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Charting the New Reformation
Part XVI – The Virgin Birth (continued)
In all probability Jesus was born in Nazareth. That is surely the assumption made in Mark, the first gospel to be written. The names of both of his parents do not appear to be historically known. The name Mary is first mentioned only in the eighth decade in Mark. All of the biographical details of her life before that time are clearly mythological. The name Joseph does not come into the Christian story until the ninth decade in Matthew. The details that we learn about Joseph’s life in that source are drawn directly from the story of Joseph the patriarch, the Joseph of the coat of many colors, which can be read in Genesis 37-50.
There are, however, a series of biblical facts about which most people seem to be unaware. How many people realize that “Mary,” the presumed name of Jesus’ mother, appears only one time in the first gospel to be written, Mark, and that is on the lips of an anonymous member of a crowd, who shouts out about Jesus: “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary?” (Mark 6:3). Note also that in this initial family reference, it is Jesus who is the carpenter. There is no Joseph. He would not enter the story until Matthew, about a decade later. It is also not until Matthew that we get our second reference to the assertion that the name of Jesus’ mother is Mary. It is furthermore worth noting, just to complete the record, that nowhere in the Fourth Gospel is the mother of Jesus ever called “Mary.” She is referred to as “the mother of the Lord.”
One other little known fact is that when the gospels were written the followers of Jesus were defending him against the charges of the critics of the Jesus movement that their founder was “base born,” that is illegitimate. How do we know? We find hints of it in the texts of the gospels themselves. In the reference just mentioned from Mark’s gospel the anonymous voice in the crowd refers to Jesus as “the son of Mary.” Every Jew would know that to refer to a grown man in Jewish society as the son of a woman was suggesting that his paternity was unknown.
Matthew dealt with this same theme overtly in his birth narrative, where he has Joseph debate what he must do with his pregnant, betrothed wife, who, he believes, is expecting someone else’s child. When Luke has the mother of Jesus say in the Magnificat that God has “looked upon the low estate of his handmaid,” a covert reference may be present to being pregnant outside of marriage, for there was no estate more lowly in first century Judaism than to be an expectant mother with no male protector. Finally, in the Fourth Gospel another voice in the crowd during a discussion of Jesus’ origins shouts out to Jesus: “We were not born of fornication” (John 8:41). The clear implication is that this person was suggesting that Jesus was. That is the background against which the story of the virgin birth is introduced into the Christian narrative. Matthew is the originator of that story and to this day, the way he does it is vivid, strange and overtly controversial. We turn now to examine Matthew’s birth narrative.
Matthew introduces his supernatural virgin birth story with seventeen of the most boring verses in the Bible. We call them the genealogy. Here Matthew seeks to ground Jesus in the literal DNA of Jewish life. He is first the descendent of Abraham, the father of the Hebrew people. Then he traces the Jesus line to King David. Jesus is also the son of David as most messianic expectations suggested. Next he traces the line that produced Jesus to the Babylonian exile. Jesus’ ancestors lived in and through this most desperate moment in Jewish history, at least until the Holocaust. Then he continued the ancestral line to Jesus himself. These are the “who begat whom” verses of the Bible. Most readers skip over them quickly as being of no great value. No one would think of reading these verses as a lesson in corporate worship.
Hidden in this boring genealogy, however, is, I believe, the clue that unlocks the meaning of the story of the virgin birth, so we turn to these verses in search of that vital clue. Matthew includes in the line that produced Jesus, four ancestral mothers. It was quite unusual in that day to place women into any genealogical line, for women were thought of more as incubators than as co-creators of the life of the unborn child. In addition to that, each of the women named was well known to Jewish readers, for their stories were told in the scriptures with which Matthew’s Jewish readers would have been quite familiar. The first of these women was named Tamar. Her story is found in Genesis 38. She is the daughter-in-law of Judah, one of the twelve sons of Jacob. Tamar was pregnant by Judah, which would have been called incest in Jewish society. She bears twins, Perez and Zerah. The line that produced Jesus flowed through Perez, a product of incest, Matthew asserts. The second ancestral mother was Rahab and her story is told in the book of Joshua (see chapters 2 and 6). She is a prostitute, who runs a brothel located inside the walls of the city of Jericho. She entertains and protects Joshua’s spies and apparently later marries one of them. The third ancestral mother mentioned is Ruth. Her story is told in the book that bears her name. After her husband has died, she seduces his kinsman, a man named Boaz, as he was sleeping on the floor after drinking too much wine and she forces him to marry and thus to protect her. The final ancestral mother in the genealogy is “the wife of Uriah.” We know from other sources that her name is Bathsheba. Her story is told in chapter 11 of II Samuel. She is the woman whose adulterous affair with King David led not only to her pregnancy, but also to the calculated murder of her husband, Uriah, while he served in King David’s army.
Does it not strike you as strange that Matthew, who was the first to relate the narrative of the virgin birth, chose to introduce that narrative by saying that the line that produced Jesus flowed through the incest of Tamar, the prostitution of Rahab, the seduction of Ruth and the adultery of Bathsheba? Is this not an unusual way to defend your founder against the charge of illegitimacy? Was Matthew saying that if a convicted felon, executed in a public place, can be the life in which God is best seen in human history, would it also not be possible to proclaim that a child called “illegitimate,” could also be the life in whom God was met in a new way? I think these possibilities need to be taken seriously. In the virgin birth story Matthew will claim a holy origin for Jesus, but then he seems to say that no matter what his origins God can raise up a holy life even through incest, prostitution, seduction and adultery. I submit that this is a powerful witness!
