We are rehashing the same old thing.
You said we are “rehashing the same old thing,” but the reason it feels repetitive is not because I am repeating myself. It is because you keep returning to the same claims even after they have been shown to contradict one another. Each time I address one contradiction, you restate the same point in a slightly different form, which forces the discussion back to the same underlying issues. The repetition is coming from your claims, not from my responses.
To show this clearly, here is the sequence of contradictions you have introduced:
Your very first claim:
...the scriptures does not imply in any way a virgin birth.
required you to argue that Matthew 1:25 implies Joseph had relations with Mary. That is the debate about
heos. Without
heos implying reversal, you have no grammatical basis for denying the virgin birth. In response, I pointed out that Matthew states outright that Mary was a Virgin for the conception and birth of Jesus:
- 1:20 — “That which is conceived in Her is of the Holy Spirit.”
- 1:23 — “Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son…”
And your reply to that was not to defend your claim from Matthew, but to change the subject entirely by appealing to Isaiah 7:14, 8:3:
...read Isaiah chapter 7... The virgin in question is Isaiah's wife and it is clear that Isaiah had sex with her and virgin in Hebrew can mean a lady that has not had a baby yet.
So I approached the prophetess, and she conceived and gave birth to a son. Then the Lord said to me, “Name him Maher-shalal-hash-baz; Isaiah 8:3 NASB
But that does not rescue your argument; it contradicts it again. You said Scripture “does not imply a virgin birth,” yet Isaiah 7:14 explicitly describes a virgin conceiving and bearing a son, and Matthew cites that prophecy as fulfilled in Mary. Your attempt to avoid Matthew’s wording by collapsing Isaiah 7:14 into Isaiah 8:3 requires treating two different women and two different children as the same.
Next, you asserted:
I am not implying reversal.
and I pointed out:
"If you’re not implying reversal, that means you agree that Matthew 1:25 does not imply Joseph “knew Her” afterward. That removes the only linguistic basis for your claim."
You recognized that your denial of the virgin birth and your denial of reversal cannot both be true, which led to your contradictory statement:
But that contradicts
both your earlier denial of the virgin birth and your later claim:
No contest on Joseph holding off making love to Miriam until after Yeshua was born.
because if Joseph and Mary were abstinent until the birth
and then had marital intercourse afterward, the
only way to assert sex afterward is to argue that
heos implies reversal. You cannot claim Joseph “held off” until after the birth — which necessarily affirms Mary’s virginity at the birth — while also claiming you’re “not debating heos.” And you cannot deny the virgin birth without relying on the very reversal you say you’re not implying.
And the contradiction becomes even sharper when you add your next statement:
“No the verse does not imply a change. The norm does. The culture does. The scriptures do not give any information on that.”
Here you deny reversal (“the verse does not imply a change”) while simultaneously asserting reversal (“the norm does, the culture does”). You are rejecting reversal in the text while importing reversal from sociology. That means you are
denying reversal and
asserting reversal at the same time — and still claiming you’re “not debating heos,” even though your argument depends entirely on the reversal you say you’re not implying.
These positions cannot all be true at once.
And your later statements introduce an entirely separate set of contradictions:
Of course what was conceived in her was of the Holy Spirit...
The Holy Spirit was involved but Yeshua is not the Son of the Holy Spirit.
Yahweh produced a Son if it was not from His seed then Yeshua is not the Son of God.
These cannot all be true at the same time.
If the conception was
of the Holy Spirit, then the conception was
not the result of sexual intercourse. Matthew explicitly says the conception was “of the Holy Spirit,” and Luke says “the Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.” Those are descriptions of
divine agency, not sexual reproduction. They rule out the idea that Yahweh impregnated Mary through a physical act.
Your claim that “Scripture does not imply a virgin birth” contradicts your own admission that Joseph abstained until after the birth and that the conception was caused by the Holy Spirit. If Joseph had no role in the conception and abstained until after the birth, and the conception was caused by the Spirit, then Mary conceived and bore a son without intercourse — which is precisely what Isaiah 7:14 describes.
Your attempt to avoid this by saying “Yeshua is not the Son of the Holy Spirit” confuses
identity with
agency. Matthew and Luke are not describing who Jesus eternally
is; they are describing who caused the conception. The Father is the eternal source of the Son; the Holy Spirit is the agent of the Incarnation. Those are different categories, and collapsing them does not resolve the contradiction.
Finally, your claim that “Yahweh produced a Son… from His seed” contradicts every relevant passage. Isaiah, Matthew, and Luke all describe a non‑sexual divine act. Nothing in the text supports the idea that Yahweh impregnated Mary through intercourse, and your own denial of reversal in Matthew 1:25 removes the only grammatical basis for claiming She had intercourse with Joseph.
You are denying the virgin birth while simultaneously affirming every textual element that implies it. Your statements about the Holy Spirit, Joseph’s abstinence, Yahweh’s “seed,” and the meaning of
heos contradict one another at every point.
And all of these contradictions expose the deeper problem with your stated method: you say
...the dictionary of the language is the starting point. And then the context and then the interpretation.
but you never actually follow that sequence. You stop at the dictionary definition and then override the context with assumptions about “norm” and “culture,” even when the context directly contradicts those assumptions. If you applied your own method consistently — dictionary → context → interpretation — every one of your claims about Mary, Joseph, Yahweh’s “seed,” and the virgin birth would collapse under the actual context of Isaiah, Matthew, and Luke.
Yes — the dictionary gives the range of possible senses. That’s the starting point, not the ending point. And that’s exactly why your argument fails: you keep stopping at the dictionary instead of applying the context.
If you really follow your own sequence — dictionary → context → interpretation — then apply it to the actual passages:
- Dictionary: ‘almah can mean a young woman.
- Context: Isaiah 7:14 describes the ‘almah whose child is Immanuel.
- Interpretation: That woman is not the prophetess of Isaiah 8:3, whose child is Maher‑shalal‑hash‑baz.
Two different contexts → two different women → two different children. Your method, if you actually used it, would force you to stop claiming they’re the same person.
The same applies to heos.
- Dictionary: heos marks a limit.
- Context: Matthew is explaining Joseph’s non‑involvement in the conception.
- Interpretation: The boundary does not imply reversal — just as Michal did not start having children after her death.
You say the dictionary is the starting point. Correct. But you keep treating it as the ending point.
And if you applied the same sequence to Matthew’s own wording — “that which is conceived in Her is of the Holy Spirit” (1:20) and “a virgin shall conceive and bear a son” (1:23) — you would have to acknowledge that Matthew himself presents Mary as a virgin for both conception and birth, which directly contradicts your claim that “the scriptures does not imply in any way a virgin birth.”
And your “Yeshua is not the Son of the Holy Spirit” line shows the same mistake.
- Dictionary: “conceive,” “beget,” etc. have a range of meanings.
- Context: Matthew and Luke explicitly say the conception was caused by the Holy Spirit.
- Interpretation: The Spirit is the agent of the conception; the Father is the eternal source of the Son. You’re collapsing identity and agency because you’re ignoring context.
So again: Matthew says the conception was “of the Holy Spirit,” and Luke says "the Holy Spirit will come upon" Mary and "the power of the Most High will overshadow" Her. Those passages describe divine agency, not a sexual act by Yahweh. How can you claim Yahweh had sex with Mary when Matthew and Luke explicitly attribute the conception to the Holy Spirit?
