Judah and…Israel…are used. In the context of the royal history, David and Solomon ruled over a kingdom comprised of these two elements. Following the death of Solomon, during the reign of his son Rehoboam, a man named Jeroboam led a revolt in the North that led to a large part of the North seceding from the Davidic kingdom. The Northern Kingdom was then called Israel, and the Southern Kingdom was called Judah. So in Micah 5:2, the Davidic Kingdom would appear to be restored.

The eldest son of Alexander Jannaeus, king and high priest, in whose reign Yeshu ben Stada/ben Pandera was active, was Hyrcanus II. Following the death of Jannaeus, his mother, Alexandra Salome, was calling most of the shots, though she declared Hyrcanus to be high priest. She died in 67, and before doing so, proclaimed Hyrcanus to be king as well. A civil war with his brother Aristobulus lead Hyrcanus’s defeat. Aristobulus was king and high priest during the years 66-63. Herod’s father Antipater urged Hyrcanus to ally himself with Aretas III, ruler of Nabataea, who then took troops to Jerusalem. Both Hyrcanus and Aristobulus appealed to Rome to decide who was ruler. The result was Pompey’s intervention, Aristobulus was removed from power, Hyrcanus became high priest again, but he had no political power. Aristobulus was able to raise another rebellion in 57 BC, and then captured again, this time by Marc Anthony. Aristobulus may well have been a cat with nine lives, seeing how Julius Caesar then released him in 49 BC in order to foment rebellion against Pompey. Falling into the hands of pro-Pompey partisans, he was killed with poison. But his son, turning to the Parthians for help, ended up ruling as king and high priest during the years 40-37. As a supporter of the Parthians, he was an enemy of Rome. While in power, he was known as Antigonus II Mattathias. Herod’s father, Antipater the Idumean, was closely connected with the Hasmoneans, and was Governor of Idumea, the region known as Edom during the Old Testament period. Antipater, not happy with Aristobulus coming to power, persuaded Hyrcanus to bring in the Nabataeans, which in turn brought in Pompey, who was gearing up for war with Caesar. Ultimately Antipater used the Romans to obtain power in Jerusalem. Originally a supporter of Pompey, he switched sides as soon as Pompey was dead, and actually rescued Caesar at Alexandria. When Antigonus, son of Aristobulus II later challenged Antipater for control of Judea, Caesar stepped in (47 BC) and made Antipater Procurator of Judea. Then he appointed two of his sons to positions of power…Herod was made Governor of Galilee and Phasael Governor of Jerusalem. Antipater ended up on the wrong side of the war between Cassius, one of the assassins of Caesar, and Mark Anthony. An official associated with Cassius was an enemy of Antipater, and he set about arranging his death. In 41 BC, Mark Anthony named Phasael and Herod as tetrarchs. Hyrcanus II was brought back yet again and put in charge. In 40 BC, Antigonus II Mattathias obtained the support of the Parthians, who invaded and installed him as king. Herod fled to Rome, where he was named King of Judea. Herod returned to attack Antigonus, who fought well, not being defeated until 37 BC. Herod captured Antigonus and sent him to Rome for execution. Herod’s brother Phasael was captured by Antigonus at the same time as Hyrcanus II. But unlike Hyrcanus, Phasael committed suicide.

So it is curious that the Magi believed that Jesus was the King of the Jews, when Herod was in fact, King of Judea. The passage from Micah cited by the Prologuer clearly deals with a Davidic Messiah who would reign over a kingdom that equated to the size of that ruled by King David, much of which was lost after Solomon’s death. I would also point out something else. Just how large was the kingdom of David and Solomon?

So before getting all excited about a Davidic Messiah restoring the old Kingdom of David, it is worth noting just how small of a kingdom it really was. David might be impressive, but his kingdom was not. And he had to fight continually to retain this middling, regional possession. Solomon inherited it, but it was divided up during the reign of Solomon’s son Rehoboam. But! Was Solomon really as powerful as the Deuteronomists and the Chroniclers made him out to be?

And the palace in which he was to live, set farther back, was similar in design. Solomon also made a palace like this hall for Pharaoh's daughter, whom he had married.

Why did Solomon marry the daughter of the King of Egypt? Was this a matter of diplomacy? Perhaps this was the sealing of an alliance with Egypt? Why do that if Solomon was such a powerful king? I’m certain that this marriage didn’t happen as the result of an Ancient Egyptian Dating Service catering to regional, Hebrew princelings with a “thing” for Egyptian women. No, politics were certainly at the heart of this. But Egypt was far more powerful than Solomon…so why enter into a deal that some have taken to be an alliance between equals? At the very beginning of Solomon’s reign, he found himself fighting an insurgent leader. He was Hadad, the son of the Edomite king that had clashed with David. Hadad, just a boy, was taken to Egypt, where the king took him into his royal household. He was raised there, and the king of Egypt married him to the sister of his wife…Tahpenes. Then…

While he was in Egypt, Hadad heard that David rested with his fathers and that Joab the commander of the army was also dead. Then Hadad said to Pharaoh, "Let me go, that I may return to my own country!

And so Solomon came to the throne faced with hostile forces led by an Egyptian-backed insurgent. It would be odd if the King of Egypt married his daughter to Solomon in order to cement an alliance, only to also send an anti-David and anti-Solomon militant. It would be less odd if the King of Egypt sent Hadad to soften-up David’s son in order to force Solomon to enter into relations with himself. In other words…I can send a lot more Hadads your way if you don’t want to agree to my terms. Isaiah would later make this condemnation…

Woe to the obstinate children," declares the Lord, "to those who carry out plans that are not mine, forming an alliance, but not by my Spirit, heaping sin upon sin; who go down to Egypt without consulting me; who look for help to Pharaoh's protection, to Egypt's shade for refuge.  But Pharaoh's protection will be to your shame, Egypt's shade will bring you disgrace.  

That is from Isaiah, and the prophet shows considerable hostility towards Egypt, no doubt due to the fact Hezekiah had rebelled against the Assyrians at the behest of the Egyptians, the Assyrians and Egyptians being mortal enemies by that time. But was Hezekiah the first to turn to Egypt to prop him up? A devastating event occurred during the reign of Solomon’s son, and thus David’s grandson, Rehoboam:

In the fifth year of King Rehoboam, Shishak king of Egypt attacked Jerusalem. He carried off the treasures of the temple of the Lord and the treasures of the royal palace. He took everything, including all the gold shields Solomon had made. 

Fascinating! Shishak is most certainly the Egyptian king…

Sheshonq I. Hadad, an Egyptian-backed enemy of David and Solomon, was discussed above. The Ten Northern Tribes of Israel also produced an enemy of Solomon…the man who would become the first king of Northern Israel…known as Jeroboam I.  He too sought refuge in Egypt:

Solomon tried to kill Jeroboam, but Jeroboam fled to Egypt, to Shishak the king, and stayed there until Solomon's death.

