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The
Historical Jesus
The Virgin Birth Modern
Westerners are well informed enough about the science and mechanics of human
conception to know that virgin birth is impossible. They may be less clear
that to accept a virgin birth also compromises the vast stretch of many
other modern disciplines - though this is no doubt instinctively
understood. So while the tale of the virgin Mary giving birth in
a stable is dutifully proclaimed and sung about, few regard it as
something "which really happened just as the Bible says". What
they may not know (or care about) is that the birth narrative
of Matthew 1.18-25 was never intended to be
history in the modern sense. The gospel authors were not giving an
historical account as a modern historian would do. Rather, they intended
to teach theology about the eternal meaning of Jesus of Nazareth for the
Hebrew nation and the world. The
lack of good history in the Nativity accounts has long been known to
Christian academics and well educated clergy. Here are some of the main
points, briefly put.
The author uses the words "Jesus
Christ" here and only once more in his whole Gospel (1.1). The title "Christ"
is, of course, the Greek for "Messiah" or "The Anointed
One". The point is again made that Jesus was special - and this
should alert us to the strong possibility that Matthew is making a
theological point rather than necessarily giving us the history of
"what really happened". The name "Jesus" is Greek
for the Hebrew name "Joshua" (Yeshua in Aramaic, the
language spoken by Jesus), which means "God is salvation" or
"God saves".
This is probably why Matthew 1.21 reads,
"... and you will name him Jesus because he will save his people
from their sins". The name later lost this meaning when it was
translated into Greek and when Christianity became primarily a
non-Jewish religion.
But, once again, the author of this Gospel is
making a theological point as well as recording a name. The
"Christ" part isn't really a name - though that's what it
later became - but a title. In more modern times it was, in effect,
turned into a patronym or surname, rather like "Smith". It
was initially Chrestus, the Latin equivalent of the Greek word
for the Hebrew title "Messiah".
The name Yeshua was quite common at the
time, which is why the Jewish-Roman historian Josephus refers to him
as "Jesus, who is called the Christ" to distinguish him from
others with the same name. The Roman historian Tacitus, writing in the
early second century, uses "Christ" as though it were the
surname of Jesus. Most translations render the
discovery of Mary's pregnancy as coming about after she and Joseph
were betrothed (engaged) but before they had been formally "married".
The Greek word actually means "before they came together". This
could denote either "before they moved in together" or
"before they had sex". Jewish couples of that period were probably
usually married about
a year after their betrothal. There is some evidence that a couple might
live together until they could afford a dowry.
But pious Jews warned
that a godly man would not sleep with his fiancée before the wedding.
Unlike recent times a suggestion in this case of immorality or sexual
sin would have been quite unlikely.
This is because most people lived
not in the so-called "nuclear family" of today but as part
of an extended family. Living together before marriage would therefore
usually have been a well-supervised arrangement. The author of Matthew's Gospel may
have been familiar with the many narratives from ancient literature.
They tell how famous men were conceived in mysterious circumstances
in which the gods participated by fertilising the mother and passing
on special powers to the offspring.
This doesn't imply, as some have
suggested, that the tale of the birth was lifted or copied from
another religion or other source. All that can reasonably be concluded
is that the author of the Gospel used a literary device from folklore, perhaps prompted by
orally transmitted tales, which were common in the ancient world.
Today we would
usually distinguish carefully between fact and fiction, or between
history and myth. These categories were unknown in the first century,
when this Gospel was written. The story was understood as history by
later generations and until modern times.
It was the advent in the nineteenth century of biblical criticism,
that analytical discipline which "tortures" the
biblical texts to discover their true nature, which first brought the realisation
that the narratives of Jesus' birth are not history. Analysis of the Hebrew and Greek
terms translated "virgin" in English texts may imply virgo
intacta. But many scholars conclude that the quotation of Isaiah
7.14 in verse 23 most likely means "young girl" rather than
"virgin".
The possibility of a woman conceiving a male child
without sexual intercourse (parthogenesis) is, I understand,
scientifically impossible since the female can't supply the necessary
male chromosome. The traditional idea of a virgin birth could easily, however, be
inferred from this word by generations which came later. Greeks and
Romans were more likely to draw the traditional conclusion than were
Jewish people. This may explain why the Nativity tale was more
easily taken up in the early Church whose members were mainly
non-Hebrews.
The tradition of a
virginal birth is recounted only here and in Luke 1.26-38. But the two
accounts are so different that some scholars think they derive from
different sources. The Catholic scholar J P Meier thinks that
each "... certainly goes back earlier than the two Gospels
that now contain it" [1]. That these verses are a construction
of the author is reinforced by the first verse of Chapter 2, which
doesn't follow from the information in the previous chapter. Many
scholars have observed that it appears in fact to be the beginning of
another birth narrative altogether.
The early emphasis on this story as "proof" that Jesus was
born of a virgin, without his parents having had sexual intercourse causes
great, if not insurmountable, difficulties for most people today. J P
Meier's conclusion is sensible. He writes:
Taken by itself, historical-critical research simply does not have
the sources and tools available to reach a final decision of the
historicity of the virginal conception ... One's acceptance or
rejection of the doctrine will be largely influenced by one's own
philosophical and theological presuppositions, as well as the weight one
gives Church teaching.
The doctrine of the virgin birth remains enshrined in the
Church's creeds, and as a teaching that must be assented to by Roman
Catholics on pain of censure.
But it no longer looms important in the
contemporary mind. I suspect that this is because Jesus himself and
traditional Christianity at large is also relatively unimportant to the
great majority of human beings in the West and elsewhere today.
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[1] A Marginal Jew, Volume 1, Doubleday, 1991
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