N.T. Wright and the Faith Required to Disbelieve Jesus' Virgin Birth Narratives -or- A Christmas Story Re-Imagined
One of the primary reasons that Christmas has been transformed, in the last few centuries, from a celebration of the appearance of the most revolutionary, paradigm-shattering human being in history to a tame, heart-warming children's festival is, I believe, due to the centrality of the "virgin birth" (or, more properly, the "virgin conception") narratives. Enlightenment modernism, with its foundation of objective, scientific rationalism, its closed-continuum of a cause-and-effect universe, has disallowed the truth of these accounts before the inquiry could ever get started because, if the virgin conception stories are true, they would undermine its entire worldview.
But at the start of an age where that worldview has, in large part, already been undermined, it would serve us well to go back and re-examine the virgin conception narratives if we are to stand any chance of rescuing Christmas from the commercial interests that have hijacked its revolutionary message for so long. If we try to go back and prove that Mary was a virgin when she conceived Jesus, however, we would fall right back into the trap of the modernist hijackers. And we cannot, we must not, take the route of postmodern nihilism and say that, since there is no such thing as truth, it may be true for some and not for others, depending upon the utility of the matter in each individual's life.
So how do we go about it? Well, it is early yet in the post-postmodern world, and I am far from adequately equipped to proffer a final solution. But what if we started thinking about things from back to front, just to start? What if we examined how much faith it would require to disbelieve the virgin conception accounts a priori, as the world has taught us to do for centuries?
That's precisely the route that N.T. Wright takes, and I believe his analysis is worth considering. What would one have to believe in order to conclude that the virgin conception stories were fabrications? Wright tackles that question in the following excerpt from The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions, in a manner characteristically N.T. Wright, working within the intellectual and scholarly framework that modernism cherished, owning it, and then shattering it from the inside with a burst of creative energy.
What would have to happen, granted the skeptic's position, for the story to have taken the shape it did? To answer this, I must indulge in some speculative tradition history. Bear with me in a little foolishness. Are they tradition critics? So am I. Are they ancient historians? So am I. Are they reconstructors of early communities? So am I. Are they determined to think the argument through to the end? I speak as a fool--I am more so. This is how it would look. (a) Christians came to believe that Jesus was in some sense divine. (b) Someone who shared this faith broke thoroughly with Jewish precedents (there is no pre-Christian Jewish tradition suggesting that the messiah would be born of a virgin; no one used Isaiah 7.14 this way before Matthew did) and invented the story of a pagan-style virginal conception. (c) Some Christians failed to realize that this was historicized metaphor and retold it as though it was historical. (d) Matthew and Luke, assuming historicity, drew independently upon this astonishing fabrication, set (though in quite different ways) within a thoroughly Jewish context, and wove it in quite different ways into their respective narratives. And all this happened within, more or less, fifty years. Possible? Yes, of course. Most things are possible in history. Likely? No. Smoke without fire does, of course, happen quite often in the real world. But this smoke, in that world, without fire? The theory asks us to believe in intellectual parthenogenesis: the birth of an idea without visible parentage. Difficult. Unless, of course, you believe in miracles, which most people who disbelieve the virginal conception don't...
If the first two chapters of Matthew and the first two of Luke had never existed, I do not suppose that my own Christian faith, or that of the church to which I belong, would have been very different. But since they do, and since for quite other reasons I have come to believe that the God of Israel, the world's creator, was personally and fully revealed in and as Jesus of Nazareth, I hold open my historical judgment and say: if that's what God deemed appropriate, who am I to object?
It's a start. But quite a start, wouldn't you say?
Grace and Peace, and Merry (Scary?) Christmas.
Raffi
But at the start of an age where that worldview has, in large part, already been undermined, it would serve us well to go back and re-examine the virgin conception narratives if we are to stand any chance of rescuing Christmas from the commercial interests that have hijacked its revolutionary message for so long. If we try to go back and prove that Mary was a virgin when she conceived Jesus, however, we would fall right back into the trap of the modernist hijackers. And we cannot, we must not, take the route of postmodern nihilism and say that, since there is no such thing as truth, it may be true for some and not for others, depending upon the utility of the matter in each individual's life.