Yet another problem for a Hebrew king, backed by Egypt. Apparently, Shishak was to keep Jeroboam in Egypt until the time was right. And that time was…Rehoboam succeeding his father Solomon. However, the Septuagint provides some additional, and very important, information that doesn’t appear in the Massoretic text. Shishak married his sister-in-law to Jeroboam, and she was the mother of Jeroboam’s son…Abijah. Why isn’t this information in the Massoretic text? Who can say for sure? But I can think of a reason why it might be regarded as particularly problematic…the relationship between Jeroboam and Shishak was not one of equals. The marriage sealed a special vassal status on Jeroboam’s part, not an alliance. So why did Sheshonq I attack Rehoboam? It wasn’t to end the war between Rehoboam and Jeroboam; 1 Kings 14:30 states that the two Hebrew kings were at war with each other throughout their reigns, and we don’t find the Egyptians intervening again. I think the answer lies in what happened when Shishak arrived at Jerusalem…Rehoboam paid him. This was no war of conquest. The best answer to this question may be that following Solomon becoming an Egyptian vassal, he paid the Egyptian king his tribute. So there were no problems apart from Hadad, whose activities may have been an inducement on Solomon’s part to put himself under the thumb of the Egyptians. At some point, perhaps toward the end of Solomon’s reign, or the beginning of Rehoboam’s reign, the King of Judah stopped paying his tribute. Sheshonq then appeared outside of the walls of Jerusalem, and, receiving his tribute, perhaps with a little back-interest thrown in, left to continue his campaign. The intermarriage between Solomon and the Egyptian king, and the intermarriage between Jeroboam and Sheshonq’s family, denote the same thing…not an alliance of equals…but rather, formalizing an overlord-vassal relationship.  If part of the key to understanding Solomon intermarrying with the royal family of Egypt is provided by the reason for Jeroboam doing the same…that might explain how original material about Jeroboam and Shishak “dropped out” of a precursor text to the Massoretic text…Solomon was an Egyptian vassal. So this long an annoying digression is meant to emphasize two things. First…Solomon was not the powerful ruler he is made out to be…his kingdom, which is to say…David’s kingdom, remained together because of Solomon’s Egyptian overlord. So David’s kingdom was really an independent kingdom only during David’s reign. Meaning…only for about 40 years. And! As the map shown above indicates…there was nothing impressive about the size of David’s kingdom. This should be remembered when assessing just what kind of figure the Royal Davidic Messiah would be. The two genealogies of Jesus presented in Matthew on the one hand, and Luke on the other hand, were discussed above. Within the Prolog of Matthew, the genealogy supports the claim that Jesus, through Joseph, would have an excellent claim to be the Davidic, Messianic King. However, if Jesus would ever make a bid to become that, which he certainly did not make, and had managed to succeed, then all he would have been in the end was a petty, regional Hebrew king who had managed to do what the real Jesus knew was impossible…drive the Romans out of Syria-Palestine, and then quell the myriad of revolts by local, rival claimants to David’s throne. But, as the Luke-group may have intended, the other genealogy, the true one, could have been used to take away the basis for that Messianic claim by showing that the blood-line was not the royal blood-line. Then the genealogy is taken back to Adam, a son of God, spinning the whole concept of who Jesus was away from the Royal, Messianic claim, to one that would pave the way for the ultimate claim about Jesus that would transcend any and all others…Son of God, which trumps…Son of David. But I could be wrong about that.

Returning to where I was before this long, but useful, digression, I return to the bizarre claim made by the sorcerers…too call Jesus the King of the Jews simply doesn’t make sense. Add to this the fact that we are not told how these sorcerers knew about the birth of this infant king, appear not to have known about the position of Herod, and did not understand exactly what the infant king would rule over. Are we are told is that they saw was the star they followed. Within the context of the vignette, they are not killed by Herod. If Herod was willing to Massacre the Innocents in order to kill just one baby, it seems strange that he would let three pagans, who would report back to their supporters that Herod was not, in fact, king, live. Herod never showed an unwillingness to kill whoever impinged upon his power and prerogatives. And then Herod proves to be a bungling fool. Suddenly lacking his army and secret police, he was stuck asking the Magi to go and find the infant king, then come back and tell him where his is…so he could go and kill him.

There is another very important point to make about Matthew connecting Micah 5:2 with the story of the Magi…there is a much better quote from the Old Testament. Try this one on…

Of Solomon.

May he rule from sea to sea, from the River to the ends of the earth.

May the desert tribes bow before him, and his enemies lick the dust.

May the kings of Tarshish and of distant shores bring tribute to him.

May the kings of Sheba and Seba present him with gifts.

May all kings bow down before him, and let all nations serve him.

That is Psalm 72:11, and how much of a better verse is there to link with the story of the Magi? Perfect for the Messiah...if conceived of as a petty, regional king. And foreign kings come to Solomon to pay him tribute. Gifts? Tribute. So what of the “gifts” of the Magi? Tribute? Or another type of payment? I think the latter. Nonetheless, the Prologuer picked a verse that involved the recognition of the Messiah as the King of Israel and Judah. Foreign kings can only recognize a trading partner, fellow participant in an alliance, or an overlord. But! At no point are the Magi said to be representatives of a foreign power. We three kings? Matthew doesn’t say how many there are. If they are kings, then a huge problem is solved. What is that? If they are kings, then they can recognize Jesus as a king and overlord. But they are not said to be diplomats or foreign envoys. Then the gifts cannot be tribute. And the word Magi cannot be translated as…king.

So what can be said? The Magi are said to have followed a star. This is totally consistent with the “star worship” aspect of Zoroasterism. The fact that they are Magi suggests Parthia, Rome’s most adamant enemy. But it could also suggest Armenia. The latter was a client kingdom of Rome. It was also the front line between the two enemies. Control of Armenia was vitally important, and Rome and Parthia battled endlessly to control it. And it changed hands constantly. Within the battlefield that was Armenia, there were probably many groups…pro-Roman, pro-Parthia, pro-Independence for Armenia. In 20 BC, Tigranes III took the throne of Armenia. He died in 10 BC, and Tigranes IV and his sister…

Erato became joint rulers. I love her hat! My God! It's full of stars! Well, it has six stars at any rate. In 7 BC, Herod executed 2 of his sons- Alexander and Aristobulus, and Publius Quinctillius Varus took over as governor of Syria. In 5 BC, Varus arrested Herod’s chosen successor…Antipater, charging him with conspiracy to murder his father. Then Herod appointed Antipas as his successor. In 4 BC, Herod changed his succession plans again, designating Archelaus as the new successor, Augustus having decreed the death sentence for Antipater. Then, also in 4 BC, Herod died. In 2 BC, Tigranes IV died and Erato was exiled from Armenia.

According to Sextus Rufus, a Roman historian, Armenia had become increasingly powerful, and during the Tigranes IV-Erato regime, there was considerable anti-Roman sentiment. The Parthian king…

 …Phraates V, had stoked the violence in Armenia. The brother-sister rulers were originally anti-Roman, and Augustus, who had not approved the new regime, did not like the new rulers. Phraates V had a change of mind and suddenly backed the pro-Roman Armenians. Tigranes IV and Erato accepted Roman suzerainty. Then civil war broke out in Armenia, instigated by anti-Roman forces. Tigranes IV was killed in battle during the violence. The point here is that during the government of Tigranes and Erato, there was considerable instability in Armenia. One may be tempted to see the Not-Wisemen and Definitely Not Kings as having been sent by an anti-Roman faction, perhaps by members of the royal family ruling in Armenia, or even by the Parthian king, with a payment for Herod. The Armenians, or the Parthians, or pro-Parthian Armenians, or pro-Armenian Armenians…there were so many potential enemies of Rome at what was essentially the frontline in a never-ending conflict between Rome and Parthia…intended to use the payment in an attempt to get Herod to revolt against the Romans. Why? This would result in the diverting of Roman troops into Syria-Palestine, leaving fewer troops to intervene in an upsurge of anti-Roman and inter-communal violence in Armenia. The Kingdom of Armenia was…

…north of Judea, so legions sent south would be a long way from the violence in the north. The province of Syria was the eastern frontier with Parthia. When Varus took over, he had four legions…a significant army. If these legions were sent south into Judea to quell a revolt by Herod, the partisans of whichever side in Armenia would have less Romans to face.

The years 7 - 4 BC also witnessed considerable instability in the Herodian family. In 7 BC, Herod executed both Alexander ad Aristobulus. Two years later, Herod and Varus arranged to have Antipater arrested and charged with treason. Now Antipas was the chosen successor. In 4 BC, Herod changed his mind yet again, declaring Archelaus to be his successor. So, the governor of Syria was involved in the bewildering changes to Herod’s succession plans, although ultimately, Augustus would decide the post-Herod political situation in Judea. Varus’s involvement, whose four legions were positioned to the east of the frontier with Parthia, suggests more than just deadly squabbling within Herod’s family was involved; it may indicate that there were anti-Roman motives somewhere in all of it. Varus’s concerns would be with ensuring that there was no trouble in Syria-Palestine. The Magi may indeed have been representatives of an anti-Roman faction from Armenia, or perhaps agents of the Parthian king.

So what about the Massacre of the Innocents? This is just another part of the Clownish Herod Episode that we meet with in the Visit of the Magi pericope. Herod was an adept tyrant who held on to his kingdom ruthlessly. He would have had a network of spies and intelligence agents throughout Judea. So, he would not need to have three sorcerers show up and only then learn about the supposed birth of a supposed rival king. Then! Only just hearing about it for the first time, he had no way to find the kid. Yet he had enough intelligence assets to locate each and every baby of a certain age! Well, most of them. These things simply contradict each other. I am convinced that if a child was born about whom legends were being spread that he was the Messiah, making him the rightful heir to King David, Herod’s agents would have known about it immediately. Bethlehem is only…

…5.5 miles south of Jerusalem. The Prologue of Matthew would have us believe that God, attempting to correct His own error, told Joseph to take the family to Nazareth in order to keep the new Herodian leader from finding Jesus. Nazareth is only 94 miles north of Jerusalem.

