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The Mystery of the Virginal Conception (Part 2)

The Mystery of the Virginal Conception (Part 2)

Two of the evangelists, St. Matthew and St. Luke, open their gospels with stories of the Nativity of Jesus, including a prophetic star in the night sky, angels appearing to shepherds to herald the newborn king, and remarkable accounts of the miraculous conception of Jesus in the womb of Mary his mother, although she was a virgin. Many New Testament scholars today seriously doubt that much of this can be taken as historical reportage. Surely, if anything in the gospel records smacks of myth and legend, it is these colorful stories of the conception and birth of the Son of God, laced as they are with angelic visitations, and miraculous signs and wonders. 

But what does the evidence actually suggest?

The accounts of the Nativity by Matthew and Luke are obviously very different from each other. For example, Luke tells of the Annunciation of the angel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary, the Roman census, angelic messengers appearing to shepherds abiding in the fields, and the finding of the baby Jesus in Bethlehem “wrapped in swaddling clothes, and lying in a manger” (Lk 2:12). Matthew, on the other hand, tells us of St. Joseph’s dreams, a special star, the coming of the wise men, the flight into Egypt, and the slaughter of the innocents. Obviously, these two accounts of the Nativity are drawn from completely independent sources. On the other hand, they also manifest important similarities:

  1. In theology: in both accounts, Jesus is said to be conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary.

  2. In lineage: he was born to Mary and Joseph, the latter at least a descendant of King David.

  3. In geography: Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea.

  4. In chronology: his birth took place during the reign of the tyrant Herod the Great (who died somewhere between 4 and 1 BC).

Moreover, while the two gospels present different genealogies for Jesus, both claim that he was born into the family headed by Joseph, which made Joseph his legal father, and therefore under Jewish law made Jesus a legitimate member of the House of David.

Where did the virginal conception story originate? Is it simply a myth, like the incredible legends of the miraculous births of many ancient, mythical heroes?

An early Christian tradition claims that St. Luke became acquainted with Mary personally, and received much of his material from her. Indeed, at two points in his book he hints at his source when he writes: “And Mary kept all these things, pondering them in her heart” (Lk 2:19, 51). In fact, the preface to St. Luke’s gospel (Lk 1:1-4) suggests that the story of the virginal conception of Jesus was already in circulation in the Christian community when Luke wrote (arguably, ca. 60-63 AD), for it was evidently among those things of which “Theophilus” already had been “informed” (Lk 1:4).

Some scholars claim that St. Matthew invented his account just to fulfil the prophecy of Isaiah 7:14, which he quotes: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel” (Mt 1:23). But this is highly unlikely. First of all, that passage from Isaiah was not generally regarded by Matthew’s contemporaries as a Messianic prophecy. As far as we know, no one at the time expected the Messiah to be born of a virgin, so Matthew was under no pressure to invent such a miraculous origin for Jesus. This also means that the frequent charge that Matthew was misled by the Greek Septuagint translation of the book of Isaiah (which states “Behold a virgin shall conceive,” whereas the original Hebrew has the more general word “almah,” here, “young maiden”), is also beside the point: again, if the passage was not necessarily a Messianic prophecy, why would Matthew feel he had to invent a virginal conception for Jesus based on the Septuagint in order to strengthen his case that Jesus really was the long expected Messiah? Moreover, Matthew wrote of this miraculous conception in such a brief and matter-of-fact way, without ever referring to it again in his gospel, that it seems more likely that he was simply reminding his readers of a familiar fact, rather than concocting a brand new myth or legend. All things considered, it seems more likely that St. Matthew recorded, and interpreted as a fulfilment of prophecy a pre-existing virginal conception story (i.e., a tale already circulating in the early Church community), than that he invented the story just to fit with Isaiah 7:14.

In short, the claim that Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary almost certainly antedates the writing of both of these gospels, pushing it back to the earliest years of the Christian movement.

The most popular objection to the historical reliability of the story of the virginal conception is that the early Church must have utilized pagan, mythological sources for the creation of this tale. However, scholars of antiquity cannot find similar stories of this kind of miraculous origin. Greek gods fall in love with mortal women, and have intercourse with them (sometimes with virgins), and barren women in the Old Testament receive their fertility again from God – but none of these are virginal conception tales. All presuppose some kind of sexual intercourse. Widely respected scholar Raymond Brown, in his massive 560 page tome the Birth of the Messiah (1977), summed up the evidence like this: “In short, there is no clear example of virginal conception in world or pagan religions that plausibly could have given first-century Jewish Christians the idea of the virginal conception of Jesus” (p. 523).  Furthermore, the passages from Matthew and Luke about the conception of Jesus by the Holy Spirit are strongly Jewish in literary style and atmosphere, full of allusions to the Old Testament. They show no literary signs of borrowing from any known pagan source. In fact, the New Testament scholar John Drane explains that St. Luke’s account may preserve literary traces of an earlier, Palestinian source:

The whole of Luke 1-2 has a very primitive kind of character compared to the rest of Luke’s writings. Though some scholars believe this to be a deliberate devise used by Luke in imitation of the style of the Greek Old Testament (the Septuagint), others have argued that Luke’s Greek is of a sufficiently consistent character [elsewhere in his gospel] to suggest that he is here [in his Nativity stories] quoting or depending on an Aramaic source. If that is true, then he must have obtained these stories of Jesus’ birth from the very earliest group of Christians in Palestine itself, the only Christians ever to speak Aramaic.” (John Drane, Introducing the New Testament, Lion Books, 1999, p. 30-31)

In other words, even the literary style of St. Luke’s virgin birth stories is consistent with the tradition that Luke received his account from the Palestinian, Aramaic-speaking mother of Jesus herself.

