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Your assertion that Matthew quoted from the Septuagint is the most repeated argument missionaries use in their attempt to explain away Matthew's stunning mistranslation of the Hebrew word alma. This well-worn response, however, raises far more problems than it answers. To begin with, your contention that "parthenos does mean virgin" is incorrect. The Greek word parthenos can mean either a young woman or a virgin; for this reason the Greek word parthenos can be found in the Septuagint referring to someone who is not a virgin. For example, in Genesis 34:2-4, Shechem raped Dinah, the daughter of the patriarch Jacob,...

Dear John, I am an EX-charismatic-fundamentalist-bapist-xtian (What a mouthful! It nearly choked me too!) in the process of converting to Orthodox Judaism and so I read your article for several reasons and would like to respond to you with some thoughts. I believe that the main problem we are dealing with here is LACK OF STUDY on the part of both Jewish and Christian people and so, the average ordinary person is woefully ignorant of the TRUTH of the other¡¯s religion/beliefs and that is the root behind it all. As you may gather from my background, I too believed that...

ARTICLE: The Science Community's Myopia Over Intelligent Design by William Dembski By attacking intelligent design theory, the scientific establishmentcontinues to insulate evolutionary biology from critique and discussion. The challenge of intelligent design for evolutionary biology is real. This is not like someone who claims that ancient technologies could not have built the pyramids, so goblins must have done it. We can show how, with the technological resources at hand, the ancient Egyptians could have produced the pyramids. By contrast, the material mechanisms known to date offer no such insight into biological complexity. Cell biologist Franklin Harold, in his most recent...

One hallmark of modern-day Christian fundamentalists is their insistence that the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are literally true in every detail and a blueprint for legislators. Yet there must be moments when even these zealots notice that the four evangelists often contradict each other on facts and morals. Some may wish it to be otherwise, but the Gospels are quite simply not gospel. At the other end of the faith spectrum, the evident disharmony between the quartet of accounts is often used to dish the whole idea of a historical Jesus. That, too, misunderstands these ancient texts....

The descent of the divine saviour implies other narrative elements. It means that there are two realms, Above and Below. Above is the region of Light, and Below is the region of Darkness, the dark prison from which we need to be rescued and from which no one belonging to Below can release us. Thus no Below-type act of liberation can do us any good, no transfer from one area of Below to another, such as from Egypt to Palestine or from slavery to freedom. What imprisons us is the human condition, which is one of bondage to the powers...