Now I admit that I do believe that there was terrible massacre ordered by Herod in 4 BC, the year in which he died and Christ was born. This massacre was aimed at wiping-out various rebel factions in Judea. This included the families of the those who were involved in rebel activity, so there would have been a Massacre of Innocents, but only within the context just described. In fact, there was considerable instability in Herod’s kingdom at the time, so it is not surprising that Varus became involved.

A Jewish shepherd named Athronges, apparently quite charismatic, got himself crowned Messiah…twice. He had four brothers, all of whom commanded a large number of insurgent paramilitaries. These partisans targeted Jews who supported Herod, non-Jewish supporters of Herod, and even carried out raids against Roman troops. Varus had to intervene in support of the troops of Archelaus. Athronges and two of his brothers were captured but the two brothers escaped, and they continued to carry out guerilla-type attacks for another two years.

There was a leader of a band of outlaws and bandits named Hezekiah. He was captured by agents of Herod and may have had some familial connection to Herod’s family. Hezekiah’s son Judas inherited his father’s forces and had himself declared king. He attacked the stronghold of Sepphoris, raiding it for weapons and money. Roman intervention was needed to defeat Judas’s forces.

One of Herod’s former slaves was a man named Simon of Peraea. He too had himself declared king and led a partisan uprising of his own. He attacked the royal estate at Jericho, burning it down and plundering it. Herod dispatched a commander named Gratus to put down Simon’s revolt, but ultimately, Roman intervention was needed. Simon was captured, only to escape. More action was needed to re-capture Simon. He died sometime during the period 4 BC – 15 AD. Some scholars believe that he is the subject spoken of in a tablet found near the Dead Sea in 2000 named Gabriel’s Revelation.

The tablet can be interpreted as Messianic in nature.

Following Herod’s death in 7 BC, the emperor sent a treasury official in Syria, named Sabinus, to  Jerusalem to take control of Herod’s assets in Judea. Varus became involved in settling Herod’s personal and political will, and both Archelaus, designated as King of Judea in Herod’s will, and the governor of Syria left for Rome to get a final decision from Augustus about what the post-Herod political structure was to be. While Varus and Archelaus were at Rome meeting with the emperor, Sabinus, bearing the title of Procurator, moved into the royal palace. He then demanded money. It was bad timing, seeing how the festival of Shavuot was in progress in Jerusalem, which meant that there a large number of pilgrims were present. Sabinus’s actions set off a riot, which quickly turned into a rebellion. Roman forces attacked the Rioters-Turned-Rebels, only to be met with a counter-attack. The violence quickly spread, and the Roman forces on hand could not contain it. Varus suddenly returned and finally quelled the rebellion. The events surrounding the response to Sabinus’s inappropriate actions, which would certainly have led to execution for obviously contravening Roman procedures, is particularly telling. Why is that? Brigands are one thing…they’re professional criminals. Rebels who declare themselves king or Messiah and have paramilitaries at their disposal are one thing. But if a bunch of pilgrims present to celebrate a religious festival…who are not brigands, rebels, or paramilitaries…are able to stage a spontaneous uprising to such an extent that Roman forces were not able to end it, and the governor of Syria had to return from a meeting with the emperor to contain it, then one conclusion that can be reached about this is that a significant uprising could occur at any time, and among people who aren’t present to cause one.

All of the above incidents make it clear that there were numerous rebels with, in aggregate, large military forces of their own. Herod and the Romans would probably have considered such groups to be terrorists who were able to blend in with the larger population. Finding them would require a network of intelligence assets. Whatever the Herodian propaganda was circulated to explain the execution of Herod’s sons, along with the ever-changing decisions as to which surviving son would receive what title and the powers inherent to it, the involvement of Varus…who only cared about maintaining order and collecting the emperor’s taxes, leads one to the conclusion that pro-Roman and anti-Roman sentiments may have been important considerations in what son received what title, and which son was sent Up There to the Metaphorical Attic of No Return. Augustus’s actions are possibly relevant to this. Herod had been totally pro-Roman throughout his reign. That made the client kingship work just fine. In his will, Herod declared Archelaus to be King of Judea. But the emperor would have to review these instructions and uphold them, overrule them, or change them. As it turned out, Archelaus was given a lesser title, and no one was granted the title of king. Why? I think that one interesting possibility is that the instability in Judea made it prudent to avoid anyone bearing, legitimately or otherwise, the title of king. Who knows how many troops spent their time trying to chase down the growing number of trouble-makers who were declaring themselves to be Messiah, king, or both.

So, the Magi, and there may have been more than three, brought gifts in an effort to bribe Herod and induce him to rebel against the Romans. Roman legions would have to move into Syria-Palestine, and while the Roman were busy with the rebellion, Parthians, Armenians, Pro-Independence zealots, or some combination of these, could carry out their plans, ostensibly being able to drive the Roman presence westward. Herod refused. So the Magi left unsuccessful? Herod’s massacre suggests otherwise. As the Magi were leaving, they met with someone else, or their proxies, who were more than willing to take the gifts and pledge an anti-Roman uprising. Many were already well underway at that moment. And the gifts brought by the Magi may have simply been a down-payment, with many more promised if the desired results were realized. Several possibilities were noted above, but there may well have been other rebels. Once word reached Herod of this, he ordered his forces to carry out a massacre of all suspected rebels and rebel-sympathizers in order to wipe out the insurgents. This turned into a massacre that included children and whole families. Herod was ill…terminally ill, and the constant changing of which sons would die, which sons would hold a particular office, only to be removed from consideration, could have indicated that the Romans were about to have a large problem on their hands. And Roman emperors had no patience with situations that interfered with the collection of taxes. Judea was a veritable tinderbox, just waiting for a big enough match to set off a full-scale military emergency…one that would force Rome to move into Syria-Palestine with a very large number of troops. This would certainly result in potentially major changes in Armenia. And such a deployment of troops would work to the advantage of the rebels…the harsher the Roman actions taken, recruitment of partisans would be easier. So a major deployment of Roman troops would benefit the Parthians, Armenians, and Jewish rebels in Palestine.

It would seem to be a good time to double-back to considerations discussed before my slight digression. Ultimately, one must reject the idea that Jewish scribes/translators changed a Hebrew reading of betulah in Isa. 7:14 to almah with the intention of depriving Christianity of a virgin birth. Simply put, Jews would not have changed sacred texts because of what a group of renegades and heretics were doing. When Christian ideas approximated Jewish ones, or when they didn’t, it is absurd to believe that they cared one bit about what might or might not be found in a Christian, Greek translation of Isaiah 7:14. To ascertain that they would, seems to me to be simply an effort to have betulah in one Hebrew version, justifying the translation parthenos, and almah in the other, and being able to have the two at the same time and to be able to blame the Jews as those responsible for changing an original reading of betulah to almah, leaving the Septuagint translation as the right one. Thus you have your virgin birth. But I don’t see it as credible that the Jews changed the reading, seeing that they had nothing that was dependent upon almah over betulah. On the other hand, the Christians did. For 2,000 years Christians of various traditions have insisted on the virgin birth of Christ, and the scholars among the factions have had to defend the Septuagint over the Hebrew version that ultimately underlies the Massoretic text, as well as the translations of Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotian. That is three vs. one. What do I mean? Well, someone’s got something wrong, or, perhaps, something has been falsified. When we step into the world of the ancient Greek text, we have:

1.  Septuagint

2.  Aquila

3.  Symmachus

4.  Theodotian

Only the Septuagint has the reading…parthenos. The remaining THREE have the reading that is the correct one for the Hebrew word almah...neanis.  That means, for parthenos to be correct, the other THREE are wrong. But! No one disparages the skills or knowledge of the Big Three, as I shall call them. Since all three agree, then the only explanation would be that Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotian have colluded and conspired to change the translation from that of the Septuagint. Collusion?

Really? Whatever for?

