5
†
The Virginal Conception of Jesus in Matthew and Luke
The virgin conception is narrated by both Matthew and Luke but it is not easy for modern people to accept it literally, since we know that humans do not reproduce by parthenogenesis (birth from a female parent without male fertilization), and this view is supported by our relatively recent discovery of DNA and chromosomes. If Jesus had been born of an unfertilized embryo, he would not have been human in the normal sense of the word. This is problematic for the doctrine of the Incarnation, that is, God became a human being in every sense except sin. Another reason for not accepting the story literally is that there are many parallels in ancient literature which describe miraculous births that involve divine intervention. They are not historically true, either, but this shows that such stories were a common way of describing the birth of an important person in the ancient world. The early Christians had plenty of precedents in describing Jesus’ birth in terms of miraculous and awe-inspiring events.
It has worried me in the past that denying the historical reality of the virgin conception might have the effect of damaging people’s faith. Prospective parents often relate to Mary and bring their concerns to her because, as a virgin mother, she is a miraculous being in whom people can confide their worries about fertility and childbirth. Sarah Jane Boss makes this point in her book Empress and Handmaid: On Nature and Gender in the Cult of the Virgin Mary, giving several examples from Christian tradition. However, the recent publication of analysis by Elina Vuola, a Finnish scholar, The Virgin Mary across Cultures: Devotion among Costa Rican Catholic and Finnish Orthodox Women, reassured me considerably. Vuola interviewed female Marian devotees in both Costa Rica and Finland, and confirmed that Mary is indeed important in matters of fertility, childbirth, and child-rearing. However, in these two quite different contexts, the last thing that seems to concern Vuola’s interviewees is that Mary was literally a virgin at the time of conceiving Jesus. Many of them disbelieved it, saying that it was an impossibility and the kind of thing that priests believe, but not ordinary people. The lack of belief in a literal understanding of the virgin birth did not harm their Catholic or Orthodox faith, or their recourse to Mary in prayer and devotion, at all.
Virgin conception is a theological metaphor, a very telling way of making the statement that Jesus was the Son of God in a special way (not the son of God in the sense that everyone is a child of God). The Christian claim that Jesus was the Son of God, as well as being theological, also stood out as a highly political one in its time. The Roman emperors from Julius Caesar onwards were regarded as divinities after their death and, when living, at least sons of gods. There was therefore an imperial cult that Christians and Jews refused to take part in, as it contradicted their monotheistic beliefs; it was difficult for Christians and Jews to enter the Roman military where participation in the emperor cult was a requirement. There were many legends about the miraculous births of emperors which reinforced their near-divine status. To claim that Jesus was the Son of God and born of a virgin stood in direct rivalry to these beliefs and made it clear where a person’s allegiance lay. Therefore, it was not surprising that Christians suffered persecution in the Roman Empire.
Another reason why the virgin conception story arose naturally in the early Church is that the Hebrew Scriptures provide plenty of precedents for belief in miraculous conception. They abound with stories of births from women either past childbearing age or at least after many years of yearning: Sarah the wife of Abraham and mother of Isaac; Rebekah the mother of Jacob and Esau; Rachel the mother of Joseph and Benjamin; Hannah the mother of Samuel; all of these women fall into this category. The theme of waiting upon God’s intervention is one that will have resonated with Jews at the time of the Exile, when the texts that included these characters were collected and edited into what eventually became the Hebrew Scriptures. The message is: be patient, God’s purpose will be served eventually. Finally, centuries later, Luke added one more to this list of women who bore a child after years of waiting: Elizabeth, Mary’s relative, the mother of John the Baptist. She is the representative of a nation that has been waiting for its deliverance.
