Was reading Matthew 1:18 in the NLT today. Some people don't like the NLT and, at first blush, here is an example of why:
The NLT reads as follows:
18 This is how Jesus the Messiah was born. His mother, Mary, was engaged to be married to Joseph. But before the marriage took place, while she was still a virgin, she became pregnant through the power of the Holy Spirit.
.
Ok, so here's the thing that I was thinking about. Matthew 1:18: In the NLT reads really well, as does the NLT in general. That's why I like it and why I've convinced Lithgow Anglican Church to trial it. What excited me was this: the NLT renders one of the final clauses this way: "...while she was still a virgin, she became pregnant...".
This wording excites me because liberals have long pointed out that the Greek word for virgin (parthenos) is able to mean both virgin and young woman. So, they have argued, Mary was just a young woman, not a virgin, and therefore the virgin birth is a pious misunderstanding of Scripture.
Before we laugh it out of court, there is some exegetical basis to this. Matthew is quoting Isaiah 7:14, from the Greek (LXX) of the Old Testament. Isaiah was speaking both about the shadow fulfillment--Mrs Isaiah indeed fulfilled this sign in the short term--and we know he also spoke, perhaps unknowingly, about the ultimate fulfillmentas narrated in Matthew 1:18.
Furthermore, the word in the original Hebrew of Isaiah 7:14 muddies things further. My Gramcord software's Princeton Abridged BDB (while camping I don't have better lexica to aid me!) says that the word refers more to something like "a young woman (ripe sexually, maid or newly married)". This certainly doesn't require Mary to be a virgin! Well, it does a little: 'maid' is an archaic English word for a virgin. Nevertheless, we're not limited to insisting Mary was, in fact, a virgin.
So I was delighted when I read Matthew 1:18 in the NLT because it said, "while Mary was still a virgin...". Now, imagine substituting "young woman" for "virgin"... "while Mary was still a young woman...". This doesn't make sense! There is a massive logic hole if this is how the original Greek was worded, because we expect that Mary would become pregnant while still a young woman! What we don't expect (and is therefore worthy of note by Matthew) is that while she was still a virgin... That blows our socks off!
So I turned to the original Greek to see if what the Greek said is helpful to our cause:
My intentionally rough, but close-to-literal translation reas thus:
18 And this way the birth of Jesus came to be: His mother Mary, having been betrothed* to Joseph, before they came together was found to be pregnant from the holy Spirit.
Note:
* 'betrothed' or engaged was legally binding in Mary's culture and to break the rules of marriage even in the case of being betrothed was considered the same. So infidelity was as bad as marital indifelity; divorce was the same as marital divorce.
So it is possible from the original for someone quite liberal to insist that Mary had been a 'loose' young girl but had never slept with Joseph, so the young woman, before coming together with Joseph, was found to be pregnant (and the myth of the Holy Spirit conception was purveyed by Mary to hide her looseness).
Of course, you can see the level of sophistry required at this point to maintain the denial of the virgin birth!
I'm throwing my lot in with the virgin birth and with the helpfulness of the NLT's translation for these two reasons:
- No one denies that the Bible says Mary and Joseph didn't have sex before they got married.
- The struggle is how to say that gently when the euphemism of the Bible ('they did not come together') is at worst a source of smut (come/cum) and at best just plain meaningless.
So appreciate this fine way they handled the original, but don't think it "proves" the virgin birth (or that it needs "proving" anyway!).
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