A Pagan Source for the Story of Jesus’ Miraculous Conception? (Part 7)

“Surely, if anything in the gospels is mere myth or legend, it is the wondrous, fairy tale stories of the Nativity of Jesus.” Such is the common sentiment not only of unbelievers today, but of the solid majority of New Testament scholars over the last century. It must be the case, they say, that the early Christians invented these tales as a parallel to similar stories told at the time about the miraculous origins of pagan gods, heroes, and emperors. Their intention (allegedly) was simply to make their Jewish Savior more “marketable” to potential Gentile converts by showing that Jesus was every bit as divine as his pagan counterparts, for he was born in a miraculous way, just as they were. Indeed, as we saw in the first article in this web series, one Oxford scholar claimed that “virgin births were rather a Gentile thing” in the ancient world.

Is that true?

No, not even close. In fact, there is no myth or legend of a truly virginal conception to be found anywhere in the ancient world before Christ. Raymond Brown, in his massive scholarly study The Birth of the Messiah surveyed all the known so-called pagan parallels, and concluded:

There is no clear example of virginal conception in world or pagan religions that plausibly could have given first-century Christians the idea of the virginal conception of Jesus. (p. 523)

The case for this conclusion was summed up by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI) in 1979:

Extra-biblical stories of this kind [concerning women who conceive by the action of a god] differ profoundly in vocabulary and imagery from the story of the birth of Jesus. The main contrast consists in the fact that in pagan texts the godhead almost always appears as a fertilizing, procreative power, thus, under a more or less sexual aspect and hence in a physical sense as the “father” of the savior-child. As we have seen, nothing of this sort appears in the New Testament: the conception of Jesus is a new creation, not a begetting by God. God does not become the biological father of Jesus. (quoted in Laurentin, The Truth of Christmas, p. 411)

In other words, whether we are speaking of barren women in the Old Testament receiving the renewal of their fertility from God so they can conceive a child again with their husbands, or pagan gods falling in love (or lust) with mortal maidens and taking some kind of creaturely form to impregnate them (as in the case of the god Zeus, who impregnated the mortal woman Danae by means of a shower of gold in order to produce the pagan hero Perseus) — none of these are virginal conceptions. Even though the maiden may start out as a virgin, in each case the story at least implies that some form of sexual intercourse takes place.

Not only is there no clear evidence of a pagan virginal conception myth that the early Christians might have copied, there is almost no evidence at all to be found in the New Testament documents that the early Christians ever borrowed from pagan myths and legends. The infancy narratives in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, for example, are strongly Jewish in style and atmosphere, full to overflowing with quotations from, and allusions to the Old Testament. And this only stands to reason: the earliest Christians — both the apostles and most of their converts — were of Jewish background and descent (either Jews of Palestine and the Mediterranean diaspora, or “righteous Gentiles” who had adopted much of Jewish belief and practice). Jews were the very last people in the Greco-Roman empire who would be likely to borrow from pagan myths and legends to express the truths of their faith, or to try to woo unbelievers. Their whole religious background forbade them from indulging in such religious syncretism. Given that the story of the miraculous conception of Jesus in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary was probably widely known in the Christian community by (at the latest) the late 50’s A.D. (see the previous articles in this web series), then this was still the time in the life of the Christian Church when a majority of its members were converts from Judaism. It is hardly likely that Matthew and Luke would spread a virginal conception tale in imitation of the accounts of the miraculous origins of pagan gods, heroes, and emperors in order to promote the mission to the Gentiles, and thereby risk alienating (even scandalizing) the Jewish-Christian majority.

In fact, the “pagan source” theory for the Virgin Birth of Jesus flies in the face of history. We do not have on record a single instance of any early Christian writer using the virginal conception story to bolster the argument for Christ’s divinity. As we shall see, the story certainly fits with the truth of Christ’s divinity, but strange to say, the early Christians used the story far more often as evidence for Christ’s humanity. From the late first-century onward, there were numerous “gnostic” sects that claimed that Jesus must have been a purely spiritual being who only appeared to have a human body. The fact that Jesus was “born” at all — born of the Virgin Mary — attested to his full humanity.