So! You think my collusion with Stormy Daniels, I mean…the Russians, which wasn’t collusion…believe me…was bad? What about Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotian colluding against the Septuagint? They replaced parthenos with neanis in the disputed passage Isa. 7:14! Why isn’t Robert Mueller investigating that? Don’t worry! I will make Isa. 7:14 great again! But now for the daily reading…please turn to Two Corinthians. And Good News Evangelicals! You’re right! God does like adultery and lying!

Leaving aside the separate issues of the Russians and Stormy Daniels, the Big Three colluding against the Lone One is hardly credible. Aquila, or so tradition holds, was a Greek-speaking Roman from Pontus. He converted to Judaism, and then produced what is usually regarded as an excellent translation of the Old Testament into Greek for use in the synagogues of Greek-speaking Jews. I see no reason to believe that this isn’t the case…his Greek translation thus having a purely practical idea underlying it. Given what is known, this simply makes sense. But the defenders of the Septuagint must ascribe a polemical aspect to Aquila’s work, positing that a Hellenic Roman’s conversion to Judaism led to the very practical, and then the very polemical, aspects overlying one another. That is assuming too much.

In the case of Symmachus, Eusebius stated that he was an Ebionite. This term usually refers to a Jewish-Christian movement that accepted Jesus as the Messiah but rejected his virgin birth. But Epiphanius, on the other hand, maintained that Symmachus was a Samaritan who converted to Judaism. I have spoken about my views of Epiphanius.

Still, if Eusebius’s statement about Symmachus being an Ebionite is correct, then I suppose that might possibly lend credence to the idea that his opposition to the belief in the virgin birth of Jesus would lead him to alter the correct translation as found in the Septuagint. But not really. Epiphanius was a polemicist, and it is hard to believe that he would take away a possible reason to discount Symmachus’s choice of the word neanis by breaking the connection with a group that stood in opposition to the virgin birth of Jesus of Nazareth. Based on polemical vs. non-polemical, especially when it comes to a polemicist, on this point, Epiphanius is preferable to Eusebius, who asserted that Symmachus wrote a work that sought to refute the canonical Gospel of Matthew.

It seems obvious that Eusebius has turned Symmachus into a Diabolical Figure who sought to undermine the doctrine of the virgin birth. Eusebius, the one who connived with Constantine to produce a false version of the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, designates Symmachus as the follower of a group that specifically denied the virgin birth of Christ, subsequently produced a Greek translation of the Hebrew text that would have the reading neanis instead of parthenos, and attacked the Gospel of Matthew. Notice that the accusation doesn’t involve the Gospel of Mark. Why would he have done that? Well, in Eusebius’s re-writing of history, it would have had no bearing on the virgin birth of Christ because the doctrine does not appear in that Gospel. This is not only very convenient…Symmachus was a Jew, and his translation appears to have been later than that of Aquila. So did Symmachus know the work of Aquila…the first conspirator with no reason to be conspiring…which then allowed him to use that work as part of his own conspiracy? Eusebius claimed that works supposedly written by Symmachus still existed in his own day, though, conveniently, not in ours. He then foists the responsibility for having obtained these works onto Origen. We get a rather apocryphal story about how Origen came into possession of these supposed works of Symmachus…

He obtained these and others of Symmachus' commentaries on the scriptures from a certain Juliana, who, he says, inherited them from Symmachus himself (Historia Ecclesiae, VI: xvii) Palladius of Galatia (Historia Lausiaca, lxiv) records that he found in a manuscript that was "very ancient" the following entry made by Origen: "This book I found in the house of Juliana, the virgin in Caesarea, when I was hiding there; who said she had received it from Symmachus himself, the interpreter of the Jews.

So the first, great Christian scholar finds himself staying with Juliana of Caesarea, who just so happened to be in possession of Symmachus’s library. And of course, there is no proof of a historical Juliana the Virgin, which goes along well with Eusebius’s willingness to make things up…or at least, change them. Palladius chimes in, claiming to have been reading a very ancient manuscript only to find a very convenient personal note embedded in it repeating the claim of Eusebius…supposedly from the pen of Origen himself. Eusebius died in 339 AD, and Palladius was born in 363 AD. The claim about a “very ancient” manuscript is also somewhat puzzling, seeing how Origen died in 253 AD. Sure, that’s “old” by Palladius’s time…but is it really…ancient? I am very skeptical about stories such as that told by Eusebius. In this case, the fact that Juliana is not a known, historical person makes it nigh impossible to prove such a story to be…false. If works existed in Eusebius’s time that attacked the Gospel of Matthew and, in particular, the belief in the virgin birth, then they may well have been written by someone else. It is not impossible that there was another writer named Symmachus, and thus two different men are being confused. Possible, but not likely. Clearly Symmachus has been set up, and this agrees well with the fact that Jerome found himself stating that he greatly admired Symmachus’s translation, but also faulted him for substituting neanis for parthenos, which is not surprising given the fact that Jerome was an advocate of the Perpetual Virginity of Mary myth, one that goes well beyond the Simple Virgin Birth myth, Catholics and Protestants agreeing about the latter but clearly disagreeing about the former. Jerome also found himself siding with Origen in greatly admiring the work of Aquila, although no doubt objecting to the fact that he handled Isa. 7:14 in the same way. Like Aquila, Theodotian was a Hellenic convert to Judaism, who produced a translation that was widely used among Christians, no doubt with the same mealy-mouthed condemnation of his handling of Isa. 7:14. This also lead to stuffing the Big Three into the same box of great translators who were great indeed but were also to be greatly blamed for providing textual support to the greatly heretical beliefs of the Ebionites.

But the question of heresy and the group of Jewish Followers of Jesus is particularly important. Many believe what I have myself stated elsewhere on this website…that the first two chapters of the current version of the Gospel of Matthew were added to the book later. I suggested that traditions amounting to back-filling the biography of Jesus as found in Mark, a biography that, basically, doesn’t exist in Mark and did not exist until stories about his pre-Jordan life appeared, can be called the Gospel of the Young Jesus. These were incorporated in an earlier work…a rough collection of small stories…traditions collected from particular Christian communities. The original version of Matthew started with the revised and expanded starting-point of the Gospel of Mark. Subsequent to the appearance of the Gospel of Matthew in its original form, someone decided to correct a perceived flaw in both the Gospel of Mark as well as the Primitive Gospel of Matthew…the lack of any traditions about the Young Jesus. This person found the earlier collection of Young Jesus traditions, edited it by borrowing various stories and connecting them with the fulfillment of a particular Old Testament prophecy in the very flawed methodology found in the Book of Matthew, including the non-existent prophecy about Nazareth…which was required to explain why a Jerusalem Jesus-Family ended up in Nazareth, and incorporated it as the Prologue to the Book of Matthew. One of the accusations hurled at the Ebionites was that the version of Matthew that they used was "not wholly complete, but falsified and mutilated.” This is the classic claim made by Epiphanius the Polemicist. It is interesting, because the words falsified and mutilated can both be further descriptors to the word…incomplete, but they do not stand as equivalents to one another. The word mutilated, applied to an ancient text, is best used in the sense of…damaged. That implies something to be attributed to the vagaries of ancient texts being passed down from antiquity. But falsified is an accusation that implies that someone has intentionally changed an existing text in order to fundamentally change what is says. Mutilated is just…bad luck. Falsified is an immoral act, as is adultery, and lying, though Evangelicals appear to believe that the latter two, and possibly the former one, are actually acts of righteousness. Falsification has, of course, proven to be popular throughout time, and Eusebius’s falsified version of the Battle of the Milvian Bridge…intriguing seeing how he falsified his own version of it…readily comes to mind. No, wait! I suppose Juliana the Virgin did that! After all, she sat down and created anti-Matthew works in the name of Symmachus! No, wait! There was no Juliana, and if there was, I’m sure she was too busy being a pious virgin to spend much time purchasing the library of one of the Big Three! Accusing the Gospel used by the Ebionites as being incomplete because it had unfortunately been mutilated and maliciously falsified by the same group and apparently at the same time…simply doesn’t hold any water. In fact, I think that the answer is one that picks up Occam’s Razor and wields it with a sublimely simple skill…the version of the Gospel of Matthew utilized by the Community of the Ebionites started, indeed, at Matthew chapter 3, which is where the earliest versions of Matthew originally began. That means that the Ebionites were using a version without the appended…Prologue derived from the Gospel of the Young Jesus, not because they falsified, mutilated, or rendered incomplete a version of the Gospel that had the Prologue…no! They were utilizing a far more reliable, earlier, and more authoritative version of the original Gospel of Matthew, by whatever name it was known by. So, Epiphanius…you are using a too-complete, falsified, too-unmutilated version of the same book that the Ebionites used. And so the Septuagint finds itself going toe-to-toe with an opposing force comprised of an impressive array of textual warriors:

