If there’s been a theme to my writing on Jesus the last few months it can be broken down this way: when we assess Jesus of Nazareth as a figure of history, we do so using the same rules and methods we apply to reconstruct the lives of other people from the past as best we can, rigorously outlining and critically perusing our sources for what is fact, what is probable, what is plausible, and what is or is not possible. Every act of so doing relies on a series of prejudicial commitments that historians make to do history that, in our period, are more derived from the rigorously naturalist historiography of Thucydides than the “mythic historiography” of Herodotus. In religious studies terms, this may not necessarily amount to methodological atheism, but it does at least mean a commitment to “bracket the transcendent,” as Ninian Smart puts it, to isolate what we can know historically before and without reference to what we may or may not believe. So, even though few people alive today tends to believe that Alexander of Macedon was in fact a son of Zeus, the historian of Alexander’s life must bracket the question of veracity and instead operate as though Philip II were in fact his father, evaluating the claim to divine parentage as a human claim in a human context. When we do that, we don’t ask, or try to answer, whether Zeus was really Alexander’s father, but we instead evaluate the claim in the context of an ancient world where cult, myth, and philosophy had a lot to say about gods, demigods, heroes, and divine humans, especially kings and emperors, in the world of the Ancient Near East and the Mediterranean, why Alexander thought this about himself, and who was or was not receptive to this sort of language.
Alexander’s an interesting example because we can be reasonably confident based on our sources about Alexander that this is something he really said about himself in public; we cannot have the same certainty about Jesus. In fact, we have no reason to think that Jesus of Nazareth claimed to be virginally conceived and born, at least if what we’re doing is history based on our sources about Jesus’s life. Scholars tend to divvy up our sources about Jesus into Paul, Mark, Q, M (material distinctive to Matthew), L (material distinctive to Luke), and John. This lineup is usually adduced by way of trying to answer what’s called the “Synoptic Problem”—the clear relationship between Matthew, Mark, and Luke given their “shared vision” (hence the Greek synopsis) of the life of Jesus. Most scholars opt for the so-called Two Source Hypothesis to answer this problem: Mark, the shortest of the three, was written first, and Matthew and Luke both used Mark; Matthew and Luke also knew a second source, nicknamed Q (for the German Quelle, “Source”), that accounts for the material common to Matthew and Luke; and Matthew and Luke also each had additional material, unique to each of them, that they included in their Gospels. John shares some things with the Synoptics, but for the most part, John has a different understanding of Jesus’s life and has seemed to most scholars to be a distinctive source (even if one answers the vexed question of whether John knew the Synoptics in the affirmative).
When scholars try to do historiography on Jesus, these are the sources that they work with, and they apply both textual and hermeneutical criteria for discerning what these sources can tell us about Jesus. Textually, several of these criteria are quite ancient: Hellenistic scholars applied them to figure out the original texts of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey from their available manuscripts. These include rules like the lectio difficilior, the “more difficult reading,” and the lectio antiquissima, the “most ancient reading,” and so on. Most scholars that study textual criticism still employ and trust these rules, basically. The hermeneutical criteria, especially in relation to the historical Jesus, enjoy much less agreement. These include rules like multiple attestation, that is, the idea that when something happens in multiple sources that are unrelated to one another, we can trust it as a consistent element of the Jesus tradition, more likely to be historically true; contextual credibility, the idea that if something matches Jesus’s context it is more likely to be true and if it does not it is less likely to be true; and embarrassment, the notion that the early Jesus communities are unlikely to have invented certain details of Jesus’s life in the Gospels, which implies they were traditional elements of such authority that Jesus’s biographers could not ignore it. On these rules, modern historians of Jesus are much less agreed. Some legitimate critiques of these criteria include the idea, for example, that contextual credibility can be limiting to our historical imagination (contextually implausible and improbable things happen throughout history; Jesus needs to be allowed not only to be a creature of context but also an individual, as capable of originality as anyone else; etc.) and the idea that our notion of embarrassment is often more indicative of our own prejudices and presuppositions than our actual knowledge of what would have been embarrassing to ancient people in the Jesus Movement and its communities. But, nevertheless, most scholars still at least use these criteria as touchpoints, if not to establish Iesus ipse, then at least “Jesus remembered,” as James DG Dunn put it in his monograph of that name.
