Two things, really-
alma means "young woman," or "maid," not "Virgin. "
Nubile", pubescent or "
of marriageable age."
The Hebrew word for "virgin" is
betulah
.We've had the whole KJV discussion before-it's not at all a good translation-its developers didn't even follow any sort of proper translation protocol.....they did the best they could, though, and came up with some damn fine prose in the idiom of the time-they just got a few key things wrong, though-admittedly, things that Christianity had gotten wrong since its inception:
almah to "virgin" is a mistranslation that dates back to third century translations of Hebrew to Greek.
Of course, you are entirely free to
believe whatever you like,
@oftheherd1 , but these are the
facts.
"Virgin birth" is called
parthenogenesis-it occurs frequently with reptiles and amphibians-t
here's an entire species of lizard in New Mexico that reproduces this way. It occurs in turkeys and chickens. It occurs with fish. It occurs under the right circumstances in most vertebrates, though, until recently, wasn't known to occur in mammals at all.
It's an extreme rarity, but it apparently does occur in mammals-at least, it's been
induced in mammals, which
implies that it could occur naturally.
The only thing miraculous about Jesus's "virgin birth" was that he was male-across nature,given that their genetic makeup comes from an entirely female source, the offspring of parthenogenesis are always
female.