– The virgin birth was likewise inserted to “fulfill” the prophecy of Isaiah 7:14. This part is particularly embarrassing to Christians, because it only came up because someone read Isaiah in Greek translation, which was garbled in process, and a phrase that should have meant “…the girl [as in, some specific girl that is standing near the speaker, or at least whose identity is implicitly understood both by the speaker and the listener] is or will soon be pregnant”, got translated as “… a virgin will get pregnant”.[/quote]
The virgin birth, death and resurrection theme along with the “hero” God-man archetype arouse in the eastern Mediterranean, where farming cultures developed religions that celebrated the yearly return of crop fertility. It dates back to before the Abrahamic religions.
Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung argue these common archetypal manifestations fulfill a psychological need. Jung made argument that; these archetypal symbols are psychological projections of the collective unconscious, the need of the human mind faced with the overwhelming specter of imminent mortality to fashion eternal symbols of human resurrection married to the god’s victory over the shadowy domain of death, a spiritual transcendence of the physical underworld to the numinous realm of eternal spirit, logos, the human and the divine united in a transcendent marriage of cycles of life, death, and infinite revitalization. This is the role of the dying/reborn god.
Campbell concludes that the god who emerges from the virgin birth is you – you have died to your animal nature and come to life as a human incarnation of compassion… born of a virgin to signify that the begetter is of the spirit and not merely of the flesh.
