At this point, the dogged skeptic might suggest that Joseph never existed and was invented by the apostles too. But this is surely to multiply hypotheses to rescue an increasingly shaky theory. Even Celsus, the source of the whole Yeshua ben Pantera legend, grants the existence of Joseph the carpenter, to whom Mary was betrothed.[1] Indeed, all the actual evidence we have says that Joseph did exist while no credible evidence from those contemporary to and eyewitnesses of the events of Jesus’ life shows that Mary had relations with any man.
The skeptic may desperately respond, “That’s because the Church edited Pantera out!”
To which the sensible person replies, “And replaced him with this?” Why does the early Church insist on taking the trouble to tell this tale of Jesus’ birth and not simply make a cursory statement that Jesus was the son of Joseph and Mary and be done with it? Why add the incredible narrative burden of a completely unnecessary Virgin Birth to the story?
The reply of the skeptic is that the early Church needed Jesus be the son of a virgin in order for him to be the Son of God. (Note how the goalposts have now shifted from “Mary needed to cover up her sinful past with the ridiculous fiction of a Virgin Birth and everybody believed her” to “The Church needed to make Jesus the son of a virgin for theological purposes”. Arguments against the Faith tend to shift their ground a lot. It’s what C.S. Lewis describes as the “restless fertility of bewilderment.”[2])
But as we have already seen, the claim the Church needed him to be the son of a virgin is to retroject on the story assumptions that need never have occurred to messianic Jews at the time. Why would early Jewish Christians need for Jesus to be the son of a virgin? Although Isaiah 7:14 was read in retrospect as referring to birth of Jesus (for reasons we will address in Chapter 8), nobody before the birth of the Church understood that text as necessitating a virgin birth for the Messiah. Nor does the doctrine of the Incarnation necessitate a virginal conception. God, being God, could have brought his Son into the world any way he chose. All the other great heroes of Israelite history had arrived in the normal way, so why not this one?
“Because he was illegitimate,” says the skeptic, arguing in a circle and coming right back to square one. “They had to concoct the Virgin Birth to explain that.”
No. They did not. All they had to do was establish that Jesus was the son of Joseph and Mary, a lie (if lie it was) made incredibly easy by the fact that Joseph had—thirty years before—accepted Jesus as his son. The last thing the apostles needed to do was invent an incredible tale of a Virgin Birth that was totally unnecessary to their story.
The assumption at the bottom of the skeptic’s claim is that the apostles are simultaneously suckers and ingenious liars and fantastically inept con men: gullible fools who believed a crazy man and his crazy mother, but also brilliant liars who invented the whole story of the Virgin Birth themselves—and all because they were too stupid to see that they need not have invented it at all.
In the end, all critics of the Virgin Birth really mean is that they hold a philosophy which declares that God is not allowed to interfere in the ordinary course of nature via what we call “miracles”. Because of this philosophy, they are forced to propose multiple mutually irreconcilable alternative explanations for the Virgin Birth that contradict one another and fail to explain. In short, the whole argument depends on a philosophical prejudice, not on evidence. But if God is, in fact, the Creator and Ruler of nature, then all bets are off and he can do anything he likes—including become incarnate of the Virgin Mary by the Holy Spirit.
Incarnate of the Virgin Mary
And so there remains always the fourth alternative: the apostles and evangelists are reporting what they sincerely believe, having received it from the mouth of Mary, whom they rightly regarded as a credible witness because they saw her Son Jesus raised from the dead.
Let’s start over and ask how the early Church could have encountered this story for the first time.
Certainly, the apostles and disciples, upon coming to know Jesus and his mother, would hardly have introduced themselves to Mary with the question, “Pleased to meet you and, by the way, are you a virgin, ma’am?” So why did the early Church come to embrace the claim of the Virgin Birth? Because of the life, Passion, Death and Resurrection of Jesus. It was that, not the Virgin Birth, that attracted the attention of the disciples. The sole witness to the birth of Jesus in the early Church was, of logical necessity, the Blessed Virgin Mary, since Joseph was long dead. And she, like any normal, modest person, did not make a big thing of it during Jesus’ earthly ministry but “kept all these things in her heart” (Luke 2:51).
As Jesus grew to adulthood, he would have learned the details of his conception and birth as we all learn the story of our birth: from his parents. Jesus was, recall, home-schooled. He learned the story from Mary and his foster-father Joseph as he learned his alphabet, his Greek and Aramaic, how to walk, and how to handle the plane and the lathe. It is a story that was, for understandable reasons, unlikely to have been told outside the Holy Family, except as the subject of gossip and speculation among neighbors and extended family who only knew bits of it third hand. And above all, it was a story that his parents, devout Jews steeped in the culture and Scripture of Israel, would absolutely have been told in union with and in light of that culture and Scripture, especially since the archangel Gabriel had explicitly linked it with them.
