[Dialogue] The complete Virgin Birth, and debunking revelation Spong version

[KroegerD at aol.com]

April 11, 2007 
The Second Fundamental: The  Literal Accuracy of the Virgin Birth  

The story of Jesus' birth has now been celebrated in pageants, Christmas  
cards and in hymns for almost two thousand years. The characters in this drama  
like Mary, Joseph, the Christ Child, the Shepherds and the Wise Men are 
familiar  icons even in our secular society. The star in the East, Bethlehem, the 
manger  and the angelic chorus elicit in almost all western people immediate 
mental  images. Unknowingly we have also, most of the time quite unconsciously, 
expanded  the details of this story so wondrously that we are shocked to 
discover that  many of the things that we have always assumed are in the Bible are 
not there at  all. For example, in the biblical story there is no mention that 
the Wise Men  were three in number or that they rode on camels. The story has 
no donkey being  led by Joseph on which the expectant Mary rode side saddle to 
Bethlehem. There  is no search for a room in the inn, no innkeeper and no 
stable. There are no  animals mentioned since there is no stable, which means that 
there were no  cattle lowing, no sheep baaing, no night wind to say," Do you 
see what I see?"  All of these details have grown in our imagination as we 
have acted them out in  pageants and sung about them in carols.  
Were the infancy narratives, which are found only in Matthew and Luke, but  
not in Paul, Mark or John, written to record the actual events that occurred on 
 the night in which Jesus was born? There is no doubt that the answer to this 
 question among biblical scholars is "Of course not!" All birth stories are 
by  their very nature mythological. They are attempts to interpret 
retroactively the  moment when a great person was born. A life has to become great before 
mythical  details begin to gather about the moment of his or her birth. These 
details  always seek to find signs of future greatness in that person's 
infancy, but  history they are not. To demonstrate that one has only to look at the  
assumptions made by the biblical birth narratives.  
Matthew asks us to believe that a star can actually announce a birth and that 
 it can move across the sky so slowly that Wise Men can follow it, first to 
the  palace of Herod and then down a six-mile wagon track of a road until it 
stops to  shine over the house in which Jesus was born. Matthew also asks us to 
believe  that King Herod would deputize these magi as his personal CIA to 
bring him  information about this threat to his throne. When they fail to do so, 
Herod, we  are told, goes into a murderous rage and kills all the boy babies in 
Bethlehem  to make sure he gets the "pretender." Such assumptions are not to 
be understood  literally by rational modern minds.  
Luke asks us to believe that post-menopausal parents, Zechariah and  
Elizabeth, can bear a son named John the Baptist; that the fetus of John the  Baptist 
while in Elizabeth's womb can actually leap to acknowledge the  superiority of 
the fetus of Jesus in Mary's womb; that angels can break through  the night 
sky to sing to hillside shepherds and that these shepherds, armed only  with 
the two clues that the promised baby is wrapped in "swaddling clothes" and  
lying "in a manger," can find the child instantly in the crowded village of  
Bethlehem. Luke also assumes that Joseph would take his "great with child" wife  on 
a 94 mile donkey ride from Nazareth to Bethlehem, while portraying Zechariah, 
 Mary, the angels and Simeon as breaking into song when it is their moment to 
 speak on the stage to explain these wonders.  
The stories that purport to tell us of Jesus' birth are dramatic and  
interpretive accounts that were clearly never intended by their authors to be  
history. They are not even an original part of the Christian story, but are 9th  
decade additions to the tradition. Paul never heard the story of Jesus'  
miraculous birth. What he says of Jesus' origins is that he was born of a woman  (not 
a virgin) like everyone else and that he was born under the law like every  
Jew. Mark, the earliest gospel writer, also appears to know nothing about a  
miraculous birth. In Mark, the fully human Jesus comes to be baptized by John  
the Baptist and, as he steps into the Jordan River, the heavens open and the  
Spirit is poured out on him by the God who lives above the sky. For Mark this  
infusion of the Holy Spirit is the source of Jesus' claim to be a divine,  
God-filled life. After Matthew and Luke introduce the story of the virgin birth  
into Christianity, we need to note that the last gospel writer, John, seems to  
deny it. There is no miraculous birth story in John's gospel and on two  
different occasions, he refers to Jesus as the son of Joseph.  
