Reply #9: Posts like yours are invariably amusing.

[okasha]

You reject the historical material in the Bible while uncritically swallowing the Zeiegeist/Murdock woo-woo hook, line and sinker. Just for an example, Mithras was born from a rock, not a virgin; Apollo's mother was seduced by Zeus--goodby virginity!--and Osiris, along with Isis, Nephtys and Set were the children of Geb (Erth) and Nut (Sky), old married folks, and presumably not celibate. Furthermore, the three you mentioned are gods of very different things. Mithras began as a god of cattle and contracts, then morphed into the soldier's god; Apollo was a sun god,as well as sponsor of fine arts and music; and Osiris was a vegetation deity and lord of the underworld. These deities are hardly the "same as each other," let alone Jesus.

And I hate to break it to you, but bronze-age nomads didn't write books. The first version of the OT was produced in the very settled city of Jerusalem by priests under the sponsorsip of king Josiah in the 7th centery BCE--some 4 centuries after the end of the bronze age. They may have had a shaky grasp of certain physical phenomena, but so did the rest of the ancient world. Decimal fractions were several centuries in the future at the time the OT was written, yet Israelite artisans seemed to have sufficient practical grasp of the concept of pi to produce round vessesls.

Oh--and the "young woman does not equal virgin" question has nothing to do with Constantine and everything to do with how the English language has changed between the early 17th and later centuries. "Virgin" meant "unmarried' during king James/Shakespeare's time; "maiden' meant what we mean by "virgin."