A Plausible Theory to Counter the Skeptics (Part 5)

In the last two installments of this web series we looked at the debate over the witness of St. Matthew and St. Luke to the miracle of virginal conception of Jesus. We looked especially at the traditional claim that the Blessed Virgin Mary was the main source from which Luke received his account. All this is of some importance, because if the virginal conception is indeed an historical-biological fact, as both Matthew and Luke evidently believed, then the only person in a position directly to know the truth about what happened was Mary herself. In the gospels Jesus’ other relatives — his “brothers and sisters,” or cousins — seem unaware of his special origin and identity. No doubt that is because Mary and Joseph did not tell anyone else about it, at first. Rather than spread the story to her relatives, and risk coming under suspicion of being an adulterer, they would have kept it as a sacred, family secret.

So, when did Mary first speak openly of this miracle? In an important little book titled The Mystery of the Incarnation (Ignatius Press, 1992), Cardinal Christoph Von Schonborn of Austria offered a plausible speculation: that Mary first began to convey the truth to the Christian community in Jerusalem, sometime after Pentecost:

When can we posit the origin of the community’s tradition that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit? It seems to me worth considering that the beginnings of this tradition may be associated with the primitive church’s experience of the Spirit. Luke clearly describes the Church’s “birth” at Pentecost in parallel with the account of Jesus’ birth: in both cases, it is the descent of the Spirit which affects the miraculous birth. We might be strongly inclined to see this parallelism as a theological “construct;” but might not the reverse be the case? Perhaps it was the original Jerusalem community’s experience of the Spirit which enabled Christians of the first generation to understand “from within,” from their own experience of the Spirit, the significance of Jesus’ conception by the Spirit? Let me take my hypothesis further: is it not possible that, for Mary herself, it was the Church’s experience of the Spirit which became the “hermeneutical locus,” i.e. the experiential milieu within which she became able to speak of the miracle of her conceiving by the Spirit?

Allow me to pursue this line of thought a little: the primitive Church’s experience of the Spirit was doubtless that of an event which rendered the meaning of the figure of Jesus transparent and evident. Does it not make sense to assume that this experience of the Spirit, in which Mary shared (Acts 1:14, 2:1), provided the primitive community with that background of experience and understanding which was necessary if it was properly to receive the message of Jesus’ conception by the overshadowing of the Spirit? (p. 37-38)

Here we have a plausible theory of the origin of the virginal conception story in the early Christian community. Perhaps Mary first began to speak of it in the early Church in Jerusalem soon after Pentecost. Saint Luke may have learned of it from Mary herself directly (Lk 2:19, 51) — or at least from the Christian community in that city — when he journeyed to Jerusalem with St. Paul around 48 A.D. Matthew already knew of the tale, perhaps from relatives of St. Joseph (since his account is centered more on Joseph, his struggles and duties, than on Mary). When St. Matthew penned his gospel ca. 60 A.D., he also knew that his Jewish-Christian audience in Palestine and Syria was already aware of the basics of the story, which is why he tells of the miracle in such a brief, matter of fact way. Matthew found the key to the meaning of this mystery in the Greek Septuagint translation of Isaiah 7:14 (“Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and call his name Emmanuel, which means, God with us”). The Septuagint translation of this Bible verse was already plausible on grounds of context, and linguistics. Although it had not previously been understood by the Jews of Matthew’s time as a Messianic prophecy, nevertheless, it occurs near the start of a whole section of the book of Isaiah that many believed to have Messianic implications.

This theory fits with all of the known facts. It also lends some initial strength to the case for the historical veracity of the story, for it gives us two relatively independent witnesses to the claim of a Christ’s virginal conception, two witnesses whose sources trace back to the very first generation of the Christian Church in Palestine, and probably back to The Blessed Virgin Mary herself.

Nevertheless, in order to be convincing, this theory still must be able to answer two basic questions: (1) how do we account for the (alleged) total silence of the rest of the New Testament regarding the miraculous origins of Jesus Christ? And (2) what about those theories that would trace the story to pagan mythological sources?

On the face of it, the silence of the rest of the New Testament about this miracle would seem to be a clear indication that belief in the virginal conception of Jesus was not widespread in the apostolic church, at least not before the last few decades of the first century. After all, this silence seems to include all of the early preaching and teaching of St. Peter and St. Paul recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, all of the epistles of St. Paul, and the gospels of St. Mark (perhaps the first one to be written) and St. John (probably the last to be written).

The implications of “silence,” however, can vary greatly, depending upon its historical context. Thus, in a court of law the general assumption is that “silence gives consent” — if no one objects to something, orally or in written form, then the presumption is that no one found anything seriously objectionable in it. Similarly, the manner of the silence about the virginal conception of Jesus throughout much of the New Testament should make us very suspicious that the authors did indeed know of the virgin birth, but simply chose not to speak of it. For example, consider the earliest Christian preaching of the gospel, recorded in the Acts of the Apostles. It is true that these evangelistic homilies do not mention Christ’s miraculous origin, but such evangelistic preaching necessarily had to be based squarely on what the apostles could vouch for as eyewitnesses:

Men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs which God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know …. This Jesus God raised up, and of that we are all witnesses. (Acts 2:22, 32; cf. acts 3:15, 5:32)

And we are witnesses to all that he did both in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem …. God raised him up on the third day … to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. (Acts 10:39-41)

In short, the story of the virginal conception of Jesus was not part of the evangelistic message of the apostles precisely because it was not something of which they could claim to be eyewitnesses. Thus, it could play no salutary part in their efforts to convince unbelievers of the truth of the gospel.

Notice also the curious way the apostles refer to Jesus in these early public sermons. The normal Jewish custom was to call a man after the name of his father. Jesus’ full name among his countrymen and fellow villagers should have been “Jesus, Son of Joseph, of Nazareth.” But St. Peter and St. Paul never refer to Jesus that way. They call him instead simply “Jesus of Nazareth,” which would have been an appropriate form of address for a Frenchman — say, Jacques de Lyons or Pierre de Normandie — but certainly not for a Palestinian Jew of the first century! In other words, it appears that the apostles deliberately avoided referring to Joseph as the father of Jesus. And this fits quite well with our theory that they had indeed learned the secret of his origin from the Blessed Virgin Mary herself, shortly after Pentecost. It did not form part of their public preaching, but it was a cherished mystery of faith, passed down from the first generation of Christians within the community of believers.

Next Time: The “Silence” of St. Paul, St. Mark, and St. John

Robert Stackpole, STD

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