Is Christianity Just a Mistranslation?

I grew up with almost no religious background. My mom was raised Catholic, and Dad was Methodist, which led to some pretty mixed messages about Christianity. Mom told me I should pray to Mary. Dad said to cut out the middle man and talk directly to God. My parents' childhood religions couldn't agree whether non-clergy were qualified to read the Bible or not, and the one time I tired to read it, I couldn't stop giggling about that line about not coveting thy neighbor's ass. My neighbor was an overweight woman who wore ugly polyester pants every day. Who would want her ass?

After failing to find a church they both could live with, my parents were satisfied if my brother and I claimed there was some higher power but didn't talk about or practice anything specific.

I knew very little about Christianity as a child. After I took an Asian art class as an undergraduate, I think I knew more about Buddhism than Christianity. Then I met my Jewish friends who tried to help me understand their religion.

I remember having a conversation one night with my friend, Jeff. He told me that Christians and Jews both followed the Old Testament and believed in the same God, but the split occured when Christians believed Jesus was the son of God. Jeff explained that Jesus, a remarkable man, was not God/his son because Mary was not a virgin, so it was not an immaculate conception, hence no miracle. Jeff said he was taught somewhere in his religious education that a mistranslation has occured. The word used to describe Mary essentially meant young woman, but in the language the text was translated to (sorry, I forgot what the two languages were--Hebrew to English?), there wasn't a perfect translation, so the concept "virgin" was used as the closest approximation for young woman. Some people read this as proof of an immaculate conception and two millenia of wars and bloodshed have resulted due to a poor translation between languages.

In The Handbook of Research of Writing (2008), Prior and Lunsford say, "the translation of a text often has high-stakes consequences" (p. 85). They continue, "Jewish translation histories are punctuated by frequent arguments over...which of the many Jewish langauges/dialects ought to be privileged as the target, especially because the most common tongue of the Jewish diaspora--the Hebrew used in sacred texts--may not be amenable to new work coinages" (p. 86). Is it possible that Christianity is the result of a mistranslation?

When I think about translations, scribes, and the fact that the Bible was written from stories passed through oral culture, my friend's explanation is plausible. Those of us who have studied a foreign language know there are not direct translations for all words in all languages. We also know that when copying for hours, it's possible to make a mistake, and those of us who have played the "Telephone Game" know how quickly words get distorted.

When I learned about Buddhism in my Asian art class, I remember God/Buddha decided to take an Earthly form and Queen Maya was the person he chose to be his birth mother. Kinda sounds like an immaculate conception to me. In Nepal, women pray to Queen Maya, which sounds very similar to the relationship many Catholics have with Mary. I wonder if Buddhism and Christianity can be traced back to a common story and if all religions ultimately derive from a single source which has been mistold, miscopied, and mistranslated to the point it has evolved into separate religions.

I'm not out to convert or proclaim any religion is wrong, but I believe it's very possible that many of the world's religions believe in variations of the same higher power. If Latin could be vulgarized into languages such as French, Italian, and Spanish, surely some Master Religion could have turned into Christianity, Judiasim, Buddhism, etc.