Parthenos and Alexandria

Some thoughts on the Jewish writers of the N.T. relying on Greek scriptures...

An interesting future subject of a post could be the association of Jesus with magic in Jewish tradition.  There is a Talmudic exchange about the lawfulness of inscriptions on human flesh.  As one rabbi argues that it is lawful, another counters that Ben Stada (considered a reference to Jesus of Nazareth) brought the sorcery he learned in Egypt into Judaea in the form of marks on his skin.

What is interesting about this is the idea of Jesus as having spent a significant time in Egypt, an idea promoted by only one of the canonical Gospels.  If Jesus had lived in Alexandria for a length of time, he may have been exposed to many influences.  Could he have been there long enough to have learned the writings of Philo?  Could he have listened to Greek-speaking Jews debate Torah in the words of the Septuagint?  

I don't know how much has been hypothesized about the education of Jesus.  It appears the twelve apostles were largely not of significant religious training.  If koine Greek was more familiar to them than Hebrew (as they spoke Aramaic instead of Hebrew), their knowledge of the Tanakh may have been mostly through the Septuagint (the Greek translation complete 270-130 B.C.) and perhaps indirectly through Aramaic Targum as well.  

One petty objection to Passion of the Christ was the use of Latin instead of Greek in dealings between Judaeans and Romans, Greek being the lingua franca of the Roman Empire, formerly lands of the Greek Empire.  The apostle Paul seems to not be unique in his reliance on the Septuagint.  The Alexandrian writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews seem to as well.  Peter and the Gospel writers in general are said to have relied on the Septuagint as well.

Which brings us to παρθένος [parthenos], the Greek word for virgin.  The Septuagint typically dates at least 100 years before the time of Jesus.  Because of the use of the Septuagint by the NT writers, its use has been derided as being inherently un-Jewish (a "real Jew" would have translated the Hebrew differently).  The Septuagint gets its name from the 72 Jewish scholars who purportedly translated it.

So it has since been argued that either the Prophets were translated centuries after the Tanakh, or that the Septuagint was revised centuries later by Christian scholars to match the Gospels.  This seems to present a chicken-or-egg problem.  What is the timeline for the Matthean translation, and why did the author think that the Isaiah reference would lend support to the virgin birth without a widely recognized Septuagint with parthenos in the translation.

One writer argues not only that the Septuagint was altered, but that parthenos doesn't really mean virgin anyway, since the Septuagint still refers to Dinah (the daughter of Jacob) as parthenos after Shechem takes advantage of her.   Of course, this ambiguity has been part of the etymology of the English word maiden, which is pretty obvious comparing the meanings of the cognate words maidenhood and maidenhead.  (The general sense of Dinah's maidenhood is conveyed by "damsel" in Elizabethan English and by "talitha" in Aramaic.) Though the possible ambiguity of "a maiden shall conceive" is unimportant if parthenos is a fabrication anyway.  It is evident that the Greek writing in the Matthean Gospel has a specific idea of parthenos in mind.    

The Isaiah 7 Immanuel prophecy seems to be a reference to a child born in Ahaz' lifetime, and I don't think anyone other than the Matthean writer references it.   It is possible that parthenos, depending on context, refers to a young woman, and that this is the only sense of "maiden" that the Septuagint translators had in mind.  The virgin birth itself is a weightier subject than whether Isaiah 7 supports it.