Erasure

I’m reading George Orwell’s 1984. It’s a phenomenal piece of literature. There is a scene in the book that hit me hard. Allow me to first give some context before I explain the scene.

In the book, the main character Winston expresses how vague and fuzzy his recollection of the past is becoming. Information is highly controlled by The Party and one of their departments, The Ministry of Truth, is responsible for constantly adjusting and updating the historical records. They have systems in place for recalling newspapers, updating the texts, destroying the old ones, and re-issuing them. This bothers Winston, but he can’t even tell if the information being replaced was even true to begin with. From his perspective, they are simply replacing false information with more false information, according to the whims of The Party. He has no idea what is true and what is false, what historical events are fictitious or real, which details contain kernels of truth or none at all. History is constantly being erased and revised.

But then he recalls a day where, for the first and only time in his life, he held evidence in his hand that The Party was lying about a specific event. There were three enemy leaders that were on trial for their crimes against The Party. The leaders publicly confessed their crimes and were given positions in The Party. Perchance, on Midsummer’s day, Winston happened to walk into a café where these three leaders were seated at a table. It was dangerous to even be seen in the same neighbourhood as them, let alone the same building. He noted that they were just sitting there, broken noses, with tears in their eyes. Several months later, these three leaders were re-convicted. They were forced to re-confess their original crimes, along with new ones that they had been committing since their reintegration into The Party. They were executed. And then, at his job in The Ministry of Truth, Winston happened upon a torn piece of newspaper about their new crimes. It stated that those three leaders had, on Midsummer’s day, been in a different country consorting with the enemies of The Party. Winston held onto the fragment for a moment before dropping it into a “Memory Hole” where it would be incinerated.

In that moment Winston saw behind the curtain. He knew that those men were in a café on Midsummer’s day, and yet The Party had published propaganda saying that they were elsewhere. This small connection called into question every bit of information The Party published. Subconsciously he knew that this was happening constantly, but there was no way to prove it. History had been made unfalsifiable.

Here’s an abrupt change of topic, although not really.

The Septuagint is a translation of the original Hebrew scriptures from the Biblical Hebrew language into Koine Greek. This translation happened around the 3rd-1st century BCE. Biblical Hebrew was no longer widely spoken or read by the Jewish community so the Septuagint was an important translation. The Septuagint is quoted in both Paul’s letters and the Gospels.

There is a prophecy in Isaiah 7:14 that reads as follows in the NIV translation:

Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.

In the original Hebrew text, the word used for “virgin” is “almah”. The word “almah” has no concern for the woman’s virginity, but refers to a young woman who has reached puberty. The word that explicitly refers to a virgin in Hebrew is “betulah”. However, when this passage was translated from Hebrew into Greek in the Septuagint, the translator used the word “parthenos”, which is associated with virginity (although it can occasionally be used to simply refer to a young woman). The author of the gospel of Matthew (1:18-25) includes a reference to the Isaiah 7:14 passage in the Septuagint also using the word “parthenos”. Most English translations render both passages as “virgin”, although some have now started to use “young woman” instead.

Let’s review some other information about the virgin birth narrative.

1. Neither Mark, John, or Paul explicitly mention or refer to the virgin birth.
2. Matthew and Luke give conflicting accounts of the narrative, with little overlap between the accounts.
3. This was an era of antiquity where virgin birth narratives were employed to assert a person’s divinity. In Luke’s narrative it is the Holy Spirit that enters Mary. Many Greek heroes were said to have been conceived between gods and mortals. The audience of the gospels was familiar with these stories.
4. The ancient world did not have an understanding of how conception works. They did not understand that it requires both male semen and a female egg to produce a zygote.
5. Matthew presents Jesus ministry as a fulfilment of prophecies in Isaiah. The original Isaiah prophecy was intended for King Ahaz of Judah and it was fulfilled in that time. It was not necessarily intended as a later messianic prophecy.

We now understand the reproductive process well enough to know that virgin births are literally impossible. What we have are texts from the ancient world that have now been granted divine status. Millions of Christians believe in the virgin birth, with no possible alternative. They trust what is written, completely.

This is a look behind the curtain. I ask myself what else has been covered by the veil of history, erased and revised by the scribes and church fathers, impossible to prove true or false?

It is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies.

• Mark Twain