Christians - even the Bible says that Jesus was not God so why do you say he was ?

[jenny1972]

The early manuscript of Matthew from the second century, and which is a ‘critical edition' in that it incorporates all the variant versions of the manuscript relating to the text in question. Here there is no virgin birth story, but rather there is a genealogy in variant forms wherein Joseph is the father of Jesus, and not God or a holy ghost. Variant A became the traditional text which now concludes the genealogy in our ‘authorized' copies of Matthew. The text diverges to list the variants in the different manuscripts. The Syriac variant from the second century, wherein Joseph is explicitly referenced as the father of the Jesus figure.

The Greek variant is an abbreviated version of the Syriac text, and states "And Joseph begat Jesus, the one called Christ." Both the Syriac and Greek variants have no ‘virgin birth myth', which is an indication that the virgin birth mythology had not become a part of the authorized lexicon of the Matthew gospel during the second century, but that copies of the manuscript without the virgin birth story were still extant and circulating at that time.

http://www.awitness.org/essays/virgin.html

The Syriac manuscript includes no virgin birth mythology, since once again it was Joseph who ‘begat Jesus', and the genealogy, in part, reads in translation, ": "Eliud begat Eleazar, Eleazar begat Matthan, Matthan begat Jacob, Jacob begat Joseph; Joseph, to whom was betrothed a young woman, Mary, begat Jesus who is called Messiah."

Versions of the manuscript which were still circulating in the second century without the virgin birth story, which had not at that time become part of the canonical and thus accepted rendition of Matthew (itself a product of cutting pieces from all the variants to come up with a standard version ... this is not in itself a simple task, given the hundreds of thousands of variant readings for all New Testament manuscripts in existence, the scale of this problem being very familiar to translators but less well known to the average Bible reader ... the end product is the result of innumerable human value judgments, with what we would call a canon becoming a formal creation only in the fourth century).