As stated, the first part of this inquiry followed quite closely on an entry in A Perennial Digression, where I stick quite closely to the scholarly detail of David Armstrong's argument. On his entry he goes into more detail, and offers resources.
If Matthew (and Luke) follows Mark, then in Part One it was very much Thomas following APD. Here, my response shifts (as does his) onto a more personal appreciation.
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A way to regard that particular story – like every other story in Scripture – is as a verbal icon (εἰκών eikṓn); as a 'metaphor' in the full and metaphysical sense of the term – by which I mean in reference to the Ancient Greek metaphora (μεταφορά), meaning to 'transfer' or 'carrying over'. The word is a compound of the prefix meta- 'across', 'beyond' or 'with', and the root verb pherein 'to bear' or 'to carry'.
This is what the story does, it carries an idea of Jesus as Son of God, heir to the Davidic kingdom, over into our mundane world, and the Ancient Near East would see it as such, not necessarily detailing an event, so much as establishing a fact. (Events, after all, are occurences marshalled by the Gods anyway.)
Jesus is a prophetic saviour in the history of Israel which has seen its share of prophets and saviours. And, moeover, Jesus is Son of God, not only from the moment of his resurrection, nor from the moment of his baptism by John, but from the moment of his very conception. This is the belief the story is meant to convey: miss that, and one misses the point that Matthew and Luke both want to make.
Both Paul and John saw Jesus as pre-existing in aeternity. Matthew and Luke's story says the same thing. In that sense, the nativity Christology is as 'High' as any. John's Gospel says "And the Logos became flesh and pitched a tent among us," (1:14), and Mt and Lk offer a narrative of that.
This is important. Shakespeare wrote "Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them" (Twelfth Night, Act 2, Scene 5). Abram was called. Moses did not choose his fate. The demigods and heroes of the ANE fall into one of these categories, and Matthew and Luke (and Mark), along with Paul and John, assert that Jesus belongs to the first order, as one 'born great', and then go on to assert just what that birth was all about, and why.
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Consider the eikṓn of the Nativity. The metaphora in all its mystical and metaphysical significance. The theology of this eikṓn is less a historical record of the circumstance of Jesus' birth, but as a mystery of His birth (as counterpoint the mystery of His death and resurrection), and the repetition of that mystery in the soul. On the one hand, the newly-born Jesus, wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger in the stable of a public house. On the other, the crucified Christ who is wrapped in a funeral robe and laid in a tomb that is not his own. Mary is the ideal disciple, who submits herself to the divine will ...
If the Evangelist did not put it explicitly into words, the Fathers and the Tradition saw it in the text. For Meister Eckhart, for example, what matters in the story is not the history but the mystery, in this case the mystery of deification, of Christ reborn, as it were, in the soul – which is, in fact, the soul reborn in Christ, "See, I make all things new" (Revelations 21:5). Miss that, and you miss the miracle.
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To defend the virgin birth as meaning nothing more than that, one could argue an admittedly anomalous case of parthenogenesis, that it's possible, theoretically, however much a biological fluke it might be, then all we're really doing is asserting a 'fantastic tale' of Jesus' birth and defending it against all claims to the contrary.
This brings me to the question of Mary's virginity. This rests, again, on Matthew and Luke (disregarding the Protoevangelium of James). In Matthew's case, to echo the prophet Isaiah, but we know that Isaiah 7 speaks of a prophecy of a child within local history, as it were, a child born within a specific timescale, let alone the young woman/virgin debate... Luke's is different, but here Mary herself is somewhat startled, she's going to have a baby, "How shall this be done, because I know not man?" (Luke 1:34). The angel answers "The Holy Ghost (Πνεῦμα ἅγιον hagios pneuma) shall come upon thee, and the power of the most High shall overshadow thee. And therefore also the Holy which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God" (1:35).
But later, the angel says: "And behold thy cousin Elizabeth, she also hath conceived a son in her old age; and this is the sixth month with her that is called barren: Because no word shall be impossible with God." (Luke 1:36-37).
No-one argues that Elizabeth's was a similar conception, and that John is also a Son of God. Simply that here, as before in the Hebrew Scriptures, age is no impediment, if God so wills. and we can also assume that this applies to the husband as well as the wife. Furthermore, we have Eve's claim that she knew her husband, but that her son Can was from God (Genesis 4:1). Which is a circuitous way of saying, between the annunciation (in Luke) and the birth, there is nothing that rules out Mary's knowing her husband. Nor is there any reason to assert that God, enabling the barren woman to conceive, did so in the wake of conjugal relations between husband and wife?
So why is Mary's virginity necessary? Because the eikṓn fails in its fulness, mystcially and metaphysically, if Jesus is born of the normal procreative practice, with a divine input, as it were.
