First Steps toward a Response to the Skeptics (Part 2)
The Time magazine feature article that I quoted in the first installment of this web series gave almost no space at all to the opinions of orthodox Christian scholars on this issue, either Catholic or Protestant. The only mainstream Catholic scholar quoted was Fr. Raymond Brown, whose massive volume The Birth of the Messiah (1977) was a classic work on the Nativity stories in the gospels. Time summarized Fr. Brown’s view as follows:
Raymond Brown … observed that the idea of divine conception in the womb appeared to be a part of a theological progression. The very first Christians thought that Jesus had become God’s Son at his Resurrection; Mark, the first gospel to be written, seemed to locate the moment at his baptism in the Jordan; and it is only by the time that Matthew and Luke were writing that believers had dated his Sonship to before his birth. Thus, if Mary was the eyewitness source for the Holy Spirit’s direct involvement in Jesus’ birth (and who else could be?) her testimony was lost to Christians for half a century before Luke somehow picked it up. Weighing this … Brown concluded that both Matthew and Luke “regarded the virginal conception as historical, but the modern intensity about historicity was not theirs.” Applying modern standards, he called the historical question “unresolved.”
Reading this summary of Brown’s viewpoint, mainstream Christian readers are apt to wonder: “Is this the best that orthodox Christian scholars can do to answer widespread skepticism about the Virgin Birth?” No, thankfully, it isn’t: and as we shall see, Catholic biblical scholars such as Franciscan Fr. Miguel Miguens, OFM and theologians such as Cardinal Christoph Schonborn of Austria, along with contemporary Evangelical scholars, have done much better.
First of all, regarding Brown’s notion that there was a “theological progression” of NT perspectives about precisely when Jesus became the divine Son of God: very little evidence can be found to back up this theory. In the early preaching of St. Peter (e.g. Acts 2:36), and in the epistles of St. Paul (e.g. Phil 2:6-11), it appears at first glance that the apostles might be saying that Jesus actually became the Messiah and divine Son of God at his resurrection, but those passages could just as easily be interpreted as meaning that Jesus was simply declared or publicly manifested as Christ and divine Lord at his resurrection. Besides, how could Jews such as Peter and Paul even conceive of the possibility that a finite, human creature could become equal in nature to the infinite, transcendent Creator? The Greeks had apotheosis myths in which human beings such as Oedipus and Hercules were raised to divine status, but they became merely “gods,” immortals, not the Almighty and omniscient God of the Old Testament.
As for Mark’s gospel, we do not know for sure that it was the first gospel to be written (a stubborn minority of NT scholars contend that St. Matthew may have written first, as the consensus of the early fathers of the Church believed). Where Mark might be placed along a time-line of “theological progression” regarding Christ’s divine origin, therefore, remains uncertain. Moreover, it is not even clear that Mark pushed the moment of Jesus’ attainment of either Messianic or divine status back from the moment of Christ’s resurrection to his baptism in the Jordan River. On his baptism, St. Mark simply writes:
And when [Jesus] came up out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove: and a voice came from heaven, “Thou art my beloved Son, with thee I am well-pleased.” (1:10-11)
Notice that Mark says nothing about Jesus becoming the Son of God at this moment. The voice from heaven is quoting Psalm 2:7, but leaves out the very words from that verse that might have given us reason to believe that Jesus was at that moment raised to divine status: “You are my son, today I have begotten you.”
Leaving aside, therefore, Raymond Brown’s dubious “theological progression” theory, let’s begin to reconstruct a more plausible view of the historical origin of the New Testament accounts of the virginal conception of Jesus Christ — one that actually can answer, step by step, the points raised by the skeptical majority of scholars today (on that scholarly majority view, see the opening article in this web series).
The Case for the Historical Truth of the Virginal Conception Accounts in the New Testament
The accounts of the Nativity of Jesus by St. Matthew and St. Luke are obviously very different. For example, Luke tells of the Annunciation to Mary by the angel Gabriel, of an Empire-wide census decreed by Caesar Augustus that brought Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem, of shepherds abiding in the fields who were visited by heraldic angels, and of the newborn Christ Child “wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid … in a manger” (Lk 2:7). Matthew, on the other hand, includes none of these episodes in his (much shorter) Nativity account. Instead, he tells us of a message from an angel in St. Joseph’s dream, of a special natal star, of the coming of the Wise Men from the East, of the slaughter of the innocents in Bethlehem and the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt. What is immediately and abundantly clear from these two versions of the story is that the authors relied upon independent sources of information. Most New Testament scholars believe that St. Luke wrote sometime after St. Matthew did, and may have utilized Matthew as a source for some aspects of his gospel, but there is no evidence at all that Luke leaned upon Matthew for any part of his Nativity account.
Despite their reliance upon independent sources, however, these two gospels record four important facts in common about the nativity of Jesus Christ: (1) his birth took place during the reign of the tyrant Herod the Great; (2) he was born in Bethlehem of Judea, the historic hometown of King David; (3) he was born of Mary and adopted, so to speak, by Joseph, the latter at least being of the lineage of David which, under Jewish law, made Jesus a legitimate member of the house of David; and finally (4) Jesus was conceived by no human fatherhood, but rather by the power of the Holy Spirit in the virginal womb of Mary.
Under the normal rules of historical evidence, corroborating points of testimony from two or more largely independent sources for the same event is at least some small mark in favor of the historicity of those common features of the story. Whatever we may decide about the historical value of those items that the two accounts do not have in common, at least these four points — including the virginal conception of Jesus — have two, relatively independent testimonies in their favor.
Furthermore, it is abundantly clear from the way these accounts were written that both Matthew and Luke sincerely believed that the miraculous conception of Jesus in the womb of Mary truly happened. Their accounts cannot be likened to the Jewish tradition of midrash, in which authors felt free piously to embellish biblical stories that were well known to their readers – for the simple reason that in the case of the Nativity of Jesus, as far as we know, there was no story of the conception and birth of Jesus that did not already include his virginal conception. If the Nativity stories in these two gospels contain pious embellishments in their accounts, therefore, they would be embellishments of that original story – indeed, embellishments of all four points of commonality mentioned above, which antedated the writing of these gospels. The miraculous conception cannot itself be one of the embellishments!
Next Time: The Witness of St. Matthew
Robert Stackpole, STD
© 2020 Mere Christian Fellowship
