Free Jesus Lied - He Was Only Human: Debunking the New Testament by C.J. Werleman

interpretative errors and rookie mistakes. So, why did Matthew write that Jesus was born to a virgin? It was because he found an obscure passage in the book of the prophet Isaiah that read:
    “ A virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call him Immanuel.” (Isaiah 7:14 NIV)
     
    This was Matthew’s attempt at “Come all see what’s written in the Hebrew Bible, and now look at the birth of Jesus. It must be true, he is the Messiah!” There are a couple of problems that Matthew runs right into. First and foremost, the passage from Isaiah was never intended to be a messianic prophecy; it was a prediction of an event that would occur in Isaiah’s own lifetime. Isaiah wrote this passage to provide King Ahaz, who pre-dated Jesus by more than 800 years, encouragement that he would eventually be given victory over his enemies.
    Isaiah documents that the House of David and King Ahaz were waging war against the Northern Kingdom of Israel, led by King Pegah, and the Kingdom of Israel led by King Retsin. The Bible records that Ahaz and Jerusalem were on the brink of defeat and facing destruction. God called for Isaiah to deliver a message to King Ahaz. The memo read, “I will send a deliverer to ensure the two hostile armies will fail in their attempt to capture the nation.”
    “ Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel. He will eat curds and honey when he knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right. But before the boy knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right, the land of the two kings you dread will be laid waste.” (Isaiah 7:14-16 NIV)
     
    Isaiah makes it crystal clear that the narrative was a prophecy about the failed siege of Jerusalem by the two attacking armies from the north. The last sentence, in particular, states that the two enemy nations will be defeated before the time that the child (Immanuel) will reach the age of maturity. Furthermore, two other Old Testament passages, namely 2 Kings 15:29-30, and 2 Kings 16:9, confirm that this prophecy was fulfilled with the assassination of the two respective kings. In other words, the fulfillment of this prophecy took place nearly eight centuries before the birth of Jesus, and had nothing to do with a future messianic prediction.
    Henceforth, another piece in Matthew’s puzzle to reverse engineer the story of Jesus to the Hebrew Bible.
    Secondly, Matthew’s Hebraic to Greek translation skills lets him down badly. The Hebrew word used in Isaiah is ‘alma’, meaning young woman. If read correctly, Isaiah was writing that a young woman shall conceive and bear a son. When Matthew interpreted ‘alma’ to mean virgin he subsequently used the Greek word for virgin, ‘parthenos’. And this 2000-year myth was thus sealed with a typo.
    The third major problem Matthew has, is when he quotes the verse from Isaiah into his birth of Jesus’ narrative, going as far as to give the meaning to the name Immanuel – ‘God’s with us’. Immanuel Christ seems kind of odd, don’t you think?
    A question that has always bothered me, even beyond the points that I have raised thus far, is why does Jesus never make a single reference to his miraculous conception by his mother? As we will review in later chapters, Mary makes several appearances throughout the New Testament but never makes mention of her discussions with angels, or God, or her virginal conception. Furthermore, everything that Jesus ever says or does during his lifetime seems to come as complete surprise, if not shock, to her. Mary appears to have surprisingly low expectations of the son that she conceived in a game of midnight ‘bury-the-bishop’ with the Holy creator.
    Unfortunately for the faithful, the discrepancies do not end here. In Luke’s narrative, the angel Gabriel came to visit her to inform her that she’d soon be pregnant with God’s child. The angel never says anything to