Old Testament messianic prophecies quoted in the New Testament who had not yet given birth and who might or might not be a virgin, and the Greek translation rendered almah as "parthenos", the Greek word for "virgin". Scholars agree that "almah" has nothing to do with virginity, but many conservative American Christians still judge the acceptability of new bible translations by the way they deal with Isaiah 7:14. The virgin birth is found only in the gospels of Matthew and Luke; there is no reference to the birth of Jesus in Mark's gospel or the Gospel of John, nor in the epistles of Paul, who says that Jesus was
New Testament Writings attributed to the apostles circulated among the earliest Christian communities and the Pauline epistles were circulating, perhaps in collected forms, by the end of the 1st century AD. One of the earliest attempts at solidifying a canon was made by Marcion, "circa" 140 AD, who accepted only a modified version of Luke (the Gospel of Marcion) and ten of Paul's letters, while rejecting the Old Testament entirely. His canon was increasingly rejected by other groups of Christians, notably the proto-orthodox Christians, as was his theology, Marcionism. Adolf Harnack in "Origin of the New Testament" (1914) observed that the church