So how would the Virgin Birth have become not merely general knowledge, but a crucial doctrine of the Faith? The question of Jesus’ origins did not become acute for the Church on the day he was born, but on the day he was raised from the dead. It was by his Resurrection from the dead, not his birth, that Jesus was “designated Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness” (Romans 1:4). Only in light of this awesome event and the gift of the Holy Spirit were the apostles electrified to realize that (in the words of the Risen Christ) “everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled” (Luke 24:44). And with that realization, the question of just how the Messianic Son of David had entered the world and was connected to the history of the Chosen People became acute. Only then did the early Church turn to the only possible source of information about his birth: Mary. They are reporting, not inventing, her story of the Virgin Birth, about which they would never have known had they not encountered the Risen Christ. The story of the Virgin Birth became a contributory testimony to, not the foundation of, the Church’s conviction that “God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified” (Act 2:36).
[1] Ibid.
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7 Responses
Isn’t a core part of Jesus’ mythos that he’s free from Original Sin? That is so important that it not only necesitates a Virgin Birth, but an Immaculate Conception of Mary as well. The idea that the Virgin Birth narrative is a “burden”, when it serves a clear theological purpose seems kind of like an overreach.
Virgin birth is not a necessity per se. Jesus could very well be born as one of the children in a large family. God would find a way.
As for *how exactly* Jesus was free from the original sin, virgin birth and immaculate conception are both elegant explanations, but they arise *from* the belief that Jesus is the Son of God and God Incarnate.
We don’t believe Jesus is the Son of God and God Incarnate because of virgin birth and immaculate conception but belief in virgin birth and immaculate conception springs from the primary belief that Jesus is God, as they fit the facts as they were presented.
To think otherwise is putting the cart before the horse.
No it doesn’t. Mary is also free from original sin but was not born of a virgin. The Church believes in the Virgin Birth because it happened. Only afterward does she ask, “Why did God do things this way?”
@Mark:
Really? The way I’ve heard it, was that it was the fact that Jesus was free from sin what made his death redemptory. By experiencing death even though he was sinless, he justified and effectively created a path for salvation for the rest of humanity. To be fair, the importance of Jesus being free from sin regarding this matter might be different or not empasized as much within Catholicism. But I do know that its pretty central to JW theology.
Still, if I’m being honest, to me, the whole thing comes across as something that was revised retroactively. If it was only after Jesus’ death that the emerging Church determined his importance and divinity, then I don’t find it unconceivable that they would then change his origins to match. So with that context, I think the reason why the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception came about, was because they realized that the Virgin Birth was not enough unequivocally determine that Jesus was free from Original Sin, so they included that as an addendum of sorts.
Jesus was free from Original Sin because he’s God. If Mary had Original Sin, Jesus still wouldn’t have inherited it. Being free from Original Sin doesn’t depend on your ancestors also being free from Original Sin; otherwise we’d need an Immaculate Conception (though no reason it would have to be a virginal conception) of Ann and Joachim, and their parents, and so on all the way back to Adam and Eve. which is rather obviously not the case.
And above all, what made Jesus’ death redemptory is that he is God. Mary was free from Original Sin and, Catholics believe, all actual sin, yet she did not die for our sins and there’s no indication that her death would have been sufficient for that purpose.
@3vuk5striker –
“If it was only after Jesus’ death that the emerging Church determined his importance and divinity…”
Well, the Christian would say that it’s only after Jesus’ resurrection that the emerging Church determined various things about his nature. Without the resurrection, it seems most likely that, like those disciples in Luke 24 who met him on the way to Emmaus, they would have been disappointed and assumed it had all been a hoped-for deliverance that didn’t happen.
This is precisely what would have happened. The two disciples were isolated from what happened in Jerusalem. The only thing they knew (that they were told) was that the tomb was empty.
They didn’t go to verify like John and Peter did. They didn’t stay in Jerusalem like the other disciples did. You could assume they were fleeing Jerusalem, perhaps fearing possible persecution.
One thing they definitely didn’t assume was that Jesus rose from the dead. They didn’t realize that Jesus was God Incarnate. They didn’t have a clue about Him being exceptional, like being born of a virgin and free of sin.
They were willing to listen to whom they assumed was just another ordinary itinerant teacher, but they didn’t have any theories of what happened other than being disappointed that this whole Messiah thing didn’t pan out.