17/12/2023
A friend told me that there was a short quote from my book 'Blue Sky God' on Radio 4 at 6am this morning (17 Dec 2023). It was at the beginning of 'Something Understood', about the virgin birth. If you want to read the full version, here it is:
The nativity story about Mary, the mother of Jesus and how the idea of the virgin birth arose is a bit of a jigsaw puzzle. Many people outside the church see it as a load of nonsense, a fairy story, and turn their backs on Christianity because of that. Many Christians struggle with it. How can there be such a thing as a virgin birth? Where did it come from? It is from Luke’s gospel that the developed idea of the virgin birth comes. The story of Gabriel’s appearance to Mary, her visit to Elizabeth, and the birth in the stable with angels and shepherds only occurs in Luke’s gospel. Matthew’s gospel only touches on it, and the other two do not have any reference to it.
So how can we understand Luke’s story of the virgin birth? There are some clues we can pick upon. Clue One: we go back to the book of Isaiah, written around 600-700 years before the birth of Christ. Specifically, to Isaiah 7:14, which reads ‘Behold a young woman shall conceive and bear a son and shall give him the name Immanuel (NRSV). Note that it says ‘a young woman’, not ‘a virgin’ shall conceive. The word in Hebrew is almah, which literally means a young woman. The specific word for virgin, betulah, is not used by Isaiah. But that does not rule out virginity, it just prophesies a young woman. Many bible translations, wrongly translate it as virgin (but not the NRSV that has been used in this book). What these translators are doing is reading from the New Testament back into the Old, and translating the Old so that it agrees with the New, or so that it agrees with the doctrine of the church. That, to my mind, is rather deceptive.
Clue Two: now jump forward 500 years to the second century BC. The Greek language dominates the Mediterranean world. The Hebrew Scriptures are translated into Greek, and became known as the Septuagint. The word almah, young woman, is mistranslated to the Greek word parthenos, virgin. In the Greek world, all around the Mediterranean, it becomes known, due to the mistranslation, that the Jewish scriptures say that the messiah would be born to a virgin.
Clue Three: enter Luke the physician and writer, the doctor, a friend of Paul. He travelled with Paul on some of his later missionary journeys. He was a Gentile convert to Christianity, so he didn’t have the Jewish background that Paul had. He was also born in Greece, and so would have read the Hebrew Scriptures in Greek. He was a very good communicator and wrote the Acts of the Apostles as well as one of the gospels, and he wrote about people – poor people, outcasts, people who had made a mess of their lives and needed to be sorted out. His gospel shows he had sympathy for anyone in trouble, especially the sick.
His writing also shows that Luke had a tidy mind and liked to get things in a sequence that made sense to him, so that the events he relates can be followed by his readers. And he was writing to the Greek-speaking world, reflecting a Greek approach to life. He is excited about the Christian message and the retelling of the life of Jesus the Messiah, the Christ, the anointed one, and he wants the world to believe in him, to believe that he is the chosen one, the anointed one, the Son of God, and that God has broken into history through Christ. So he gathers his material about the life of Jesus very carefully.
Clue Four: if you were telling the life of a famous person in those days, the custom was to write a prologue to the life which heralds the importance of the facts that you were going to relate, often focusing on the events of his birth. The first two chapters of Luke’s gospel are that prologue. They are written in the style of a Jewish legend or poem. To herald the importance of the message that his gospel contained, it meant that the birth of Jesus had to be shown to have special meaning. Luke carefully looked into the Old Testament prophesies about the coming of the Messiah (in the Greek translation, the Septuagint), and carefully constructed his prologue to fit in with the prophecies he found, one of which was that a virgin would conceive and give birth.
He may have come across the Jewish belief (described in the Talmud, Niddah 31a) that there are three partners in the conception of any child – a man, a woman and the Holy Spirit of God, who breathes life into that creation, so it was perfectly natural for the angel to say to Mary “The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the most High will overshadow you”. That’s what happened at any birth – the power of God overshadowed the moment of conception to breathe new life. Luke’s other themes are there as well – God was coming to ordinary, humble circumstances, to ordinary people, not to royal finery. Also, the outcasts were there – the shepherds, the rogues, the sinners, the low-life – all given a special place of importance in the story, heralding what was to come.
