"Behold, a virgin shall conceive..."

This is the time of the year when I get asked most often, and not only by people outside the church, whether Christians still have to believe that Jesus came into the world by supernatural means. Put another way, the question is whether belief in the virgin conception of Jesus (virgin birth is not the same issue) remains a core belief for the Christian faith. One column will not quite answer both questions satisfactorily, but maybe this one and the next together will serve as at least a beginning.

In my view at least, the biggest problem about belief in the virgin conception is the physicalism that attaches to it. Taken literally, it is about impregnation without human sperm and a delivery without a broken hymen, and all of a sudden a divine mystery reduces to an enigma of biology. This hardly gets at the true meaning of the belief itself, whose primary purpose was to affirm both the greatness of God’s love and the specialness of Jesus’ humanity. The virgin conception in its barest literal form plays an important role in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, but not elsewhere in the New Testament. If Paul’s single reference to Jesus’ birth, at Galatians 4:4 (“... born of a woman…”), is any indication, the emphasis for many if not for most of the earliest Christians fell not so much on Jesus’ divine origin as on his very human one. The distinctive fact may have been simply that, in contrast with the mother of Isaac in the Old Testament, Jesus’ mother was very young and not very old.

For Matthew and Luke, of course, the emphasis is not on the human, but on the divine origin of the Nazarene, and the (different) traditions upon which their testimony rests must be taken seriously. Both writers drew freely upon varied efforts of early Jewish Christians to present the details of Jesus’ life against the background of ancient prophecies about a coming Deliverer of Israel from all her enemies. Typically, these efforts sought to demonstrate Jesus’ Messianic identity by showing how everything he said and did and everything that happened to him fulfilled exactly what had been prophesied through the centuries about what God’s chosen Messiah would be like. Appearing in at least some of these demonstrative arguments was the idea that Jesus fulfilled the Messianic prophecies through the manner of his conception and birth. Especially important for this purpose was the prophecy of First Isaiah, at 7:14: “ Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” (KJV)

Revered as this passage is in Christian circles, however, it cannot bear the weight that Matthew and to a lesser extent, Luke (in chapter one but not chapter two), placed upon it originally. Of the many scriptural passages that shaped the Messianic expectations of the Jewish people from the Exile in Babylon to the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, Isaiah 7:14 was one of the least relied upon. In spite of the hold that this particular prophesy has had on Christian sensibility and belief, Messianic prophecy in Old Testament times showed little if any anticipation that the Messiah would be one who comes into the world through a supernatural conception.

As a whole, then, the apostolic tradition contains strong challenges to the view that the doctrine of the virgin conception expresses a core belief for all Christians, the assent to which is somehow essential for faith today. It also calls into question the view that the doctrine’s primary purpose is to assert as fact a supernatural conception of a human being under the conditions of time and history. Contrary to the standard Christian interpretations of Isaiah 7:14, the Hebrew text of this passage speaks of a young woman (alma), and not a virgin (betula), who would give birth to a Deliverer (who in First Isaiah turned out not to be the Messiah at all). It is true that, as biblical scholars who keep their textual analyses separate from their dogmatic convictions remind us, in one Greek translation of the passage a hundred years before Jesus’ birth (the Septuagint), the mother of the coming Messiah is referred to explicitly as a virgin (parthenos). However, later Greek translations of this passage do not repeat the practice; instead they use neanis, the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew alma.

That belief in Jesus’ virgin conception is difficult to maintain as a core belief, however, in no way entails that the belief lacks meaning and truth. It does suggest, though, that what meaning and truth the belief does contain --- considerable, in my judgment --- is more likely to be discovered when our language breaks free from the bonds of literalism and ascends on the wings of symbolism to realms of glory beyond the capacity of both facts and logic ever fully to encompass.