For Mary to have been a virgin when Jesus is conceived matters insofar as it can become an archetype of the divine indwelling in the soul. If, as I was on the point of arguing (sorry, @rocala
) that whether or not she knew her husband does not matter, I find myself realising it absolutely does, because then the nativity becomes just another case of the gods smiling on this world, one more extraordinary event told in the stories of Jewish Greco-Roman culture. It would not, it could not, hold the relevance it does in traditional Christian exegesis.
Mary’s immaculate conception (that she was free of the stain of sin from the moment of her own conception), her Davidide ancestry, her perpetual virginity, and her dormition and assumption are even harder, if not impossible, to establish as historical. These stories seem clearly to be the expansion of Mary's significance by later generations. Again, it seems obvious that her developed cult is the successor to the various goddess cults of pagan antiquity, at the very least she takes over the devotional role of such deities in previous affections.
Here I return closer to Armstrong's conclusion:
"Christians in the modern world are often touchy about the disciplines that they take to undermine their distinctive theological claims. In their defense, there are sometimes hills worth dying on (if Jesus did not rise from the dead in some way, there really is no point in being Christian, though even if he did, that is it quite enough to justify all of subsequent Christian confession)..."
"... there are scholars who seem to think that the biblical, literary, or theological elements of these stories are arguments in their historical favor, that the “Jewish roots”, of Christian Mariology underlines the historicity of later Christian beliefs about Mary, or that the power of the Christian Tradition (as invested in whichever organ one finds relevant) to decide on matters of faith and morals includes an infallible power to remember and interpret history. All of these approaches reflect methodological confusion of the highest order: they do not seem to grasp what history is and is not, as well as what theology is and is not."
For my part, I believe, and as a result of this process am more convinced, that Jesus was born of a virgin. I cannot prove that it happened historically, but theologically, I believe it because I stand in that belief that the stories want to affirm something about Jesus, the man, that in micro equates to that which I believe about the cosmos in macro, that the world was born ex nihilo and in that sense ex virgine, and that having established the world as other-than-Himself, in which God created the human as methorios, as an intermediary between (in our case) the physical and the spiritual, the appearance of the Logos incarnate is the means of bringing about its rightful end and conclusion back in Himself.
"Whether this transhistorical vision is in fact grounded in an intrahistorical set of events disappears from view, for me, in the wake of the larger calling that I render my own soul and body patient to the indwelling Word, that I may become both the opening womb and empty tomb through whom Christ comes into the world, in whom that eschatological creation continues to be realized."
If Matthew (and Luke) follows Mark, then in Part One it was very much Thomas following APD. Here, my response shifts (as does his) onto a more personal appreciation.
+++
A way to regard that particular story – like every other story in Scripture – is as a verbal icon (εἰκών eikṓn); as a 'metaphor' in the full and metaphysical sense of the term – by which I mean in reference to the Ancient Greek metaphora (μεταφορά), meaning to 'transfer' or 'carrying over'. The word is a compound of the prefix meta- 'across', 'beyond' or 'with', and the root verb pherein 'to bear' or 'to carry'.
This is what the story does, it carries an idea of Jesus as Son of God, heir to the Davidic kingdom, over into our mundane world, and the Ancient Near East would see it as such, not necessarily detailing an event, so much as establishing a fact. (Events, after all, are occurences marshalled by the Gods anyway.)
Jesus is a prophetic saviour in the history of Israel which has seen its share of prophets and saviours. And, moeover, Jesus is Son of God, not only from the moment of his resurrection, nor from the moment of his baptism by John, but from the moment of his very conception. This is the belief the story is meant to convey: miss that, and one misses the point that Matthew and Luke both want to make.
Both Paul and John saw Jesus as pre-existing in aeternity. Matthew and Luke's story says the same thing. In that sense, the nativity Christology is as 'High' as any. John's Gospel says "And the Logos became flesh and pitched a tent among us," (1:14), and Mt and Lk offer a narrative of that.
This is important. Shakespeare wrote "Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them" (Twelfth Night, Act 2, Scene 5). Abram was called. Moses did not choose his fate. The demigods and heroes of the ANE fall into one of these categories, and Matthew and Luke (and Mark), along with Paul and John, assert that Jesus belongs to the first order, as one 'born great', and then go on to assert just what that birth was all about, and why.
+++
Consider the eikṓn of the Nativity. The metaphora in all its mystical and metaphysical significance. The theology of this eikṓn is less a historical record of the circumstance of Jesus' birth, but as a mystery of His birth (as counterpoint the mystery of His death and resurrection), and the repetition of that mystery in the soul. On the one hand, the newly-born Jesus, wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger in the stable of a public house. On the other, the crucified Christ who is wrapped in a funeral robe and laid in a tomb that is not his own. Mary is the ideal disciple, who submits herself to the divine will ...