Aquila

Symmachus

Theodotian

Ebionites

The Gospel of Mark

The Primitive Gospel of Matthew

And what of the Massoretic text? It just so happens to emerge with the same text that underlies the Big Three and is clearly in line with the absence of the virgin birth story in the Gospel of Mark, the writings of St. Paul, and indeed…the original version of the Gospel of Matthew. Perhaps…Occam’s Sword. When read in light of these observations, then the Jews did not falsify Isa. 7:14 in the Massoretic text. The import would be, conversely, that Christians altered the Septuagint reading of neanis to support the claim found, inherent, in the Gospel of Young Jesus where it starts…the birth of Christ. I think it’s clear that, and this is something that many Christians have simply not realized…in the Prologue to Matthew as it stands, the supposed virgin birth is not given any more significance than the simple fulfillment of an Old Testament prophecy. NOTHING is made of the virgin birth story after the Prologuer moved on to the next little narrative, and it is echoed nowhere else in the remainder of the book. So, it is a story that simply fulfills a prophecy…that’s it. It never figures as having any relevance to the ministry of Christ and is never brought up in the ontology of Jesus…it is no more relevant than the little story of Jesus’s family going to Egypt to escape Herod, only to be recalled when God apparently couldn’t foresee that Herod’s son would succeed him, or that whichever son that would prove to be would probably have the same attitude toward potential rivals as Herod did. So God, with egg on His face, had to divert the Jerusalemite Royal Family to the little town of Nazareth. I would ask the question…how much would you condemn a person who said…I don’t believe the little story about Jesus in Egypt? Probably not much. But…I don’t believe that Jesus was the result of a virgin birth…now I am a heretic deserving of the worst punishments The Satan can inflict! In fact, the two stories are on a par with one another. A virgin birth, as I have argued elsewhere, does not make one the Son of God…it is, at best, a parlor trick…and one that had actually been done before…seeing how to get the virgin birth you want you are stuck with the virgin birth you don’t want…one that proves that a virgin birth does not make you the Son of God. As for the supplemented version of Matthew, one that the Ebionites knew nothing of, as much as the Roman church’s leaders would assert, with lethal force, that the doctrine of the virgin birth was and is one of the most important tests in determining whether you are a heretic or not…that version of Matthew stands in stark disagreement with the older version of that gospel. So, you can’t condemn the Ebionites for using a version of Matthew that had not yet been supplemented with stories from the Gospel of the Young Jesus…that would be an anachronism. What Eusebius, Jerome, Epiphanius, and countless churchmen had to rail against in order to rail in favor of the Virgin Birth Myth, was an artificially created conspiracy led by Aquila, Symmachus, Theodotian, the Hebrew version underlying those Greek translations, the Jews, and the Ebionites…and! To their chagrin…and with their silence…the Gospel of Mark, the Primitive Gospel of Matthew, the writings of St. Paul, and the fact that none of the suitably supplemented Gospels that made it into the canon ever make any significant use of the virgin birth story as anything more than fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy, or simply as a miracle story that is really cool in your church’s Christmas pageant. The church had come to so demonize the Ebionites for, among other things, not believing in the virgin birth, that any and all textual sources to be found outside the canon that indicated that a virgin birth had not occurred, could simply be lumped in with the Ebionites in their great heretic attack against a story that didn’t have any real significance to it until the later church turned it into the One Great Litmus Test for all who would call themselves Christians…not Ebionites…to be sure.

As I noted in another essay, the material in which Isa. 7:14 is contextualized is highly significant. First, the sign of Immanuel was only brought into being because Ahaz had refused to specify a sign as Isaiah had told him to do. Had Ahaz named his own sign, it wouldn’t have been a virgin birth. Even more important is the fact that Immanuel’s birth is a symbolic one…not a miraculous one.  There are two other children named in the material, two of whom are clearly Isaiah’s sons, and the meaning of the names of all three boys are key to understanding the material. Jesus…Joshua…was never called Immanuel. I have also noted elsewhere that many scholars have argued that Immanuel is, in fact, Ahaz’s son Hezekiah. He would be closely associated with Isaiah, and the Deuteronomists regarded Hezekiah to be the best of all of Judah’s post-David rulers. For them, the key failing of all of Judah’s kings except Hezekiah and Josiah was the failure to remove the bamoth…often translated as…high places. These were, in fact, hills at the top of which a syncretistic cult that combined the Israelite God Yahweh, with figures from Canaanite religion…Baal, really the storm-god Hadad, and Asherah, among others. The bamoth remained in place except for two reigns because Canaan was a land of agriculture, unlike the desert, the ancient place of wandering of the descendants of Abraham. You don’t need rain in the desert, which is a good thing, seeing how you won’t get any. But agriculture needs rain…and so the Storm God Hadad was vital…in other words, Yahweh didn’t make things grow…Baal…the Lordly One...that was his thing. If Immanuel really was Hezekiah, then it would be necessary to argue that Immanuel was to be the birth name, and Hezekiah was the throne name. It must be said that many cultures in the ancient Near East have, quantifiably, had a tradition of the use of throne names. The Assyrians did certainly, and so too the king who reigned over the Syrian territory whose capital city was Damascus. How is that quantifiable? At various times in the historical tradition of the Old Testament we meet with a Syrian named Ben-Hadad, which, of course, means…the son of Hadad, or…the son of the Storm God. Given the years between such references, I think it is clear that we are dealing with Ben-Hadad II, Ben-Hadad III. I feel certain that these are throne names. The name Rezin also appears among Syrian kings of different eras, suggesting that it too was a throne name. But is there evidence of this in ancient Judah? I have referred many times to the king Uzziah, father of king Jotham. Uzziah’s name means…Yahweh is My Strength. But I have also referred to the same man as Azariah, whose name means…Yahweh is my Help. The 2 names look very similar…

עֲזַרְיָה‎‎ ‘Ǎzaryāh,

עֻזִּיָּהוּ ‘Uzzîyāhū

So similar that all that needs to happen is for 1 letter in the name Azariah to be accidentally dropped by a copyist to end up making the name…Uzziah. And many scholars believe that Uzziah is a copyist’s error. The name Uzziah is used in the following passages: 2 Kings 15:13; 15:32; 15:34; 2 Chronicles 26:1; 26:3; 26:8, 26:9; 26:11; 26:14; 26:16; 26:18; 26:19; 26:21; 26:22; 26:23; 27:2. The name is also used in the dating schemes found in the prophets…Isaiah 1:1; 7:1; Hosea 1:1; Amos 1:1; and Zechariah 14:5. But he is called Azariah in 2 Kings 14:21; 15:1; 15:6; 15:7; 15:8; 15:17; 15:23; 15:27. It seems strange that a simple copyist’s error was reproduced so many times, and it seems strange that the names Uzziah and Azariah are both used in 2 Kings 15, producing a narrative with both names. The king’s official name…throne name…was Azariah. How do I know that? Because that is the name used in the Assyrian annals. It also seems strange that a copyist’s error could inadvertently result in a name that has a clearly discernible meaning…Yahweh is my Strength vs. Yahweh is my Help. In the book of 2 Kings, although it is stated that Yahweh struck Uzziah with leprosy, it doesn’t say why this happened. 2 Chronicles is the source of the story that connects Uzziah’s leprosy with a specific, religious irregularity…the king had attempted to perform a cultic function reserved for the priests. The historian Josephus states that as the king was about to make his offering, there was a tremendous earthquake. It split one of the walls of the Temple, allowing light to stream in. When this light hit Azariah’s face, he broke out in leprosy. 2 Chronicles is clear on the fact that the High Priest during that part of the reign of Azariah, and the priest who specifically confronted the king about what he was about to do, was named…Azariah. If Uzziah was the birth name, and Azariah was the throne name, and if you wanted to distinguish between the priest and the king, you might just revert to calling the king by his birth name. But another editorial layer in the historical traditions used by the Deuteronomists referred to the king by his throne name, producing a conflated tradition. Unless, of course, you want to take the position that King Azariah and King Uzziah are two different and distinct persons. Wouldn’t that wreak havoc on Old Testament chronology! The other possibility…theoretically, is that Immanuel was simply a brother of Hezekiah, his mother being about to give birth. The name occurs only two times in the whole of the Old Testament, and all in the context of the prophecy of Isaiah. I suppose that’s odd in its own right, seeing how there is a plethora of names in the Old Testament, including many obscure ones, and somehow this name manages not to appear anywhere else.

