Last Christmas Eve, I wrote about the first point: how the virgin birth is a signifier of the power of God to save his people. The miraculous birth narrative says that God can and does intervene, and does not always do so within humanly circumscribed limitations. This matters to Christian martyrs throughout the ages. It matters also to the millions of Christians who make undramatic sacrifices every day of their life. The Christmas miracle affirms that their faith is not just human wishing, a collection of agreeable ideas and values, but is backed by the ultimate power in the universe.
The second theological point made by the story of the virgin birth is that not only was Jesus of God, he was so in a unique category. This does not mean that he was God incarnate, (God taking human form). Nor does it mean that he pre-existed from eternity. A careful reading of scripture will, I believe, reveal that the Jesus of scripture is fully human, sharing the same nature as us, to whom he is a brother. It also declares that he has the same nature as every other human that has been used by God. But the birth narrative in Matthew and Luke tells us that he was in a different league, even to the prophets. He was something else, even though he was one of us.
The point is that he was all these things, but not by some freak of nature. This was God’s doing. The Bible calls Jesus the Son of God, as well as the Son of Man, and the virgin birth is indispensable in making this point. God intervenes in history in order to save humanity and the earth, and he does this through a man, but a man that is in some sense divinely authored. Jesus is presented as sui generis, like, but unlike, all of us.
It's Christmas Eve again, and I still believe that the virgin birth is a necessary narrative, and that being necessary does not mean that it is necessarily true in the historical sense.
There are good reasons for supposing that it is not. The virgin birth comes late to the gospels, and is missing in Mark, the earliest gospel, and again in John, widely considered the latest and last to be composed.
The resurrection is in all four gospels. Why is the virgin birth only in two, and given its full Christmassy range in only one?
It’s easy to imagine the authors of Matthew and Luke considering the effect that Mark’s gospel was having on the early Christian communities, and asking themselves whether there wasn’t something that was being missed. They seem keen to be clearer than Mark had been about exactly who and what Jesus was. What better way to get this across than in a birth narrative featuring the sort of miraculous events expected in accounts of the births of holy figures?
Did it really happen? No one can possibly say, but I can’t say that it didn’t. After all, it would be inconsistent to accept the point of the story, that God intervenes miraculously, yet rule out the possibility that he has done so in this case. That’s why I’m agnostic about the virgin birth.
Being agnostic about the virgin birth does not require agnosticism towards all biblical miracles. For what it’s worth, my view is that some happened, some didn’t, and some,it’s impossible to say. It won’t do to treat all biblical miracles the same. The virgin birth is very different from the resurrection: one private and thinly attested, the other, very public, multiply attested and insisted on. Maybe one happened and the other is theological legend, who knows? But though they may not be the same, they have this in common: they can be doubted, but they must not be disregarded.
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