HOMEPAGE MY PROFILE ESSAY ARCHIVE MESSAGE BOARDS CALENDAR Charting the New Reformation Part XV –The Third Thesis: The Virgin Birth, Understood as Literal History, Makes Christ’s Deity, as Traditionally Understood, Impossible! Almost all of us, at one time or another, have participated in a Christmas pageant. We have been angels or shepherds, wise men or Joseph, the Virgin Mary or even one of the animals located around the stable - a camel, a sheep, a lamb or a cow. At one point early in my ministry, I served a congregation, Calvary Parish in Tarboro, North Carolina, the county seat of Edgecombe County. Around that county at almost every crossroads, where a service station and a country store were located, this church had created mission congregations. I was thus responsible also for churches in such rural villages as Old Sparta, Speed and Lawrence. There were two additional mission churches in Tarboro itself, one rooted in racial segregation and the other in the social divide between owners and workers. Since every church had a Christmas Pageant, I got to attend numerous pageants a year! That was, to put it frankly, “cruel and unusual punishment” for a priest. I knew the color, size and shape of every bathrobe in Edgecombe County, for that is what all the characters wore as costumes, except for the Virgin Mary, who was always in pastel blue. Because of our adult familiarity with Christmas pageants, the birth narratives found in the gospels are writ large in our memories. The way we remember them, however, is as a single blended narrative, which is not the way they appear in the Bible. There is no birth story in Mark, the first gospel to be written (circa 72 CE). It was not until the ninth decade (circa 82 - 85 CE) in the writing of Matthew that the story of the virgin birth made its entry into the Christian tradition. Matthew is the one who added such unique features to the Christmas observance as the star in the East, the Magi, the gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh, the slaughter of the “Holy Innocents” by King Herod and the flight of the holy family, Joseph, Mary and the Christ Child, into Egypt to escape Herod’s wrath. These details are uniquely Matthaen, appearing in no other book of the Bible. The third gospel to be written, Luke, which appeared in the late ninth or early tenth decades of the Christian era (circa 89-93), gave us a second birth story. It is the details of this version with which we are most familiar, since Luke provides the story line that has been followed by most of our Christmas pageants. This is where we find such familiar details as the annunciation to Mary in Nazareth by the archangel Gabriel, informing her that she is to be the virgin mother of the messiah; the journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem to be “enrolled” by Joseph and Mary, when she is “great with child;” the story of “no room at the inn;” the birth, presumably in a stable, although the only hint of a stable in the text, is that an animal’s feeding trough becomes the manger in which the infant is laid; the angels appearing to hillside shepherds to announce that “unto you is born this day in the city of David a savior who is Christ the Lord,” and their subsequent urging of the shepherds to go seek the baby in Bethlehem. The angels give the shepherds only two clues: “You shall find the child wrapped in swaddling cloths (not clothes as is so often misread) and lying in a manger.” The shepherds go, find the babe and return to their fields, while “Mary kept all these things in her heart and pondered them.” These uniquely Lucan additions to the story of Jesus’ birth appear nowhere else in the Bible. They are the products of Luke’s mind only. What does this brief analysis of the biblical details of Jesus’ birth mean? It means that contradictions abound. In Matthew the Holy Family, immediately after Jesus’ birth, is forced to flee to Egypt to avoid the wrath of Herod. In Luke, however, we read that Jesus was incorporated into the tradition of the Jews by being circumcised on the eighth day, presented in the Jerusalem Temple on the fortieth day and then with his parents, Mary and Joseph, he made his way leisurely back to their home in Nazareth. Matthew has wise men, while Luke has shepherds. Is either writing a first-hand memory? The two cannot be harmonized. In the final gospel to be written, John (circa 95-100), most people are surprised to discover that the story of the miraculous birth of Jesus has disappeared altogether; it simply is not there. More than that, on two occasions in this gospel without a birth story, Jesus is referred to simply as “the son of Joseph” (John 1:45, John 6:42). No reference to the birth of Jesus occurs anywhere else in the entire Bible. This is all there is. Two deeply contradictory narratives, related in two separate books of the New Testament, is the totality of the Bible’s story of Jesus’ birth. The birth tradition that most of us meet at Christmas has been built by blending these two irreconcilable narratives into a single story in which all of their contradictory details are quietly blunted. The first step in our understanding of the meaning of the Virgin Birth tradition is, therefore, to take the time to note exactly what the Bible says about the origins of Jesus. It is not what most of us have been taught. When that truth registers for the first time people begin to ask questions that are almost frantic. Are there any facts here that we can trust? Were these fanciful stories written by their original authors as history? Let me state at once that there is not a chance that any of the birth details in either Matthew or Luke’s version of the virgin birth are either accurate or literally true! The data supporting this conclusion are overwhelming. Stars are masses of burning gas, they do not announce earthly events! Wise men do not follow a star that travels through the sky so slowly that they can keep up with it. No star is equipped with a GPS system that allows it to guide oriental magi to the proper destination. A convenient supply of gold, frankincense and myrrh are not kept available, or camels at the ready, just in case a star does appear. Angels do not break through the midnight sky to sing to hillside shepherds. Shepherds do not go in search of the divine child armed only with the two previously mentioned clues. Especially is this so when that town is said to be crowded with visitors drawn by a decree from the Roman emperor! Virgins do not conceive. Every one of these details is mythological. Matthew seeks to ground each detail of his