this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2025
1007 points (98.8% liked)
Comic Strips
20718 readers
3412 users here now
Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.
The rules are simple:
- The post can be a single image, an image gallery, or a link to a specific comic hosted on another site (the author's website, for instance).
- The comic must be a complete story.
- If it is an external link, it must be to a specific story, not to the root of the site.
- You may post comics from others or your own.
- If you are posting a comic of your own, a maximum of one per week is allowed (I know, your comics are great, but this rule helps avoid spam).
- The comic can be in any language, but if it's not in English, OP must include an English translation in the post's 'body' field (note: you don't need to select a specific language when posting a comic).
- Politeness.
- AI-generated comics aren't allowed.
- Adult content is not allowed. This community aims to be fun for people of all ages.
Web of links
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world: "I use Arch btw"
- !memes@lemmy.world: memes (you don't say!)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Isaiah 7:14 calls mary a "Almah" which is a unmarried but ready to marry woman; and the implication is virgin, which is why it was used for virgin too.
Virgin Mary is almost certainly a mistranslation.
The point was that jesus was the child of a unmarried couple, which was seen as bad, and yet jesus is fucking jesus.
Personally I prefer Christ on a cock. Which because I have had my mind poisoned by the French invokes the image of Jesus riding a giant rooster.
Die for my sins harder, daddy.
That's how i always meant it, when i said this.
I hardly think this was necessary.
I think it nailed his point to a t
No you don't understand it had to be done
Didn't Jesus have brothers and sisters? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brothers_of_Jesus
The name's Christ, James Christ.
From now on I'll exclaim "JOSES CHRIST!" Instead because I don't want his brothers to feel different..
Well, Jermaine and Janet Christ both had decent solo careers after the death of Jesus
Hoe say Christ.
Jesus was the first born. Even if Mary was a virgin when he was born, this isn't necessarily the case for his younger siblings
Yeah, but you have to factor in the rabid Christian belief that she’s an eternal virgin. So they have to make up all kinds of complicated explanations for how any siblings could exist.
(According to official doctrine they were either cousins or children of Joseph’s from a previous marriage)
German uses the word Jungfrau (literally young woman), there's no separate word explicitely defining a state of not having had sex.
I'm guessing Almah is similar.
But I heard a different story about the "virgin birth" - problem is I have no idea if it's true or not. Anyhow:
There was some sort of ritual where young women were invited to spend a night at the temple, with priests. Due to the religious nature of this, they were still considered to be virgins ("marriable" I guess?) afterwards. Quite the opposite, it was seen as an honour. Even if they got pregnant.
So there's your "Virgin" Mary who was "visited by an angel" to conceive.
edit: there is some evidence that girls used to work and live at the temples, and my story is likely an interpretation of the Gospel of James.
From what I found, Mary supposedly lived at the temple from childhood as a consecrated virgin.
So apparently she was groomed by the priests?
This is your source.
To be honest, I was more into ancient Greek, Egyptian and Norse than Christian mythology as I was growing up, so yeah, it might be.
I am not a scholar on these things by far.
I don’t think there’s any evidence of this.
The Bible has a story with a character pretending to be a temple prostitute to secure her inheritance. But when she becomes pregnant, she is supposed to be put to death. I don’t think temple prostitution was at all a thing by 700 BCE, much less 3 BCE, and it seems more like a holdover from extremely uncomfortable ancient at the time of writing practices - kinda like some of the remnants of child sacrifice that you can find in the OT. I think this is also something the Romans would have noted.
This is something I would believe about a Roman temple maaaaaaaybe. I think your source heard a garbled version of the idea of the Vestal Virgins, and got really confused beyond that.
At what point did the mistranslation occur? There have been many translations.
It was between the anime and the first OVA, the original manga used the previous sentence.
In the Septuagint, so still in the Jewish context. For more details watch this short video.
Oh ot all makes sense now!
/s
It makes sense that mary literally just had premarital sex and got pregnant.
It is insane that Christians get it wrong.
My bet is it's to weed out dissidents, question the obvious fake bullshit and we can cut your head off before you become an opposition leader or something. They did burn and torture so many people because of this.
The idea that Mary was a virgin predates Christianity having any sort of power. It’s more the influence of Greek philosophy (anti materialism)
Isaiah is Old Testament, it doesn't refer to anything Jesus-related (unless you're Christian and really love bending the text to your will).
Yes and if you continue reading, and listen to Christians, you will see that it is most likely the source of Matthew 1:23. Which was written in greek and used "parthenos", which seems to mean the same thing like almah.
https://biblehub.com/greek/3933.htm
Isaiah didn't talk about Mary or Jesus but talked about his own time. Messiah is this context meant savior in the political sense. It's not a prophecy for the distant future, only in the Septuagint much later. But don't take it from me, take it from Dan McClellan.
Frankly, I am not a scholar but a willing listener. So Dan probably knows better than me.
But what i don't understand about his point is the claim of mistranslation by using parthenos.
parthenos does seem to mean the same thing as almah
https://www.billmounce.com/greek-dictionary/parthenos
https://biblehub.com/greek/3933.htm
I am very willing to accept that isaiah 7:14 wasn't talking about jesus, but like Dan says later authors do mean mary when talking about parthenos. So my point does seem to stand.
But let's say Dan is 100% correct, then almah got mistranslated and applied to Mary to fulfill the misunderstood prophecy and then my point is still kinda right that almah got mistranslated by Christians to made Mary a virgin.
In short, I think my point kinda stands either way, while I might picked a bad verse to make my case and my argument and understanding was slightly misguided.
I was reacting to the "Isaiah talks about Mary" part of your argument. I'm not a scholar either and I linked a very short video but in other contexts, Dan elaborates that the Greek has been used for a raped woman who therefore isn't a virgin anymore but the main meaning is virgin.
I'm not sure what your point was. I neither up nor downvoted your comment. But since the whole birth story is fabricated by arguably Christians, it either was by applying the mistranslation of Isaiah or, if the intended audience of the gospels understood it to mean "young woman", it was an even later invention. If your point is that Jesus wasn't the son of a virgin and never claimed to be, than sure.
That is my point, yes.
I am sorry if I wrote my comment in a way that sounded aggressive.
My point is basically, (as far as I am aware of) all the "virgin mary" claims come from translating a word (different words in different languages) which could mean young woman or virgin, while she was obviously pregnant, making 1 translation much more likely than the other one and Christians somehow choose "virgin".