Indeed, that’s all history is. History is not the past itself, and historiography is not the certain retrieval of the past from the obscurity of oblivion. All history is reconstruction, a simulacrum of the past that we weave from the available data rigorously and creatively engaged. The Jesus of history is therefore distinct from the historical Jesus, just as both are distinct from the kerygmatic Jesus, the dogmatic Jesus, and the cosmopolitan Jesus, and just as each is distinct from the present and future Jesus, in Christian (and other) confessions. History is not, crucially, theology, which is not an attempt to reconstruct the past, but to speak about God by speaking about God’s administration (oikonomia) of the world, which includes history but also includes things like science, art, philosophy, and so on. Theology is a summative, and prescriptive, mode of discourse, not a descriptive mode of discourse like history: it requires a comprehensive, and symphonic, use of disciplines, methods, and imagination, and seeks to say something about the formal and final causality of the whole, not its material or efficient causality. Theology must, as Miayoto Musashi advised of the swordsman, “Become acquainted with every art.” History, by virtue of being history, and crucially in order to be good history, does not and cannot engage in that kind of vision.
One consequence of that methodological difference means that history and theology are not always going to agree with each other. They do not have to agree with one another to be compatible. Indeed, in order for theology to do with history what theology should seek to do with history, history cannot at first agree to be subject to the interests of theology. History must, in fact, be pitilessly insensitive to them, and pursue its quest to reconstruct the past with as disinterested a disposition as is humanly possible—if not absolute objectivity, which is impossible, then at least a self-aware and self-examined choice to evaluate the data qua data, wherever the data may lead. History’s iconoclasm is the necessary prerequisite to theology’s iconodouleia, and exists always as a purificatory tool for preventing it from becoming a more base idololatreia, in this case, venerating the transcendent as the barren past.
There is hardly a better example of this dynamic than in the virgin birth. On no other topic are theologians and apologists, particularly of Catholic and Orthodox varieties, more likely to find references in places where they don’t exist: in Paul’s brief, and fairly spartan, mention that Christ was “born of a woman” (Gal 4:4); in John’s Prologue about the Logos becoming flesh, which mentions nothing about a virginal conception or birth (Jn 1:1-18 says nothing about Christmas and then moves immediately to the preaching of John the Baptist); in John’s Marian texts, which are indeed significant features of his Gospel but which do not, crucially, say anything about Mary’s virginal conception and birth; in John’s mention of an accusation that Jesus was illegitimate (Jn 8:41-47), which is certainly interesting, but also not an obvious reference to a virginal birth. On no other topic, either, are theologians and apologists more likely to confuse typological, allegorical, and anagogical exegesis of Jewish Scripture—that is, texts of the Hebrew Bible that feature precedents for the kinds of things that the New Testament authors and the Early Christians believe about Jesus and Mary when they believe in the virgin birth—with something like a historical proof for its veracity. These precedents, too, are interesting, and the use of them by the New Testament authors and the Early Christians who thought about Mary to develop their understanding of her and of the special character of her motherhood of Jesus is also interesting. It might even be relevant for theology. But it’s not the same as history, playing by history’s rules.
If we are trying to answer the question of whether Jesus was born of a virgin historically, the first thing we have to note is that only M and L say anything about a virginal conception and birth—but they don’t have the same tale. For Matthew, Jesus is conceived and born of a virgin in fulfillment of the oracle of LXX Isaiah 7:14; this is revealed to Joseph in a dream, and Mary never says anything in Matthew’s Nativity story (Matt 1:18-25), while in Luke, the virginal conception and birth is revealed by the Archangel Gabriel to Mary (Lk 1:26-38) and not to Joseph. M and L both agree that Jesus’s virgin birth is connected to his Davidide ancestry: Matthew’s genealogy in 1:1-17 prefaces the oracle to Joseph in his dream, and the Annunciation of Gabriel clarifies that the son Mary will give birth to will be heir to David’s throne. This also explains why both Gospels are anxious to have Jesus born in Bethlehem but disagree about why Jesus is born there. In Matthew, the Holy Family already lives in Bethlehem and only relocates to Nazareth after the Flight to Egypt and their return; in Luke, a convoluted, chronologically incorrect story about a census put out when Herod was alive, Quirinius was governor of Syria, and which apparently required return to ancestral hometowns. Most scholars find Luke’s story absurd for a number of reasons. For one thing, Herod died in 4 BCE, but Quirinius was not governor until 6; Luke’s account of the census implies that Augustus put out a universal census through the empire, for which we have no record in 6 (and we absolutely would if it happened); no ancient census required the mass displacement of workers that Luke thinks happened (any economy would break if every working person had to leave and be gone for days and weeks, a point that Dan McClellan puts well here). There was a census in 6, but it was a local census carried out in Syria and Judea, and Josephus mentions nothing about a mass displacement in its wake. Luke would remember this census because it was the census that sparked the rebellion of Judas the Galilean; he attributes the cause of Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem to it, but under circumstances that simply are not credible. It seems more likely that Luke needs Jesus to have been born in Bethlehem, knows that he’s from Nazareth, and invents a loose memory of the events of 6 CE to explain why Jesus was born in Bethlehem rather than his erstwhile hometown of Nazareth.
