Few if anyone alive today tends to believe that Alexander of Macedon was in fact a son of Zeus. The point about Alexander is, we can be reasonably confident, based on sources about Alexander, that this is something he really said about himself in public. What we cannot be so certain of, on the other hand, is whether Jesus was actually born of a virgin.
Unlike Alexander, Jesus of Nazareth never made any such claim, in fact he never said much if anything about his childhood.
Paul, our earliest source, says "but when the fullness of time had come God sent forth his Son, coming to be from a woman, coming to be under the Law" (Galatians 4:4) which is not really very helpful. John’s Prologue talks about about the Logos becoming flesh, but nothing about a virginal conception or birth, no nativity. Only Matthew and Luke say anything about a virginal conception and birth – but they don’t have the same tale.
In Matthew, Jesus is conceived and born of a virgin in fulfilment of the oracle of his Septuagint reading of Isaiah 7:14. This is revealed to Joseph in a dream, Mary never says anything in Matthew (1:18-25), while in Luke, the virginal conception and birth is revealed by the Archangel Gabriel to Mary (1:26-38) and not to Joseph.
Both Matthew and Luke agree that Jesus’s virgin birth is connected to his Davidide ancestry. This explains why both gospels are anxious to have Jesus born in Bethlehem, but disagree about why Jesus is born there.
Luke's is the more convoluted story. His chronology is wrong, and scholars find the story problematic, if not absurd, for a number of reasons. Herod died in 4BCE, but Quirinius was not governor until 6CE, ten years later. Luke’s account of the census implies its empire-wide, but there's no record of such in 6CE (and we can be reasonably sure there would be a mention of one). No census required people to return to their ancestral hometowns – that would defeat the whole point of what the census was for. Luke needs Jesus to be born in Bethlehem, even though he knows he’s from Nazareth, and invents a narrative to explain it.
Matthew is more acceptable in saying that Jesus was born when Herod the Great was king, probably between 6-4 BCE. That would put Jesus at the age of around thirty at the start of Pilate’s prefecture. (Even Luke says Herod was king.)
John, composed after Mark, Matthew, and Luke, is unimpressed by the idea that Jesus either was, or needs to have been, from Bethlehem. John actually has Nathanael say "Can there be anything good out of Nazareth?" (1:46) and later challenges the idea of the importance of an earthly origin when Jesus says "I am come down out of heaven" in the Bread of Life discourse (John 6). In this long discourse Jesus affirms himself in the face of his detractors.
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So, two stories about the conception and birth, and they disagree on the details. Matthew’s story of the magi reads like a midrash to make Jesus like Moses, who similarly escapes a murderous king as an infant, goes down to Egypt and then comes back again. Matthew has the Holy Family in Bethlehem only to establish the association between Bethlehem and David; the family relocates to Nazareth after Herod dies.
If Luke tries too hard to get Jesus to Bethlehem, Matthew struggles too much to get Jesus to Nazareth.
It seems more likely, then, that Jesus was born and raised in Nazareth. But could he still be a Davidide?
Who could know? It would have been impossible in the first century CE to demonstrate a clear genealogy over the course of a thousand years that would connect Jesus and David directly. Matthew’s genealogy disagrees with Luke’s, and the lineages are so different as to seem irreconcilable.
One way to do this is to propose that Mary was a descendant of David, and the Lukan genealogy is hers. But both Matthew and Luke’s genealogies are each attributed to Joseph, and in both, Jesus’s virginal birth requires that his relationship to Joseph is effectively one of an adoptive or stepfather. A belief in Mary as a Davidide does not emerge until the second century, in the Protoevangelium of James. This text gives us a lot of how we think about the virginal conception and birth stories, as well as later Mariological traditions that became popular among Christians. It seems a tradition contrived to answer a difficulty felt in the text that Jesus, in his humanity, was not actually a Davidide by the standards of later readers, rather than a historical notation.
Paul, the earliest source, and John, the last, both have higher Christologies than the Synoptics, explicitly describing Jesus’s pre-existence as a divine/angelic/heavenly being alongside God as the explanation for his sonship. That He is the Son of God is a given. They don't need nativity stories, nor a Davidide heritage.
Stories of miraculous conceptions and births for demigods, heroes and divine humans were both widespread and normative in the writings of the Ancients. Matthew and Luke’s belief in the virgin birth makes sense in relation to the literature and landscape of the religious world. In the Hebrew Scriptures such stories are found. In Genesis, Isaac is miraculously conceived and born to Abraham and Sarah in their old age; there’s good reason, reading the Hebrew text, to suspect that in the original version of the story The Lord himself is the father of Isaac.
The angel tells the Matthean Joseph: "texetai huion, kai kaleseis to onoma autou Iēsoun" and the reference is not only to Isaiah 7:14, but also to the Septuagint text of Genesis 17:19: "idou Sarra hē gynē sou texetai sī huion, kai kaleseis to onoma autou Isaak."
