Literalism & Virgin birth...
Posted: Thu Apr 12, 2007 10:48 am
This topic, as Spong addresses it, does seem to challenge our concepts of Christianity, and what really makes one Christian... Here's more:
Thoughts, comments? Spong's crediblity? Warm regards, Roger
The story of Jesus' birth has now been celebrated in pageants, Christmas cards and in hymns for almost two thousand years. The characters in this drama like Mary, Joseph, the Christ Child, the Shepherds and the Wise Men are familiar icons even in our secular society. The star in the East, Bethlehem, the manger and the angelic chorus elicit in almost all western people immediate mental images. Unknowingly we have also, most of the time quite unconsciously, expanded the details of this story so wondrously that we are shocked to discover that many of the things that we have always assumed are in the Bible are not there at all. For example, in the biblical story there is no mention that the Wise Men were three in number or that they rode on camels. The story has no donkey being led by Joseph on which the expectant Mary rode side saddle to Bethlehem. There is no search for a room in the inn, no innkeeper and no stable. There are no animals mentioned since there is no stable, which means that there were no cattle lowing, no sheep baaing, no night wind to say," Do you see what I see?" All of these details have grown in our imagination as we have acted them out in pageants and sung about them in carols.
Were the infancy narratives, which are found only in Matthew and Luke, but not in Paul, Mark or John, written to record the actual events that occurred on the night in which Jesus was born? There is no doubt that the answer to this question among biblical scholars is "Of course not!" All birth stories are by their very nature mythological. They are attempts to interpret retroactively the moment when a great person was born. A life has to become great before mythical details begin to gather about the moment of his or her birth. These details always seek to find signs of future greatness in that person's infancy, but history they are not. To demonstrate that one has only to look at the assumptions made by the biblical birth narratives.
Matthew asks us to believe that a star can actually announce a birth and that it can move across the sky so slowly that Wise Men can follow it, first to the palace of Herod and then down a six-mile wagon track of a road until it stops to shine over the house in which Jesus was born. Matthew also asks us to believe that King Herod would deputize these magi as his personal CIA to bring him information about this threat to his throne. When they fail to do so, Herod, we are told, goes into a murderous rage and kills all the boy babies in Bethlehem to make sure he gets the "pretender." Such assumptions are not to be understood literally by rational modern minds.
Luke asks us to believe that post-menopausal parents, Zechariah and Elizabeth, can bear a son named John the Baptist; that the fetus of John the Baptist while in Elizabeth's womb can actually leap to acknowledge the superiority of the fetus of Jesus in Mary's womb; that angels can break through the night sky to sing to hillside shepherds and that these shepherds, armed only with the two clues that the promised baby is wrapped in "swaddling clothes" and lying "in a manger," can find the child instantly in the crowded village of Bethlehem. Luke also assumes that Joseph would take his "great with child" wife on a 94 mile donkey ride from Nazareth to Bethlehem, while portraying Zechariah, Mary, the angels and Simeon as breaking into song when it is their moment to speak on the stage to explain these wonders.
The stories that purport to tell us of Jesus' birth are dramatic and interpretive accounts that were clearly never intended by their authors to be history. They are not even an original part of the Christian story, but are 9th decade additions to the tradition. Paul never heard the story of Jesus' miraculous birth. What he says of Jesus' origins is that he was born of a woman (not a virgin) like everyone else and that he was born under the law like every Jew. Mark, the earliest gospel writer, also appears to know nothing about a miraculous birth. In Mark, the fully human Jesus comes to be baptized by John the Baptist and, as he steps into the Jordan River, the heavens open and the Spirit is poured out on him by the God who lives above the sky. For Mark this infusion of the Holy Spirit is the source of Jesus' claim to be a divine, God-filled life. After Matthew and Luke introduce the story of the virgin birth into Christianity, we need to note that the last gospel writer, John, seems to deny it. There is no miraculous birth story in John's gospel and on two different occasions, he refers to Jesus as the son of Joseph.
