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

by Andrew Lincoln

The statement uses the language ‘being conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary.’ Whether this language has a historical base is difficult to determine, but it seems clear to me that in Matthew’s and Luke’s birth narratives theological interests frequently override historicity and, in comparison with the rest of the New Testament, that the virgin birth does not belong to the centre of the gospel, and so I am open to the possibility that the language of conception by the Spirit and virgin birth refers not to a biological or historical fact but is to be seen as the evangelists’ depiction in narrative form of their conviction about the divine Sonship of Jesus.

Why focus on Jesus’ birth at all? What is the significance of anyone’s birth in relation to that person’s life as a whole? Though some have always turned to astrology to discover the significance of the time of their birth, for most people there is little to explore about the meaning of their births other than to state the obvious – they constitute the beginning of their lives. Any further significance is to be found only within the context of those lives as a whole. If those lives are deemed to have special importance, then their beginnings, in retrospect, are caught up in the impact of lives that have made a difference. In studying such lives due attention will then be paid to the formative influences on them from the very beginning, and the circumstances of their birth to particular parents at a particular time and a particular place can be said to take on meaning.

There are, however, other instances in which talk of the significance of a birth would appear to make sense. They have to do with exceptional aspects surrounding a birth. Those who discover they were given up for adoption at birth might have good reason to reflect on the meaning of their arrival in the world in such circumstances. Other unusual factors may contribute to giving special significance to a child’s birth, ranging from dramatic rescues from death of women about to give birth to medical choices between the life of the mother and the life of the child.

the time of Jesus it was conventional in telling of the lives of great people, particularly when little was known of their origins, to depict their births in a way that already displayed unique features befitting their future greatness.

Christians hold that the birth of which we are speaking is not simply that of a figure in history, Jesus of Nazareth, but is also in some sense related to his identity as the second ‘person’ of the triune God.

At one end of the spectrum, there are those who hold that if Scripture and the creed state that Jesus was born without a human father and all things are possible for the God who is the Creator of the universe, then only those who disbelieve in the miraculous powers of such a God would be arrogant enough to question the matter.8 At the other end, there is little to discuss because it is assumed that no intelligent present-day Christian would take the story of the virgin birth literally and it is a simple matter to demonstrate its non-historicity. Anyone who pretends otherwise is really a fundamentalist or an intellectual hypocrite.

According to the faith of the Church the Sonship of Jesus does not rest on the fact that Jesus had no human father: The doctrine of Jesus’ divinity would not be affected if Jesus had been the product of a normal marriage. For the Sonship of which faith speaks is not a biological but an ontological fact, an event not in time but in God’s eternity.

The earliest New Testament writings, as is well known, are those of Paul and in them there is no mention of a virgin birth. Paul does, of course, make some reference to Jesus’ birth in three places (Gal. 4.4; Rom. 1.3; Phil. 2.7). But all three passages simply assume Jesus’ full humanity in his birth and show no interest in the circumstances of the birth itself.

Paul and the Jewish Christian tradition he takes up in Romans 1.3 show no reservation about employing the term ‘seed’ in connection with Jesus’ birth, indicating that this birth was the result of the continuity of the male seed in the line of David. Elsewhere Paul can speak of Jesus as also the seed (singular) of Abraham (Gal. 3.16, 19), and this is in fact the context for the following reference to Jesus’ birth in Galatians 4.4. The one whom God sent as God’s Son, born of a woman, is the one who is the fulfilment of the promise to Abraham about his physical seed. Paul has a high Christology, which includes the notion of the pre-existence of Christ, but a virginal conception plays no part in this and it is almost certain that he did not know of such a tradition.