Luke is building the prologue to show the significance of the rest of the story he has to tell of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. Some of the prologue may be based on what others have told him, some of it he has constructed to fit the prophecies, but all of it is full of significance for the rest of the gospel. It basically said to the reader “Listen up: this is about a very important person.” Luke has constructed a prologue which contains all the pointers to indicate to the reader that this is a very significant man. But the prologue did not have to be a true account of events – people understood that. Our modern minds find this a very difficult concept, we expect everything that is put down as a life story to be an accurate account of what happened, and we feel deceived if this is not so. But our modern concept of accurate biography did not exist then – the mindset of the day did not see it that way. If Luke had not written a great prologue, the way all the Greek legends were written, he would have been doing Jesus a disservice.
It is also helpful to ask the question, ‘Does it matter?’ Central in Luke’s story was Mary, shown to be a virgin to fit in with what was thought to be the Old Testament prophecy. And of course, over the years, Mary has gained hugely in importance in the tradition of the church, the virgin birth being central to that. But if you take out the idea that Mary had a virginal conception, it actually makes very little difference to the story. It is not mentioned in any of the earlier letters, nor in the gospels written by Mark and John – for them the story begins with Jesus’ ministry, and John the Baptist is the herald to tell of the significance of the rest of the story. The only other place it can be construed to be mentioned is in a similar prologue to Matthews’s gospel. Matthew simply says, “When Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together, she was found to be with child by the Holy Spirit.” (Matthew 1:18) In Jewish understanding, any pregnant woman was with child by the Holy Spirit – it was God’s breath, God’s Spirit, that gave life to any child. This was normal. What was not normal was that Joseph was being asked to remain betrothed to Mary given that she had been impregnated by someone else, and it shows the generous nature of Joseph that he took her in.
Luke tells us of a special man, born as a baby, a man who grew up to be more god-like than any human being, full of love and compassion, wisdom and strength – so full of God that he was called the Son of God and was seen by those Jews around him as the Messiah who was prophesied in their scriptures, the one who would be their salvation. Does it matter whether God did something miraculous to conceive the child in Mary, or whether it was Joseph or someone else in the natural way of things, with God’s presence overshadowing the moment of conception? The truth of the matter is that Jesus grew up to be specially anointed by God, the anointed one, the Christ, the Messiah.
The nativity story can be taken in two ways – either as a literally true story that Luke based on actual eyewitness accounts, or as an allegorical story which sets the scene and points to the significant truths of the momentous events that happen during the ministry years of Jesus the Messiah, his death and resurrection. Either way, it sets the scene and complements the rest of the gospel.
Many outside the Church see it as a fairy story. It is not. It is a story of great significance in the gospels, whether you see it a factual or allegorical. It weaves together elements of expectation, anticipation and hope from the Old Testament and joins the Old Testament to the New. It is like an old native American story teller says as he begins his tribe’s story of creation “I don’t know whether it happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” Or a priest who once said “The Bible is true – and some of it happened”.
We can get into a very sterile debate about ‘whether it happened this way or not’, and lose the greater truths which are there if we see it as a metaphorical story. The story of Jesus being conceived by the Spirit of God affirms that what happened in Jesus was of God. The glory of God filling the sky and the special star suggest light in the darkness, breaking into this world, a special anointing, divine light shining into the world. The story of the gentile magi from lands afar affirms that Jesus is the light for all, not just the Jews (this story appears only in Matthew’s gospel). The story of the shepherds shows that the good news is especially for the marginalised, the poor, the disadvantaged. The song of the angels declares Jesus as Lord and Saviour – not Caesar, who used those titles for himself. These were royal titles, fit for a king.
Read metaphorically, the nativity story means all of this and more. And it means it independently of whether we see it as a factual story or not. Arguing about whether they are factual or not can actually distract from their deeper meaning and lose something of their significance. Personally, I do not see the nativity story as factual, but I see truths within it.