Despite these biblical data that are universally recognized in the Christian academies of higher learning, the early 20th century Tractarian movement still decided to include the literal accuracy of the virgin birth among the "Five Fundamentals," which they declared must be believed to be a Christian. Indeed, they listed the virgin birth in the number two position. It must be difficult for them to realize that there is no reputable biblical scholar of world rank today, either Catholic or Protestant, who still treats the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke as literal history, not a single one.
Today we know that virgins do not conceive. In the 1st century Mediterranean world, however, where the mysteries of reproduction were not fully understood, the only way they could explain human greatness was to ascribe to the hero a supernatural heritage in which a divine being or presence acting upon a pure virgin produced a "god/man." Such stories were a dime a dozen in that world.
The story of a virgin birth for Jesus thus entered Christianity through Matthew in the middle years of the 9th decade. Matthew based his story on a text from Isaiah that he, quoting a Greek translation, thought said, "Behold a Virgin will conceive and bring forth a child." If Matthew had read the Hebrew original instead of a Greek translation, he would have discovered that the word "virgin" was not present anywhere in that text. In Hebrew, the prophet Isaiah wrote, "Behold a woman is with child." Where I come from to be with child is not to be a virgin. This text was written as part of a sign that the prophet Isaiah was giving to the King of Judah in the 8th century BCE to convince him that the armies of Syria and the Northern Kingdom, that were at that moment besieging Jerusalem, would not conquer his capital city. Isaiah's words were designed to give assurance to the king about the continuation of his kingdom of Judah in that crisis. It certainly did not refer to an event that would occur 800 years later.
Proof texting from the Hebrew Scriptures was a popular interpretive tool for Matthew, but like many a country preacher has done since, the text was twisted to mean what Matthew wanted it to mean. Even the Jewish writer Trypho pointed out this mistake in a dialogue with Justin Martyr in the 2nd century of the Christian Era. However, his protest was of no avail and so the story of Jesus' birth to a virgin mother, based on the misunderstanding of a mistranslation of a text in Isaiah, entered the Christian tradition as literal proof of the miracle of the virgin birth.
The virgin birth was then said to be that which proved Jesus' divinity. It was for this reason that the fundamentalists, who battled the modernists at the turn of the 20th century, decided that the virgin birth, understood literally, had to be one of the irreducible Five Fundamentals that formed the heart of Christianity and without which Christianity would cease to be. As we shall see, however, they tied their literal hopes to a very weak reed and ultimately this tactic failed. There was no literal virgin birth. Shouting loudly does not change reality. The literal account of the Virgin Birth, understood as biology, was based on bad exegesis and time would reveal that it was also based on a flawed understanding of reproduction. When science discovered in the 18th century that women have egg cells and were therefore equal co-creators of every life ever born and not simply receptacles through which a new life could enter the world, at that moment all virgin birth stories died as literal history, since the story of Jesus' virgin birth would now give us not a fully human and fully divine life, but a half human and half divine life..
I note also that the whole Bethlehem tradition as the birth place of Jesus is today dismissed in scholarly circles as an interpretive myth. A Bethlehem birth place for Jesus was built on a verse in the prophet Micah. It was part of the messianic claim made for Jesus that he was heir to the throne of David and thus had to be born in David's city. It too is not history.
Mark, the first gospel, assumed that Jesus was born in Nazareth. He is called in all the gospels "Jesus of Nazareth" and "a Galilean" since that was the region of both his birth and life. The struggle to claim messiah status for Jesus was clearly operating by the time the gospels were written and so both Matthew and Luke turn him into what the yearned-for messianic King of the Jews was actually thought to be. The "Messiah" was regularly referred to by the Jews as "God's firstborn son." When those terms were applied to Jesus well after his earthly life had ended, it was inevitable that these titles would be literalized and Jesus would come to be thought of as a divine life, literally fathered by God through the human medium of the virgin Mary.
Literalism has turned this attempt at interpretation into bad history and bad biology and thus ... it turns him into being a figure, not unlike a mermaid, who is neither divine nor human. Matthew clearly did not mean for this narrative to be taken literally...
Thoughts, comments? Spong's crediblity? Warm regards, Roger