Michael Lattke provides the following translation of Odes of Solomon 19:6-8:
The womb of the Virgin caught
[it],
and she conceived and gave
birth.
And the Virgin became a mother
in great compassion
and she was in labor and bore a
son.
And she felt no pains/grief,
because it was not useless/for no
reason
Commenting
on the “Virgin” in this passage, Lattke writes that:
In spite of the later Christian
equation of the (btūltā) with Mary—and the “son” with Jesus
Christ—at the time of composition of the Odes it can be said for certain
only that the influential prophecy of Isa 7:14 LXX is behind this verse:
. . . δωσει κυριος αυτος υμιν ιδιου η παρθενος εν γαστρι εξει [v. l. ληψεται] και τεξεται
υιον, και καλεσεις το ονομα αυτου Εμμανουηλ.
. . . the Lord himself shall give you a sign; behold, a virgin shall
conceive in the womb, and shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name
Emmanuel.
This allusion could, of course, have been drawn from one of the many
passages that also make use of Isa 7:14 (cf. Matt 1:23; Luke 1:31; Rev 12:1-5).
If θ used the equivocal
word παρθενος, it could be
allegorical, perhaps “truth personified.” Kittel calls this exegesis “adventurism”
on Diettrich’s part, there is nothing in this birth mythos to suggest it. It
certainly concerns a young woman, who may have been accepted as a “virgin.”
There is no question of a “cult,” and as little of the “conception by the
Virgin” in any dogmatic sense. The silence regarding any male participant or
any sexual intercourse only intensifies the spotlight case on the mythi
persona. (Michael Lattke, The Odes of
Solomon [Hermeneia—A Critical and Historical Commentary on the Bible;
Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009], 276)
As
John Lawrence M. Polis noted:
Michael Lattke believes it does not
directly refer to Mary and Jesus, but to Isaiah 7:14: the identification of
Mary with the virgin and Jesus with the Son would be a posterior Christian interpretation.
If he is correct, then we have a pre-Christian interpretation of the ‘almāh
of Isaiah 7:14 as a virgin. (John Lawrence M. Polis, The Virgin Shall Give
Birth: The Validity of the Traditional Doctrine and Scotist Explanations of Mary’s
Cooperation with the Miracle [New Bradford, Mass.: Academy of Immaculate,
2022], 20)