The prophetic literature is notoriously difficult to grasp correctly…as far as how the material came to be incorporated into book form. Who did this is usually unclear. Jeremiah became friends with a scribe named Baruch, who became responsible for putting Jeremiah’s material into shape. There are no clues within Isaiah that would lead to any kind of conclusion about Isaiah’s material. Immanuel’s name appears again in 8:8, where the same basic idea appears…Rezin and Pekah will be defeated at the hands of the Assyrians. There is no question that the material has decidedly messianic character:

For to us a child is born,
    to us a son is given,
    and the government will be on his shoulders.
And he will be called
    Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
    Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

Of the greatness of his government and peace
    there will be no end.
He will reign on David’s throne
    and over his kingdom,
establishing and upholding it
    with justice and righteousness
    from that time on and forever.
The zeal of the Lord Almighty
    will accomplish this.

These verses routinely turn up in the Christmas pageant, despite the fact that no one in the gospels, or in any of the New Testament literature, applies these titles to Jesus. At most, they are simple messianic images, and as such, could be applied to any man deemed to be the Messiah…including Jesus. The giving of a child to the nation is completely consistent with Immanuel, the clear conclusion given the fact that Rezin suddenly re-appears in 9:11. So it is possible that material specific to the context of the Immanuel sign is intermingled with material that envisions a future Messiah. It is very hard to believe that a king in the ancient world, who must rule by the threat of violence, and cannot escape being caught up in a seemingly endless series of wars, could be called the Prince of Peace. While Jesus is an excellent candidate for such a role, it is never used in relation to him. If there is a co-mingling of Immanuel-Rezin-Pekah material with messianic prophecies, then this may have been due simply to how later redactors arranged the material. I believe strongly that this is the case, and that Immanuel was not envisioned as the Messiah, and it is telling that both occurrences of the name are inextricably linked to the invasion of Pekah and Rezin.

One might object to the idea that Immanuel is Hezekiah because it would have a significant impact on the chronology of the kings of Judah. I would counter that by saying that the chronological indicators as they apply to the ages of the kings when they took the throne, the lengths of their reigns, and the synchronisms whereby the beginning of the reign of a king is juxtaposed with the year that the king in the other kingdom was currently at in his reign…these numbers are, as a whole, unreliable. It is the case that as material is copied over and over again through the centuries, the data that is most easily corrupted is…numbers. Take the case of Saul, the first king. 1 Samuel 13:1 states that…

Saul was one years old when he became king, and he reigned two years.

Move over Immanuel! Saul the One-Year Old Absolute Ruler! So the chronology of the royal period of the history of the chosen people starts out with a hopelessly corrupt text. Saul clearly wasn’t one years old when Samuel anointed him as king. It is equally clear that he reigned far more than two years. How long did he reign? Ask Acts 13:21…

And afterward they asked for a king, so God gave them Saul, the son of Kish, a man of the tribe of Benjamin, for forty years.

So how did the writer of Acts have such key information? The answer is…he didn’t. There is no doubt that David reigned forty years. I say this because his reign is actually dated in this way: he ruled over Judah for 7 years, and over the whole of the Israelite kingdom for 33 years. This is rather precise. Now, how long did Solomon reign?

And the period that Solomon reigned in Jerusalem over all Israel was forty years

So says 1 Kings 11:42. What an amazing thing it is that David reigned 40 years, and then his son reigned 40 years. And! According to Acts 13:21…

Saul- 40 years

David- 40 years

Solomon- 40 years

Amazing? I suppose…and completely impossible. Many have noted that the story of David and Bathsheba appears to be toward the end of David’s reign. Bathsheba was an upstart wife, quite possibly having put on her striptease at the time David was most likely to see her. She then engineered a coup against David’s older son by going into the king’s bedchamber while he was dying, only to re-emerge with David’s choice of Solomon as his successor. A very similar event happened with...

Esarhaddon of Assyria, whose mother, entering late into the game, became his father’s favorite, and she arranged for the kid Esarhaddon to suddenly jump to the number one spot. This led to a violent inter-familial war, and the same thing happened in David’s family. Solomon himself tells God that he was very young when he succeeded David:

Now, O Yahweh my God, you have made your servant king instead of my father David; but I am a little child…

I love this verse…

For it was so, when Solomon was old, that his wives turned his heart after other gods…

Yes…blame the wife! Wives. It was Solomon’s fault, not theirs. Elsewhere, this idolatry is said to be the result of having to accommodate foreign wives. An Egyptian wife would want to worship Egyptian gods. But who married them? Marrying foreign princesses was part of forming alliances. Nonetheless, the royal court would have known that they would have to provide the means to worship foreign gods for these wives. Still, we learn that Solomon was a minor when he became king, and lived to be an…

…old man. And that means? Well…his reign must have been considerably longer than 40 years, the exact length of the reign of his father. This was recognized by the Jewish historian of the time of the Roman emperor Vespasian…i.e., Josephus:

Solomon died at 94, having reigned for 80 years

This is not correct. What Josephus did was recognize the clear chronological problem and took forty years and added another forty years to it. His implicit suggestion that Solomon was 14 years old when he became king is probably pretty consistent with the truth. So what of Acts 13:21 and the statement that Saul reigned 40 years? The writer simply resorted to the very conventional use of the number 40 in the Old Testament and gave it to Saul. The writers of 1 Kings, having no idea how long Solomon reigned, also gave it to Solomon. So…

Saul- no idea

David- 40 years

Solomon- uncertain

The study of the chronology of the royal period of biblical history was sent up a blind alley when scholars such as Edwin Thiele came up with the preposterous suggestion that both kingdoms…Judah and Israel…followed a practice of co-regencies. This means that at any given time, the kingdom of Judah, for example, actually had 2 kings. So if king X reigned 32 years, and his son, king Y, was made co-regent during the 22nd year of his father and reigned 19 years, then when king X died, he was ascribed a 32 year reign, but when king Y died, he was given a 29 year reign. So! Ten years actually overlap…the same years given to both monarchs. There is no evidence of this practice. So why suggest it? Because of a desire to tenaciously hold onto the dead accuracy of all three sets of chronological markers that I referenced earlier. It is an extreme, fundamentalist impulse to find a way to reconcile the unreconcilable. It is true that when king…

Azariah, aka Uzziah, became ill with a skin disease, at some point, he went into isolation. His son and eventual successor…

…Jotham, was running the government during this period. That is the only verifiable overlap between two kings. And there is no evidence that Jotham actually bore the title of king (melek)while his father was still alive. History shows that you cannot have two kings ruling over the same kingdom…the result is inevitably…civil war. Ashurbanipal…

…or as I like to call him…King Basket-Head, tried it with his brother, Shamash-shum-ukin. They divided the Assyrian empire between them…civil war. The Romans attempted to have more than 1 emperor at a time. In a few rare instances, this worked. But otherwise…civil war. Divine-right absolute rulers do not tolerate partners. When Uzziah died, he was ascribed his full reign. When Jotham died, he was ascribed...below I will admit that the Deuteronomists became confused about the length of Jotham’s reign, no doubt because he governed while Azariah was ill. But the messed-up numbers are due to confusion, not to fictional co-regencies. Still, there are plenty of Thiele-like commentators…and simply go to Wikipedia and look up the kings of Judah and Israel and you will find the absurd assertions of Thiele reproduced by absurd authors attempting to save a bunch of numbers…numbers that are wrong all the way back to Saul and Solomon. In short…they strain out a gnat but swallow the camel. There is a bewildering array of four kings reigning at any given time…two in the North, and two in the South. And there is not a shred of evidence for any of it…whatsoever. But this most Bizarre Chronological Fiction highlights the point I just made…the numbers are hopelessly wrong. The best course of action is to establish dates from the Assyrian royal and link up biblical kings when possible.

