Born of a Virgin?

"The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter." Thomas Jefferson (1823)

A majority of Americans -- and a larger percentage of Christians -- believe Jesus Christ was born of the Virgin Mary and did not have a human father a Newsweek poll recently showed. Seventy-nine percent of Americans and 87 percent of Christians said that was their belief. Fifteen percent of Americans and 8 percent of Christians said they did not share that belief. Results of the poll on beliefs about Jesus are included in a Dec. 13 2004 Newsweek cover story on "The Birth of Jesus." Researchers with Princeton Survey Research Associates found that 93 percent of Americans think Jesus Christ actually lived and 82 percent think he was God or the son of God. Fifty-two percent of respondents said they believe Jesus will return to Earth in the next millennium, and 15 percent said they believe he will return in their lifetime.

Yet St. Paul does not mention the virgin birth anywhere in his writings. It would seem reasonable to assume that if Paul had known of the special conditions of Jesus' birth that he would have mentioned them in one of his epistles. In fact, the opposite appears to be true: he seems to have thought that the birth was natural and conventional:

Between 49 and 55 CE, he recorded the first known reference to Jesus' birth. In Galatians 4:4, he writes:

"But when the time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under law." If he had been aware of the virgin birth, he would have undoubtedly replaced "woman" with "virgin", or made some other change to show that the birth was miraculous. This passage was written some 45 years before the gospels of Matthew and Luke were written, and 55 to 62 years after Jesus' birth.

In about 57 CE, he wrote his only other reference to Jesus' birth. In Romans 1:1-3 he writes: "I Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle and separated onto the gospel of God...concerning his Son Jesus Christ our Lord, which was made of the seed of David according to the flesh." The phrase "of the seed of David" strongly indicates that Paul believed Jesus to be the son of Joseph, because Matthew traces Jesus' genealogy from David to Joseph. The phrase "according to the flesh" implies a natural, normal conception and birth.

A further interesting twist is this:

Most liberal theologians believe that the author of the Gospel of Matthew (or someone who supplied the writer with source material) scanned an unknown ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures. He found what he believed to be a reference to Jesus' birth. It was in Isaiah 7:14. This has since become a famous passage; it is often recited at Christmas time. He simply copied it into Matthew (1:23) as a method of showing that prophecies in the Hebrew Testament were fulfilled in Jesus' life. As it happens, the Greek translators had made a mistake. When they were translating the Hebrew writings into the Greek Septuagint and similar translations, they converted the Hebrew word "almah" as the Greek equivalent of our English word for virgin. "Almah" appears 9 other times in the Hebrew Scriptures; in each case it means "young woman". When the scriptures referred to a virgin (and they do over 50 times) they always used the Hebrew word "betulah". So, Isaiah appears to have referred to a young woman becoming pregnant -- a rather ordinary event.

Now those who know me or have read parts of the Blog know I’m an atheist. So why am I writing about the Virgin Birth? It’s partially because though I don’t actually believe in God (and much else to do with Religion in general) I do find certain aspects of it rather interesting – the Virgin Birth being one of them.

So… Was the tale of the Virgin Birth simply started by a mistranslation? Was it used to later bolster the divinity of Jesus? Does it really matter?

All very good questions… and I do like asking questions…

[Please note that parts of this Blog were shamelessly stolen from various websites after a Google search and could be completely wrong. I rely on those who have MUCH greater knowledge of the Bible to put things right as necessary]

As J.S. Spong, Episcopal Bishop of Newark, NJ, wrote: "In time, the virgin birth account will join Adam and Eve and the story of the cosmic ascension as clearly recognized mythological elements in our faith tradition whose purpose was not to describe a literal event but to capture the transcendent dimensions of God in the earthbound words and concepts of first-century human beings."