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
God Is Not Great conceive, and bear a son" (see ), pointing out where the stories converge, Old Testament to New. Comparing the Testaments, he considers the New Testament "also a work of crude carpentry, hammered together long after its purported events, and full of improvised attempts to make things come out right". He points out that, while H. L. Mencken considered some of the New Testament events to be historically verifiable, Mencken maintained that "most of them ... show unmistakable signs of having been tampered with". Hitchens also outlines the inaccuracy in Luke's attempt to triangulate three world events of the time with