The “Silence” of St. Paul, St. Mark, and St. John (Part 6)

Silence can be deafening. 

As I began to explain in the previous installment of this web series, the so-called “silence” of the rest of the New Testament regarding the virginal conception of Jesus Christ — apart from the gospels of St. Matthew and St. Luke — is certainly very strange. 

Let’s look first at the alleged “total silence” of St. Paul on this mystery of faith. In his book The Virgin Birth (1981), Fr. Miguel Miguens analyzed the seeming silence of the bulk of the New Testament regarding Christ’s miraculous origin, especially the alleged silence of St. Paul and St. Mark. He wrote:

Careful phrasing can be noticed in Romans 1:3 … when Paul refers to Christ’s birth “according to the flesh” as a coming into existence, but not as “being begotten,” as he does in the case of Isaac, Ismael, Jacob, and Esau …. The same tendency is perceptible in Galatians 4:4, where Paul refers to Christ’s birth of a woman as being “sent out” by God, as well as when only God appears as the counterpart of the woman, as “the” Son of God born of a woman — whereas any mention of a human consort is omitted, contrary to Paul’s own custom …. [Paul] does not know of any father of Jesus more immediate than Abraham and David. Still, he knows that it was a “woman” who brought the Son of God into existence according to the flesh. Unlike Sarah and Rebecca, however [whom Paul mentions in his epistles], this woman does not conceive of any man, she is not associated with any husband. (p. 57-58)

In short, it looks as if St. Paul deliberately avoided mentioning that Jesus had a human, biological father. 

This is even more evident in the gospel according to St. Mark. Pope St. John Paul II pointed this out in his series of Wednesday audience addresses on Mary:

Mark’s gospel does not mention Jesus’ conception and birth. Nonetheless, it is worth noting that Mark never mentions Joseph, Mary’s husband. Jesus is called “the Son of Mary” by the people of Nazareth, or in another context, and “the Son of God” several times (3:11, 5:7; cf. 1:11, 9:7, 14:61-62, 15:39). (Theotokos, p. 113)

Father Miguens focused his attention on Mark 6:3, where the common people of Galilee exclaim: “Where did this man get all this? What is the wisdom given to him? What mighty works are wrought by his hands! Is not this the carpenter, the Son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?”

Some biblical commentators have suggested that by calling Jesus “the Son of Mary,” the crowds may have been insulting Jesus, because the normal custom was to call a Jewish man after his mother’s name when the father was unknown. But it was also customary to call a Jewish male after his mother’s name because the father was long dead (cf. Lk 7:12 – it is an ancient Christian tradition that St. Joseph died many years before the start of Jesus’ public ministry: the last we hear in the gospels of Joseph alive is in the story of the finding of the boy Jesus in the Temple in Luke 2:48, when Jesus was about 12 years old.). Apparently, it was also a Jewish custom to call a man the son of his mother because his biological father was a widower, and it provided a way to distinguish the sons of a man’s first wife from the sons of his second wife. In short, it is not immediately clear why the people of his hometown called Jesus “the Son of Mary.” Father Miguens also notes:

The context [of Mark 6:3] does not provide any clues for an insulting intention: the purpose of vv.2 and 3 is to stress that Jesus was just like everybody else in town, with nothing extraordinary or outstanding about him. (p. 14)

It is also highly unlikely that Mark would have quoted a public slander about Jesus’ parentage and then have offered no response to such slander anywhere in his gospel. Thus, it seems we can at least dismiss the “insulting intention” interpretation of Mark 6:3.

Father Miguens actually finds Mark 6:3 significant for an altogether different reason: the synoptic parallel passage to Mark 6:3 in Matthew 13:55 records the crowds as saying of Jesus “is not this the carpenter’s son?” The more distant parallel passage in Luke 4:22 has them saying “Is not this Joseph’s son?” and in John 6:42, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know?” In other words, it looks as if St. Mark has deliberately extracted any reference to Joseph as the father of Jesus from the common, early Christian tradition of what the crowds in Galilee were saying about him. 

