The Skeptics Make Their Case (Part 1)
The poet-laureate of England, the late Sir John Betjeman, summed up the question in the hearts of many Christians in the English-speaking world when he wrote:
And is it true? And is it true,
This most tremendous tale of all,
Seen in a stained-glass window’s hue,
A Baby in an ox’s stall?
The Maker of the stars and sea
Become a Child on earth for me?
The solid majority of biblical scholars in the academic world today, both Catholic and Protestant, would probably answer Betjeman’s question with resounding diffidence. “Yes,” they might say “it is true —in a sense. Not literally or historically true, of course. No doubt the story of the Nativity of Jesus in the gospels contains mostly just early Christian legends, but that story still can convey to us today, in a mythical way, the main theological points it was always intended to illustrate: that God was acting in the life of Jesus in a decisive way for the salvation of the world.”
Around Christmas each year, expressions of this scholarly perspective often appear in summary form in mainstream news magazines and tv specials. On December 13, 2004, for example, the cover story of Time magazine bore the title, “The Secrets of the Nativity,” and the article inside carried the heading: “Behind the First Noel: How the Story of Christ’s Birth Came to Be.” Predictably, the article informs us that scholars do not really know for sure how the story of the Nativity of Christ came to be, and in particular, how the popular legend of the conception of Jesus in the womb of his virgin mother Mary arose. Most of the scholars quoted in the article simply see the tale as the product of what they call the “theological creativity” of the early Church (a phrase which means that the earliest Christians used fictional literary genres at times in order to package and communicate the main truths about Jesus that they wanted to get across to their audience). Also, predictably, not a single scholar is quoted who actually believes that the historical evidence suggests that Jesus really was born without human fatherhood, or that it actually makes a difference to the Christian Faith if the story is historically true.
In this series of web articles, I am going to try to rectify such unfairness by “letting the other side be heard.” I am going to show that the evidence on hand suggests that Jesus really was born without human fatherhood: in other words, the traditional Christian explanation (or “legend” as some would have it) for the origin of Jesus fits better with the historical evidence available to us than any alternative explanations on offer. Moreover, I will argue in the second half of this series that it really does make a difference to the overall pattern and coherence of the Christian Faith if we can accept that the doctrine of the Virginal Conception of Jesus is literally true. Finally, I will try to show that the dichotomy expressed in the common question, “Is it a myth or is it historical fact?” is actually a false dichotomy. The wonder of the virginal conception story is that it is both fully mythical and historically factual at one and the same time. As C.S. Lewis put it, “the Word became flesh” also means that “myth became fact.”
First, then, to the historical question.
The Case against the Historical Truth of the Virginal Conception accounts in the New Testament
The general skepticism of the scholarly majority on this matter was neatly summarized in the aforementioned Time magazine article, as well as in relatively recent books by New Testament scholars such as Geza Vermes, Marcus Borg, and W. Barnes Tatum (Borg was a leading spokesman for the group of radical biblical scholars known as “The Jesus Seminar”).
The claim that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary, they say, is clearly expressed in just two New Testament books: the Gospel according to St. Matthew, and the Gospel according to St. Luke. What many scholars believe to be the earliest NT documents, however — the epistles of St. Paul and the Gospel according to St. Mark — say nothing at all about any miraculous origin for Jesus, which surely implies that the earliest Christians were unaware of it. The belief evidently arose sometime later. Tatum wrote:
Outside the infancy narratives themselves in Matthew and Luke, the New Testament is silent with regard to Jesus’ conception by the Holy Spirit. This silence is particularly deafening in the sermons of Peter and Paul reported in the book of Acts …. If these sermons contain an ancient tradition of apostolic preaching, it is …. striking that the virginal conception is not part of that tradition. This general silence is also maintained by Paul in his letters (cf. Gal 4:4; Rom 1:3-4), and by the authors of Mark and John (Tatum, In Quest of Jesus, Abingdon Press, 1999, page 152)
With regard to the account in St. Matthew’s gospel, Time magazine reports the scholarly consensus that it was probably written “sometime after” 60 A.D.:
Fellow Jews early on challenged Matthew’s gospel assertion that [the virginal conception of Jesus] fulfilled a prophecy in the book of Isaiah [Is 7:14] that the Messiah would be born to a “virgin” (Isaiah’s Hebrew actually talks of a “young girl;” Matthew was probably working from a Greek mistranslation). [Jewish] Critics may also have alleged that Jesus’ birth early in Mary’s marriage to Joseph was the result of her committing adultery; much later Jewish sources named a Roman soldier called Panthera. Those accusations, some scholars believe, account for the verse in Matthew in which Joseph considers divorcing Mary before his dream-angel allays his doubts.