The earliest Gospel, Mark, also shows no sign of knowledge of this tradition. This is not simply an argument from silence, since, in the case of Mark, in the ‘sandwich structure’ of 3.20–35 and in 6.1–6a the evangelist is quite clear about the attitude of Jesus’ mother and brothers towards Jesus; it is one of alienation and unbelief.4 In 6.4 Mark has the saying of Jesus that ‘Prophets are not without honour, except in their home town, and among their own kin, and in their own house.’ This makes it highly improbable that Mark was aware of a tradition that Jesus’ birth was an extraordinary occurrence about which his parents had received some special revelation. What is more, given the tendency in the early Christian movement to honour Jesus’ family,5 it appears highly unlikely that Mark would have presented this negative portrait unless it had been rooted in the tradition.

John’s Gospel makes very clear that Jesus is more than merely human. Its prologue depicts him as the incarnation of the Word who in the beginning was at God’s side and declares that what God was, the Word was (1.1, 14). But for the Fourth Evangelist there is no recourse to a story of virginal conception to make this point.

So, in fact, John introduces Jesus in his narrative as someone in full solidarity with normal human fleshly existence; he has a father (1.45) and a mother (2.1, 3). There can be little doubt that for the Fourth Gospel the Word’s becoming flesh did not entail anything other than the normal means of human conception.

this case, however, there has to be doubt whether Jesus’ illegitimacy is in fact in view. The verse reads: ‘They said to him, “We are not illegitimate children [literally, ‘not born of fornication’]; we have one father, God himself.”’ While this could be taken as an ironic attack on Jesus by his opponents because of rumours in circulation about the abnormal circumstances of his birth, this is highly unlikely given that John has just had the Jewish opponents say precisely the opposite – that Jesus is the son of Joseph and that they know his father and mother (6.42), and in any case the context of the debate about spiritual paternity and their emphasis on having one father makes another interpretation far more plausible.

of descent continued down to Jesus through his father’s seed. The term ‘seed’ frequently has the extended meaning of ‘descendant’ but, unless used metaphorically, retains the connotation of being in the line produced by the male role in procreation.13

Note also though that Mary was thought to have been descended from David too and that Matt’s genealogy also features women

This then appears to be a strong statement of Jesus being in the physical line of descent from David continued through his own father.

? Necessarily through his father

the distinction between natural and legal parentage is a present-day concern that is being read back into the interpretation of Davidic descent.

is hard to see why he went to such pains to show that Jesus could be considered to have Davidic descent despite Joseph not being his biological father.

The notion that Joseph had children from an earlier marriage is found in the late second-century Protevangelium of James and is advocated in the fourth century by Epiphanius, but there is no hint within the New Testament, other than this possible cryptic reference to ‘the son of Mary’, that Jesus’ brothers and sisters were anything other than products of the marriage of Joseph and Mary. In addition, if Jesus were being distinguished from his brothers and sisters in Mark 6 on the basis of different mothers, then one would have expected his siblings’ mother also to have been named.

Many in Nazareth are scandalized by Jesus’ teaching and deeds because they know Jesus’ trade and his family and find these incompatible with his being a teacher who communicates wisdom.

It has now become clear that there is no evidence of the virgin birth tradition elsewhere in the New Testament and that the accounts in Matthew and Luke are the only possible canonical witnesses to such a tradition.

? A bit quick to get to that point

We shall assume, with the scholarly consensus, that Matthew and Luke were written around 75–85 CE and, therefore, some two generations after Jesus’ birth.

Dominant in the Gospel writers’ presentation of Jesus was their Christological conviction, based on the resurrection, that Jesus was both Messiah and Son of God.

what they had perceived through the resurrection was the case, then this is who Jesus must always have been throughout his life – uniquely God’s Son. Indeed, he must have in some sense existed as the Son or the Word prior to his earthly life.

This method of applying Scripture was common in Judaism. The Qumran writings with their pesher interpretative technique (‘this is that’) offer parallels. This in our situation, they say, is that in the text, and so they see what has happened in the case of the teacher of righteousness and in the events of their community as anticipated in Scripture.

