Only in the same sense that George W. Bush was born with a silver spoon in his mouth,
… and no one ever asks whether the spoon was sterling or silver plate.
No one asks that question because we all know that ‘silver spoon’ is a figure of speech. Its point is that Bush was born into privilege and wealth.
Virgin birth is an ancient figure of speech, a way of pointing, not to privilege and wealth, but to extraordinary personal qualities exhibited by an individual. For example, Alexander the Great was said to be virgin-born—more than three hundred years before Jesus’ birth. The same was said of the great Roman Emperor Caesar Augustus who died in 14 C.E., about sixteen years before Jesus’ death. His father was the god Apollo who conceived him in his mother, Atia.
These great, but pre-Christian, historical figures were just two of numerous virgin-born humans. A number of great religious figures were also virgin-born. That should tell us that a virgin birth in the ancient world was not a literal belief. People used the term ‘virgin birth’ not because they believed in miracles, but because it was an attempt to say something about the greatness of a person.
It is a modern arrogance to impute such incredulous ignorance to the ancients concerning human reproduction. Of course they were aware of human intercourse producing pregnancy, and counting to nine was not rocket science for them.
Yet, for some reason the story of the virgin birth of Jesus, more than any other doctrine, has become a litmus test for much of fundamentalist Christianity.
The virgin birth is found only in Matthew and Luke, and is totally absent from the earliest New Testament writers Paul and Mark and, also, from all the later writers following Matthew and Luke. Two and a quarter centuries after the writing of the New Testament, this metaphor/story became enshrined in the Nicene Creed. Scholars have long pointed out that the Isaiah ‘prophecy,’ on which the virgin birth is based, is a misreading of the Isaiah passage. Matthew and Luke wrote in Greek and quoted Isaiah 7:12-16 from the Septuagint (a Greek translation of the Old Testament completed about 200 years before Jesus appeared on the scene). The Greek Septuagint uses a Greek work which specifically means ‘virgin,’ whereas the Hebrew work it translates has the broader meaning of ‘young woman,’ who may or may not be a virgin.
Awareness of such textual misunderstandings has not deterred people, even today, from affirming a miraculous birth for Jesus. Nor has such belief been dismissed, even when it is pointed out that there have been any number of virgin birth stories that were part of the Middle Eastern religious and political scene prior to Jesus.
Although, today, we do not use the expression virgin-born to describe an outstanding person, we still cannot trace with exactitude the cause of the extraordinary talent of an individual, talent far exceeding what we expect from humans. Birth and culture may hint at greatness, but they cannot totally encompass it. How do we understand Mozart composing good music at the age of five? How do we understand Albert Einstein, working in a Swiss patent office, envisioning such counter-intuitive views of time and space? We can study their early lives and gain some understanding but we cannot, out of that study, predict their greatness.
In the Zen tradition, a student is warned not to confuse the finger pointing to the moon for the moon itself. In the same way the expression ‘virgin-born,’ pointing to the greatness of a person, ought not be confused with the literal birth-origin of that person.
Was Jesus born of a virgin? No, there is no need to literalize a miraculous ‘who done it’ story. However, keepimg in mind that a virgin birth is a figure of speech the ancients used to to point to an extraordinary human being, one could still sing of such a birth at Christmas and affirm that statement in a creed. Many Christians today choose to do neither.
An afterword
At times, if my mood is light, I might whimsically play out a scenario with a fundamentalist. I will say that we could, if we so wanted, use virgin-born today as a metaphor, nor for greatness, but for uniqueness. With that understanding, we could say that our children, each of whom we agree has unique characteristics, are virgin-born. Using the same logic, we could take the next step and acknowledge that each one of us is virgin-born. And since Bible verses are important, I then top off my playfulness with a quote from the Gospel of John, first chapter, verses 12 and 13, as a way to stir the imagination.
But to all who did receive him, to those who have yielded him their allegiance, he gave the right to become children of God, not born of any human stock, or by the fleshly desire of a human father, but the offspring of God himself.
Bob Tucker
April 2009
Bob:Enjoy your days away. I thought of “extra virgin” olive oil as another use of the metaphor alluding to something/one special.
possible addition in future development of the idea
I have to teach this concept of virgin birth this Sunday in Birmingham, Alabama. Class is diverse so don’t leap to the conclusion that we are a fundamentalist, flag waving, football fans born of a mobile home. But this is hard to understand for me and your article made it a little easier. I wonder if the concession to paganism and others born of “virgins” (Ceasar Augustus) was like Paul’s permission to adult men to be followers of Christ without circumcision–it just made it easier to join the movement. Is this reasonable or does it fall into the category of persuasion that allows one to say anything to get elected. (No pun intended).
The simple meaning of the statement, “A man had two sons,” in the parable of the Prodigal Son could be taken literally, as in an actual family, however, being a parable, we know it is a story. The incidents around the birth stories of Jesus are also stories and not literal facts. This was the point of my blog.
I am sorry this comment is so very late. You may be right that part of the motivation for the virgin birth story might have been ‘evangelistic.’ To compare Jesus to Caesar Augustus was, no doubt, confrontational and would get a person in that day thinking, or angry. However, the basic cause for the virgin birth language is, I believe, the need to express meanings in the language and images of the day. To speak of a person’s conversion from atheism to becoming a follower of Jesus as a ‘quantum leap,’ is using a contemporary image. Virgin birth, like ‘quantum leap’ today, communicated something in the time of the writing of Matthew and Luke. However, if virgin birth was used of someone today, the claim would be greated with great skepticism. To communicate, we need to speak in words and the images understood by both parties.