This part of my response of R.G. Price’s Case Against Historical Christ will be fairly short as there is not much to his argument. We must realize that Price is going for quantity of evidence rather than quality. We are supposed to feel overwhelmed by the number of arguments before we even evaluate how strong they are.
Some of the details of the life of Jesus are based on mistranslations of the Hebrew scriptures
The main “mistranslation” that Price uses is Isaiah 7:14. I already dealt with this somewhat in my previous post.
I have come across this argument for as long as I have been doing apologetics. Skeptics love to point out that the Hebrew almah means “young woman” and that this was translated as parthenos (“virgin”) in the Septuagint (Greek translation of the Old Testament) that Matthew used.
We are supposed to be shocked by this and to begin to doubt everything we have read in the Bible.
The first thing that I need to say is that there is a lot overlap between almah and parthenos. Most young women were virgins and most (female) virgins were young women. It is a reasonable translation.
I don’t think that the translators of the Septuagint thought that the woman who give birth in Isaiah 7:14 was a literal virgin at the time of childbirth. I explained this in my previous post.
The virgin conception of Jesus does not depend on the meaning of almah. Luke doesn’t even mention Isaiah 7:14 in his description of the birth of Jesus.
What about Jesus riding into Jerusalem in Matthew 21? Is this a mistranslation? Did Matthew actually think that Jesus rode two donkeys at the same time? I answer this claim in detail here.
The final thing I will say is that translators then, as now, are both translators and interpreters. The translators of the Septuagint and the authors of the New Testament were interpreting in ways that perhaps make us uncomfortable.
But when we read other Jewish interpretations from the first century, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Midrash, we see that the New Testament writers were very conservative.
For some context, you might want to check out the Targums, that is the paraphrase into Aramaic.