Furthermore, we know as a matter of historical record that far from making the gospel message more palatable to the pagan world, the story of the virginal conception was mocked and derided on all sides, by Jewish and Gentile polemicists alike. In the Greco-Roman world, by the mid to late first century the pagan myths had been largely discredited as factual accounts, so there would have been little advantage to gain for the cause of Christian evangelism — at least among the educated classes — by copying them. For example, in 178 A.D., the pagan philosopher Celsus wrote sarcastically about the Christian God’s “love-affair” with a Jewish peasant girl, and the Jewish rabbi Trypho, in his dialogue with St. Justin Martyr (ca. 155-160 A.D.) accused Christians of telling tales similar to the pagan myths. He wrote: “You should be ashamed of telling such stories. It would be better for you to assert that this Jesus had been born as a man among men” (Dialogue with Trypho, 99, 62).

Geza Vermes has argued that among the Jewish intelligentsia at the time, an interpretation circulated of the miraculous conceptions given to barren women in the Old Testament that excluded any human fatherhood. He found this evident especially in the writings of the Alexandrian philosopher Philo (d. ca. 50 A.D.):

“The Lord begat Isaac” (The Allegory of the Laws, 218-219). In short, Sarah conceived of God and gave birth to a son of God.

Quoting another passage of Genesis which refers to God opening Leah’s womb (Gen 29:31), Philo points out that the Bible attributes to the Deity something that normally “belongs to the husband,” namely impregnation (The Cherubim, 46). Along the same lines, in connection with Genesis 25:21, Philo recounts that the barren Rebekah became pregnant through the power of God (The Cherubim, 47), an image that is the straight parallel to Mary conceiving of the Holy Spirit.

Be that as it may, (and it is certainly debatable whether Philo really meant to say that God’s power acted apart from any human fatherhood in these cases, much less that he had the equivalent of sexual intercourse with barren women in the Old Testament!), it is not likely that the writings of Philo were the source for the virginal conception story in the early Christian community. Philo’s imaginative and innovative biblical commentaries lay outside the mainstream of Jewish interpretation of the Scriptures, especially as those Scriptures were read in Palestine. Moreover, among the gospel writers, the only one that shows any traces of influence from Philo’s philosophical and biblical speculations is St. John, who may have borrowed and re-worked the notion of the divine “Logos” from him — but by all accounts, John’s gospel was the last to be written, and therefore hardly the source of the virginal conception story for Matthew and Luke.

Some biblical critics claim that the story of Christ’s virginal conception arose because of a negative attitude to sexuality that infected the Christian movement in antiquity. Once again, however, such a critique simply does not fit the facts of history. At the time the gospels were written, and especially among the Jews, conjugal union between man and wife was valued as something good and wholesome, one of God’s created blessings. A more widespread denigration of human sexuality in the Greco-Roman world only really began to prevail from the 2nd century onward. We cannot account for the origin of the virginal conception story in terms of an extreme pessimism about sexuality that began long after that story was already circulating in the early Church.

In the end, of course, we cannot prove by historical evidence alone that Jesus’ was miraculously conceived in the womb of the Virgin Mary. It is obviously not the kind of historical event that is subject to observation and testimony. Only one person was in a position to know the full truth — the Blessed Virgin herself — and she did not write a tell-all book on the matter! And even if she had done so, many would not have believed her; there was no DNA testing available at the time to see if her child inherited his DNA solely from her. As St. Ignatius of Antioch wrote to the Christians in Ephesus (ca. 110 A.D.): “Three eloquent mysteries were wrought in the silence of God: the virginity of Mary, her giving birth, and the death of the Lord” (19:1). The virginal conception is therefore a mystery ultimately accessible only by faith, a divine work “wrought in silence,” in the hiddenness of Mary’s womb. On the other hand, what the historian can show (and what I have endeavored to show in this web series so far) is that the doctrine of the Virgin Birth fits all the known facts surrounding the Nativity of Jesus better than any of the alternative explanations on offer.

Next Time: Even so, What Difference Does it Make?

Robert Stackpole, STD

© Mere Christian Fellowship, 2020