birth story in the predictive powers of the Hebrew Scriptures. He accomplishes this task only by the wildest stretch of the text imaginable. Just for starters, the word “virgin” does not occur in the Hebrew text of Isaiah 7:14, yet Matthew tries to build his ‘virgin” story on this text. If that is not enough Matthew reads this text to say that this non-existent virgin “will conceive.” In Hebrew the text in Isaiah 7:14 does not read: “Behold a virgin will conceive,” but “Behold a woman is with child.” The two are not the same! One can also search these birth narratives and discover that many familiar details simply are not biblical. No stable is mentioned anywhere, no innkeeper is ever referred to, no camels on which the wise men ride ever appear and there is no reference anywhere to the magi being three in number. We have sung “We Three Kings” so long that we have inserted them into the gospel. These facts shock people when they first hear them, but by and large these details continue to remain a part of our Christmas seasonal fantasies. They are also constantly being re-enforced in our minds by the artifacts of the season. We see Christmas cards with angels singing to hillside shepherds, with a man on a camel looking up at a star, and with a strong silent male standing behind a kneeling mother watching an infant lying in an animal’s feeding trough. Crèche scenes are built on lawns, in churches, in our homes and in our consciousness. We sing re-enforcing hymns like, “While shepherds watch their flocks by night.” We extol the “Silent Night” in the “Little Town of Bethlehem.” All serve to burn these literal images into our minds. Then we discover what the Bible actually says. Truth is sometimes disturbing. We then note that the earliest biblical writers in the New Testament apparently had never heard about Jesus having had a miraculous birth. Paul, the first person whose writings became part of the New Testament, never mentions Jesus’ miraculous birth. Writing to the Galatians about the year 52 CE in Galatians, Paul says only that Jesus was “born of a woman, born under the law.” In Paul’s mind that made him fully human and fully Jewish. Even the Greek word that he uses for woman in this text (gunaikos) has no connotation of virgin about it. It is the word from which we derive “gynecology.” The only other reference to Jesus’ origins in Paul comes in Romans (circa 58), where Paul describes Jesus as: “descended from the house of David, according to the flesh” (Rom.1:3). Royal descent only came through the male line. As I noted earlier in this column there is no birth story in Mark. In that first written gospel, Jesus is presented at the beginning of this gospel as a perfectly normal, adult male, who comes to be baptized. It was for Mark at his baptism, not at his conception, that God’s spirit entered him, making him holy. Later, in Mark’s gospel this author portrays Jesus’ mother as coming with his brothers to seize Jesus because people were saying, “He is beside himself” (Mark 3:21), that is, he is “out of his mind.” That is not the way a woman would act toward her adult child if an angel had literally said to her at his conception that he “will be called the son of the Most High….who will reign over the house of Jacob forever” (Luke 1:33). So the story of the virgin birth is clearly a late development in the biblical tradition. By the year 325 CE, however, it had been enshrined in the Nicene Creed and began to play a part in the great Christological debates. That was quite a theological journey, but we can no longer pretend that it was either original or true. Myths contain truth, but they are never literally true. What then is the truth embedded in the virgin birth story? We turn to that next week. ~John Shelby Spong Read the essay online here. Question & Answer Lori Wells from Indiana writes: Question: Thank you for the many years of enlightenment I’ve received from reading your newsletter. I have a question that I haven’t seen addressed in your Q&As. Long ago, there was a young person sitting with my family in the Hope Moravian Church during the weekly sermon. I was bored so I picked up the prayer book and began looking at the fine print in the back where I had never looked before. It contained a table that showed when Easter would fall each year for the foreseeable future. I wondered how they could know that and then I read the formula. Easter is the first Sunday after the full moon after the vernal equinox. My, that sounded pagan to me. I have amazed many people over the years by relating this data, but still have no idea how it originated. Reading your series on Easter recently has brought this question to my mind again. Do you know the explanation? Answer: Dear Lori, It is not pagan so much as it is Jewish. The Jews operated on a year of twelve lunar months. This would normally give you a year of 360 days. This meant that they lost 5 ¼ days a year. So, unless they made an adjustment to their calendar, the harvest festival of Sukkoth would no longer come at the time of the harvest. Dedication or Hanukkah, the festival of lights, would no longer come in the dead of winter and Passover would no longer come in the spring of the year. So in approximately seven out of every nineteen years, the Jewish calendars would add a leap month called Adar II to the end of their calendars. So they fixed Passover to come on the 15th day of Nisan, but that meant that it would come at a different date each year. Since Jews started the day at sundown rather than at midnight on our calendars we say Passover is on the 14th and 15th days of Nisan. Christianity built the crucifixion onto Passover and so we fixed Easter to come at the time of Passover, which was on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the 21st of March. This coming year 2016, Easter will be on March 27 one of the earliest of all possible dates. Thanks for asking. ~John Shelby Spong Announcements Jesus: The Cold Case, the film is up on On Demand again for the duration of Easter! Winner of the AFTA award for best documentary (in New Zealand) and Silver and Bronze medal winner at the New York Festivals Awards. Acclaimed film director and author Bryan Bruce takes on the ultimate cold case – Who killed Jesus and why? He visits the scenes of the crime, and talks with some of the world leading experts on the historical Jesus including Geza Vermes, Prof. John Dominic Crossan, Prof. Elaine Pagels, Dr. Helen Bond, Sir Lloyd Geering and Bishop John Shelby Spong. Rent $3.99 24-hour streaming period Watch on iOS, Apple TV, Roku, and Chromecast. Learn more.