This also implies that the Lukan Nativity story misremembers the date of Jesus’s birth. If Jesus was born when Quirinius was governor, and he was around thirty when John baptized him (Lk 3:23), this means he began his ministry sometime around 36 CE. But this is a problem for Jesus’s chronology if he was crucified under Pontius Pilate, since Pilate was prefect from 26 to 36 CE, when he was recalled by Tiberius. Even if Jesus’s ministry is only one year long, as it is in the Synoptics, Jesus and Pilate are ships in the night: Pilate can’t crucify him. Matthew’s Nativity story is therefore more likely to have it right by saying that Jesus was born when Herod the Great was king, probably sometime in the last two years of his life from 6-4 BCE. That would put Jesus at the age of around thirty right around the start of Pilate’s prefecture. Luke, even with his confused chronology, probably attests to this as well by saying that Jesus’s birth happened when Herod was king (Lk 1:5). To be clear, too, this can only be Herod the Great. Only Herod the Great was King of Judea, Idumaea, Samaria, Galilee, the Decapolis, and surrounding territories; Augustus denied the title to Archelaus, his successor in Judea, Idumaea, and Samaria upon Herod’s death in 4, instead naming him ethnarch; Antipas never held the title. In a world obsessed with title and honorific, it is unlikely that Luke could have misremembered this detail about the status of one of Herod’s sons; moreover, Archelaus can’t be in view here because he was deposed the year that Quirinius became governor of Syria in 6. No subsequent Herod was king until Agrippa under Claudius from 41 to his death in 44. So, Matthew and Luke both think Jesus was born while Herod was king; but in saving this fact in Luke’s narrative, it comes at the cost of almost the rest of Luke’s understanding of why and how Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea despite being publicly reputed to be from Nazareth.
Does this count as multiple attestation, if M and L both agree that Jesus is born in Bethlehem but disagree on why? Yes, but with the key caveat that this is where multiple attestation itself as a criterion runs into trouble. Sources can multiply attest to something not always for historical but sometimes for ideological reasons. In this case, the obvious candidate is that both M and L think that Jesus and Joseph are Davidides, and Bethlehem is David’s city. That Jesus was from Nazareth yet publicly reputed to be a Davidide, or at least acclaimed as such by his followers towards the end of his life and afterwards, would have roused suspicion at a minimum. Jesus of Nazareth does not quite fit the scriptural paradigm for a Davidic messiah that traces his city of origin to David’s, in Bethlehem (Mic 5:2). Matthew (Matt 2:5-6) and John (Jn 7:40-44) both concur that this was an expectation among Jesus’s contemporaries, and John in particular finds it an objection to Jesus among Jesus’s interlocutors. Given that John was composed after Mark, Matthew, and Luke, and lacks a story of Jesus’s virgin birth in Bethlehem, it perhaps matters that John includes this criticism in his Gospel. John either knows the tradition of Jesus’s virginal conception and birth in Bethlehem and chooses not to include it, but does record the criticism of Jesus by his contemporaries as being from Galilean Nazareth and therefore not qualifying as either a Davidide or a prophet, or doesn’t know it and includes the criticism. Either way, the point is that John is clearly unimpressed by the idea that Jesus either was or needs to have been from Bethlehem. Virginal birth is not mentioned by Jesus’s interlocutors in part because it was not generally expected by ancient Jews of a coming messiah.
