The Virgin Birth

Eve of the Festival of the Ascension

The Virginal Conception of Jesus

"...who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary..." --from the Apostles' Creed

"...was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary.."--from the Nicene Creed

Many twentieth and twenty-first century professed Christians, especially Protestants, have trouble believing the doctrine of the virgin birth, or more properly, the virginal conception of Jesus. The central reason is that you can't get around its being a miracle. Virgin Births don't happen, at least not in a rational universe. ( I have been told that there are actually very rare instances of parthenogenesis in humans, but I don't think that's what's happening in the Biblical birth stories.)

You can get around the resurrection being a miracle. Many of the more rationalistic Christians think of it as being a "spiritual" rather than bodily resurrection. Many think of it as a new birth of faith in the Spirit of Christ that emerged shortly after his death rather than a bodily resurrection.

The early twentieth century German New Testament scholar Rudolph Bultmann developed a programatic rationalistic understanding of the New Testament which he called "Demythologizing." Bultmann contended that first century people lived with a mythological understanding of the world. In order for miraculous events in the New Testament to have meaning for modern day people, we must take the mythological elements out and understand these events rationally. This is easy enough to do with, for example, Jesus' demon exorcisms. What first century people thought of as demon possession, modern people think of as mental illness. Jesus operated within the thought framework of his time. Whereas his contemporaries saw him as, among other things, an exorcist, we would see him as having a good understanding of psychology and an ability to use that understanding to heal mentally ill people. Bultmann's understanding is very popular to this day, even among people who wouldn't know the word demythologize or the name Rudolf Bultmann.

While you can demythologize the resurrection as a new birth of the Spirit among the disciples (the resurrection appearances are more difficult to demythologize), the Virgin Birth resists such rationalization. Many moderns see it as not essential to the Christian faith and therefore can be dismissed. They note that the Gospels of neither Mark nor John mention it, that Paul doesn't mention it, and that none of the other NT writers mention it. If Paul didn't need it for his faith in Christ, why should I need it for mine. Jesus could be the full incarnation of God without having been born of a virgin. The doctrine is superfluous to the Christian faith. We therefore find it absent from modern day Protestant creeds, such as the Canadian Creed. 

The crucial point of the debate is rationalism. Do we believe that all events must correspond with the laws of nature, or do we believe that God can intervene with the laws of nature and cause events that go against the laws of nature, i.e. miracles. I take the latter position.

Many who agree with me that God can and does intervene to change things then go on to abandon any rational thinking about the Bible and Christian doctrine. If one miracle in the Bible really happened, then they all really happened--would be this type of thinking. That is not my position. I do employ critical  thinking and rational logic in my approach to the Bible and the creeds and everything else. 

So finally we come to the Virgin Birth (this blog will be a little longer than my usual). I believe that it happened. I don't think it is necessary for the Christian faith. In some ways I just as soon wish it hadn't happened, but it did.  Why do I think so?

My reasons have more to do with applying standard criteria used by New Testament scholars to determine the authenticity of sayings of Jesus and events in the life of Jesus. Among those criteria the top two are Discontinuity  and Multiple Attestation. 

The criterion of discontinuity is basically this: If a saying or event is discontinuous with both Judaism and early Christianity, it is more likely authentic. The logic here is that if you can't find it in the understandings and doctrines of the Jewish faith that Christianity came from or the nascent Christian faith that emerged, there is less likelihood that the church made it up. The idea of a virgin birth is totally absent from the Hebrew Bible (our Old Testament) (I'll deal with the Septuagint version of Isaiah 7:14 in a later blog) and from the thinking of the earliest Christians. Moreover, it is also essentially absent from Greco-Roman thought of the time. 

More important for this case is multiple attestation. The more gospel sources have an event, the more likely it is historical. In the case of the virgin birth we have two gospel sources, the source in the Luke narrative and the source in the Matthew narrative. Clearly Matthew does not know the Gospel of Luke and Luke does not know Matthew. They both know and use Mark, but Mark lacks a birth story. 

Matthew's story of the birth of Jesus is almost completely different from Luke's. Matthew has the wise man, the three gifts, the star of Bethlehem, Herod's killing the Jewish baby boys in an effort to kill Jesus, Joseph and Mary's flight to Egypt with the baby to escape Herod's wrath. None of these events are in Luke. 

Luke's story has the angel Gabriel's annunciation to Mary, Mary and Joseph's going to Bethlehem for a census enrollment, no room for them in the inn, Jesus being born in a manger, the shepherds having an appearance of angels to them in heaven singing the Gloria and telling them to go see the baby. None of these elements are in Matthew.

The only things the two stories have in common are Joseph and Mary are in both, both have Jesus born in Bethlehem, and both have him born of a virgin. 

The intervention of God in human affairs manifests itself in what the theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg called "unique events." Modern rationalism is not able to deal with unique events. For something to be quantifiable from a time before recording and cameras, we need duplication, especially duplication in our own time. If someone were resurrected from the dead today, we would want to get him to a research hospital, take all sorts of blood samples, give him all sorts of scans and tests, and try to determine what chemical, or enzyme, or whatever, he had that the rest of humanity did not have. We would want to find the resurrection chemical, the resurrection factor. But Jesus' resurrection, like his birth were unique events. We have nothing to compare them to. 

If you think in terms of God being able to intervene in history, to intervene with the laws of nature, then there is multiple source evidence to believe in the virgin birth of Jesus. I do.

Faithfully,

Christian