Mary’s virginity and youth are the polar opposite of late childbearing and there are no clear precedents for a virgin conception in the Hebrew Scriptures, but this story still reflects the theme of God’s miraculous intervention in the history of the Jewish people. This time, in Mary, God is doing something extraordinary and creating something completely new. Faith in Jesus Christ relates to the new covenant. To reinforce the idea that the virgin conception is something rather different from the theme of late birth, the four women preceding Mary in the genealogy of Matthew (Matt. 1.1–17) do not include Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, and Hannah, but instead Tamar, who conceived by Judah when pretending to be a prostitute; Rahab, the prostitute who helped Joshua invade Jericho; Ruth, the Moabite who became the great-grandmother of David by seducing Boaz; and Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite who was desired by David and so became the mother of Solomon. Three of these women continued the line of Judah and one ensured that the Israelites captured the Promised Land, and so they are heroines in the Jewish tradition, but unlikely heroines in somewhat compromising situations. Mary is the fifth and last woman included in the genealogy.
It has been speculated that the genealogy and the four names of women of questionable reputation might imply that Mary’s pregnancy was thought to have been controversial, perhaps the result of an illegitimate union; this was claimed in ancient anti-Christian polemical arguments which were scornful of the virgin conception. However, we do not need to speculate on whether there is hidden historical detail behind the story if we believe that all we have is a mythical story based on theological symbolism. Matthew only tells us that the conception occurred ‘from the Holy Spirit’ and that Joseph was persuaded of the fact by an angel.
A much better explanation that links these five women together is that they all brought very important new circumstances into being at crucial moments in the Davidic line. From Tamar comes the royal line of Judah through Perez, whose descendants were the kings in Jerusalem, including David; Rahab facilitated Israel’s entry into the Promised Land under Joshua; Ruth was the great-grandmother of David and the one close Davidic ancestor of whom readers of the Jewish Scriptures knew the life details; Bathsheba gave birth to Solomon, who built the Temple and continued David’s line. Finally, Mary brought into being Jesus, the one who represents all these things in himself: he is the new David and Joshua, the foundation of the new community of salvation, the King of the kingdom of heaven who brings it into being, and the High Priest of the new Temple. Mary then is the natural fifth in the list of women because of whom she brings into being, and not because of the potentially scandalous circumstances by which this occurs.
The virgin conception was thought to have been foreshadowed in Isaiah 7.14: ‘Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel.’ This is the English translation of the Hebrew, but Matthew 1.23 quotes the Greek version which includes the word ‘virgin’, parthenos. Translated into English, it reads: ‘Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel, which means “God is with us”.’ This was the proof text which Matthew used to show that the virgin conception was prophesied in the Jewish tradition.
The original context of Isaiah’s prophecy is rather different to the way it is understood in the New Testament. Isaiah was telling King Ahaz that the Assyrians would destroy Judah’s enemies, Syria and the northern tribes of Israel, in the very near future, and also threaten Judah itself before the child of the prophecy was old enough to tell between good and evil. The son’s name is Immanuel because this prophetic sign is to announce God’s action in punishing both Israel and Judah, although Judah eventually survived the successive Assyrian invasions when Jerusalem stood firm under Ahaz’s son Hezekiah, who was also advised by Isaiah. The boy is a prophetic metaphor, like other such symbolic allusions in the prophetic books (for example, the basket of fruit in Amos 8.1–2 or Hosea’s prostitute wife in Hosea 1.2). Who the boy was or whether he lived at all is insignificant. The theme of a boy being born who will not grow very old before Assyria invades the lands of Israel is repeated in Isaiah 8; this child is the fruit of a meeting between Isaiah and a prophetess.
In actual fact, the coming of Christ is much better prefigured by the prophecy of Isaiah 9.6 which promises peace for the Davidic kingdom: ‘For a child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders; and he is named Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.’ This is a message of hope made very familiar thanks to Handel’s setting in the Messiah. In its original context, this probably reflected the new reign of King Hezekiah, Ahaz’s son, regarded much more favourably than Ahaz in the Hebrew tradition. However, Matthew chose Isaiah 7.14 because it acted as a proof text for the virgin conception. Parthenos can also mean ‘betrothed person’ as in 1 Corinthians 7, and thus serves a double purpose, as Mary was betrothed to Joseph but had not ‘known’ him at the birth of Jesus, as Matthew 1.25 states. Therefore, Matthew gave the Isaiah 7.14 text an interpretation which has endured in Christianity.