Summing up his study of the whole gospel of St. Mark on this matter, Fr. Miguens reports:

The state of affairs in Mark, therefore, is as follows. Mark does not even hint at any human father of Jesus; Mary appears as “mother” (of Jesus), but nothing is said about her husband or about her marital status; Joseph’s name is de facto ignored by Mark, and there are unequivocal indications of a deliberate purpose by the evangelist to erase this name, or any mention of human paternity for Jesus, from his gospel; on the other hand, the evangelist is very emphatic in relating God and Jesus as “Father” and “Son.” These details find a suitable explanation only if the evangelist is aware and convinced that Jesus had a human mother and a non-human father (but no human father). (p. 26)

“Curiouser and more curiouser,” as Alice in Wonderland would say! This so-called “silence” throughout much of the New Testament regarding the virginal conception of Jesus Christ sounds more like a “deafening silence.”

Finally, let us look at the gospel according to St. John, probably the last of the four gospels to be written (in the 80s or 90s A.D., most likely). According to Fr. Ignace De La Potterie, SJ, the proper reading of John 1:12 implies the miraculous conception of Christ. This version is based on a minority of early manuscripts of St. John’s gospel, but that was enough to convince the translators of the Jerusalem Bible to translate the verse like this: “to all who accept him [that is, Jesus], he gave power to become children of God, to all who believe in the name of him who was born not out of human stock, or urge of the flesh, or the will of man, but of God himself.” In other words, on this reading the proper meaning of this passage is that because Jesus himself was not begotten from a natural process, but from above (“but of God himself”), he is able to give to those who believe in him the power to become children of God.

One may be tempted to dismiss Fr. De La Potterie, and the translators of the Jerusalem Bible, as engaging in a bit of orthodox Christian “special pleading” here, for the solid majority of the ancient manuscripts of St. John’s gospel that we possess do not support this reading of John 1:12. On the other hand, a number of the earliest Fathers of the Church who commented on the first chapter of St. John’s gospel seem to know only the text with the minority version of John 1:12 included, and they interpret this passage as testimony to Christ’s conception by the Holy Spirit (the list includes St. Justin Martyr, St. Irenaeus of Lyons, Tertullian, and St. Hippolytus).

It is probably fair to say, therefore, that we do not know for sure which reading of John 1:12 was intended by the Evangelist — but that also means we do not know for sure that he was completely silent about the virginal conception of Jesus Christ, or completely unaware of it.

Even if we were to conclude that St. John and St. Mark show no signs at all of an awareness of any claim that Jesus was miraculously conceived, we need not be greatly concerned. After all, Saint John is silent about many significant aspects of the life of our Lord: for example, there is no mention in his gospel of the baptism of Jesus, his parables, his transfiguration, and the institution of the Eucharist. We need to bear in mind that a “gospel” is not a modern biography; it is the very nature of this literary genre to be historically quite selective. In a modern biography, we expect the historian to record every significant word and deed of his subject, and usually in chronological order. A “gospel,” however, involves the selective use and arrangement of the biographical details of the life of Jesus in order to manifest particular theological truths about him, for a particular audience. In St. Mark’s gospel, for example, the life story of Jesus involves the gradual unfolding of what has been called “the Messianic secret.” To be sure, Mark tells us right from the outset that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, but we are not told what those titles really mean. As the story unfolds, it gradually becomes clear that he was the kind of Messiah no one expected: a suffering Messiah (Mk 8:31), and indeed the divine Messiah (Mk 6:50; 14:62-64). He was “the Son of God” not just in the normal Jewish sense of the phrase — that is, as the rightful King of Israel — but in altogether new and divine sense. It would have contradicted the literary structure of Mark’s gospel, therefore, to recount the story of his miraculous conception right at the start.

To sum up the case: while the rest of the New Testament outside the gospels of Matthew and Luke may seem to be totally silent about the virginal conception of Jesus, the special nature of much of that silence implies (in the epistles of St. Paul) a deliberate avoidance of any reference to any natural father of Jesus, and (in the case of St. Mark’s gospel), the deliberate extraction of any mention of St. Joseph from the common tradition. This kind of silence, therefore, tends to support rather than undermine our contention that belief in the virginal conception of Jesus was widespread in the early Christian community, at least from the mid-50’s A.D. onward, and probably even earlier.

Again, this silence probably prevailed because the doctrine of the Virgin Birth could not really play a salutary part in the evangelistic mission of the early Church to unbelievers. Instead, the story was reserved for those who had already converted to Christ, who already believed in his divinity, and who had already experienced the fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit — for whom the gospels of Matthew and Luke primarily were written.

Next Time: A Pagan Source for the Story of Jesus’ Miraculous Conception?

Robert Stackpole, STD

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