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Henry Imler September 11th, 2007
N.T. Wright gives three interesting lines of argument for thinking
that perhaps, just perhaps we have cause to think that Jesus was indeed
conceived while Mary was still a virgin. Wright does note that from a
strictly historical standpoint, the issue cannot be resolved either
way. However, there are some reasons to thing that it was possible. The
following is a synopsis of what Wright espouses along these lines in
chapter 11 of Two Visions of Jesus.
- God is not wholly outside our universe, acting only on
occasion to intervene in history. Instead, the Jewish God is very close
and involved with our lives. Given this, it would be quite allowable
for God to act in this way to usher in the climax of history, taking up
His title of creator to bring “a new creation from the womb of the old“. - Isaiah
7:14 was never used in any Jewish tradition to support the idea of the
messiah having a virgin birth. Matthew was the first. It would not make
sense to incorporate a pagan idea (hero having a virgin birth, e.i.
Alexander and Augustus) into a very Jewish story, unless it happened.
Once it had occurred, then were the stories of Isaiah 7:14 looked at again with a new perspective. - If
the early Christian community thought this happened, why did two very
different stories take shape? If it were really a metaphor for
something about Jesus, then it should have had a unified beginning, not
the two separate cores that we see in Matthew and Luke. Once again, the
stories of Matthew and Luke are very Jewish, and the virgin birth does
not even matter that much to the story of Jesus. God could have easily
used the child of Joseph and Mary as the messiah. In the stories of
Matthew and Luke we have following progression of themes: “Jewish -> Pagan -> Jewish”
the rest of the way. It does not make sense for the climax of the
Jewish story to have a pagan introduction, unless it happened.
- Religion
- Comments(3)
Israel wasn’t a bubble. I think it’s too much to assume that no
cultural influences were seeping into their religious life, as much as
they were prone to resist it. There are other elements of the Jesus
story that look similar to pagan ideas. And there are other ways that
early Christianity broke with Judaism, too.
No one is claiming that Israel was in a bubble. What Wright is pointing
out is a couple of literary curiosities in the origin stories from both
Luke and Matthew. With Matthew’s audience being largely Jewish, and
considering his overt concern with showing that Jesus was a good Jew,
the best of all Jews as a matter of fact, it does not make sense that
Matthew would include a pagan origin story. One would expect that from
Mark, but not Matthew. Why would someone concerned with all matters
Jewish reinterpret an obscure Hebrew Bible story into realized prophecy
with a pagan bend? One of the most plausible answers is that it was
widely believed that he was born of virgin. The invention where none is
necessary is a clue to something actually happening.
Wright puts it this way:
The second thing is the presence of the virgin birth (a pagan concept,
see the writings of Virgil) in two conflicting stories. If there was a
common literary or oral source for this, one would expect the details
of the origin to be the same. That is an indicator of a common source.
Instead, the stories vary wildly. This suggests that the story is
rooted in something deeper than a common oral or literary source.
Things that are based in multiple sources are more likely to be
historical than something that only has one oral or literary source.
Wright puts it this way:
Again, these are only evidence for something that cannot be proven or disproven historically.
Didn’t Matthew use Mark as a source? If Mark would use a pagan story
and Matthew would use Mark, then it doesn’t seem that mysterious.
I’ve never heard someone claim that because two versions of a story are
very different, then there must be a true story in back of them. There
probably was an older, less detailed story, just as many of Mark’s
stories are older and shorter. Then the authors of Matthew and Luke
came along and embellished like they did with so many other stories.
The Jewish-pagan-Jewish thing assumes that there’s one linear thread of
early Christian thought. That’s just not the case. They were spread
over an empire and the traditions were diverging in several directions.
Some writers were trying to make the story more Jewish, others were
pulling it toward the Gentile worldview.