The Virgin Birth (2)

The Tradition

Including extracts from "The Virgin Birth and Childhood Mysteries of Jesus" by James Still.

Jesus was not the first man to be burdened with the myth of a virgin birth.

2200BC - Sargon

One of the first warrior-kings was Sargon of Akkad, who established his kingdom in 2200 BC.
Sargon is perhaps the first Babylonian king who was said to have a larger-than-life birth and childhood.

He was born in secret, to a mother of lowly birth and a father who was a mountain god.

Sargon's mother placed the child in a basket of rushes and sent him down a river to protect him from the god's enemies.  Does that sound familiar? This tale was of course later borrowed and attributed to both Horus and Moses!

The babe was rescued downstream by simple folk and the goddess Ishtar loved and guided Sargon through his early childhood and to his final destiny: the ascension of the throne.

Sargon's biography started a tradition of "tall stories" that subsequent kings felt the need to match.

Having divine birth and predestination became important attributes for a mortal king; he could be said to be "god-favoured", gaining recognition and power during his life which often continued into posterity long after death.

By 1000 BC -  we find this tradition had grown, so that the biographers of kings and important men insist that they were not only divinely born, but actually transcended death to become gods themselves.  Zoroaster, the Persian prophet and patriarch who lived and preached in ancient Babylon, was said to have been God-begotten and virgin born.

The Ishtar Priestesses

The "Ishtar priestesses" conducted fertility rites, prophesied and performed elaborate rituals in the temples throughout Babylon. The priestesses administered the temples and also managed a lucrative prostitution business that provided a steady stream of financial support for temple activities.

After their exile, upon their return to Palestine, Hebrews of the Babylonian captivity brought back wondrous tales of the priestesses and their blasphemous sexual ministries to the men who visited them.

The role of the Ishtar priestess was to act as both mother to the prospective man's child and minister to the child's divine needs:

The title of the harlot-priestesses of Ishtar and Asherah was "Holy Virgin".  The title didn't mean physical virginity; it meant simply "unmarried." The function of such "holy virgins" was to dispense the Mother's grace through sexual worship; to heal; to prophesy; to perform sacred dances; to wail for the dead; and to become Brides of God.

The Hebrews called the children of these priestesses bathur, which meant literally "virgin-born" as in those children who were born of the holy harlot-priestesses of the temple.

The Hellenic (Greek speaking) world had no equivalent to the bizarre rituals of Ishtar, and mistranslated and misunderstood the literal Hebrew's bathur as Parthenioi, also "virgin-born" but in the sense of physical, not spiritual, virginity.

So the concept of virgin birth went from Babylon to Greece, via the Hebrews.

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Geoff Mather 2007

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