The trope recurs in another miraculous birth, Samson’s, when the Angel of The Lord Yhwh tells Samson’s mother, Manoah’s wife, idou sī en gastri hexeis kai texēi huion (LXX Judges 13:3); the only thing missing from the formula at this point is the explicit instruction to name him Shimshon/Samson.
Matthew and Luke’s virgin birth stories disagree with one another on numerous details, but make the same points; that Jesus is Son of David, and Son of God, and that seems ideologically, literarily, and culturally driven rather than historically driven. In that they agree with Paul and John.
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On all of these grounds a historian, doing history, would be inclined to dismiss the virgin birth as a fiction, well before addressing the question of whether a miracle occurred to bring about Jesus’s birth.
But a historian, qua historian, can have nothing to do with miracles, whether possible or not, because they are bound by the limits of 'history' as a discipline. History is about establishing probability, plausibility, and possibility, in orbit around what can be determined from sources. And whether miracles are possible or not – which is a philosophical and theological question – is separate from whether they have actually occurred.
History can’t decide if miracles do or don’t happen, its jurisdiction ends there, it runs out of competence to adjudicate data.
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In saying the virgin birth is theology, not history, is not an evasion, nor is it saying whether or not it "really happened." Simply that we cannot treat history’s word as final in all instances. We cannot, however, confuse theological claims for historical ones, as though demonstrating something as theologically or philosophically true is the same as establishing its historical veracity, that is to misunderstand the relationship of these modes of discourse.
In evaluating the virgin birth, we should look beyond the question of whether or not it happened – because we can't answer that question either way.
What we can do is follow the story as it evolves in the Early Christian centuries – Matthew and Luke are harmonised, read alongside John’s Logos Christology, and with apocryphal versions like the Protoevangelium, the virgin birth comes to represent more than just itself, but also the mystery of the Incarnation, and on through the Nicene and Chalcedonian transformations of its dogma, the Christmas story becomes an icon of God’s unification of humanity with divinity by assumption, and therefore of the possibility of humanity becoming divine.
It says simply, mythologically, a truth too profound to be easily put into words.
And in the end, the point of Christmas, as Meister Eckhart saw, is less history and more the mystery of deification itself: if one is stuck on how Christ was born in the past, one can’t progress to how Christ is born now, in you and me, in the eternal dance of creation, and in the miraculous birth of the divine in the human soul.
I, for myself, believe that, and because I believe that, the Virgin Birth becomes a reality to and for me.
Unlike Alexander, Jesus of Nazareth never made any such claim, in fact he never said much if anything about his childhood.
Paul, our earliest source, says "but when the fullness of time had come God sent forth his Son, coming to be from a woman, coming to be under the Law" (Galatians 4:4) which is not really very helpful. John’s Prologue talks about about the Logos becoming flesh, but nothing about a virginal conception or birth, no nativity. Only Matthew and Luke say anything about a virginal conception and birth – but they don’t have the same tale.
In Matthew, Jesus is conceived and born of a virgin in fulfilment of the oracle of his Septuagint reading of Isaiah 7:14. This is revealed to Joseph in a dream, Mary never says anything in Matthew (1:18-25), while in Luke, the virginal conception and birth is revealed by the Archangel Gabriel to Mary (1:26-38) and not to Joseph.
Both Matthew and Luke agree that Jesus’s virgin birth is connected to his Davidide ancestry. This explains why both gospels are anxious to have Jesus born in Bethlehem, but disagree about why Jesus is born there.
Luke's is the more convoluted story. His chronology is wrong, and scholars find the story problematic, if not absurd, for a number of reasons. Herod died in 4BCE, but Quirinius was not governor until 6CE, ten years later. Luke’s account of the census implies its empire-wide, but there's no record of such in 6CE (and we can be reasonably sure there would be a mention of one). No census required people to return to their ancestral hometowns – that would defeat the whole point of what the census was for. Luke needs Jesus to be born in Bethlehem, even though he knows he’s from Nazareth, and invents a narrative to explain it.
Matthew is more acceptable in saying that Jesus was born when Herod the Great was king, probably between 6-4 BCE. That would put Jesus at the age of around thirty at the start of Pilate’s prefecture. (Even Luke says Herod was king.)
John, composed after Mark, Matthew, and Luke, is unimpressed by the idea that Jesus either was, or needs to have been, from Bethlehem. John actually has Nathanael say "Can there be anything good out of Nazareth?" (1:46) and later challenges the idea of the importance of an earthly origin when Jesus says "I am come down out of heaven" in the Bread of Life discourse (John 6). In this long discourse Jesus affirms himself in the face of his detractors.
