Jesus Wasn't Pagan

[Darat]

There is a decent argument against the virgin birth using biblical texts, but I don't think using a 17th century translation of "pneuma" as ghost is giving an accurate picture of what Matthew was writing. To my knowledge, at the time of the KJB translation, "ghost" had a different connotation to how we would use the word today, which is why modern translations use the word "spirit". Literally pneuma means "breath".

It's irrelevant to my point exactly how the supernatural entity is described, Jesus according to the Bible was conceived via the "same" mechanism many other "children of the gods" were in many other mythologies - i.e. a supernatural entity did the deed.

 

[Primus]

I always thought Jesus sounded more Buddist than Christian. Don't know many Christians who take kindly to being homeless and hanging out with debt-collectors and hookers.

 

[ceo_esq]

It's irrelevant to my point exactly how the supernatural entity is described, Jesus according to the Bible was conceived via the "same" mechanism many other "children of the gods" were in many other mythologies - i.e. a supernatural entity did the deed.

Yet it's the mechanism (or, some might argue, the lack of one) resulting in Jesus' conception that is one of the features of the story that distinguishes from most of the alleged mythological antecedents. I think we may fairly describe the "mechanism" (with that term's suggestion of moving parts and material processes) of the conception of "many other 'children of the gods'" to be good old sexual intercourse, the absence of which is one of the central features of the Christian story about Jesus' conception (which I earlier reduced to its essential components of "a child conceived by a divine father and a mortal mother who was a virgin at the time of the birth"). I think the author of the essay linked in the OP was on to something when he argued that merely pointing out that other figures had divine or semi-divine parentage is "vague and unhelpful" in terms of the discussion of potential pagan antecedents for the Christian virgin birth: "What such 'similarities' boil down to seems to be the earth-shattering revelation that supernatural things happen to supernatural figures, which is essentially a tautology."