Some scholars have argued that early Christian belief in the virginal conception arose from a desire to exhibit the personal deity of Jesus Christ, that is, to “deify” him so that he would be more like the gods and heroes of the pagan world, and therefore more marketable to a Gentile audience. But this simply does not fit the facts of history. The truth is that throughout the first two centuries of the Christian movement, we do not have on record a single instance of any early Church Father or Christian apologist using the virginal conception story to bolster an argument for the divinity of Christ. On the contrary, oddly enough the virginal conception is usually mentioned as evidence of Jesus’ humanity, since there were numerous “Gnostic” sects at the time that claimed that Jesus was a purely spiritual being who only appeared to have human flesh and blood, when in reality, they claimed, he did not have a human body at all. The mere fact that Jesus was “born” of the Virgin Mary, therefore, attested to his full humanity.

Furthermore, historians of the early Church know that far from making the gospel message more attractive to the non-Christian, pagan world, the tale of Christ’s virginal conception was mocked and derided — at least by the “intelligentsia.” For example, in AD 178 the pagan philosopher Celsus wrote sarcastically about God’s love-affair with a Jewish peasant girl. By the end of the 1st century AD, the pagan myths were widely discredited as factual accounts among educated Gentiles, so there was not much advantage to the cause of Christian evangelism in inventing a miraculous birth for Jesus. Moreover, as we have seen, if the story goes back to the earliest decades of the Christian movement, then it would have arisen in a Christian community that was overwhelmingly Jewish in background—and Jews were the very last people on the planet who would be likely to want to copy the myths and legends of the pagans.

Some critics claim that the virginal conception story must have arisen because of a negative attitude toward sexuality that infected the Christian movement in antiquity. But once again, the claim does not fit the historical facts. At the time the gospels were written (in the mid-first century AD), and especially among the Jews dwelling in Palestine, conjugal relations were valued as good and wholesome, one of God’s created blessings. We cannot account for the origin of the virginal conception tale in terms of a pessimism about sexuality that only arose in the Greco-Roman world from the second century onward. Besides, it is difficult to see how the story of a virginal conception by the power of the Holy Spirit is necessarily a slur against the natural goodness of conjugal love. As C.S. Lewis once pointed out: we might just as well say that the story of Jesus feeding the five thousand by multiplying loaves and fishes is an insult to bakers! In other words, the extraordinary is not necessarily a denigration of the ordinary.

Finally, Some critics point out that the gospels according to St. Mark and St. John seem to know nothing about Christ’s virginal conception. But in Mark, there is no mention of Joseph at all, and Jesus is even called “son of Mary,” in violation of the normal Jewish practice of calling a man the son of his father (this does not necessarily mean that his contemporaries believed that he had no human father — there are several reasons why a Jewish male in those days might have been called the son of his mother: for example, that his human father was unknown, or dead, or that his father was a widower who had remarried, and people wanted to distinguish the sons of his first wife from the sons of his second wife).

In any case, even the silence of the rest of the New Testament regarding the conception and birth of Jesus need not be a cause for historical skepticism, for it does not necessarily imply that the other writers were unaware of the virgin birth. Regarding the gospels in particular, we need to remember that each gospel writer selected from among the teachings and deeds of Jesus, and the events of his life, only those things that were pertinent to the particular didactic purpose the writer had in mind for the particular audience for which he was writing. For example, given his intention to demonstrate to his largely Jewish-Christian audience that Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah, Matthew focused on those aspects of the Nativity of Christ that, according to his research, fulfilled Old Testament prophecy. Since he believed he had found an Old Testament prophecy in Is 7:14 that foreshadowed the virginal conception, he was happy to include in his gospel account the story, already circulating in the early Christian community, of the miraculous birth of Jesus. Meanwhile, St. Peter and St. Paul were evangelists: their primary concern in their epistles was with those aspects of the Christian message that had been publicly witnessed, and therefore could be persuasively preached to the uncommitted: above all the saving death and resurrection of Christ. The virginal conception was a mystery cherished by those who were already Christians, not something that could be presented to potential converts in order to win them over, or to new converts struggling to grasp, adhere to, and live out the basics of the faith.

In fact, we know from the letters of St. Ignatius of Antioch (who was martyred about 110 AD), letters written to Christian churches throughout the Mediterranean world, that the virginal conception of Jesus Christ was known and revered everywhere in the early Church. He wrote to the Church in Ephesus (19:1) that “three eloquent mysteries were wrought in the silence of God: the virginity of Mary, her giving birth, and the death of the Lord.”

In the end, of course, the historian cannot “prove” beyond any reasonable doubt that Jesus was conceived in the womb of the Virgin Mary simply by appealing to the limited evidence available. After all, only one person was in a position to know the full truth of the matter, and she did not write a tell-all book about it (and even if she did, skeptics would still claim she was lying or fantasizing)! Still what the historian can do is show that Christian belief in the real, virginal conception of Jesus Christ fits the known facts better than any alternative explanations on offer for the origins of this story

All this raises one final question: if Jesus really was conceived miraculously, without human fatherhood, did he know this himself? Surely he did; Mary and Joseph must have told him of the extraordinary events of his conception and birth at some point, when they felt the time was right. And these facts must have corroborated for him what he had experienced in his human heart from the beginning: a supreme intimacy with one whom he could only refer to as Abba, “my Father” (Lk 2:49). In that light, and in the light of the voice of his heavenly Father speaking to him at his baptism, he came to know his true identity as the Father’s only Son.

Next time: Why the Virginal Conception of Jesus Matters

Robert Stackpole, STD

© 2020 Mere Christian Fellowship

A Child is Born, a Son is Given (Part 1)

A Child is Born, a Son is Given (Part 1)

Why the Virginal Conception of Jesus Matters (Part 3)

Why the Virginal Conception of Jesus Matters (Part 3)