Continuing our discussion of ancient rejections of the Virgin Birth, we note New Testament instances of this. For instance, in Mark 6:3, for instance, Jesus’ neighbors, incredulous that this common kid from the neighborhood is amazing the crowds, refer to him as the “son of Mary”, not of Joseph, as they try to denigrate him.
In John, after a particularly heated argument centering on the issue of fatherhood (in which Jesus declares that God is his Father and blasts his critics as being of “your father the devil” (John 8:44)), those critics fire back that he is a Samaritan and demon-possessed (cf. John 8:48). In other words, they claim he is illegitimate, not a Jew, and crazy. (Samaritans and Jews regarded each other with the same disdain that many Palestinians and Israelis have for each other today.)
None of this is evidence for anything other than that a) even in his lifetime, some people were aware that there was something unusual about his origins and, b) that enemies of the Faith such as Celsus[1] spread the claim of illegitimacy, eventually concocting (long after Jesus’ time on earth) the tale that he was the bastard son of a Roman soldier named “Pantera” (in case you ever wondered where the rock band got its name).
The primary difficulty for this claim is that evidence for it is non-existent. It depends entirely on massively privileging rumors by ancients and speculation by moderns as “fact” while treating actual documents written by people who were both eyewitnesses and friends of eyewitnesses to Jesus as though they are mere hoaxes or legends.
More than this, it depends on trying to maintain the claim that the apostles and evangelists were simultaneously the most gullible fools of all time, the most cunning liars and con men who ever lived and the most incompetent hoaxers in the history of the world.
Consider: the Virgin Birth story has to originate somewhere. The most likely candidates for that origin are Jesus, Mary, or the apostles. This leaves us with three alternatives:
The first problem is how a homeless itinerant preacher–obsessively haranguing passersby with a story of his own Virgin Birth–would have ever attracted huge crowds of followers and persuaded them to believe in him so profoundly that they deified him and invented a whole Resurrection yarn to account for his shameful crucifixion. It passes the bounds of everything we know about normal psychology to take this account of the story of Jesus seriously, even if there was evidence for it.
The second and fatal problem is that there is not one syllable of evidence for the claim that Jesus ever discussed his Virgin Birth anywhere in the four gospels, much less made it the monomaniacal focus of all his thoughts. Nor does it seem to have occupied the thoughts of the early Church very much. The focus of the early Church is not on Jesus’ birth, but on his Death and Resurrection. One gospel, Mark, doesn’t even bother with a birth narrative and simply begins with Jesus as an adult. John only says “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14) and then moves on to the narrative of his adult ministry. The epistles never bring it up either, with the exception of Paul’s passing reference to the fact that Jesus was “born of a woman” (Galatians 4:4). If this story is so central to Jesus’ allegedly megalomaniac self-understanding, why do we hear absolutely nothing about it in his preaching? There’s no There there.
2. If it is argued that Mary was the source of this allegedly fictional story in the early Christian community, either she believed her story or she did not. If she did not believe her own story, she was a spectacular liar. But spectacular liars are never liars about one thing. They live lives of spectacular lying and this quickly becomes obvious to psychologically normal people.
If she believed her story, that is either because she was telling the truth or was mad as a march hare. But, once again, the problem is how such a story ever became rigorously and faithfully believed by Jesus’ circle of disciples if it was not true. What normal person, confronted with a psychologically unbalanced woman trying desperately to hide her illegitimate pregnancy, would accept that tale as the real story? There have, after all, been countless other out-of-wedlock pregnancies throughout history and, no doubt, some of the mothers involved have cooked up some yarn about virginal conception to try to explain their difficulties, whether due to madness or pathological lying. But has anybody ever believed such a story outside of this one case? Perhaps one or two especially doting friends or family at most. But all normal people have always regarded such tales as contemptible lies at worst and pathetic delusions at best. How on earth, then, did this one story of a Virgin Birth gain the passionate faith of Jesus’ whole circle of disciples instead of becoming Exhibit A for them that they should keep far away from a very kooky man with a very kooky family and not be his disciple in the first place?
3. The third alternative is that the story originates with the apostles themselves as liars who cooked up the story to cover for Mary’s alleged indiscretion. But this is the most incredible claim of all.
Think about it: You are an apostolic con man. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to foist on the world a Messiah, embarrassingly crucified and supposedly raised from the dead. Your problem: you know he is not only dead, but illegitimate. What do you do?
Well, let’s review the job requirements for a Messiah. The Messiah, as we have seen in Chapter 3, was supposed to be of the line of David. That’s it. That’s all. Nothing in the Jewish tradition said he had to be born of a virgin. Nobody in your culture expects him to be born of a virgin. So all the inventor of a Messianic lie had to do was establish that Jesus was the son of Joseph and Mary (both Davidic descendants). Given that Joseph had, in fact, raised Jesus as his own son, why on earth go out of your way to draw extra scrutiny to Jesus’ origins with a tale like this? If you are a liar, just say he was born of Joseph and Mary and be done with it. Who will be the wiser, particularly since the events of his birth are thirty years in the past?
More tomorrow.
[1] See Origen, Contra Celsum I.32. Available on-line at http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/04161.htm as of July 20, 2018.
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