Virgin Gospel Distractions

For some reason, we like distractions, red herrings, and avoiding the deeper issues of life and the gospel of Jesus. It is just so much easier for us to focus on things that don't matter and thus avoid those that call for us to live very differently than we do.

Throughout the history of Christianity and Judaism, we have seen plenty of theological red herrings which did little more than prop up power structures and distance people from finding God's will for their lives. We have seen Greek pagan theology provide the basis for so many constructions of hell and the afterlife through the influence of poets like Dante. We have seen the Church promote Crusades for wealth and power under the guise of rescuing the Holy Land from infidels. We have seen the Spanish Inquisition force people to confess accepted beliefs at the point of a sword. We have seen claims of the Bible propping up slavery in order to keep it from interfering with the profit motives of slave holders.

Perhaps the most pernicious of theological distractions has been in regard to claims of Mary's virginity. In only one other case of Christian theological practice do we allow one passage from the Bible to dictate a doctrine the church holds so dear. In general practice, we shield ourselves from getting waylaid by a potential misinterpretation.

Biblically, Luke chapter one is very clear that the author is claiming Mary to have been a virgin when she conceived Jesus. This is not merely one verse in isolation, it is the general position of the entire passage. There is no denying that Luke presents Mary as a virgin prior to Jesus' birth. So far, so good, but then we look at Matthew and the underlying text from Isaiah and things get a little more complicated.

Matthew's story of Jesus birth is not a story about Mary's virginity. Indeed, Joseph simply knows that she is pregnant and somehow this pregnancy has been blessed by God's Breath. Matthew goes on to quote from Isaiah, but not in a way that assumes Mary was a virgin. His point is to emphasize that this child is Immanuel. God is with us in the birth of this child.

The concept that Jesus was born of a virgin is not a theme of his text. Rather than making an issue of her virginity, Matthew makes an issue of Joseph claiming the child after Jesus is born. Joseph names the child Jesus. This was understood as a declaration that he was assuming fatherhood over this child. The claim of paternity or fatherhood was how a child was accepted in the community and before the law as belonging to the man making that claim. Interestingly, it is the same signal given at Jesus' baptism in which God names Jesus as Son.

Matthew had plenty of opportunity to make some clear assertion of Mary's virginity, but he does not. If this were an important doctrine for the early church and Matthew, he would clearly have highlighted it, but he didn't. Mark and John don't even have birth narratives, so we can clear them of oversight in the matter. The problem is that leaves us with Luke, and only Luke to serve as the basis for a doctrine that no other text in the New Testament supports.

In point of fact, Matthew goes out of his way to highlight a series of women in Jesus' ancestral line. They were women whose sexual lives and or immigrant status stand out as questionable. Yet these are the women Matthew mentions leading up to Mary's scandalous pregnancy. If Matthew had considered Mary a virgin or needing to be a virgin, these are hardly the women to mention in the ancestral lineage of Jesus. It would appear that Matthew mentions them specifically because the message of the gospel is that Jesus preached God's desire to reconcile sinners and outcasts.

When we glance back at Isaiah, we have to start scratching our heads. Is this where Luke got his idea that Mary was a virgin at her conception? Isaiah 7:14, which seems to be Luke's passage of reference indeed uses the term virgin, but only in its Greek translation, not the Hebrew. In the Hebrew, it is simply the term for a young girl. The intent of the Isaiah passage was to state that in a short time from Isaiah's declaration, a child would be born of an as yet unmarried girl. By that time, both of the abhorred kings of the land would be gone. Regardless, this was never understood as a virgin giving birth and remaining a virgin.

The Septuagint indeed uses the same Greek term applied by Luke and Matthew, but the term is not forcibly a reference to a virgin, so much as to a young girl who might be assumed to be a virgin. It is applied in some Greek texts to young girls who were indeed not virgins. This leaves us with some serious lack of basis for an important doctrine. We have the extended passage of Luke 1, but nothing else that definitively supports Luke. We need not discount Mary's virginity on that basis, but it at minimum calls into question the importance of that interpretation.

To complicate matters, there are some other things going on in Luke's first two chapters that might give us further pause.

Luke is not writing history along our standards of history writing. He is writing theology, interpreting the importance of Jesus. In chapter one, specifically, he is writing something closer to poetry than history. This is a stylized birth narrative that in fact includes two sections of poetic verse, first in the conversation between Mary and Elizabeth and then in Zechariah's response to the birth and naming John the Baptist. The purpose of this chapter is much more than the simple recording of the facts surrounding the birth of Jesus. It is a passage about what we can expect of Jesus and John the Baptist, as well as the meaning of their lives and ministries.

This was a standard way of introducing biographies of great characters of history in Roman and Greek circles. It is formulaic in that it presents the importance of the people to whom we are being introduced. Luke was not around as a witness to Jesus' or John's births. He had no recording devices on the walls where Mary and Elizabeth spoke. What he presents are not the words of a thirteen or fourteen year old girl speaking with her cousin. Luke was not trying to present Mary's words verbatim. Instead, he uses a picture of her conversation to help us understand the importance of the children to be born, specifically their impact upon the world.

Jesus never mentions his own birth or much specific about his mother. When he does, he says that rather than his mother being blessed, it is those who believe his message and follow through in obedience. Paul never mentions Jesus' birth. Neither of them mentioned anything of importance about Jesus' birth in regard to salvation. James, Peter, John, and Jude make no mention of Jesus' birth.

For the Biblical writers, nothing about Jesus' birth spoke of Jesus' divinity. Nothing about Jesus' birth spoke to Jesus' sinlessness. Nothing of Jesus' birth spoke to his being Messiah, apart from his lineage to David. That lineage, however, was through Joseph, according to both Luke and Matthew.

It is not the Bible that makes an issue of Mary's supposed virginity. It is tradition. Augustine made a big deal of it in formulating his doctrine of original sin. The Bible and Jesus do not. After all, the message of the gospel is God's acceptance of sinners. There is no need to make anything special of Mary when Jesus was a friend of sinners and those rejected by religious society. All else is a red herring.

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© Copyright 2017 Christopher B. Harbin

http://www.sermonsearch.com/contributors/104427/christopher-harbin/
My latest book can be found at: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1520737602/