Despite these biblical data that are universally recognized in the Christian  
academies of higher learning, the early 20th century Tractarian movement 
still  decided to include the literal accuracy of the virgin birth among the "Five 
 Fundamentals," which they declared must be believed to be a Christian. 
Indeed,  they listed the virgin birth in the number two position. It must be 
difficult  for them to realize that there is no reputable biblical scholar of world 
rank  today, either Catholic or Protestant, who still treats the birth 
narratives of  Matthew and Luke as literal history, not a single one.  
Today we know that virgins do not conceive. In the 1st century Mediterranean  
world, however, where the mysteries of reproduction were not fully 
understood,  the only way they could explain human greatness was to ascribe to the hero 
a  supernatural heritage in which a divine being or presence acting upon a 
pure  virgin produced a "god/man." Such stories were a dime a dozen in that 
world.  
The story of a virgin birth for Jesus thus entered Christianity through  
Matthew in the middle years of the 9th decade. Matthew based his story on a text  
from Isaiah that he, quoting a Greek translation, thought said, "Behold a 
Virgin  will conceive and bring forth a child." If Matthew had read the Hebrew 
original  instead of a Greek translation, he would have discovered that the word 
"virgin"  was not present anywhere in that text. In Hebrew, the prophet Isaiah 
wrote,  "Behold a woman is with child." Where I come from to be with child is 
not to be  a virgin. This text was written as part of a sign that the prophet 
Isaiah was  giving to the King of Judah in the 8th century BCE to convince 
him that the  armies of Syria and the Northern Kingdom, that were at that moment 
besieging  Jerusalem, would not conquer his capital city. Isaiah's words were 
designed to  give assurance to the king about the continuation of his kingdom 
of Judah in  that crisis. It certainly did not refer to an event that would 
occur 800 years  later.  
Proof texting from the Hebrew Scriptures was a popular interpretive tool for  
Matthew, but like many a country preacher has done since, the text was 
twisted  to mean what Matthew wanted it to mean. Even the Jewish writer Trypho 
pointed  out this mistake in a dialogue with Justin Martyr in the 2nd century of 
the  Christian Era. However, his protest was of no avail and so the story of 
Jesus'  birth to a virgin mother, based on the misunderstanding of a 
mistranslation of a  text in Isaiah, entered the Christian tradition as literal proof of 
the miracle  of the virgin birth.  
The virgin birth was then said to be that which proved Jesus' divinity. It  
was for this reason that the fundamentalists, who battled the modernists at the 
 turn of the 20th century, decided that the virgin birth, understood 
literally,  had to be one of the irreducible Five Fundamentals that formed the heart 
of  Christianity and without which Christianity would cease to be. As we shall 
see,  however, they tied their literal hopes to a very weak reed and 
ultimately this  tactic failed. There was no literal virgin birth. Shouting loudly does 
not  change reality. The literal account of the Virgin Birth, understood as 
biology,  was based on bad exegesis and time would reveal that it was also 
based on a  flawed understanding of reproduction. When science discovered in the 
18th  century that women have egg cells and were therefore equal co-creators of 
every  life ever born and not simply receptacles through which a new life 
could enter  the world, at that moment all virgin birth stories died as literal 
history,  since the story of Jesus' virgin birth would now give us not a fully 
human and  fully divine life, but a half human and half divine life..  
I note also that the whole Bethlehem tradition as the birth place of Jesus is 
 today dismissed in scholarly circles as an interpretive myth. A Bethlehem 
birth  place for Jesus was built on a verse in the prophet Micah. It was part of 
the  messianic claim made for Jesus that he was heir to the throne of David 
and thus  had to be born in David's city. It too is not history.  
Mark, the first gospel, assumed that Jesus was born in Nazareth. He is called 
 in all the gospels "Jesus of Nazareth" and "a Galilean" since that was the  
region of both his birth and life. The struggle to claim messiah status for  
Jesus was clearly operating by the time the gospels were written and so both  
Matthew and Luke turn him into what the yearned-for messianic King of the Jews  
was actually thought to be. The "Messiah" was regularly referred to by the 
Jews  as "God's firstborn son." When those terms were applied to Jesus well 
after his  earthly life had ended, it was inevitable that these titles would be 
literalized  and Jesus would come to be thought of as a divine life, literally 
fathered by  God through the human medium of the virgin Mary.  