For all these reasons: the competition with miraculous claims for the Roman emperors, and their deified lineage; the context in which early Christian culture expressed theological and religious ideas through symbolic forms; the way in which miraculous births have precedents in the Hebrew Scriptures; and taking into account all these along with scientific advance in knowledge of human reproduction, we can conclude that there are very good historical and literary arguments that should lead us to regard the virgin conception as presenting a theological truth in the form of a symbolic story that suited the context but not historical fact. The title ‘Virgin’ might be a fitting way of describing Mary, but it did not relate to her permanent physical state.
Who then was Jesus’ actual father? There is no reason to think that it was anyone other than Joseph. If the virgin conception narratives are mythical, then the detail about Joseph’s concern because of Mary’s premature pregnancy is not historical, and in the absence of other information we are left with the fact that Jesus was described as Joseph’s son (Luke 4.22; John 6.42). Second-century opponents of Christianity claimed that it was a Roman soldier named Panthera, but that was an obvious way of pouring doubt on belief in the virgin birth which was established in the Church by then. Any suggestion other than Joseph the husband of Mary is unfounded speculation.
The Virginal Conception in Ancient Literature
What would the original readers of the gospels have understood when they read about the virgin conception? Mary Foskett asks this question in her book A Virgin Conceived: Mary and Classical Representations of Virginity. In both ancient Greco-Roman and Jewish culture, the word ‘virgin’ applied to a young woman evoked an interconnected set of ideas:
· It referred to the state between one stage of life – childhood – and another – adulthood;
· It was therefore an indication of the purity and innocence of a person at the very beginning of their adult life;
· It was also an indication of honour and spiritual power, but also vulnerability;
· Virginity referred more to social status than to the state of the physical body (it was only regarded as being compromised when there were clear reasons to doubt it).
Virginity was a liminal or in-between state: it represented the point when females were no longer girls, but not yet fully married women. The state of betrothal was an intermediate period when the young woman had not yet moved to her husband’s house (despite this, Luke refers to Mary as betrothed rather than wife even though she travels with Joseph to Bethlehem). ‘Liminal’ is a word which refers to the borderline between places, seasons, or periods of life, and these boundaries are regarded across the world as having the quality of an openness to divine or supernatural forces. In the life cycle, it principally relates to birth, adulthood, conversion, marriage, and death. These present opportunities for members of a community to gather and come into contact with their tradition and its deities, representing all this in ritual drama. Liminality is both sacred and dangerous, hence the need for ritual observances and taboos.
The spiritual dangers of liminality, such as the threat of pollution by incorrect observance of traditional customs, go along with practical dangers. In the case of female virginity, there is the possibility of sex being forced on the young woman before she is ready through marriage, or her seeking it. This has the potential to cause parents much stress; in traditional patriarchal cultures, the virgin is an important asset, a person with financial and social value, a commodity. This is clearly described in the Wisdom of Jesus ben Sirach (42.9–14);1 the passage has a misogynistic conclusion, but it illustrates the concern over virgin daughters in the ancient world!
A daughter is a secret anxiety to her father,
and worry over her robs him of sleep;
when she is young, for fear she may not marry,
or if married, for fear she may be disliked;
while a virgin, for fear she may be seduced
and become pregnant in her father’s house;
or having a husband, for fear she may go astray,
or, though married, for fear she may be barren.
Keep strict watch over a headstrong daughter,
or she may make you a laughingstock to your enemies,
a byword in the city and the assembly of the people,
and put you to shame in public gatherings.
See that there is no lattice in her room,
no spot that overlooks the approaches to the house.
Do not let her parade her beauty before any man,
or spend her time among married women;
for from garments comes the moth,
and from a woman comes woman’s wickedness.
Better is the wickedness of a man than a woman who does good;
it is woman who brings shame and disgrace.
Mary as parthenos is pictured in Matthew and Luke as being in this liminal period between girlhood and marriage, just after the onset of puberty. She is the ideal virgin, honourable and attentive to the moral customs, but an unexpected pregnancy would certainly have caused consternation both with her fiancé, as we see in the story of Joseph’s reaction, Matt. 1.18–25, and with her parents, whose reaction we do not read about in the gospels nor in the second-century Protevangelium of James where they feature. Matthew rather than Luke is alert to the social questions that describing Mary as a virgin at the time of conception would have raised; Luke simply states Mary’s own concern: ‘How can this be?’, but she is quickly reassured by Gabriel.
Readers of Matthew and Luke who knew the Hebrew Scriptures would have been aware of the many references to a female who is a virgin, betulah in Hebrew. The Greek version of the Jewish texts (Septuagint) was in wide circulation at the time of the writing of the gospels, so it is important to consider also the instances of the Greek word for virgin, parthenos, in the Septuagint. See Appendix 3 for the details of the biblical occurrences of these words.
What is unanimous in all these references is that the idea of ‘virgin’ relates to the liminal state between childhood and womanhood. It never refers to the idea of a virgin as an adult female. The one possible exception is Joel 1.8 which concerns a lamentation over the ruin of Israel: ‘Lament like a virgin dressed in sackcloth for the husband of her youth.’ Here the unfortunate woman indicated in the simile is like Dickens’ Miss Havisham: she remains in the virgin state because the husband she was expecting to marry has been killed. She is not a model for virginity as an adult vocation.
The Virgin Daughters of God
The virgin in the Hebrew Scriptures is either a specific person (Rebekah; the daughter of the host in Gibeah; Jephthah’s daughter; Abishag; Esther) or figurative, describing a situation (future good or bad outcomes, ‘it will be a time when virgins…’, etc.), or legal, indicating what is to be done in a particular situation (‘if a virgin…’ etc.). In thirteen cases, the word ‘virgin’ describes not a person, but a nation or community. Israel is a virgin daughter four times, Jerusalem or Zion three times, Judah twice, and Samaria, Sidon, Babylon, Egypt once each. In these passages, God is imaged as the anxious and angry father of the wayward daughter intending to impose punishment, except in Jeremiah 31, where virgin Israel is restored. It is interesting to note that the natural enemies of ancient Israel, the Egyptians and Babylonians, are also regarded as God’s failing daughters, a reminder of the way that Israel’s texts present a God who is a father to all peoples.
For the Hebrew prophets, God is both a concerned father of Israel and her prospective bridegroom. References of both types occur in Isaiah, Jeremiah and Lamentations, Ezekiel, and Amos. Hosea’s famous image is of Israel as a whore (in Hosea 5.3, the male symbolic figure Ephraim is also used for the whoring metaphor). The prostitute metaphor is also used in Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel in referring to Israel, Judah, Jerusalem, Samaria, and Sodom. Overall, the prophetic message is that the perfect daughter or wife as the community or nation is the one who listens only to her father or husband, preserving her virginity for marriage and whose attention does not waver towards false gods. In the New Testament, the symbol of the divine bridegroom passes to Christ.
In the apocryphal books, those not in the Hebrew canon but part of the Septuagint, once again a virgin is a young female in the liminal period between the stages of childhood and adulthood. There is one interesting reference to Wisdom as a virgin bride, in Sirach 15.2.
What is clear, therefore, is that Mary as a virgin will have been understood in the light of these passages in the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures of the Jewish people. She is a young woman having just entered puberty and a symbol of Israel or Jerusalem, the ‘Daughter of Zion’. The association made between the virginity of Mary and scriptural metaphors about the virgin daughters of God cannot have been lost on any reader in the early Church familiar with the Jewish Scriptures in either Greek or Hebrew. Mary’s Magnificat (Luke 1.46–55) makes this abundantly clear:
My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour,
for he has looked with favour on the lowliness of his servant.
Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.
His mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,
according to the promise he made to our ancestors,
to Abraham and to his descendants forever.
Mary is God’s servant in this hymn but so is Israel (although different Greek words are used, doulē, slave or servant in the first instance, and pais, child, which can be translated ‘servant’, in the second). Mary has suffered lowliness but will now be called blessed; God has helped Israel and made good all the promises made to the nation. Israel has suffered from powerlessness and, when Luke was writing his gospel, had suffered over one hundred years of Roman rule which, after the Hasmonean period, had returned Israel to the state they were in before it, as vassals to a dominant and tyrannical foreign empire (imaged as a destructive beast in the book of Daniel). We do not need to speculate, as many have, as to why Mary as an individual is lowly; we do not know very much about her background in Luke. She is rather the representative of Israel, particularly its believers loyal to the monotheistic tradition who are the anawim of Jewish culture, that is, the poor, both economically and politically. These are the ones who understand the importance of waiting on God.