So, there are two stories about Jesus’s virginal conception and birth; they disagree wildly on details; one of them tells a very implausible story about the when, where, and why of Jesus’s birth. The other of them is not much better, to be clear; Matthew’s story of magi coming from Persia to visit the infant Jesus, who escapes Herod’s wrath and flees down to Egypt to come up again, seems clearly to be a midrash to make Jesus like Moses, who similarly escapes an evil, murderous king as an infant and then goes down to Egypt and comes back up out of it again to the holy land. Nor does it seem that Matthew has the Holy Family living and working in Bethlehem for anything other than the association between Bethlehem and David, given that the family relocates to Nazareth after Herod dies. The text attributes this to Joseph’s fear of Archelaus (Matt 2:22), presumably because of a belief that Archelaus might continue the hunt for the child; but it is not clear why Joseph and the family would be any safer under Antipas’s rule in Galilee, as Antipas was also Herod’s son and arguably much more the political animal his father had been. If Luke tries too hard to get Jesus to Bethlehem, Matthew is struggling too much to explain why Jesus ultimately becomes associated with Nazareth. The historically simpler answer on both ends is that Jesus was born and raised in Nazareth, which is why he was associated with Nazareth; his associations as a Davidide during his ministry and afterwards became the basis for the Bethlehem tradition to make Jesus fulfill the oracle from Micah.
Could Jesus and his family have been Davidides? Many scholars are skeptical, and at least if the question is whether the historical Jesus was in fact a flesh and blood descendant of David, the question is effectively moot, since it would have been impossible in the first century CE and it is impossible now to demonstrate a clear genealogy over the course of a thousand years that would connect Jesus and David directly. Famously, Matthew’s genealogy disagrees with Luke’s (Lk 3:23-38), and the lineages they seek to use to connect Jesus to David and beyond David to Abraham (in Matthew) or to Adam (in Luke’s) are so different as to be irreconcilable other than through extraneous acts of eisegesis clearly motivated by the desire to harmonize. One of the most common ways to do this in Christian antiquity—a twofer, insofar as it also enables a virginally conceived and born Jesus to also be a flesh-and-blood Davidide—is to suggest that Mary is also a descendant of David and the Lukan genealogy is hers. But both Matthew and Luke’s genealogies are each attributed to Joseph, and in both, Jesus’s virginal birth requires that his relationship to Joseph is effectively one of an adoptive or stepfather. The clear belief in Mary as a Davidide does not emerge until the second century CE, in the Protoevangelium of James. This text gives us a lot of how we think about the virginal conception and birth stories, as well as later Mariological traditions that became popular among Christians. It seems a tradition contrived to answer a difficulty felt in the text that Jesus, in his humanity, was not actually a Davidide by the standards of later readers, rather than a historical notation.
Now, ancient people frequently claimed divine, mythical, heroic, legendary, and other kinds of famous ancestry for themselves all the time. Whether these genealogical claims are actually true and whether the people who made these claims believed they were true and whether they were publicly accepted as true are all separate issues. Some scholars, like Bart Ehrman, seem not to totally get this when they evaluate whether Jesus was a Davidide. That is to say, it does not matter if Jesus really was a descendant of David, anymore than it matters if Jewish priests were actually descendants of Aaron and Levi: all of our sources about Jesus, including Paul (who, again, has nothing on Jesus’s genealogy, conception, birth, etc.), think he’s a Davidide, and this implies that people at least thought he was one. Jesus was publicly acclaimed as messiah prior to his crucifixion and was crucified as a messianic claimant, specifically in a royal-Davidic mode. It is quite possible that this is because Jesus’s perceived ancestry, however fictive, was attributed to David and accepted to be such by some but challenged as such by others, who found his Galilean origins in Nazareth unbecoming the dignity of a Davidic messiah. His family may have passed down a fairly long tradition of this descent—whether legitimately, or with the same authority that many White people in the United States cherish the belief that they are really First Nations peoples of various kinds (with increasingly infinitesimal blood quanta), who’s to say?—and they may have been known as Davidides. Indeed, there’s some contextual credibility for this idea: Galilee was resettled by zealous Jewish families in the Hasmonean period, and several of the towns built there bear messianic names (Natsarit itself, Nazareth, is from netser, “branch,” a reference to the Davidic “branch” of Isa 11:1); several of these families may have cherished stories of royal descent. And, on those grounds, it’s even possible that Mary herself was a Davidide: Joseph, in marrying a local girl, may well have married someone of a similar or shared extended family background, whose families had similar traditions of ancestry.