If the Evangelist did not put it explicitly into words, the Fathers and the Tradition saw it in the text. For Meister Eckhart, for example, what matters in the story is not the history but the mystery, in this case the mystery of deification, of Christ reborn, as it were, in the soul – which is, in fact, the soul reborn in Christ, "See, I make all things new" (Revelations 21:5). Miss that, and you miss the miracle.
+++
To defend the virgin birth as meaning nothing more than that, one could argue an admittedly anomalous case of parthenogenesis, that it's possible, theoretically, however much a biological fluke it might be, then all we're really doing is asserting a 'fantastic tale' of Jesus' birth and defending it against all claims to the contrary.
This brings me to the question of Mary's virginity. This rests, again, on Matthew and Luke (disregarding the Protoevangelium of James). In Matthew's case, to echo the prophet Isaiah, but we know that Isaiah 7 speaks of a prophecy of a child within local history, as it were, a child born within a specific timescale, let alone the young woman/virgin debate... Luke's is different, but here Mary herself is somewhat startled, she's going to have a baby, "How shall this be done, because I know not man?" (Luke 1:34). The angel answers "The Holy Ghost (Πνεῦμα ἅγιον hagios pneuma) shall come upon thee, and the power of the most High shall overshadow thee. And therefore also the Holy which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God" (1:35).
But later, the angel says: "And behold thy cousin Elizabeth, she also hath conceived a son in her old age; and this is the sixth month with her that is called barren: Because no word shall be impossible with God." (Luke 1:36-37).
No-one argues that Elizabeth's was a similar conception, and that John is also a Son of God. Simply that here, as before in the Hebrew Scriptures, age is no impediment, if God so wills. and we can also assume that this applies to the husband as well as the wife. Furthermore, we have Eve's claim that she knew her husband, but that her son Can was from God (Genesis 4:1). Which is a circuitous way of saying, between the annunciation (in Luke) and the birth, there is nothing that rules out Mary's knowing her husband. Nor is there any reason to assert that God, enabling the barren woman to conceive, did so in the wake of conjugal relations between husband and wife?
So why is Mary's virginity necessary? Because the eikṓn fails in its fulness, mystcially and metaphysically, if Jesus is born of the normal procreative practice, with a divine input, as it were.
For Mary to have been a virgin when Jesus is conceived matters insofar as it can become an archetype of the divine indwelling in the soul. If, as I was on the point of arguing (sorry, @rocala
) that whether or not she knew her husband does not matter, I find myself realising it absolutely does, because then the nativity becomes just another case of the gods smiling on this world, one more extraordinary event told in the stories of Jewish Greco-Roman culture. It would not, it could not, hold the relevance it does in traditional Christian exegesis.Mary’s immaculate conception (that she was free of the stain of sin from the moment of her own conception), her Davidide ancestry, her perpetual virginity, and her dormition and assumption are even harder, if not impossible, to establish as historical. These stories seem clearly to be the expansion of Mary's significance by later generations. Again, it seems obvious that her developed cult is the successor to the various goddess cults of pagan antiquity, at the very least she takes over the devotional role of such deities in previous affections.
Here I return closer to Armstrong's conclusion:
"Christians in the modern world are often touchy about the disciplines that they take to undermine their distinctive theological claims. In their defense, there are sometimes hills worth dying on (if Jesus did not rise from the dead in some way, there really is no point in being Christian, though even if he did, that is it quite enough to justify all of subsequent Christian confession)..."
"... there are scholars who seem to think that the biblical, literary, or theological elements of these stories are arguments in their historical favor, that the “Jewish roots”, of Christian Mariology underlines the historicity of later Christian beliefs about Mary, or that the power of the Christian Tradition (as invested in whichever organ one finds relevant) to decide on matters of faith and morals includes an infallible power to remember and interpret history. All of these approaches reflect methodological confusion of the highest order: they do not seem to grasp what history is and is not, as well as what theology is and is not."
For my part, I believe, and as a result of this process am more convinced, that Jesus was born of a virgin. I cannot prove that it happened historically, but theologically, I believe it because I stand in that belief that the stories want to affirm something about Jesus, the man, that in micro equates to that which I believe about the cosmos in macro, that the world was born ex nihilo and in that sense ex virgine, and that having established the world as other-than-Himself, in which God created the human as methorios, as an intermediary between (in our case) the physical and the spiritual, the appearance of the Logos incarnate is the means of bringing about its rightful end and conclusion back in Himself.
"Whether this transhistorical vision is in fact grounded in an intrahistorical set of events disappears from view, for me, in the wake of the larger calling that I render my own soul and body patient to the indwelling Word, that I may become both the opening womb and empty tomb through whom Christ comes into the world, in whom that eschatological creation continues to be realized."