In short, most modern scholars suggest that Matthew probably felt compelled to create the virginal conception story to show that Jesus fulfilled the prophecy that Matthew found in the Greek mistranslation of Isaiah that he had on hand — perhaps also because there was a slanderous story already circulating that Jesus’ conception was illegitimate. His conception could not have been illegitimate, Matthew claimed; rather, it must have been a miraculous, virginal conception, in accord with an ancient prophecy!
A decade or two later, a Gentile convert to Christianity, St. Luke, evidently picked up the story from another source (not from Matthew), and amplified it in a way that Gentile converts to Christianity would understand and appreciate. The Time magazine article puts it like this:
Unlike Matthew, Luke is thought to have been a pagan rather than Jewish convert to Christianity, writing in fine Greek for other non-Jews and so using references they would find familiar. His version’s heraldic announcements, parallel pregnancies, angelic choirs and shepherd witnesses bear a tantalizing resemblance to another literary form, the reverential “lives” being written about pagan leaders in the same period. In such sagas the hero is not a hero unless his birth reflects the magnificence of his later achievements, and such super-nativities originally attached to great figures of antiquity like Alexander the Great, were at that point bestowed upon Roman leaders within decades of their actual deaths. Was Luke selling out the Jewish tradition that had helped shape Jesus and Matthew? Hardly, he clearly cared about Judaism, paraphrasing frequently from the Scriptures and setting scenes of Jesus’ later youth in the great Jewish Temple. But by the time Luke wrote, says John Dominic Crossan, author of The Birth of Christianity [and another “Jesus Seminar” scholar], “Christians are competing in a bigger world now, not just a Jewish world …. And in the wider world, Alexander is the model for [Caesar] Augustus, and Augustus often becomes the model for Jesus.”
With regard to the tale of the virginal conception of Jesus in particular, that same issue of Time magazine reports:
As New Testament scholars have delved deeper into the pagan faiths that competed with earliest Christianity for followers, Mary’s virginity has been challenged …. as a theme borrowed from the literature of the non-Jewish world. Stephen Patterson of Eden Theological Seminary lists divinely irregular conceptions in stories about not only mythic heroes such as Perseus and Romulus and Remus, but also flesh and blood figures like Plato, Alexander and Augustus, whose hagiographers reported that he was fathered by the God Apollo while his mother slept. “Virgin births were rather a Gentile thing,” says the Very Rev. John Drury, chaplain of All Souls College at Oxford University. “You get it in a lot of the legends where the God impregnates some young girl who has a miraculous son.”
All of this led scholars like Marcus Borg to conclude that “the stories [in Matthew and Luke] look like the literary creation of each author,” in other words, they appear to be tales with very little basis in historical fact. Borg wrote:
[T]he stories look as if they have been composed to be overtures to each Gospel. That is, the central themes of each birth story reflect the central themes of the Gospel of which they are a part. (https://www.religion-online.org/article/the-light-in-the-darkness/)
Thus, Matthew’s story of the virgin birth reflects the main message of his gospel as a whole: that Jesus is the promised Messiah, who must have fulfilled all the prophecies of the Messiah found in Isaiah and other parts of the Hebrew Scriptures. Luke’s account of the Nativity also reflects his main concerns: that Jesus is the divine Son of God, sent into the world to be the true Savior of the world (and not Caesar Augustus, who was also revered as a divine son of God and savior of the world in his time). For Borg it follows that it does not matter whether the virginal conception really happened or not. The Nativity stories are what scholars call theologoumena — that is, largely fictional tales intended to convey a theological point rather than historical information. Borg writes:
The truly important questions about the birth stories are not whether Jesus was born of a virgin, or whether there was an empire -- wide census that took Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem, or whether there was a special star leading wise men from the East. The important questions are, "Is Jesus the light of the world? Is he the true Lord? Is what happened in him 'of God'?" Answering these questions lays claim to our whole lives. (Same online source cited above).
W. Barnes Tatum seems to agree with such assessments; he sums up the matter with brevity and assurance:
Few theologians still defend the virginal conception as biological fact, and most have been inclined to view virginal conception as spiritual truth underscoring the closeness between Jesus and God. (In Quest of Jesus, p. 155).
In short, the case made by the skeptics, at first glance, looks very strong.
As we shall see, however, on closer inspection, it’s not.
Next time: First Steps Toward a Response to the Skeptics
Robert Stackpole, STD
© 2020 Mere Christian Fellowship