The problem for Hezekiah, chronologically, is the dating of Sennacherib’s siege of Jerusalem to the king of Judah’s 14th year. We know that the siege took place in 701 B.C. Problem number two- the date of the attack of Pekah and Rezin against Hezekiah’s father Ahaz. Actually, the attack began at the very end of the reign of Ahaz’s father Jotham. So, the clear picture is that Pekah and Rezin attacked Jotham to force him into an anti-Assyrian alliance. Jotham died, and when Ahaz came to the throne, he made it clear that he would follow the policy of his father Jotham and refuse to join the alliance. So, an attack already underway was simply continued. But the situation involving the powers in Palestine need one more step back. Although there was no system of co-regencies in Ancient Israel, it is possible, as I just noted, that the Deuteronomic redactors were confused when it came Ahaz’s father Jotham and grandfather Azariah. 2 Kings 15:32 states that Jotham was 25 years old when he became king and reigned 16 years.  Ahaz was 20 years old when he became king and he reigned 16 years. And what about grandpa? This is the chronological data…

Azariah- became king when he was 16 years old

Jotham- reigned 16 years

Ahaz- reigned 16 years

This can’t be right. The reign of Jotham and the reign of Ahaz can’t both have been 16 years. So who’s is wrong? 2 Kings 15:32 says what it says about the length of the reign of Jotham, even though 2 Kings 15:30, a mere two verses away, states this:

Then Hoshea, the son of Elah, led a conspiracy against Pekah, son of Remaliah, and killed him. So he reigned in his place in the twentieth year of Jotham.

But if Jotham reigned 16 years, how could there have been a twentieth year of his reign? We know that Ahaz was on the throne in 734 BC, since the Assyrian annals record that he paid tribute to the Assyrian king in that year. I would make this the first year of Ahaz’s reign, and the last year of Jotham’s reign. Here’s the kicker…the Assyrian annals also record that in 738, king Azariah of Judah came into direct conflict with the Assyrian king. In fact, the Assyrian records indicate that Azariah, who was the father of Jotham, and grandfather of Ahaz, and great-grandfather of Immanuel, attempted to set up a regional coalition involving kings in the North. It would appear that he was attempting to create an alliance that would stop the inroads being made by Tukulti-Apil-Esharra III, who took the Assyrian throne after stepping into a royal family squabble and resolving it amicably; well, not so amicably seeing how he resolved the crisis…by killing everyone. That’s not surprising, seeing how he was a particularly sadistic and brutal man, originally governor of Kalhu and a top military officer who bore the name…Pulu. 2 Kings 15:19 refers to him as King Pul. He intended to take the Assyrian empire to new levels, and so it isn’t surprising that he adopted the throne name Tukulti-apil-Esharra, seeing how the first expansion of the old Assyrian kingdom is linked to Tukulti-apil-Esharra I…

…and as Ahaz clearly knew, it was best to stay on his good side and pay him his tribute. This he did as soon as he took the throne. Ahaz’s grandfather Azariah apparently didn’t know that, or he felt that it was worth a chance. This was the first instance of conflict with the king of Judah and the Assyrians. Conflict between the king of Northern Israel and Assyria went as far back as 853 BC, when king Ahab joined a large coalition that turned the Assyrians back at the Battle of Qarqar. Azariah was no doubt aware of the fact that it was only a matter of time before the Assyrian king and his army made their debut outside the walls of Jerusalem. 2 Kings says little about Azariah, no doubt due to the condemnation of him for religious irregularities that supposedly led to the skin disease he contracted. But it does say that he rebuilt a military outpost named Elath, which is well south of Jerusalem on the Gulf of Aqaba…

This would appear to have been a vantage point for keeping an eye on what was happening in Egypt. One must always exercise caution when referring to 2 Chronicles. But it does describe Azariah as not only significantly re-arming, but also subjugating the Philistines, attacking the Arabians and Meunites, and levying tribute on the king of Ammon. He is also said to have re-fortified the walls protecting Jerusalem, including the construction of vantage points that would allow archers to reign down arrows on any attacker. He also fitted various points of the wall with, based on the description, special weapons that appear to be…

…well, perhaps a little more primitive…

…catapults. There is no doubt in my mind that what 2 Chronicles is describing is essentially correct…Azariah was preparing for war. According to the Assyrian records, the anti-Assyrian coalition was the work of Azariah. But the Assyrians defeated this coalition in 738. So the years 738-734 are easily quantified. Azariah placed Judah at the center of a coalition meant to drive Assyrian influence out of Palestine. That failed, and Azariah chose to pay his tribute and refrain from any more anti-Assyrian agitations. However, Rezin of Syria and Pekah of Northern Israel attempt to re-activate this alliance. They turned to Judah. This probably happened after Azariah’s death, when the 2 smoldering fire-brands, to quote Isaiah, insisted that Jotham join the coalition originally put together by his father Azariah. Jotham learned the lesson that his father had learned. He refused, and the result was a concerted attack against Judah seeking to force Jotham back into the anti-Assyrian front. He refused, but died not too long afterwards…in 734, when Ahaz took the throne in the midst of an attack raging outside the walls of Jerusalem. He was desperate. No matter. Isaiah stepped in and, knowing that the king’s wife was pregnant or would be shortly (see below), used the Not-Miraculous Birth of Immanuel…later to be called by the name...Hezekiah, as the sign that Rezin and Pekah would fail when the Assyrian king returned.

Azariah contracted leprosy, or some disease similar to it. The Chronicler connects this misfortune with Azariah’s attempt to supplant the role of the priests in the Temple. When the High Priest, also named Azariah, went to stop him, the king became furious. Then a sudden outbreak of leprosy, which began on his forehead, occurred. Eventually, Azariah found himself in quarantine. Jotham was governing the kingdom. The historian Josephus states that as the king was about to make his offering, there was a tremendous earthquake. It split one of the walls of the Temple, allowing light to stream in. When this light hit Azariah’s face, he broke out in leprosy. Cool story, though clearly apocryphal. But the prophet Amos, who was active during the reign of Azariah, has a book bearing his name that begins…

The words of Amos, who was among the herdsmen of Tekoa, which he saw concerning Israel in the days of Uzziah king of Judah, and in the days of Jeroboam, son of Joash, king of Israel, two years before the earthquake.

Neither 2 Kings nor 2 Chronicles mentions this earthquake. But some have estimated it as measuring roughly 8 on the Richter scale. Isaiah appears to mention it as well…

In that day a man will cast away his idols of silver and gold, which they made to worship, and will give them up to moles and bats, to go into the clefts of the rocks, and into the crags of the cliffs…hiding from the terror of Yahweh and the glory of His majesty, when he arises to shake the earthy mightily.

That is from Isa. 2:20-21. The book of Isaiah is dated, according to 1:1…

The vision of Isaiah, the son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah.

The prophet Amos was active in the North, and Isaiah was active in Judah. Both were contemporaneous, and both referenced an earthquake and made substantial use of earthquake imagery…you thought that one was bad? Just you wait! This earthquake is usually dated to ca. 750. That means that there were roughly 12 years between the earthquake and the uprising of Azariah. The connection between Azariah’s skin disease and the rift in the Temple wall is no doubt a fable. But at some point he developed what may have been leprosy, and it appears that it was first noticeable on his face. Eventually, Jotham would have to assume his father’s responsibilities. So did Jotham reign 16 years? Or was there really a twentieth year of his reign? No. A workable hypothesis would attribute Jotham with a reign of only about 4 years, indicating that Azariah didn’t live more than a few years after his attempt to stop the Assyrians failed. And 20 minus 16 = 4! Jotham took the throne, and at some point, possibly in 735, Rezin and Pekah decided they wanted the Azariah-incited conflict to begin again. Jotham refused, and the two smoldering firebrands attacked. If Azariah died around 738, following his payment of tribute to the Assyrian king, then Jotham reigned roughly four years…during the period 737-734. Rezin was killed by the Assyrians in 732. The conflict in Palestine, usually called the Syro-Ephraimitic War, has been dated differently. But the differences are usually only a couple of years. Perhaps 735-732 can be reckoned as the period of time from the formation of the alliance, to the execution of Rezin. Pekah survived the Assyrian assault, only to be assassinated. However, it is possible that within this date range, the attack against Jotham/Ahaz took place at any given point. It could have begun as a regional conflict before there was open rebellion against the Assyrians. In fact, this idea recommends itself. It would be rather stupid to withhold tribute and renounce the Assyrian overlord first, and then attempt to pull Judah into it. Rezin and Pekah would have sought the biggest possible alliance before provoking an attack of an Assyrian empire at its most powerful. I think that 734 is a good, approximate date.