So how do we go about it? Well, it is early yet in the post-postmodern world, and I am far from adequately equipped to proffer a final solution. But what if we started thinking about things from back to front, just to start? What if we examined how much faith it would require to disbelieve the virgin conception accounts a priori, as the world has taught us to do for centuries?
That's precisely the route that N.T. Wright takes, and I believe his analysis is worth considering. What would one have to believe in order to conclude that the virgin conception stories were fabrications? Wright tackles that question in the following excerpt from The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions, in a manner characteristically N.T. Wright, working within the intellectual and scholarly framework that modernism cherished, owning it, and then shattering it from the inside with a burst of creative energy.
What would have to happen, granted the skeptic's position, for the story to have taken the shape it did? To answer this, I must indulge in some speculative tradition history. Bear with me in a little foolishness. Are they tradition critics? So am I. Are they ancient historians? So am I. Are they reconstructors of early communities? So am I. Are they determined to think the argument through to the end? I speak as a fool--I am more so. This is how it would look. (a) Christians came to believe that Jesus was in some sense divine. (b) Someone who shared this faith broke thoroughly with Jewish precedents (there is no pre-Christian Jewish tradition suggesting that the messiah would be born of a virgin; no one used Isaiah 7.14 this way before Matthew did) and invented the story of a pagan-style virginal conception. (c) Some Christians failed to realize that this was historicized metaphor and retold it as though it was historical. (d) Matthew and Luke, assuming historicity, drew independently upon this astonishing fabrication, set (though in quite different ways) within a thoroughly Jewish context, and wove it in quite different ways into their respective narratives. And all this happened within, more or less, fifty years. Possible? Yes, of course. Most things are possible in history. Likely? No. Smoke without fire does, of course, happen quite often in the real world. But this smoke, in that world, without fire? The theory asks us to believe in intellectual parthenogenesis: the birth of an idea without visible parentage. Difficult. Unless, of course, you believe in miracles, which most people who disbelieve the virginal conception don't...
If the first two chapters of Matthew and the first two of Luke had never existed, I do not suppose that my own Christian faith, or that of the church to which I belong, would have been very different. But since they do, and since for quite other reasons I have come to believe that the God of Israel, the world's creator, was personally and fully revealed in and as Jesus of Nazareth, I hold open my historical judgment and say: if that's what God deemed appropriate, who am I to object?
It's a start. But quite a start, wouldn't you say?
Grace and Peace, and Merry (Scary?) Christmas.
Raffi
The Bishop of Durham said:
Someone who shared this faith broke thoroughly with Jewish precedents (there is no pre-Christian Jewish tradition suggesting that the messiah would be born of a virgin; no one used Isaiah 7.14 this way before Matthew did) and invented the story of a pagan-style virginal conception
Deane:
I thought that nobody dared make such bold arguments from silence after the Dead Sea Scrolls taught or reminded us (1) how many ideas previously thought to be Greco-Roman were in fact Jewish by the first century, and (2) how little of the diverse material of Jewish religion has come down to us. If there is anything remarkable about Wright's argument from silence (or, should I say, argument from alleged "intellectual parthenogenesis"), it is remarkable that he would attempt such an argument.
So, turning aside from the Bishop of Durham's argument from silence, what is left in the text itself is Matthew's esoteric reinterpretation of an Old Testament prophet. Now, let's see ... how likely is it that Matthew would reinterpret a prophet as though he had predicted something about the life of Jesus? Oh yes, I seem to remember that he does seem to do this fairly frequently--and even more frequently, where? ... oh yes, in just these early passages of the Gospel of Matthew.
Leaving aside the Bishop's blustering rhetoric, it may pay to remember the nature of the actual texts before us. As I have outlined here, still the most probable explanation is that Jesus' nativity tales in Matthew and Luke have been invented practically wholesale.