Does the Virgin Birth Matter?

Christmas is drawing closer.  I accidentally (as a result of missing a bus and needing somewhere warm to shelter) joined the Midsomer Choral Society, with just a few weeks’ rehearsals to go before their Christmas concert.  The main piece we are rehearsing is a splendid interweaving of mediaeval and Victorian Christmas carols, telling the Christmas narrative from the Fall of Adam to Mary’s pregnancy and giving birth to Jesus.  (Now, at last, I understand why the Christmas tree decorations of my childhood included plastic apples – and it wasn’t just because 25^th December is also the birthday of Isaac Newton!)

Singing all these sweet, lilting carols about how Mary wouldn’t have been Queen of Heaven if Adam hadn’t stolen the apple, Mary as a spotless rose, Mary getting pregnancy cravings for cherries, Mary singing lullabies to Jesus, and so on, reminds me of a whole set of questions about Christmas.  Was Jesus really born of a virgin?  Did Jesus even have a biological mother?  Does the Bible even claim that he was born of a virgin, or is that a mistranslation?  Does it matter?  And (something that surely does matter) did Mary have any choice?

To start with: no, I don’t think it does matter all that much.  The earliest Christian writings and sermons don’t refer to Jesus’s birth, and neither does Mark’s gospel, probably the earliest account of Jesus’s life to be written. 

This wasn’t because the early Church wasn’t interested in miracles.  Contrary to what I keep seeing asserted on the internet, Christianity didn’t start as a collection of moral teachings probably originating in Buddhism and passed west along the Silk Road by traders, which were given a fictitious mouthpiece ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ to make them sound more authoritative, which then led to the creation of a set of picturesque legends about Jesus to make him sound more interesting. 

The Romans weren’t interested in persecuting people for spreading religious ideas about loving your enemies and giving your wealth to the poor.  What they had a problem with, and what the Christians refused to give up, was the insistence that a crucified criminal was in fact God’s anointed king, far more important than the Emperor, and that God had vindicated his innocence by miraculously raising him from the dead.

The Resurrection was central to early Christian teaching.  Paul wrote: ‘If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.’  He did not write: ‘And you must also believe that Jesus was born without his mother ever having had sex.’

On the other hand, Paul does quote an early Christian hymn about Jesus:

 

Who, being in very nature God,
    did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
rather, he made himself nothing
    by taking the very nature of a servant,
    being made in human likeness.

 

So people in the 1^st century already considered that Jesus was something more than an ordinary human.  Although only Matthew’s and Luke’s gospels tell the story of Jesus being born of a virgin, John’s gospel begins with a poetic description of how ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,’ and then ‘The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.’

But still, if Jesus is God born in human form, does that need him to have been conceived without sex?  Some people think that it does, and that this is very important.  Paul Ellis’s essay Why Does the Virgin Birth Matter? argues that it is important for three reasons: because Isaiah had prophesied that the miracle of a virgin birth would be a messianic sign; because Jesus had to be a sinless perfect sacrifice; and because he had to be a sinless high priest.

The first one is bogus.  The line in Isaiah often quoted as ‘Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: Behold, a virgin will be with child and bear a son, and she will call his name Immanuel,’ in the original could simply refer to a young woman who is pregnant – or to a woman who is now a virgin, but is soon going to have sex and get pregnant.  The prophecy might have referred to the birth of King Ahaz’s son Hezekiah, or to Isaiah’s own son whose birth is described in the next chapter and who was given the cumbersome but meaning-filled name Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz (which means ‘quick to the plunder, swift to the spoil’), or to some other child whose mother actually did name him Immanuel, but at any rate, it referred to a baby who would be born very soon in the time that Isaiah was describing, and promised that the countries currently threatening Israel would be defeated before that child was old enough to be capable of making moral choices.  It wasn’t intended to be a prophecy about a coming Messiah hundreds of years in the future.

Many of the lines from the Hebrew Bible that are quoted in Matthew’s and John’s gospels as prophecies fulfilled are like this.  I don’t think that the writers were trying to trick people into believing in Jesus by saying, ‘Look, the prophets foresaw that the Messiah was going to do all these things; nobody has done all of them except Jesus; so he must be the one the prophets foresaw,’ although this is how a lot of people seem to read the Bible today.  I think the gospel writers just saw Jesus’s life as poetically echoing all sorts of themes and motifs that they were familiar with from the scriptures they had grown up revering.

Ellis argues, reasonably, that if Jesus’s sinlessness required him not to have had a human father, then it also required him not to have had a human mother, since ‘First, any human parent would taint the sinless Savior with original sin – if there was indeed such a thing as original sin.’  As he continues, for Jesus to have been both fully God and fully human, he could not have had God as a father with a human mother, because this would instead make him half divine and half human.

Ellis’s solution to these problems is that, while the Son as the Second Person of the Trinity had existed all along, Jesus’s physical body was a special creation of God which was placed in Mary’s womb, and Mary was just a surrogate mother than Jesus’s genetic mother.  As he says, ‘The Son of God was fully human because the Creator who made First Adam was quite capable of making Last Adam.’

However, the phrase ‘if there was indeed such a thing as original sin’ is telling.  Ellis emphatically says elsewhere that he does not believe that we inherit sin from our ancestors.

If a popular preacher is going to quote modern biology – for example, the fact that in sexual reproduction, the woman is not a field for seed to be sown in, but a genetic parent who contributes the mitochondrial DNA and half the nuclear DNA of a child – then he might as well accept the fact of evolution while he’s at it.  If there ever was a historical Adam – a single first human to be spiritually aware and have moral consciousness – then God didn’t create him out of nothing, but out of the DNA of his hominid parents.  Adam would be likely to have had slight, probably invisible mutations in the DNA that had passed from his parents to him, but only to the extent that every one of us born in any generation before or after that has had mutations.

I’m not saying that I do take the Genesis 2 creation story literally.  I don’t think the compilers of Genesis intended either the story in Genesis 1 or the story in Genesis 2 to be taken literally, and they certainly can’t both be true when they contradict each other, not to mention being contradicted by scientific evidence.  But the point still stands.  If God could create psychologically modern humans from ancestors who looked much the same as us but were incapable of thinking the way we do, whether He did this in one generation or gradually over a long time, then He was capable of being incarnate in the body of a baby who was physically the child of two ordinary humans.

So I don’t think that Jesus had to have been without human parents.  But does the Bible say that he didn’t have a human father?  This is something to consider tomorrow.