In this third thesis, I stated that if the Christian Church insists on interpreting the virgin birth as literal biology, “it will make Christ’s divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.” That is for many a startling claim so let me be more specific. We understand reproduction today in a way that the first century authors of the gospels could not and did not. No one in that day knew that women produced an egg cell. The assumption was that pregnancy occurred after the analogy of a farmer planting his seed in the soil of mother earth. Mother earth added nothing to the genetic makeup of the planted seed that grew out of the soil. The soil only nurtured the seed in order to bring it to life. The existence of an egg cell containing genes from the woman would not be confirmed by western science until many centuries later. When that insight was confirmed it meant that all virgin birth stories died. Virgin birth stories were created to explain extraordinary human power. In each virgin birth story of antiquity, however, it was always a divine agent paired with a virgin female. Since the virgin mother added nothing except incubation to the divine offspring, there was no need to remove her from the reproductive act. Only the male agent had to be replaced by the divine spirit or the God figure. That alone would produce the deity masquerading in human form. All of these assumptions disappeared, however, when the egg cell of the woman was discovered. Now we knew that every child born received half of his or her genetic code from each parent. The product of a union between a deity and a human virgin could now never be either fully human or fully divine. Indeed such an offspring would inevitably be half human and half divine.
The meaning of “Incarnation” was thus lost and a literal understanding of the virgin birth made Jesus begin to look something like a mermaid or one of those creatures in Greek mythology having a human head attached to an animal’s body, a blend that was neither one thing nor the other. A modern understanding of genetics has thus rendered all virgin birth stories as inadequate to produce what they were designed to explain.
There was one other church tradition or doctrine that collapsed under the weight of these facts. If the mother of Jesus passed on to her son fifty percent of her own human makeup, she too, as a child of Adam, would inevitably have passed on to him the stain of the fall into original sin, which the church claimed every child of Adam possessed. This would mean that Jesus could not have been born “sinless,” an important component in the formation of traditional Christology. He too would have been corrupted by original sin through his mother. When the Roman Catholic Church declared in the 19th century that the mother of Jesus had herself been born without sin or “immaculately conceived,” they sought to address this glaring, but new problem. Theology does adjust to reality if reality comes too close.
There was in Jesus something that his followers believed could not have been produced by human beings alone. In the fullness of his humanity the fullness of God had been met and experienced. That was the original Christ claim. That is what the myth of the virgin birth was designed to proclaim. It was never universally believed as literal or biological history.. Of the five major writers of the New Testament, two, Paul and Mark, appear never to have heard of it. Two, Matthew and Luke, offer quite different versions of it. The last, John, appears to have dismissed it. Our task is not to believe it, but to understand it.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.
Question & Answer
Robin Hutcheon, via the Internet, writes:
Question:
You say that the word “soul” is not a biblical idea. Yet my concordance in the King James Version records 36 instances from Genesis to Revelation where the word “soul” occurs, even omitting the best known reference in Luke in which Mary, in the Magnificat, acknowledges that “my soul doth magnify the Lord.”
It would seem that this word had a wide currency and acceptance in pre and post Christian times and while you may not like the word, it has a resonance with many Christians as being the God particle in our lives, which maintains that link with the infinite and eternal spirit of love, life, light and the essence of all being. Moreover, in Joshua 22:5, we are called upon to love the Lord our God and serve him “with all your heart and all your soul,” an injunction endorsed by Jesus in his ministry in the Great Commandment, which is repeated weekly as part of our service of Eucharist.
Moreover, many Christians celebrate “All Souls’ Day,” which maintains that link with our loved ones, who are no longer alive on earth, but who are still very much part of our lives in terms of influence, reflection and memory. You can’t just dispense with the word because you don’t like it. I don’t like the word “sin,” but it has meaning and resonance with millions of believers and I have to accept it in the vocabulary of any discussion on matters of faith and belief.
Answer:
Dear Robin,
Word studies are quite deceptive. We use words to translate biblical concepts that are not necessarily the words that were used in the original Hebrew, the language of the Old Testament. The word “soul” comes to us primarily through the Greek language, not the Hebrew language. The Greeks divided the human into two parts, body (soma) and mind (psyche). The Greeks also had a word for spirit (pneuma) that over time blended in the word for mind and created something which was thought to be close to what the Hebrews meant when they used the word “nephesh,” which is the word that got translated “soul.” Nephesh did not, however, mean “soul,” as we now understand that word. Nephesh really meant something closer to “breath.” It was that breath power that they believed animated the body, but it was never thought of as an entity separate from the body, and thus called a soul.
In the Genesis story of creation, we read that God “breathed into the nostrils” of Adam. Thus it was God’s breath, God’s “nephesh” that enabled Adam to become “a living soul,” an animated being. In the primary Hebrew understanding of life beyond this life, a place they called Sheol, they did not think of it as being inhabited by disembodied souls. It was also not a place of reward or punishment. It was rather a shadowy, drab existence to which all the dead went – the good, the bad and the indifferent. It had little to do with what later came to be called “The Immortality of the Soul.”
Resurrection of the body became the Christian understanding of life after death and this understanding reflects Christianity’s Jewish heritage much more than it reflects Christianity’s later Greek heritage. The resurrected body could not simply be identified with the flesh. It rather meant the resurrection of the whole person. Heaven was not a place of resurrected bodies, but neither was it a place of disembodied souls. It rather pointed to a state of wholeness in which the individual was somehow sharing in the eternal life of God. It was an attempt to describe in human words that which was beyond the boundaries of time or space, where words always fail.
So “soul”, as it came to us out of a dualistic Greek mind and world view, is not a biblical concept whether English translators used this word or not.
Thanks for writing.
John Shelby Spong
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