Found in translation
Sir: I read with interest the results of your Christmas poll (‘Do you believe in the Virgin Birth?’ 15–29 December). Galatians iv 4 shows that in about ad 53 Paul hadn’t heard of the Virgin Birth (‘born of a woman, born according to the Law’). But by about ad 90, drawing on Matthew, and Flavius Josephus’s ‘Jewish War and Antiquities of the Jews’, Luke wrote Luke and Acts, elaborating with Matthew on a mistranslation of the word for ‘young woman’ in an Old Testament prophecy. This sowed a seed which fell into the fertile soils of a preexisting Mediterranean matriarchal culture as well as the profound misogynistic psychosexual muddle that afflicted the early Church fathers, of whom St Jerome and St Augustine of Hippo are prime examples.
Rear-Admiral Guy F. Liardet CB CBE
Meonstoke, Hampshire
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