According to Luke’s Magnificat, that part of Israel which has been lifted up are those who believe in Christ as the risen Son of God. For the rest, the nation was still under the Roman Empire and, by the time of the writing of Luke’s Gospel, had been defeated in a disastrous war against Rome and the Temple destroyed. Therefore, Mary is at the same time Israel and the Church. While the association of Mary as a type (that is, a representative image) of the Church is not made explicit until Ambrose in the late fourth century, it is clearly implicit in the New Testament itself, nowhere more obviously than in the first two chapters of Luke. Like Mary, the Church in the apostolic period was in a liminal place where the outcomes were not clear. It too faced dangers and temptations which had the potential to take it away from faithfulness to the original message of Christ. These concerns are expressed in the epistles of Paul and John.
The metaphor in which the Church is likened to a virgin was employed at an early point. Paul’s epistles portray the Church as Christ’s bride, ‘holy and without blemish’ (Eph. 5.27), and liken the Corinthian church to a ‘chaste virgin’, with the danger of being led astray like Eve with the serpent (2 Cor. 11.2–3). In Revelation, chapters 19 and 21, the Bride of the Lamb is the new Jerusalem with clear associations with the Church. The fourth-century Christian historian Eusebius recorded the second-century writer Hegesippus as comparing the very earliest church with a virgin: ‘They used to call the Church a virgin for this reason, that she had not yet been seduced by listening to nonsense’, in other words, before the coming of what were, in his view, various heresies which attracted many Christians. He was referring to the time during which James was the ‘bishop’ in Jerusalem (Church History IV.22, see also III.32.7). Here the metaphor emphasizes the innocence but also potential corruptibility of the virgin, yet Mary is the Virgin who cannot be corrupted. At the end of the second century, Clement of Alexandria likewise spoke of the Church as a Virgin Mother (Pedagogy 1.6), and this symbolic image is established by the time of Ambrose and Augustine in the fourth to fifth centuries.
Therefore, the fourfold association between Israel – Church – Virgin – Mary is implied at an early stage in Christian tradition.
In the Greco-Roman world, virginity was likewise a metaphor for a community in some aspect, for example, a city or nation that had not been conquered, as in the virgin goddess Athene/Minerva, the patroness of Athens, the deity of culture and the arts, including the art of war. Other goddesses associated with virginity were Artemis/Diana, the deity of the natural world, hunting and blood, and therefore the patroness of childbirth and female puberty, including the beginning of menstruation; Hestia/Vesta, patroness of the family, the home, and the state; and (in some accounts) Hecate, the goddess of witchcraft, dogs, the dead, crossroads, and doorways. These virgins represented powerful forces in human experience, either civic or social (Athene and Hestia), natural (Artemis), or the liminal, those aspects of life on the boundaries of social organization (Hecate). The recognition that the state or family could not control everything was reflected in the importance of the wild goddesses Artemis and Hecate in the female life cycle and reproduction. There was also the poetic idea of a virgin understood as Justice bringing in a new age of peace represented by her boy child, in Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, written a few years before the birth of Jesus. This was so strikingly similar to the story of the birth of the bringer of peace by a virgin that Christians claimed that Virgil had been inspired as a prophet.
The Exaltation of the Virginal State
The exaltation of virginity as a permanent, desirable adult state for females is not derived from the Hebrew Scriptures. It is associated with the Greco-Roman world. While, generally, virginity was not a virtue in Greek society and its prolongation not regarded as particularly healthy, nevertheless, sexual activity was devalued in the philosophical traditions of Pythagoras and Plato and, in some prominent cults, lifelong virgins were regarded as especially holy and mediators with the divine in classical Greece and Rome. For example, it was believed that the steadfast chastity of the Vestal Virgins and the continuity of their flame preserved Rome (and the diminishing of either threatened it). Virginity was also important in the Greek cultic traditions of the priestesses at Delphi, where the priestess was possessed by Apollo in the course of prophecy, thereby reflecting the relationship with the divine as an alternative to human marriage. The idea of marriage to divinity became a feature of future Christian female religious orders, nuns as ‘brides’ of Christ.
