We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded by your direct support for ReKnew and our vision. Please consider supporting this project.

mary

Why Believe the Virgin Birth Accounts?

Some skeptics claim that the story of the virgin birth of Jesus is derived from similar stories from pagan literature. While I won’t address here the details of the various parallels that some use to argue this point—as it has been demonstrated by many scholars that they simply don’t hold up to scrutiny—I will offer four reasons why I trust that the Bible’s account of the virgin birth is trustworthy and thereby reject this pagan-origin theory as bogus.

  1. It’s extremely unlikely that the early Christians who were largely first century, orthodox, Palestinian Jews would borrow material from pagan stories. All the historical evidence indicates that Palestinian Jews were strongly resistant to pagan stories and practices.
  2. Unlike the pagan stories, the accounts that are included in the Gospel were not about someone who lived “once upon a time,” but someone who lived in the very recent past and in the region where the story was originally being told. Even if the earliest Jewish Christians would have been capable of incorporating pagan legends into their proclamation, it’s hard to see how they could have plausibly done this while Jesus’ brother and mother along with others who knew him were still alive. (I would argue that both Matthew and Luke were written prior to 70 AD, but even if one accepts a later dating of 70 to 90 AD this is still very close to the event by historical standards. Plus, we must remember that the Gospel material was passed on and protected orally before being written. On the importance of oral traditions in non-literate cultures, see Eddy, Boyd, The Jesus Legend).
  3. Unlike any other literature that contains alleged supernatural conceptions, Matthew and especially Luke give us many historical reasons for accepting their general historicity (here too, see The Jesus Legend). The infancy narratives of Jesus in particular bear all the marks of reports that go back to the earliest witnesses.
  4. The alleged parallels of these pagan stories to the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ conception are simply not very impressive. There are, of course, numerous accounts of gods having sex with each other to produce a divine mythic hero and even some accounts of a male god having intercourse with a woman to produce a partly divine hero. But these supposed parallels actually lack one key thing: virginal conception. The divine or human females had sex! So far as I know, there are three possible exceptions to this (Krishna, Buddha and the son of Zoroaster), but even in these accounts it’s a stretch to say they parallel the Gospel accounts of a seed being created ex nihilo and planted in the womb of a woman who had never had sex. In addition, we have absolutely no historical reasons for thinking any of these accounts is at all rooted in history or that the earliest Christians knew about them – let alone borrowed from them.

Of course, none of this proves that Mary supernaturally conceived Jesus while remaining a virgin. The nature of the subject is that it’s impossible to prove (true or false). And, I should add that my faith in Christ doesn’t hang or fall on the historicity of this particular story. At the same time, I find I have many compelling historical (as well as existential and philosophical) reasons for accepting the general portrait of Jesus in the Gospels, and since the story of Jesus’ virginal conception is part of this broader story, I believe it to be true.

Photo credit: Lawrence OP via Visualhunt.com / CC BY-NC-ND

Related Reading

Is Jesus Unique?

The Search for a Non-Unique Jesus Built into the naturalistic assumption that drives the liberal New Testament search for the “man behind the myth” is the notion that, whoever Jesus was, he cannot have been utterly unique. The laws that operate in the world today, including the laws of human behavior, have always operated. And…

What “God Loves You” Actually Means

From the beginning, God chose to have a people who would be the object of his eternal love, just as Christ is the object of his eternal love. God sought to acquire a “bride” for Christ who would receive and reflect the love of the triune community (Eph 5:25-32). And the only qualification for being…

The “Christus Victor” View of the Atonement

God accomplished many things by having his Son become incarnate and die on Calvary. Through Christ God revealed the definitive truth about himself (Rom 5:8, cf. Jn 14:7-10); reconciled all things, including humans, to himself (2 Cor 5:18-19; Col 1:20-22), forgave us our sins (Ac 13:38; Eph 1:7); healed us from our sin-diseased nature (1…

What the Cross Tells Us About God

Whether we’re talking about our relationship with God or with other people, the quality of the relationship can never go beyond the level of trust the relating parties have in each other’s character. We cannot be rightly related to God, therefore, except insofar as we embrace a trustworthy picture of him. To the extent that…

Sermon: The Twist

In this sermon clip, Greg Boyd discusses how when you read a book with a twist ending, the ending reframes the entire story. The Bible is no different. In this sermon, Greg shows how Jesus’ message reframes how we are to understand the Bible, and he shows us why the Anabaptists shared this belief. You…

The Incarnation: Paradox or Contradiction?

We’re in the process of flushing out the theology of the ReKnew Manifesto, and we’ve come to the point where we should address the Incarnation. This is the classical Christian doctrine that Jesus was fully God and fully human. Today I’ll simply argue for the logical coherence of this doctrine, viz. it does not involve…

Topics: