Sir: Whatever the actual origins of the vir- gin birth
narratives and dogma, which have occasioned a rich and interesting critical literature, Richard Dawkins is mistaken in asserting so confidently that they arose entirely from a misinterpretation of a mistranslation of Isaiah vii 14. This Hebrew passage speaks of an unidentified marriageable maiden (almah ) who would 'conceive and bear a son' and the Septu- agint translation of Greek-speaking Jews speaks of a virgin (parthenos) at the time of marriage. Even with recent speculation about expectations among Hellenistic or Essenic Jews about the birth of the future Messiah, this brief and relatively obscure sentence alone could hardly have given rise to belief in the virginal conception of Jesus, though it proved suitable retrospec- tively as a prophetic indication of what the primitive Church accepted for other reasons.
A little education is an arrogant thing when it informs the scientistic mind of Dr Dawkins, who by his own account is the product of millions of years of haphazard evolution from a mindless cosmos which has had no idea of what it has done. Out- side his limited sphere of trying to explain, for example, the transformation of species by imagining monstrously unlikely transi- tional forms, which exist in his lecture- notes if not the fossil record, the telegenic professor succeeds in matters Roman Catholic only by combining the scholarship of a Dave Allen with the humour of a Joseph McCabe.
Revd Fr William Mingay
St Peter's Church, Corpusty, Norfolk
Previous page
