No more than Latin is the mother tonight of modern day Italians. They spoke Aramaic, a related language. I’m sure scholars spoke (or at least read) biblical Hebrew, but it wasn’t the language of the common man.
And what @md-2000 said. The theological strand of early Christianity that grew into modern-day Christianity was largely created by Paul. The groups that proselytized among the Jews mostly died out, and their remnants were presumably eradicated as heresies after the Council Of Nicea standardized the religion.
We know that there were two competing early churches, one that was focused on Jews, and the other, in which Paul played a major role, more ecumenical. They argued about things like whether Christians had to keep kosher (Paul says “no”.) Paul’s won. That doesn’t mean he invented Christianity from whole cloth, but he had a lot of influence on where it ended up, as witnessed by the large chunk of the new testament written by him.
Here’s what Wikipedia says:
As Gentiles joined the young Christian movement, the question of whether they should convert to Judaism and observe the Torah (such as food laws, male circumcision, and Sabbath observance) gave rise to various answers. Some Christians demanded full observance of the Torah and required Gentile converts to become Jews. Others, such as Paul, believed that the Torah was no longer binding because of Jesus’ death and resurrection. In the middle were Christians who believed Gentiles should follow some of the Torah but not all of it.[55]
…
The Council of Jerusalem did not end the dispute, however.[57] There are indications that James still believed the Torah was binding on Jewish Christians. Galatians 2:11-14 describe “people from James” causing Peter and other Jewish Christians in Antioch to break table fellowship with Gentiles.[78] (See also: Incident at Antioch). Joel Marcus, professor of Christian origins, suggests that Peter’s position may have lain somewhere between James and Paul, but that he probably leaned more toward James.[79] This is the start of a split between Jewish Christianity and Gentile (or Pauline) Christianity. While Jewish Christianity would remain important through the next few centuries, it would ultimately be pushed to the margins as Gentile Christianity became dominant.
No doubt, there weren’t exactly two factions. But it seems to be a good approximation. And Paul’s faction won. And there’s a ton of stuff in Christianity that doesn’t make sense from a Jewish perspective, and was almost certainly formalized by people who had never been Jews and didn’t have much but way of Jewish background. The most striking is the common Christian claim that a perfect blood sacrifice, being the ability of mere humans to perform, was required for forgiveness of sins. The old testament gives enormous details on all the required sacrifices, and the “sin offering” is explicitly dependant on the wealth of the sinner. A rich man had to sacrifice a nice young bullock, but a poor man could sacrifice a dove, and a really poor man sacrificed some grain. So, very much within the capacity of ordinary men, and no requirement for blood.
Most of the New Testament, and hence most of the writing on which Christian beliefs are based, consists of letters written by Paul. And another book, Acts of the Apostles, largely concerns the disputes between Paul and Peter, and their resolution.
Regardless, if you look at the sentence structure in the original Hebrew, it does not state, or even imply that the virgin referenced is going to remain a virgin through the experience of becoming pregnant, carrying a child, and giving birth.
But Paul was a Jew, so anything that “was almost certainly formalized by people who had never been Jews and didn’t have much but way of Jewish background” probably wouldn’t have come from him.
But this maybe makes it sound like Paul’s letters predated Christianity. Paul’s letters were written to Christian churches.
It’s true that Paul’s letters are our source for some Christian beliefs, but that doesn’t mean Paul originated them. (Kind of like how we don’t know how much of what’s in Euclid’s Elements originated with Euclid himself.)
I agree with the second sentence, but can you provide an example of a woman who was carried off either without forced sex, or where consent was freely given? It seems more like the ancient words for “rape” just have a different focus than the modern (the violence of the abduction vs the violence of the resulting sex acts), but are still pretty coterminous in their focus on violence against women with sex as a major part of it.
I don’t think marrying someone afterward counts as consent, or waiting a while to commit the acts of sexual violence.
On the other hand, the notion that a woman should express consent is shockingly modern. I don’t think (to return to the subject of the thread) that God or even Gabriel obtained Mary’s consent, either, or Joseph’s, either.
I can’t cite specific sources, but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen versions of the Helen of Troy story where Helen went with Paris willingly, but was still described as “raped”.
The whole virgin birth come from the mistranslation of Isaiah in the Septuagint is well known.
I first ran into this almost 30 years ago in, IIRC, Elaine Pagels’ book The Origin of Satan.
As I remember it, the theory is that the authors of Matthew and Luke looked through the Septuagint for signs to convince other Jews that Jesus was the promised messiah.
Back to the article I linked to above:
It’s interesting that the whole deal about the virginity was from a mistranslation.
Sorry, i knew he was born a Roman citizen, and didn’t realize he was also a Jew.
A lot of very anti-Jewish and non-Jewish stuff in Christianity does come from Paul, though. He’s certainly the authority for “you don’t need to follow the law God gave the Jews.”
In the link I gave, the page includes a discussion of the Hebrew word “kharash” that is translated into tektōn in the Septuagint and such. Sometimes (but not always) a suffix is added to indicate the material the work with.
Both Hebrew and Aramaic have a word that might mean “craftsman” in some sense: naggar and naggara, resp. The former appears in the Talmud. The later is likely to be the word locals used in describing Joseph’s line of work. The gospel writers would then have translated that into Greek.
I guess the other question is, how big was Nazareth? What sort of work would a fullt-time craftsman do, and was the town big enough to support that? I suppose we’re back to stuff that’s really hard to pin down, like how much wood furniture would the average working class Nazarean have and how often is it replaced? What was Jewish society of the time like - were there the equivalent of Squires and Knights and other lesser nobles in the Nazareth area to be richer clients for woodwork?