So Matthew is not so much citing Scripture to prove to other Jews that Jesus is the Messiah as employing Scripture to give expression to the confession that he and his readers share – that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. In the light of that confession Scripture as a whole and in its individual parts can now be read as prefiguring Jesus. And if Scripture prefigures Jesus, then it is not surprising that Matthew, as we have suggested above, can go further and in some places use the prefigurement in Scripture to shape his narration of the story of Jesus’ birth.

His presentation of Jesus as the Davidic Messiah from the beginning of his life is informed in particular by the Moses stories.

The influences of the Moses story continue after the account of the massacre of the innocents. Herod dies and Joseph in Egypt is instructed in a dream to go back to Israel, ‘for those who were seeking the child’s life are dead’ (2.20). Presumably Matthew means Herod is dead, but, in using the plural, the echoes from the Exodus story become more important than consistency in his own.

it also becomes apparent that Matthew has also used this Exodus passage to shape his description of Joseph’s original journey to Egypt (2.13–14). The main parallels here are between Joseph and Moses rather than between Jesus and Moses, but because Joseph also takes Jesus with him, this means that the overall parallel between the life of Jesus and the life of Moses continues.

What is more, Jesus and Moses are the objects of those seeking the life of the child (2.20). In both stories a child who is to be the agent of salvation has an attempt made on his life; in both this is done by a tyrannical king; in both other innocent children die as a result; in both the king’s attempt is thwarted; and in both the child who is to bring salvation is himself saved. In all these ways the details of the birth narrative adumbrate what is to be a major motif for Matthew – Jesus is the new and greater Moses.2

They begin not with Scripture but with what is believed about Jesus Christ and then, in a two-way movement, both read Scripture in the light of that belief in order to draw out Christ’s significance and employ Scripture to fill out the tradition when they express their belief in narrative form.

Luke achieves similar ends primarily by means of pastiches of scriptural language informing the narrative and serving the overall motif of a comparison between John the Baptist and Jesus.

John the Baptist’s parents are modelled principally on two scriptural couples, Abraham and Sarah and Elkanah and Hannah, who faced the stigma associated with infertility and yet whose situations were resolved by God’s miraculous intervention.

There can be little doubt that Gabriel’s appearance to Zechariah is modelled on that to Daniel. This is highly significant for Luke’s use of Scripture. Already in the first chapter of his Gospel he has had the law, the prophets and the writings foreshadow what happens at the start of the new era of salvation. Abraham and Sarah are taken from Genesis in the Law, Elkanah and Hannah from the Former Prophets, and Gabriel from the Writings. Later at the end of the Gospel in Luke 24.44 Luke will refer to this threefold division of Scripture when he says that ‘everything written about Jesus in the law of Moses, the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled’ and now it becomes apparent that he has embarked on this process himself from the very beginning of his story of Jesus.

As he fills out this pattern for his story of Jesus’ presentation, however, Luke appears to confuse a number of matters. He thinks the purification according to the law involved both parents – ‘their purification’ (2.22) – when in fact it was necessary only for the mother.

But there was no law that required the presentation of a firstborn son in the sanctuary. Luke paraphrases Exodus 13.2 in 2.23, but this simply declares that a firstborn male was holy to the Lord. What then had to be done was not to present him physically but to redeem him when he was a month old, to buy him back from the Lord by paying a priest five shekels, as is set out in Numbers 3.47–48 and 18.15–16 and of which there is no mention in Luke’s story.

Under the influence of the presentation of Samuel in the sanctuary, Luke has made the presentation part of the law and run it together with the law about purification. All of this militates against the view that Luke got the information for his birth story from Mary. Mary would have known the customs, whereas Luke, a Gentile Christian who had probably been a god-fearer, would have had no practical knowledge of these laws.

Interesting

So the Gospels of Matthew and Luke as a whole follow that of Mark in presenting their message about Jesus in the form of an ancient biography.

