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The world that Jesus came to was one in which God’s people struggled to survive against hostile forces and, hanging on to his promises, waited for him to intervene. The New Testament tells us that God’s intervention, when it occurred, began with the birth of a baby.
THE VIRGINAL CONCEPTION
The belief that Jesus was born of a virgin is one of those issues that have become a test case for belief. One problem is that the common term ‘the virgin birth of Jesus’ is misleading.
It is Jesus’ conception, not his birth, which is the issue. Both Matthew and Luke are clear that neither Joseph nor any other man was responsible for Jesus’ conception: it was God. The ‘virginal conception’ of Jesus is a better term. The idea that Jesus was born of a virgin is often ridiculed. Some people allege that the whole thing rests on a rather primitive naivety. They suggest that as these first-century authors did not have our knowledge of fertilization, their accounts can be dismissed. This, of course, is nonsense: Joseph may not have known much about gynaecology but he knew that the production of a baby needed a man!
Other people question the account on different grounds. Some point out that many of the Greek or Roman gods were in the habit of having sexual relations with women. True, but three points need making. The first is to question whether anybody ever really took the idea of the gods engaging in sexual activities seriously. The second is that the gospel accounts are very Jewish documents; while tales of the gods engaging in sex occurred amongst the Greeks and Romans, the idea of Yahweh doing anything similar would have been an appalling blasphemy to Jews. Thirdly, the biblical accounts are very different from the lurid Greek or Roman ‘gods have sex with woman!’ tales. What happens is depicted here as fact, rather than myth, and is described in a way that deliberately avoids any hint of immorality. Mary is promised that ‘the Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you’ and we are told no more. We get a picture of God being involved in Jesus’ conception in a way that is mysterious, awesome, pure and – above all – holy.
Still others argue that the key is to be found in Matthew, where we read: ‘All of this happened to fulfil the Lord’s message through his prophet: “Look! The virgin will conceive a child! She will give birth to a son, and he will be called Immanuel” (meaning, God is with us).’
What has happened, the sceptics say, is that the idea of Jesus being ‘born of a virgin’ came about as an attempt to make events fit a prophecy in Isaiah. Yet the idea that Jesus was born of a virgin is also found in Luke and is hinted at elsewhere. A careful reading of the gospels suggests that it was widely known that there was something unusual about Jesus’ origins. So, in John we read of a crowd making an insinuation that Jesus is illegitimate and in Mark 6:3 there is no mention of Joseph as Jesus’ father. Furthermore, Jesus was known as ‘Jesus, Son of Mary’, which is very striking in a culture where a child is always known as the son or daughter of their father.
Of course, some sceptics have suggested that this hint of illegitimacy was there for the most obvious reasons: Jesus was illegitimate. In our culture, where nearly fifty per cent of all births are now outside marriage, such an allegation is easy to believe. But while illegitimacy may have occurred in rural Palestine in Jesus’ day, it would have been very unlikely in the sort of small religious village where everybody knows everybody else and a woman can barely glance at a man without it being noticed. And Jewish culture and law valued virginity highly.
Behind these real objections to a virginal conception seems to be the old contention: miracles cannot happen. But once you accept there is a God who can, and does, intervene in his world, then the difficulties vanish. If Jesus was in some way divine, then God has to get involved in the human story at some point and conception is the obvious place.
But why did God have to do it this way? Why did he become a human in Jesus? The Christian view is that the human race needs rescuing from the mess it is in, but that any rescuer must have both the power and the right to intervene. Someone who was merely human couldn’t act as rescuer: they would, by definition, be part of the problem. And someone who was ‘merely’ God would not be entitled to save us; he would not be one of us. Jesus represents the answer to this problem: as ‘God become one of us’, he is eligible to save us and yet also has the power to save us. The virginal conception allows Jesus to have the necessary dual citizenship of both heaven and earth.
There is another point. It is easy to be intimidated by the idea of God. Yet one aspect of the Christmas story is that God came to earth in this way so that he wouldn’t intimidate us. God didn’t become bigger to impress us, he became smaller to attract us.
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