The Birth of Jesus

This is no small difference. By asserting Mary's virginity, Matthew and Luke are taking the device of the miraculous conception farther than any other Jewish writer had before. Why? The simplest explanation is that it happened. As uncongenial as that opinion may be to modern audiences, Shakespeare was right when he had Hamlet say, "There are more things in heaven and earth... than are dreamt of in your philosophy." The miraculous may strike some as fantastical, but countless people have believed, and believe now, that God intervened in the temporal world in just this way. If the virginal conception were a historical fact, however, it is somewhat odd that there is no memory of it recorded in the Gospel accounts of Jesus' ministry or in the Acts of the Apostles or in the rest of the New Testament. It is also striking that in parts of the Gospels Mary herself appears unaware of her son's provenance and destiny. (In Mark, when Jesus is casting out devils at the beginning of his ministry, "his friends"--the sense of the Greek is "family," or "household," which would presumably include his mother--thought he was mentally disturbed and tried to stop him, saying, "He is beside himself." If Mary had received Gabriel's message, then she should have known her son was not mad, but the Messiah. And even if she were not around in this story in Mark, had Jesus been born in such extraordinary circumstances, it is logical to assume that those closest to him would have known at least something of it--enough, anyway, to see Jesus as someone with a special role or destiny of which the exorcisms were a likely part.)

If we assume, for the sake of argument, that the virginal conception is not a fact but an article of faith, there are other explanations for Matthew's and Luke's Nativity accounts. Theology (that Jesus was not merely another prophet-king figure like Moses or David, but something more) and narrative symmetry both argued for a unique birth. "The early church insisted on the virginal conception as the logical beginning to a story that climaxed with the physical resurrection," says Deirdre Good, a professor of New Testament at the General Theological Seminary in New York. "The two separate miracles form a theologically perfect whole. It simply would not have been enough for Jesus to have been 'chosen' by God in his lifetime. Through divine intervention, Jesus was seen to be both divine and human from the start."

The virginity detail did not particularly help the cause early on. To non-Christian Jews and pagans, the first Christians were superstitious and backward, a group of marginal people on the fringes of empire preaching an outlandish message. According to the Yale historian Jaroslav Pelikan, Celsus, a fierce Platonic critic of Christianity who wrote between A.D. 175 and 180, attacked the idea that God had come into the world in "some corner of Judea somewhere," and one Roman emperor, Pelikan writes, dismissed the Jewish and Christian God as "essentially the deity of a primitive and uncivilized folk."

Defensive about such charges, educated Christians fought back. The apologist Origen of Alexandria answered Celsus, arguing that "we tell no incredible tales when we explain the doctrines about Jesus." The last thing the Christians wanted was to appear to be yet another mythological cult, worshiping some kind of demi-god; their deep Jewish faith in the commandment to have "no other gods before me" foreclosed that possibility. "Incredible tales" were for the idolatrous.

And there were scandalous tales in circulation, too: was the story of the virginal conception told to hide Jesus' illegitimacy? As startling as the allegation is for many, it dates from at least the second century, and maybe as early as Jesus' lifetime. "It was Jesus himself who fabricated the story that he had been born of a virgin," Celsus wrote in A.D. 180. "In fact, however, his mother was a poor country woman who earned her living by spinning. She had been driven out by her carpenter-husband when she was convicted of adultery with a soldier named Panthera. She then wandered about and secretly gave birth to Jesus. Later, because he was poor, he hired himself out in Egypt where he became adept in magical powers. Puffed up by these, he claimed for himself the title of God." Second- and third-century Christian writers alleged that some Jews also suggested Jesus' birth was illicit.

Perhaps the most intriguing possible hint of illegitimacy in the New Testament comes in the Gospel of John, in an exchange between Jesus and the Temple priests. The back-and-forth is sharp, even brutal, with Jesus accusing the priests of failing to live up to the example of their common father, Abraham. Their reply: "We be not born of fornication; we have but one Father, God Himself." In his exploration of this passage, the late Raymond E. Brown, a distinguished scholar and Roman Catholic priest who taught at Union Theological Seminary, wrote: "The Jews may be saying, 'We were not born illegitimate, but you were.' The emphatic use of the Greek pronoun 'We' allows that interpretation."