“Just because you're taught that something's right and everyone believes it's right, it don't make it right.” Mark Twain Tis the season to celebrate how easy it is for truth to be whatever you simply choose to believe it is, allowing one person’s mistranslation to become another person’s miracle of a virgin birth. More than the result of divine intercession, however, such a “miracle” is the result of a need to pretend to know the mind of an omnipotent intelligence better than any rudimentary understanding of linguistics, let alone the problems that arise from playing the telephone game. Ironic, yes, but not surprising in the least, given the history with which Christians have chosen to label those they feared for being different as “heretics” and “witches.” The question is why. To answer this question, we have to return to the third century BCE, when the confusion all began. At that time, the Hebrew Bible was being translated into the Greek Septuagint. In t...