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

by Andrew Lincoln

The LXX translators do not, then, change the force of the Hebrew, and even if, somewhat improbably, they intended the term to be taken in the more technical sense of ‘virgin’, the Greek version of Isaiah would still involve no notion of miraculous conception but mean only that a woman who is at present a virgin will become pregnant.

those who assume Matthew is relating a virginal conception, the statement that Joseph ‘had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son’ (1.25) serves to underline that Mary remained a virgin until after she had given birth. Again, however, this is by no means the only way to understand its function. It can be read as simply continuing to make clear that Joseph was not the father and to underline that he remains righteous throughout this whole affair. He behaves precisely how someone concerned to uphold the law strictly should do. So, for example, when Josephus discusses the Essenes, he sees their conduct as exemplary for all Jews and goes on to claim that the law permits intercourse only for the procreation of children and therefore any man who has sex with a pregnant woman is impure (C. Ap. 2.199, 202).12

Unless we assume that this matter was of no interest to Matthew and his first readers, there are only two viable explanations of this gap in the account. One is that they are so familiar with a tradition that Jesus was conceived miraculously without any male involved in the process that this can simply be presupposed. Readers can then be expected to pick up on the one possible allusion to this tradition the account offers and realize that the term parthenos in the Isaiah citation should now be interpreted not, as expected from its LXX source, as a young woman but as a virgin. This is certainly possible and, despite the account’s lack of interest in depicting the conception as a miracle, is how most of its later readers have interpreted it, presumably under the influence of Luke’s story and later credal tradition. But there is, of course, another fairly obvious explanation. Matthew was aware of another tradition, one that Jewish opponents would use against Christian claims about Jesus, namely, that some other unidentified male was the father.

The angel does not tell him he was wrong in thinking that Mary was pregnant by another man but does tell him that he was wrong in the conclusion he has drawn from this, namely, that he should divorce her.

Why are these women there and why are these four singled out, while well-known matriarchs such as Sarah, Rebekah and Rachel, who needed divine intervention in order to conceive, are not included?

They are included immediately before and immediately after David – and nowhere else. David’s own ancestry and that of his first successor are shown to have anomalies. What connects Mary with the four women, then, is the similar scandal or irregularity surrounding her relationship with Joseph and her conceiving. Such a stigma should be no obstacle to viewing Jesus as the Messiah in the line of David.

Other scholars have argued against this view previously - not a necessary conclusion

When, then, in 9.10–13 (cf. also 11.19) Matthew records that the Pharisees took offence at Jesus eating with tax collectors and sinners, this would make little sense if they already considered Jesus himself to be an outcast. Such behaviour would be only to be expected; other outcasts would be Jesus’ natural companions. The offence is that Jesus is doing something that is not in accord with his social status as a religious teacher and is ignoring purity regulations in doing so.

Although Jesus had been conceived irregularly, Joseph’s acceptance of him meant that he would not have been seen as a mamzer; there would have been no public questioning of his paternity or treatment of him as having any other status than Joseph’s son.

Interesting that no one ever questioned Jesus was Joseph’s son yet author assumes Mary was adulterous - she was legit 14??????

There are scriptural accounts of conception, especially about those who are to have a significant role in Israel’s history, in which only the divine agent and the mother are mentioned, although the accounts assume the role of a human male.

Such examples would suggest that, if Matthew and his tradition were assuming familiarity with Graeco-Roman or Egyptian stories about the gods begetting children, the language of being conceived or begotten by God’s Spirit could well have signalled a virginal conception. Such stories circulated widely across the Mediterranean world and it would be surprising if they had passed Matthew and his readers by.

Elsewhere, when employing this type of discourse, Philo can speak of God making Sarah, or virtue, pregnant by seeds from heaven, so that Isaac should be seen not as offspring of creation but as the work of the uncreated God, who can therefore ‘most properly be said to be the father of Isaac’ (Det. 59–60, 124).

Although the alternative approach offers a different plausible interpretation, which could possibly be supplementary, the motif of abstention from intercourse during pregnancy does in fact correspond to what can be found in Graeco-Roman biographical accounts of conception from the gods.

In this light it can also be noted that the interpretation of 1.25a as not only underlining that the child was not Joseph’s but also indicating that he was doing what any righteous Jew would do, abstaining from intercourse during pregnancy, does not fit very well at this point in the account. It would be strange to emphasize again at this stage that the child was not Joseph’s but someone else’s when, on this reading, that had already been dealt with by the angelic announcement and equally strange to insert a comment about this aspect of Joseph’s law-observant righteousness just here.

It makes better sense to see it as an expansion on Joseph’s obedience to the angelic instructions that underlines the absence of his own involvement in the extraordinary conception of this child by the Spirit.

Why does the author bother to tell us if it has nothing to do with anything/no one knew any different/it had no impact on Jesus’ life

Reassessing the rival readings has allowed us to see that a good and possibly more compelling case can be made for Matthew’s account being about a virginal conception.