Literalism has turned this attempt at interpretation into bad history and bad 
 biology and thus it has no staying power. Far from protecting Jesus' divine  
claim it turns him into being a figure, not unlike a mermaid, who is neither  
divine nor human. Matthew clearly did not mean for this narrative to be taken 
 literally, as we shall see next week when we examine the chapter that 
Matthew  used to introduce the story of the virgin birth. Because this is the most 
boring  chapter in the New Testament, people have over the centuries failed to 
grasp its  importance as a clue to understanding how Matthew was interpreting 
Jesus' birth.  I refer to Matthew's prologue to this birth story 
(Matt.1:1-17). Read it this  week in preparation for next week's column. You will be 
surprised at what you  discover there.  
John Shelby Spong  
_Note  from the Editor: Bishop Spong's new book is available now at 
bookstores  everywhere and by clicking here!_ 
(http://astore.amazon.com/bishopspong-20/detail/0060762071/104-6221748-5882304)   
Marilyn Redel from Amherstburg, Ontario, Canada writes:  
I'm really bothered by the fundamentalist Christian movement that talks so  
much about the 'end times.' My daughter-in-law admits to being a fundamentalist 
 Christian, and my husband and I get into some discussions with her from time 
to  time. I'm wondering about your views on the book of Revelation, since I 
haven't  heard you mention it. Do you have any reading suggestions about 
Revelation?"  
Marilyn's husband adds:  
I recently reviewed the Book of Revelation, which I hadn't read for some  
time. There's been a lot of fuss about end times among evangelical friends and  
family. It's no wonder, in the 2x2 church in which I grew up, that we didn't  
spend a lot of time reading this book. I have a question about the 12 tribes  
mentioned, of which 12,000 each are spared: Are they the original Israel and  
Judah tribes (which couldn't have all been around when this material was  
supposed to have been written)?  
Dear Mr. & Mrs. Redel,  
I have never written about the Book of Revelation because I do not regard it  
as worthy of the kind of study that would be required to write about this 
book.  I'm sorry it was included in the canon of the New Testament because it is 
so  dated. It is a piece of apocalyptic literature written under a code 
developed by  late 1st century Christians. Presumably the community that wrote this 
book and  that received it would understand that it was designed to strengthen 
them to  endure a persecution that was probably local, not empire wide, in 
the last  decade of the 1st Christian century. It is a product of the same 
Johannine  School that produced the Gospel of John and the Epistles of John in the 
New  Testament though it is not by the same author. It probably does 
participate in  the idea that the world is coming to an end soon but that was obviously 
a  mistake since we are here now. In early Christianity there was an idea 
that the  second coming of Jesus and the dawning of the Kingdom of God on earth 
would come  in the lifetime of people living then. Paul advances this idea both 
in I  Thessalonians and in I Corinthians. By the end of the 1st century that 
idea had  begun to die out and was replaced by the suggestion that the church 
must be  built for the long term. The book of Acts reflects this new 
consensus. The book  of Revelation reflects a throwback to the earlier attitude and may 
have been  inspired by the current local persecution that was interpreted as 
the beginning  of the cruelty that would accompany the end of the world. In 
later years, when  the supposed date of Jesus' birth was set and time counted 
from that day  forward, end of the world talk has always accompanied the end of 
a century and  was even more pronounced at the end of a millennium.  
I have no truck with those who read the Bible this way. Predictions about the 
 end of the world, talk about the "rapture" and "no child left behind" are 
all so  much literal nonsense to me.  
I have read the book of Revelation on several occasions. I studied it when I  
was in seminary, but in no great depth. Today I would rather spend my time on 
 the gospels, Paul, or even the prophets, all of which have enriched my life  
greatly. I do not see such potential in the book of Revelation.  
When one tries to interpret the symbols as Mr. Redel does in his letter, he  
falls into the trap of assuming that there is some literal truth that needs to 
 be discovered. That is not the case. If all the copies of the book of 
Revelation  were lost tomorrow, I do not believe much of value would disappear. 
However, it  does keep some religious fanatics busy so maybe that is its primary 
purpose.  
Thank you for your letter.  
John Shelby Spong 



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