Jesus’s plausibly Davidic credentials, of course, don’t help the historicity of either M or L’s Nativity story. In both cases, Jesus’s Davidide status would have been the impetus for the story of his birth in Bethlehem, a narrative way of more deeply connecting him with David and messianic traditions about David, and of anticipating and/or responding to complaints about Jesus’s qualifications to be Davidic messiah as a Galilean.
The other major shared element of Matthew and Luke’s Nativity stories beyond Bethlehem and his Davidide status is that, for both of them, Jesus’s virginal conception and birth establish Jesus as Son of God. This is the point on which the ideological character of M and L’s multiple attestation to the virgin birth tradition is most clear, on multiple levels. For one thing, Paul, Mark, and John all also believe Jesus is Son of God, but none of them make use of a belief in the virgin birth to explain it. In fact, Paul and John have higher Christologies than Mark, Matthew, or Luke, explicitly describing Jesus’s preexistence as a divine/angelic/heavenly being alongside God as the explanation for his sonship, and make no mention of a virgin birth. The virgin birth story, in M and L, is clearly meant to retroject Jesus’s divine sonship back to his first human origin; they both say so. But this was not, clearly, the only or even the ultimate way to attribute divine sonship to Jesus available among his followers (including the earliest of our sources). M and L’s way of grounding Jesus’s divine sonship are distinct from Mark’s and Q’s, but also from Paul’s and John’s.
This could serve as an argument in the story’s historical favor, of course, if we could clearly establish a historiographical rather than theological interest in the story on the part of M and L. If they have other options, but choose this one, couldn’t it be that they do so because they have reason to think it happened? But this line of reasoning rests on an excluded middle: just because M and L are not Paul and John does not mean they do not have their own theological agendas, their own traditions, their own literary interests in presenting Jesus as Son of David and Son of God for which virgin birth is more genetically useful than preexistent divine messiah or Logos. So why the virgin birth as an enhancement of Jesus’s divine sonship in M and L? Perhaps the uniqueness is an example of the criterion of embarrassment, and implies the veracity of the event, in the style of Tertullian’s Credo quia absurdum?
Here, knowledge of the wider trends of Early Judaism and Greco-Roman religion point us in the other direction, as stories of miraculous conceptions and births for demigods, heroes, and divine men were both widespread and normative in the Ancient Mediterranean, such that M’s and L’s belief in the virgin birth makes a good deal of contextual sense read in relationship to the languages, literature, and landscape of the religious world of antiquity. For one thing, the Hebrew Bible either explicitly or implicitly describes a few miraculous births, and many ancient Jews believed that several heroes enjoyed such births. M and L make some intentional references to these stories in their story of Jesus’s virgin birth. For example, in the Book of Genesis, Isaac is miraculously conceived and born to Abraham and Sarah in their old age; there’s good reason, reading the Hebrew text, to suspect that in the original version of the story Yhwh himself is the father of Isaac. When the angel tells the Matthean Joseph that texetai huion, kai kaleseis to onoma autou Iēsoun, we should acknowledge that the formula texetai huion, kai kaleseis to onoma autou is not only a reference to LXX Isaiah 7:14, the oracle about the young woman’s motherhood in the Davidic court, but it’s also a reference to LXX Genesis 17:19, where nearly the same construction occurs, idou Sarra hē gynē sou texetai sī huion, kai kaleseis to onoma autou Isaak. The trope recurs in another major story of miraculous birth, Samson’s, when the Angel of Yhwh tells Samson’s mother, Manoah’s wife, idou sī en gastri hexeis kai texēi huion (LXX Jdg 13:3); the only thing missing from the formula at this point is the explicit instruction to name him Shimshon/Samson. 1 Sam 1 also has a story of a barren woman conceiving and giving birth to a son of great significance to Israel’s history, but without an angelic annunciation. Early Jewish expansions and rewritings of biblical literature, pseudepigraphal legendaria, and more adduced special births of this kind to other biblical heroes, like Noah and Moses. So, while aspects of the virgin birth tradition in M and L are unique to the Gospels, and reflect the specific interests of their Gospels, the notion of an Jewish hero being the subject of a divine birth story was well established in Hellenistic and Roman-era Judaism. M and L are participating in a literary trope well known to ancient Jewish writers, and this puts their infancy narratives into a context that makes them less likely to be reporting objective events and more likely to be weaving a rich literary account of Jesus’s early life that would be enticing to readers of Jewish scripture.
