There are good reasons to accept that the Christian topic of immaculate conception is grounded in the mistranslation of the Hebrew alma (which simply means “young woman”) as “virgin”: “It would appear that Western civilization has endured two millennia of consecrated sexual neurosis simply because the authors of Matthew and Luke could not read Hebrew” (Harris, The End of Faith).

There are also good reasons to accept that the seventy “virgins” awaiting martyrs in the Muslim paradise resulted from a mistranslation: in using the word hur, transliterated as “houris,” the Koran relied here on the early Christian texts that used the Aramaic hur, meaning “white raisins,” a delicacy.