Seems counter to argument up til now but ok

Readers may be relieved to know that, though there have been a few dissenters1 and the exegetical case still needs to be made, there is far greater agreement that Luke’s annunciation story is about a virginal conception. Yet what is said about Jesus’ origins in the rest of Luke’s writings complicates matters interestingly.

Luke’s story is very different and the focus is on Mary rather than Joseph.

Luke has an announcement to Mary before she becomes pregnant and, unlike Matthew’s account, in Luke 1.26–38 there is no hint of scandal or sexual irregularity.

Mary’s response to the angel’s announcement is the typical human response of such announcement scenes, with her question expressing puzzlement, astonishment and initial disbelief at what she has been told: ‘How can this be, since I do not know a man?’ (1.34).

Those who find here no clear account of a virginal conception argue that Mary’s objection is no more than a conventional literary device that is meant to prompt the next stage of a dialogue.4 In terms of any verisimilitude in the narrative, her question makes little sense. She has not, of course, been told that there will be anything extraordinary about the manner of her conception. She is betrothed to Joseph, as the narrator has made clear (1.27), and therefore should be expected to think that, although they have not been intimate yet, intercourse will take place and the child who is to be Davidic king will be the fruit of their future union.

Elizabeth’s pregnancy, despite her old age and lack of ability to conceive previously, now produced as evidence that with God nothing is impossible, has relevance not only to Mary’s ability to have a child who is Son of God but also to the manner in which she will have this child. If a barren woman can bear a child, a virgin can conceive. After all, nothing is impossible with God! Mary’s response, expressing her obedience to the divine word, is to be seen as including her acceptance of a miraculous conception for her future son. This reading of the latter part of Luke’s account is, of course, in essence the traditional interpretation. On a sequential reading it entails that with Mary’s question the account moves from one wholly comprehensible within Jewish cultural expectations to one that narrates an event totally unprecedented in Jewish Scripture, namely God bringing about the birth of a human without the presence of a male seed.

Since her virginity was not a matter of public verification, the only person for whom this could have been clearly miraculous would have been Mary herself.

This led Vincent Taylor to the complex theory that Luke 1.34–35 constitute a later interpolation but one that, because of the Lukanisms of these verses, must have been made by Luke himself when he learned about the virginal conception story after he had completed the Gospel as a whole.

A better solution, and one that explains why Luke and his readers might not have found the juxtaposition uncomfortable or contradictory, can be found by returning to Luke’s use of the conventions of ancient biography. The writers of such biographies were also sometimes content to juxtapose two different sorts of tradition, one natural and one miraculous, about their subjects’ origins and in some cases to leave readers to sort out the connection or to decide for themselves which to accept.

The stance taken here is that the more significant primary factor for Christian theology is the canonical witness and that in this case that witness is diverse.

So far the claim has been made that there are definitely two and possibly three different traditions within the New Testament itself about Jesus’ conception. The annunciation stories in Luke and most probably in Matthew witness to a virginal conception, Paul, John and Hebrews bear witness to Jesus being a physical descendant of David through Joseph, and Luke combines this perspective with that of a virginal conception, while the minority reading of Matthew and possibly Mark 6.3 suggest illegitimacy. So the primary hermeneutical question is how such canonical diversity is to be handled.

however the diversity is handled, it will inevitably have consequences for the historicity of one or other of the traditions.

It is from these hypotheses that the issue arises of whether Luke knew of and used Matthew’s birth narrative and whether, if Matthew’s narrative were thought to contain a virginal conception, this means that there is only one independent witness to this tradition within the New Testament, because Luke would have taken the notion from Matthew and developed it in his own way. On these hypotheses also, if Matthew’s account does not contain a virginal conception, as held by the minority report, then again we would have only one witness, this time Luke, who would have added it to his version of Matthew either from a tradition with which he was familiar or as a result of his creative embellishment of Matthew.

Assumes that Luke was familiar with Matthew as opposed to the two of them utilising Q

As we have seen, at best it only emerges elsewhere relatively late in the development of the Matthean tradition. The lack of mention of a virginal conception in the earliest birth announcement tradition and the absence of it in Paul or in Mark also indicate that its circulation was not widespread and that the Lukan material’s familiarity with it is unlikely to have originated very much earlier than the time of the final version of the Gospel. This is in line with the commonly held view that, though the infancy narrative is now integral to Luke’s Gospel, it is likely to have been written last.

Given the probability that Luke was written in the late 70s or the 80s, it is unlikely that any tradition about the virginal conception would have reached him very much earlier, otherwise it would surely have made some impact on his narrative as a whole.

Luke is content to allow material that talks of Joseph as Jesus’ father to sit side by side with a virginal conception, even in the infancy narrative.

Access to a tradition of Mary’s eyewitness testimony would have rescued him from inaccuracies about, for example, the Roman census and the Jewish law.

The conclusion that the most plausible reason for the Lukan material containing a virginal conception is not that it had more reliable information than the earliest form of the tradition of a birth announcement but that it adapts the tradition to conform more closely to standard elements in the accounts of the lives of great figures in ancient biography fits with another feature of Luke’s storytelling. Elsewhere in the New Testament ‘Son of God’ remains a metaphor for Jesus’ unique relationship to Israel’s God.

