Born of a Virgin?: Reconceiving Jesus In The Bible, Tradition And Theology

by Andrew Lincoln

Just as Luke on a smaller scale parallels, in the case of John the Baptist and Jesus, material about parents, annunciation by Gabriel about conception, the response of the mothers, the birth, the circumcision and naming, prophetic responses to the birth and summaries on the growth of the child, so Plutarch, in the case of Alcibiades and Coriolanus, parallels sections on their origins, their upbringing and training, their physical attributes, their marriages and children, their deeds as statesmen, how they died and what happened after their death.13 What is more, just as Luke’s comparison had a clear apologetic purpose – to show the importance of John but the even greater significance of Jesus, so Plutarch’s parallelism had its own apologetic thrust – to show that Plutarch’s own homeland of Greece was not in the least inferior to Rome in the statesmen it produced and in its political and military impact on the world.14