How did the myth of Jesus' resurrection originate?

[Aractus]

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Matt 2:8 et seq. says the Magi went to Bethlehem, and to a house. But Luke 2:7 says “wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn”. I actually have been to the Church of the Nativity, and there on the floor (I have a photo somewhere) is a silver(ish) medallion marking THE EXACT SPOT where Jesus was born. Never mind that the said church was only established some hundreds of years later. I think that’s the one where the mother of Constantine went souvenir shopping, and a local said “You want beerte’place, I got beerte’-place, for good price, best price for you”. (My accent mimics with fondness that of our Egyptian Nile-River tourguide, Amr, who charmingly told us about “eerte’-quacks” -- you know, those shakings that cause buildings to collapse).

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I don't know how many times to explain to you the same thing. At the end of Mt. 1 Jesus is born, and the author (ie Matthew) doesn't tell us where or when he's born. In Mt. 2 the Magi are sent to visit Jesus - after he is born, and in some other location. Luke's account is much longer and more detailed, he details that Mary visits Elizabeth. He never details the Magi visiting Jesus, so you can't try and put something that appears in Matthew in a specific timeframe in Luke especially when we're not told when the Magi came to visit.

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Inns (or caravanserais) at the time (and inns for many centuries thereafter and everywhere) had stables for the animals. You may call it a barn, but it was a stable, animals stayed there, and they were fed, and Luke has Jesus put (not born) in a manger, a feeding trough. I didn’t write the NT. If I had, I’d have hired an editor – he’d have corrected my irrelevant mis-statement that they all stayed in a manger; it was in the stable of an inn. The main point is that the Magi went to a house in Bethlehem, not on the road to anywhere; and Luke says nothing about a house, just an inn and a manger.

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Yes okay, stables.

"They probably stayed just a day"? So, Mary who is about 12 years old gets to the inn, 10 cm dilated already no doubt, has a first baby after a very short labor, baby gets wrapped and put into a manger, the shepherds and angels come, do their adorations and all of that baloney, it all takes only one day, and then they went to their house that was also in Bethlehem?

I stopped reading your post the first time the minute I read that you claimed that Mary was 12. Your claim is nearly as stupid as trying to claim what height she was. Girls would be betrothed soon after reaching maturity (12-13) and that period lasts at least a year.

The Catholics in their wedding vows behave as if this is still the case with their "i do's". Those particular vows were only meaningful in the ancient Jewish culture - betrothal was the legal aspect of Marriage, and the vows and consummation - and of course the wedding ceremony itself happened a year later. Mary could have been any age 13-19 and it would have been perfectly normal. Joseph as a very rough average for the time probably would have been 3-5 years older.

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Never mind that your version will make any woman laugh and sneer -- Luke 2:6 et seq. utterly demolish your impossible fabrication, since he says there that Joe and Mary were there for days before the birth, and the rest of his story also takes time to play out.

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They went to Bethlehem expecting to stay at the Inn.

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By what imaginative device is this implied meaning discovered, uncovered, exposed? Wishful thinking? Certainly not from the context of Is 7:14, my negation further supported from Genesis.

You are focused too much on the one word, when the context is dispositive. I’m not fluent, but enough of a “Hebrew scholar” to be able to read from the Tanakh (the Hebrew, not the Aramaic bits) and understand it, with some help from a parallel English translation. At least, I can reasonably assert the contextual accuracy of the translation. That “hineh ha’almah harah” refers to a woman who is nearby the speaker and his audience and who is already pregnant is clear in the context of the rest of Is 7. The full text of the sentence is: “hineh ha‘almah harah veyoledet ben; vekarat shemo Immanuel”. "Here is the young woman, pregnant; she will bear a son and call his name Immanuel". Compare this with when Hagar was already pregnant with Ishmael by Abraham (the old goat), and the exact same form is used. In Gen 16:4 she conceives, she is pregnant; then in Gen 16:11 an angel tells her she will give birth to a son and will call him Ishmael (God listens). “Hinokh harah veyoledet ben; vekarat shemo Yishmael …”. “Harah” in the Hagar case is unambiguously present tense-pregnant because seven sentences before we learned she had conceived. In the Isaiah case, it is unambiguously present-tense because of the context. In neither case is the “imperfect” or future tense implied, in both cases the woman is already preggers. Such pregnancies can be of young women or old women; but they cannot be of virgins. Note also the conflation of the angelic annunciation to Hagar with that to Mary. Literary stuff. Forget just "almah", it is a trap for the credulous; do the context.

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It's a trap? If I go to the dictionary definition I can call bullshit on you:

http://www.blueletterbible.org/lang/lexi...ongs=H5959

Gen 16:4 doesn't contain the word almah. It's translated as virgin elsewhere in the OT too.

That the two translations were independent is unproven, nonsense on its face: LXX was from about 2nd C. BCE, thus available to the author of Matt.

Why don't you try refuting my argument then? Matt never quotes from the LXX, he quotes only from the Hebrew. He translates it himself, and there's no evidence that Isaiah had already been translated into Greek by the first century!

I’m puzzled at the stubbornness of your refusal to get the drift of this straightforward argument. If you really don’t follow it, you are regrettably innumerate and might do well to consult with a statistician or mathematician at the University. Let me try one last time: David lived 1000 years or so before Jesus.

No, he lived at least 1,000 years before Christ. You're the one claiming a specific amount, you're the one claiming to know that number as fact, not me. If you can provide me conclusive proof that he lived 1040-970BC then fine - otherwise, you're the one who believes the OT is complete reliable history regarding this, so much so you believe that we can calculate exactly when David lived!

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I will point out the obvious to you, although why it escaped you is a mystery to me: From Abraham to David you have the OT, and whether that list is historically true or not, there is only the need to copy from the former to the NT from the texts that would have been available. There is no corresponding set of texts going all the way from David to Joseph, 1000 years, such that the other two groups of 14 generations can likewise be just copied.

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Yes there are - or rather were - but they just weren't in the OT. Why is this difficult for you to grasp?

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The very fact, by the way, of 14 generations are claimed to be in each group argues AGAINST the notion of skipping generations in a genealogy: it either is a magical set of 3 groups of 14 generations as asserted by Matthew, or it is not. Skipping defeats Matt’s purpose, dontcha think, if the records were available to all, as you insist? He’d surely be caught fudging the numbers. Also, since Matt says there were 2x14=28 generations from David to Jesus, and the other genealogy lists more than 28, both cannot be true. Got it? (I didn’t re-count the lists, I’m taking your word).

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Matt counted 28 generations. He didn't count every generation, and nor did he have to.

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This above of yours is beyond confoundedly stupid, AR – I can’t begin to disentangle such convoluted speculation. But I leave it untouched, for the ages.

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You behave in such a childish way. If you *knew* both to be true, the way that you *know* the reliability of the OT in calculating when David lived, then you would also know that it would mean that explanation had to be the case. There's little you have done, but kick up a fuss that the genealogies are either 1. different (which is fine if Luke's is for Mary) and 2. different lengths (also fine if Luke deliberately ignores generations listed by Matthew).