Do you accept Jesus, the man?

@walabby you just showed your ignorance. The Septuagint is the Greek translation of the old testament and done before Jesus was born..

@walabby The "mistranslation" is really more of a misinterpretation. Isaiah was talking about a young woman who was already pregnant at the time he wrote it, saying she would name her son Immanuel. Yeshuah is not Immanuel any more than George is Michael. Isaiah not only didn't mean the messiah would be born of a virgin, he wasn't saying anybody would nor was he talking about the messiah at all.

At any rate, the myth is the myth. The myth is that Yeshuah the Nazarene was born of a virgin.

@SparkleLeaf I recall a rabbi once explaining, in a radio programme, that Mary was originally descibed by an old Hebrew word that would simply mean "young woman".

As a theological riddle I often wondered why poor Joseph was more or less sidelined.

As the entire tradition was patriarchal from the ancient Hebrew "prophets" onwards, maybe even before their time, I would have thought it more have been logical to have given Joseph some sort of Divine intervention making one of his "seed" (as they said in those days) being that of Someone Special.

Although that still relegates Mary to being "only" Jesus' grower and mother, it might have prevented the cruel "Immaculate Conception" myth later developed by the Mediaeval Church to excuse its mysogyny and its notion that children are born full of sin due to the way they are started.

It was also have made the narrative slightly less incredible than parthenogenesis; although of course that principle would have been totally unknown two millennia and more ago.