 One of the most famous assertions in the Christian Bible it's found in the book of Matthew chapter 1 is that in the Jewish Bible the prophet Isaiah predicted the Messiah is going to be born of a virgin and it's based upon a mistranslation of the Hebrew. Isaiah speaks about an Alma that would give birth Alma as a young girl young woman and the Christian Bible insists that the word Alma means virgin. Now one of the primary ways in which this mistranslation is defended and justified is by appealing to the Greek translation of the Tanakh of the Hebrew Bible where missionaries insist that the rabbis themselves when they translated the Tanakh into Greek they rendered Alma from the seventh chapter of Isaiah as Parthenas which they say means a virgin and so the Christian defense basically says don't accuse us of mistranslating Isaiah as virgin your own rabbis when they translated the Bible from Hebrew into Greek they translated Alma as Parthenas and that means virgin and that's where their defense is is based however there are numerous problems with this number one we know that the rabbis when they translated the Tanakh I'm sorry when they translated the scriptures into Greek they did not translate the entire Tanakh the rabbis only translated the five books of Moses we know that the story is told in the Talmud tractate Megillah 9a that King Petalmi summoned 72 rabbis from Jerusalem to Alexandria to translate the five books of Moses into Greek the story goes that he put them into 72 different rooms and at the end each of their translations matched exactly this was done in the third century BCE now this story is confirmed by Josephus who tells us that the 72 rabbis only translated the five books of Moses and in an ancient Greek letter called the letter of Aristias which confirms that King Petalmi had the rabbis translate the Torah the five books of Moses it's not clear it's not exactly clear who translated the rest of the Tanakh who did the rest of it we know that our Khazal our sages translated the five books of Moses but who did the rest of the Tanakh is not really well known it's not known at all and this is confirmed by Christian scholars if you were to get a contemporary version of the Septuagint you'll find in the introduction the following declaration is made the variety of translators is by the way is our Christian editors of this the variety of the translators meaning of the Bible is proven by the unequal character of the version some books show that the translators were by no means competent to the task meaning some of the books in the Tanakh you can see we're done very poorly while others on the contrary exhibit on the whole a very careful translation the five books of Moses is considered to be the part best executed while the book of Isaiah appears to be the very worst by the way Isaiah is exactly where we're looking to find the defense of this mistranslation for the virgin birth number two in ancient Koina Greek the word Parthenus does not mean virgin anyway it really means the exact same thing that Alman means which is a young woman this is confirmed by one of the leading scholars of ancient Greek Spiros Ohades in his commentary to the Bible and it's confirmed in this Septuagint translation of Genesis chapter 34 which is a story of the rape of Dina when the daughter of Jacob Dina is raped so there if you get the Greek translation it speaks about her after her being raped as a Parthenus so clearly Parthenus does not mean a virgin furthermore the entire Septuagint both the Chumash the five books of Moses and the rest of the books of the Bible were not valued by the Jewish people they were not studied by the Jewish people they were not preserved by the Jewish people if you go to any Jewish library you'll never find a Septuagint it's basically a book the Jewish people dissociated themselves from one of the ways we know this is that our sages tell us that when this translation was done we didn't want to do it we were forced to do it and the sages proclaimed it the sages saw this of an event of the translation of our Bible into Greek as a tragedy and the sages proclaimed a fast day the 10th day of Tevet is a day where we mourn this terrible tragedy of the translation of our scriptures into Greek so this is a version of the Bible that was not really ours it's not one that we study that we preserved and so the question is so who preserved these books and we know that they were preserved only by the church and we know that the version that we have today is not the version that our rabbis made how do we know this because because it's fine because the Talmud tells us that when the sages translated the five books of Moses into Greek the Talmud tells us that the sages made about a dozen editorial emanations to the text that the rabbis in order to make sure that people did not misunderstand their reading of the Greek they made some editorial changes in their translation and the Talmud gives us those editorial changes if you study the Talmud's list of these changes and you compare it to the version to the text of the Septuagint to the five books of Moses that we have today you will not find these editorial changes that proves that whatever version of the Septuagint we have today is not our version another important point is that the Christian Bible when quoting from the Hebrew Bible very frequently does not quote from the Masoretic text which is again the text that we as a Jewish people have preserved and passed down they go to the Septuagint the Greek translation why is this strange it's strange because our Tanakh was not written in Greek and the Christian Bible itself says in the book of Romans that God entrusted his oracles to the people of Israel the Christian Bible admits that God entrusted his scriptures to the Jewish people and that if it wasn't for the Jewish people there wouldn't be a Bible for Christians to read therefore the only Bible that's reliable is the one that's been passed down by the Jewish people which is the Masoretic text and not a Greek translation that was done by who knows who one very interesting example of this is from the Christian Bible book of Acts chapter 7 where in verses 14 to 15 it says those of you who know the the Chumash the five books of Noah's as well will spot the problem in the Christian Bible book of Acts it says that 75 people went down to Egypt 75 people went down to Egypt whereas in the book of Genesis chapter 46 verse 27 in Exodus chapter 1 verse 5 in Deuteronomy chapter 10 verse 22 we're told it was 70 Jews that went down to Egypt so what happens how is it possible for the New Testament to say it was 75 so the answer is very simple because they're not quoting from the Jewish Bible they're not quoting from the Masoretic text they're quoting from the Targum Shivim the Septuagint and the question would be what is the authority of this Greek translation how does anyone have the right to ignore the Hebrew text that's been passed down faithfully by the people that God appointed to be the guardians his witnesses over his text how can anyone ignore what the Hebrew text says and base their Bible upon a Greek translation that we don't know who did it what is the authority of that translation and why does it supersede the Hebrew text