Some defenders, of course, have suggested that an agreement between Matthew and Luke stems not so much from a common early Christian tradition but from knowledge derived originally from Jesus’ family, Matthew’s sources ultimately going back to Joseph and Luke’s to Mary. We have given reasons earlier why it is highly unlikely that such family knowledge would only emerge at such a late stage in Christian tradition.

He tackles the doctrine from two angles: the New Testament evidence and its dogmatic value. In regard to the former, he points out that the accounts in Matthew and in Luke ‘are never again referred to in the further course of the history of the Christ; nor does any apostolic passage appeal to them’. When he adds, ‘They conflict with the two genealogies, which go back to Joseph in a simple and straightforward way without taking any account of these stories’,54 this would need to be qualified.

all histories are narrations of the past constrained by the sources employed and by the perspectives and social and cultural locations of the historians who employ them and to the accompanying recognition that, in regard to the results of historical methods, one has to be talking in terms of probabilities rather than certainties.

Trusting them as divine revelation entails trusting their witness to the significance of Jesus and does not necessarily mean taking them literally as straightforward, historically accurate accounts.

The diversity among the witnesses to Jesus’ conception within the New Testament also raises questions about scriptural truth. Such questions are, of course, not new and are raised, for instance, by the existence of the four very different Gospel narratives about the life of Jesus as a whole. Each can be seen as drawing out different aspects of the significance of God’s action through that life and thereby allowing the gospel message to speak again to a variety of different situations. Rather than assuming that scriptural truth has to be monolithic or uniform, readers can appreciate its plural and dialogical nature as, for example, they allow the different perspectives among Matthew, John, Paul, Hebrews and James on the nature of the salvation accomplished in Christ and on its relation to the Jewish law to be what they are and to challenge and interact with one another.

when it is then asserted, ‘Mary had to be a virgin because Jesus is the Son of God’ and the one who will be named Emmanuel ‘can have no other father than the Father who is the first person of the Trinity’. This is to encourage taking ‘Son of God’ in the most literal sense and would have been news to other canonical writers like Paul or John who believed Jesus was the Son of God but did not think that that entailed that his mother was a virgin or that he did not have a father who gave him his descent from David.

one does not balk at God bringing the world into existence or raising Jesus from the dead, then there should be no problem with a virginal conception.

But this appeal to the general possibility of miracle quickly becomes very limited. For defenders of the tradition, a virginal conception or a virginal birth does not normally happen but, exceptionally, it has taken place in the one case of God’s activity in the birth of Jesus. They turn out to be just as biased against the miraculous when it comes to other miracles in the ancient world and no more willing than anyone else to accept at face value accounts of other miraculous conceptions in Graeco-Roman literature. This position is, in fact, dependent on a particular view of the authority of Scripture, one that again fails to recognize the nature of Scripture as the words of God in the words of humans of their own time and place.

The argument of Christians was not so much that such events had occurred uniquely in the case of Jesus but that they had parallels with what was claimed for other divinities yet were superior in the case of Jesus because of the quality of his life and its effects.

concedes that parthenogenesis by itself cannot account for Jesus’ birth because human males need a Y chromosome, but indicates that there is a mutation that produces people who are genetically male with XY chromosomes but, because of an inability to respond to testosterone, appear as completely normal females, although sterile and without a uterus. Mary, he proposes, could have been such a person who went on to develop an ovum and uterus. ‘If this happened, and if the ovum developed parthenogenetically, and if a back-mutation to testosterone sensitivity took place, we would have the situation of an apparently normal woman giving birth without intercourse to a son.’

????

‘The Virgin Mary being a mammal, whether she reproduced by cloning or by selfing, the result could only be a daughter. Jesus either had an earthly father, or Jesus was a woman.’

????

Without complete human DNA Jesus would be a semi-divine or wholly divine special creation that appeared to be human.

He concludes therefore that we have to get away from any biological understanding of the virgin birth and see that the scriptural birth stories are making the theological point that Jesus is not simply the product of evolutionary processes and human procreation but is ‘God with us’.

This is a fair point

one’s view of Jesus’ conception is linked with questions about Christ’s humanity and divinity and the relation between them.

because the nature of his conception has been seen by some to be crucial for the sinlessness of Jesus, without which his atoning work would have been ineffective in dealing with the sin of humanity.

The notion of a human prophet who was inspired by God’s Spirit cannot do the same theological work as the doctrine of the incarnation.

Once there is no need to negotiate a literal virginal conception, there need be no doubts or ambiguities about the full humanity of Jesus as a first-century Jewish male and, in thinking about that humanity assumed by the Word, no obstacles to applying our current theological understanding of what it means to be human and no need to be confined to traditional discussions about whether it was a human body or soul or a combination of the two that the Word assumed and whether we can only talk of the assumption of a human nature rather than a fully human subject or person.