+++
So, two stories about the conception and birth, and they disagree on the details. Matthew’s story of the magi reads like a midrash to make Jesus like Moses, who similarly escapes a murderous king as an infant, goes down to Egypt and then comes back again. Matthew has the Holy Family in Bethlehem only to establish the association between Bethlehem and David; the family relocates to Nazareth after Herod dies.
If Luke tries too hard to get Jesus to Bethlehem, Matthew struggles too much to get Jesus to Nazareth.
It seems more likely, then, that Jesus was born and raised in Nazareth. But could he still be a Davidide?
Who could know? It would have been impossible in the first century CE to demonstrate a clear genealogy over the course of a thousand years that would connect Jesus and David directly. Matthew’s genealogy disagrees with Luke’s, and the lineages are so different as to seem irreconcilable.
One way to do this is to propose that Mary was a descendant of David, and the Lukan genealogy is hers. But both Matthew and Luke’s genealogies are each attributed to Joseph, and in both, Jesus’s virginal birth requires that his relationship to Joseph is effectively one of an adoptive or stepfather. A belief in Mary as a Davidide does not emerge until the second century, in the Protoevangelium of James. This text gives us a lot of how we think about the virginal conception and birth stories, as well as later Mariological traditions that became popular among Christians. It seems a tradition contrived to answer a difficulty felt in the text that Jesus, in his humanity, was not actually a Davidide by the standards of later readers, rather than a historical notation.
Paul, the earliest source, and John, the last, both have higher Christologies than the Synoptics, explicitly describing Jesus’s pre-existence as a divine/angelic/heavenly being alongside God as the explanation for his sonship. That He is the Son of God is a given. They don't need nativity stories, nor a Davidide heritage.
Stories of miraculous conceptions and births for demigods, heroes and divine humans were both widespread and normative in the writings of the Ancients. Matthew and Luke’s belief in the virgin birth makes sense in relation to the literature and landscape of the religious world. In the Hebrew Scriptures such stories are found. In Genesis, Isaac is miraculously conceived and born to Abraham and Sarah in their old age; there’s good reason, reading the Hebrew text, to suspect that in the original version of the story The Lord himself is the father of Isaac.
The angel tells the Matthean Joseph: "texetai huion, kai kaleseis to onoma autou Iēsoun" and the reference is not only to Isaiah 7:14, but also to the Septuagint text of Genesis 17:19: "idou Sarra hē gynē sou texetai sī huion, kai kaleseis to onoma autou Isaak."
The trope recurs in another miraculous birth, Samson’s, when the Angel of The Lord Yhwh tells Samson’s mother, Manoah’s wife, idou sī en gastri hexeis kai texēi huion (LXX Judges 13:3); the only thing missing from the formula at this point is the explicit instruction to name him Shimshon/Samson.
Matthew and Luke’s virgin birth stories disagree with one another on numerous details, but make the same points; that Jesus is Son of David, and Son of God, and that seems ideologically, literarily, and culturally driven rather than historically driven. In that they agree with Paul and John.
+++
On all of these grounds a historian, doing history, would be inclined to dismiss the virgin birth as a fiction, well before addressing the question of whether a miracle occurred to bring about Jesus’s birth.
But a historian, qua historian, can have nothing to do with miracles, whether possible or not, because they are bound by the limits of 'history' as a discipline. History is about establishing probability, plausibility, and possibility, in orbit around what can be determined from sources. And whether miracles are possible or not – which is a philosophical and theological question – is separate from whether they have actually occurred.
History can’t decide if miracles do or don’t happen, its jurisdiction ends there, it runs out of competence to adjudicate data.
+++
In saying the virgin birth is theology, not history, is not an evasion, nor is it saying whether or not it "really happened." Simply that we cannot treat history’s word as final in all instances. We cannot, however, confuse theological claims for historical ones, as though demonstrating something as theologically or philosophically true is the same as establishing its historical veracity, that is to misunderstand the relationship of these modes of discourse.
In evaluating the virgin birth, we should look beyond the question of whether or not it happened – because we can't answer that question either way.
What we can do is follow the story as it evolves in the Early Christian centuries – Matthew and Luke are harmonised, read alongside John’s Logos Christology, and with apocryphal versions like the Protoevangelium, the virgin birth comes to represent more than just itself, but also the mystery of the Incarnation, and on through the Nicene and Chalcedonian transformations of its dogma, the Christmas story becomes an icon of God’s unification of humanity with divinity by assumption, and therefore of the possibility of humanity becoming divine.
It says simply, mythologically, a truth too profound to be easily put into words.
And in the end, the point of Christmas, as Meister Eckhart saw, is less history and more the mystery of deification itself: if one is stuck on how Christ was born in the past, one can’t progress to how Christ is born now, in you and me, in the eternal dance of creation, and in the miraculous birth of the divine in the human soul.
I, for myself, believe that, and because I believe that, the Virgin Birth becomes a reality to and for me.