It is important to underline that the conventions for an ancient biography should not be confused with those for a modern one. The genre of bios was a flexible one and operated within a continuum that stretched from ancient history writing on the one side through to the encomium and the ancient romance or novel on the other.

Even historians, such as Thucydides and Tacitus, who claimed to have investigated their subject matter closely and to have sought out oral or, where available, written sources (cf. also Luke 1.1–4), would compose the discourses that take up a large amount of space in their histories in accord with what they thought would fit the character of the speaker and the occasion.

Look at similarities between Luke & Matt though - Q source

should be apparent, then, that in this area Matthew’s and Luke’s birth stories also provide the features that would be expected of an ancient biography’s depiction of the beginnings of the life of a great figure.

Sometimes such biographies recount something miraculous about the birth of the subject. Moses’ mother, Jochebed, is enabled to give birth so easily that nobody notices the occurrence (cf. Josephus, Ant. 2.205–221) and similarly Cicero’s mother delivers her child without any pain or labour (Plutarch, Cic. 2). More frequently, and of more significance for our topic, the miracle has to do with conception. Plutarch provides three examples. In relating the origins of Romulus, he says that ‘the story which is most believed and has the greatest number of vouchers’ is that her uncle, Amulius, made Romulus’ mother a vestal virgin.

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

The narrator begins at the time when Mary and Joseph are betrothed (1.18b). Unlike the modern custom of engagement, betrothal was considered part of the marriage not a state prior to it, and here in 1.19 Joseph is called Mary’s husband as well as her betrothed. Betrothal was the period in which a young woman, usually aged between 12 and 14,3 was transferred from the authority of her father to that of her future husband. It had two stages. For the first year or so she would continue to live under her father’s roof, but then she would move in with her husband and he would support her financially. It is not certain whether sexual intimacy was allowed during the first stage,4 but during both stages the couple were considered legally married.

this point it is worth observing that Matthew’s is the only Gospel that mentions dreams and it does so six times. Five references are in the birth narrative, and four of these five are to Joseph’s dreams. It is probably no coincidence that in Genesis the great receiver and interpreter of dreams was also named Joseph.

But in Joseph’s dream the angel also tells him something that the narrator had already conveyed to readers in 1.18, namely, that the child conceived in Mary is ‘from [or of] the holy spirit’.6 Most commentators simply assume, possibly under the influence of their view of Matthew’s later citation of Isaiah 7.14, that this is a reference to a virginal conception. But what would this phrase mean in a Jewish context? It should at the very least give pause for thought that elsewhere in Jewish literature the language of divine begetting does not entail a conception without a human father. Readers would need very clear indications if they were expected to take this phrase in such an unprecedented way.

In Psalm 2.6–7 – ‘You are my son; today I have begotten you’ – God’s address to the king meant that the latter had a special status and role in carrying out God’s purposes and obeying God’s will as a son obeys his father, not that God had been involved in his birth instead of a human father.

Paul’s talk of Ishmael being born according to the flesh and Isaac being born according to the Spirit (Gal. 4.29) confirms how the latter formulation would normally have been taken. His readers would have been clear that Abraham was the biological father of both sons but that Isaac was the son who was the fulfilment of the divine promise.

What is of concern is to establish that Joseph was prepared to serve as Jesus’ father so that Jesus could be called a son of David, as Joseph himself was, and that Joseph gave this public acknowledgement by naming Mary’s child (1.21, 24–25).

In Judaism, in order to establish paternity, it was not sufficient to ask the mother, because she might lie about the father so as not to be accused of adultery. Rather a man had to give testimony, since most men would be reluctant to acknowledge a child unless it was their own. The Mishnah, from around 200 years after Jesus’ birth, is very clear on this: ‘If a man says, “This is my son”, he is to be believed’ (Baba Bathra 8.6).

In Hebrew the term employed is almah and that simply means a young woman, who would have been understood to conceive by the usual means.