And therein lies the problem. If 701 was Hezekiah’s 14th year, then he came to the throne in 715. That would then be the year that Ahaz died. 2 Kings 18:2 says that Hezekiah was 29 years old when he became king. That would mean that he was twenty-nine in 715, and thus was born in 744. So he could not have been born in 735, a difference of approximately 10 years. 735 saw three events…the death of Jotham, the accession of Ahaz, and the impending birth of Immanuel. If Immanuel is indeed Hezekiah, and he was born in 735, then he was 34 in 701. If Ahaz reigned for 16 years, then Ahaz died in 719. Hezekiah took the throne that year, when he was 16 years old. That is perhaps roughly two years older than Solomon when he took the throne. Whether it’s Solomon, Esarhaddon, Hezekiah (Immanuel), or the Roman emperor Nero, when the new king is still quite young, the Queen Mother wields enormous power. In the case of Hezekiah, that would be Abi, daughter of Zechariah, a friend of the prophet Isaiah. One might be tempted to speculate that the connection between Zechariah and Isaiah was also a connection between Isaiah and Abi, and thus we know how it came to be that Hezekiah followed a religious course that was consistent with Isaiah’s teachings, and why Hezekiah remained close to Isaiah. The Assyrian siege of 701 took place in the 18th year of Hezekiah’s reign, not the 14th. Of course, the Assyrians put an end to the Northern Kingdom in 722. 2 Kings 18:10 synchronizes this event to the 6th year of Hezekiah. That is completely inconsistent with the considerations just noted. 722 would have been the 13th year of Ahaz. So chronological considerations do not present any real problem for the equating of Immanuel with Hezekiah.

There are two points to be made. In deciding between Jews changing the word betulah to almah in the Massoretic text, or Christians changing the word neanis to parthenos in the Septuagint, clearly the decision would be that it was Christians who changed it. However, it is possible that the original translator of the material in Isaiah being discussed actually used the word parthenos, without intending a literal virgin birth. If I am correct in Ahaz taking the throne in approximately 734, then at some time after his accession, he married Abi, daughter of Isaiah’s friend Zechariah. But it is also possible that the actual marriage had not yet taken place, which would have been due to the extreme military emergency at that time. Since the marriage ceremony had not occurred yet, then Abi was, by the expectations of the culture, particularly given the fact that both families were among the most noble in the kingdom, still a virgin. But the marriage was imminent, and once it had taken place, Abi would not have been a virgin anymore. So! If the translator understood the context in this way, then he could have reckoned that Isaiah was saying that Abi, still a virgin at the moment the conversation was taking place, would conceive and bear a son; and while that son was still a baby…the Assyrian king would arrive and end the machinations of Rezin and Pekah. So the idea is NOT that a virgin, remaining in a virginal state, would miraculously give birth to a son named Immanuel. The idea is that the woman who was at the moment a virgin, would, following the marriage, conceive and bear a son in the normal way. In other words, if this possibility is anything more than hypothetical, then a great deal of subtle precision was exercised when translating almah as parthenos. If the context is possible, then Ahaz was given a double-dose of good news. One of the first concerns of any royal family is producing a male heir and successor. As Isaiah has said, that would happen very soon, so Ahaz need not worry about having a son. And! That son is also the assurance that God will not allow Rezin and Pekah to defeat Judah, so the king should double-down, shout insults at Rezin and Pekah, after all…their mothers wear combat boots...make obscene gestures, and order the archers to fire another volley of arrows from behind the defensive vantage points that Ahaz’s grandfather Azariah had built on the walls of Jerusalem…who knows? Maybe one of them will get lucky and hit Rezin in the eye! Or perhaps put his grandfather’s catapults to good use and possibly hit Pekah over the head with a Pekah’s-Head-Sized rock. Isaiah has told Ahaz what he most wanted to hear…twice. He could afford to be the bravest man in the world. And so the translator, knowing that neanis was the best translation of the Hebrew word in the Vorlage that sat in front of him, nonetheless chose to illustrate the mechanics of the imagery in such a way as to clearly communicate how he understood the narrative. If so, he would have had no idea about the tremendous theological consequences of his decision. In this way, parthenos is, in fact, a perfectly acceptable translation for the word almah…it just doesn’t mean what those who turned the Gospel of the Young Jesus into the Prologue of the Gospel of Matthew thought it meant. That happened later, with Matthew originally beginning with Chapter 3, which is exactly where Mark began his gospel.

This leads to a second point. If there were two stages involved…the first stage being someone collecting traditions about Jesus’s life before the Jordan, something that that person or persons were very much interested in…thus we have the Gospel of the Young Jesus. However, when that collection was transformed into the Prologue, the rough-hewn collection of traditions was put into a structured context. What is that? The redactor or redactors sought to connect each tradition with material in the Old Testament, and therefore each narrative was the fulfillment of some key prophecy of the Old Testament. See where that leads? Is it possible to break the link between the tradition of the virgin birth of Jesus and the reference to Isa. 7:14? Absolutely! If the Gospel of the Young Jesus was simply a collection of traditions, and the identification of passages from the Old Testament that forms the cement that bonds the Prologue together was not part of it, then in the Gospel of the Young Jesus, the redactors of the prologue found a tradition about Jesus’s virgin birth with no reference to Isa. 7:14! The redactors added it. And so it is possible to believe that the story of the virgin birth arose among a group of Christians who knew nothing about Isa. 7:14. The redactors of the prologue knew about the Greek version of that key passage, and knew that the word parthenos appears in it. Not being aware of the reason why the Greek translator chose the otherwise puzzling Greek word that he did, and no doubt not really caring since these redactors were want to simply rip Old Testament passages out of their contexts and attach them to the different narratives which they found in the Gospel of the Young Jesus, they misunderstood and yet utilized the otherwise very precise INTERPRETATIVE TRANSLATION on the part of the Septuagint translator and attached it to the story of Jesus’s birth…as found in the collection. This means that the tradition of the virgin birth was originally completely separate from any reading of Isa. 7:14, and the tradition itself obviously precedes both it being collected and stuck in a collection, as well as the substantial re-working of that collection by redactors who thought that the narratives, with the proper structure, would be a great way to Reverse-Mutilate the original version of the Gospel of Matthew. So! You get to have the virgin birth without any interference from Isa. 7:14! Three stages:

1. The story of the virgin birth of Jesus arises within a particular group of early Christians

2.  Someone, seeking traditions about the young Jesus, finds this tradition, and incorporates it into a collection of such traditions that he was making

3.  Redactors of the early version of the Gospel of Matthew find the collection, think it would be a great supplement to add to the front of the original version of Matthew, but feel compelled to connect each tradition with an Old Testament prophecy, even in those instances where the passage in question isn’t really prophetic at all.

Isa. 7:14 enters the picture at stage three.  But that would certainly lead to a question that is critical to the overall search for the panther. What is that? How that tradition arose…or better put…why did that tradition arise? And I think that the panther may well be at the heart of the answer.

I suppose it was inevitable that this part of the essay series on the Search for the Panther ran a little longer than I originally planned.  And to think…the star of the show hasn’t even appeared yet! Of course, stars appear as a theme, sometimes subliminally, sometimes not-so-subliminally, throughout this website. We met Zoroaster, the central figure of the mighty star-cult…

And so it comes as no surprise that the Magi arrived in Judea having followed a course seen in the stars…

Get on the wrong side of the Little Girl in Big Trouble, and you might find yourself…

…seeing stars! You can even ask Mommy…

I suppose that dealing with Regan would be bad enough. If you were David Bowman, you’d have to deal with HAL, an otherwise nice computer with a soothing voice who nonetheless won’t let you back in your spaceship...

So much for computers! Perhaps all there is to do is fly straight into the Star-Gate. Of course, you might end up somewhere you don’t expect…

My God…it’s full of stars!

End Transmission.