Virgin priestesses were unknown in the Jewish tradition. Luke and Matthew would not have wanted their readers to view Mary as equivalent to the Greco-Roman female deities or classical poetic concepts, or to see her conception by the Holy Spirit as having any parallel with the intercourse between gods and nymphs in Greek or Roman myth. However, because of the associations, their Gentile audience will have understood the story as being in direct competition with these ideas, and to represent a superior version of the relationship between God and faithful human communities. Gentile converts to Christianity were replacing their inherited traditions of classical mythology with the biblical theology of the Jewish tradition, as it was understood to be realized in Jesus Christ. The narrative of the virgin conception will have struck a chord with a Gentile Christian readership in a different way than with a Jewish Christian one, although the process by which Gentile Christians learned and elevated the Jewish scriptural traditions will have meant that their interpretations soon merged. However, the continuation of the tradition of virginity suggests that the Greco-Roman inheritance did have considerable influence.
Female adult virginity as a vocation may have made its way into Jewish communities in some isolated cases. The Jewish philosopher Philo refers to a Jewish sect near Alexandria, the ‘Therapeutrides’, as being ascetic and including elderly ‘virgins’. So virginity out of choice may not have been unknown to the Jewish tradition at the time of the writing of the gospels, although the Therapeutrides were not in mainstream Jewish culture, and their sources seem to have been eclectic (in addition, the actual existence of the Therapeutrides has been questioned in scholarship).
Abstinence from sexual relations was adopted by males in some sections of Jewish culture at the time of Christ, for example, the Essenes at Qumran. Jesus’ remark about people becoming eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom (Matt. 19.10–12) suggests that it might have applied to some of his followers, but this is hardly evidence for a general acceptance of the importance of sexual abstinence for both males and females in Jesus’ movement. Paul suggests not marrying simply because of the imminence of the Parousia, the return of Christ, and the primacy of the task of spreading the gospel, but he is certainly not against marriage per se, nor does he hold up female celibacy as a virtue (1 Cor. 7.1–16, 25–40).
Celibacy became important in Christianity as Roman and Greek culture influenced the early Church over many decades, and the virtue of celibacy emerged much later in Christianity in its religious orders and eventually its priesthood; in this context, Mary’s physical state came to be of interest and she was believed to have been a virgin before, during, and after the birth of Jesus, then for the whole of her life; her hymen remained unchanged. She was the ‘Ever Virgin’. Yet this is a long way from the intentions of Matthew, Luke, and the early Church traditions which preceded them. In the gospels, the virgin conception is symbolic of a new divine action that has no precedent and no human cause. Virginity in the gospels is a statement about what God was doing in the birth of Jesus, rather than referring to the physical condition of Mary.
While the New Testament does not show any interest in the physical state of Mary’s body, it can be conceded that the process of literalization – the move from seeing something as metaphor to regarding it as historical fact – has already been initiated in the gospel narratives, because Luke and Matthew wanted to answer the reader’s questions: ‘How could a virgin conceive a child’ and ‘what would happen socially if a virgin conceived?’ The first question is placed on the lips of Mary by Luke, and the second is answered in Matthew by Joseph’s dilemma resolved by his dream, both referring to the action of the Holy Spirit.
More explicit concern for Mary’s physical condition appeared in the second-century Christian apocryphal gospel, the Protevangelium, when a woman called Salome inspects Mary’s womb to check that the virgin really has given birth. Here we see the process by which the original metaphor evolved to become a doctrine about Mary’s Perpetual Virginity. The Protevangelium states that the siblings of Jesus are step-brothers and sisters by a previous marriage of Joseph, who is widowed when he takes on the responsibility of the young virgin Mary. This establishes the lack of sexual contact between them.
Notes
1 Better known as Ecclesiasticus; in the Protestant canon, this book is placed among the apocrypha.