There’s also a wider Near Eastern and Greco-Roman, pagan context to the infancy stories in the Gospels and the stories of Jewish heroes subject to divine birth. The Ancient Mediterranean was home to a vast array of cults to and stories about gods cavorting with humans and producing demigods, heroes, and other divine men. From Gilgamesh to Herakles to Achilles to Aeneas to Romulus and Remus to Alexander to Julius Caesar to Octavian, Near Eastern and Greco-Roman cultures were open and susceptible to claims of divine birth whether mythological or historical. Ancient Greeks and Romans publicly enjoyed renditions of these stories like Plautus’s Amphitryo, which retells the conception and birth of Herakles to Alcmene by the, er, intervention of Jove. Ancient people even had philosophical ways of understanding divine birth that defanged mythic stories of divine rape and seduction by making them accounts of divine pneuma, rather than semen, the impregnating agent in the human mothers of the heroes. (Heroes born to goddesses, like Aeneas, appear to have gotten here the old-fashioned way.) Ancient Jews were part of the ancient world, not separate from it and participated in normal Near Eastern and Hellenistic culture in a variety of ways. The Hebrew Bible has a story of gods mating with women and producing demigod offspring in Genesis 6; the redactor views this development negatively, but still reports it. In several of the miraculous birth stories listed above scholars feel confident that the original version of the story featured Yhwh as the father, a fact uncomfortable for the editors and papered over by use of the scribal creation of the Angel of Yhwh. Cain, for example, is declared fathered by Yhwh in the mouth of Eve (Gen 4:1); Yhwh may originally have been thought the father of Isaac; Yhwh is almost certainly the original father of Samson (when divine beings meet women in fields, watch out). Some scholars have also pointed out that, contrary to the later Christian tradition of reading the Annunciation as a story of Mary’s heroic consent to God’s will, the Annunciation story itself has some of these features. M and L, in other words, have stories of a divine birth because Ancient Jews valued those kinds of stories for Jewish heroes, and Ancient Jews valued those stories because ancient people generally valued them.
So, M and L know their readers: they know that a divine birth story will undergird Jesus’s claim to divine sonship for Jewish and non-Jewish readers alike, who expect this kind of thing for sons of God (Yhwh or Zeus). In fact, later Christians drew on the continuity between Jesus’s manner of conception and birth and that of other heroes to emphasize his legitimacy as Son of God: Justin Martyr points out that Christians claim nothing different for Jesus from what the Greeks already believe of Herakles or Dionysos (1 Apol. 21.1-3).
So, to recap: M and L’s virgin birth stories disagree with one another on numerous details; both are meant to make the same points, that Jesus is Son of David and Son of God, that seem ideologically, literarily, and culturally driven rather than historically driven. Paul, Mark, Q, and John do not have this story and do not know about it. Paul is the earliest writer of the Movement whose work we still possess; Mark is the first Gospel; and John is the only Gospel that claims to have been written by an eyewitness to Jesus’s life (Jn 21:22-24).
On all of these grounds a historian, doing history, would be inclined to dismiss the virgin birth as history, well before addressing the question of whether a miracle occurred to bring about Jesus’s birth. The sources are not unified in affirming it, and the sources that do share a virgin birth story are late and don’t agree on it either. M and L also have a clear motive, rhetorically, literarily, and theologically, to adduce a virgin birth—to underline that Jesus is Son of David and Son of God—though clearly these beliefs are not dependent on a virgin birth; in fact, writers with higher Christologies than M and L, like Paul and John, don’t have one.
But a historian, qua historian, would also be inclined to hold in abeyance a miracle story in favor of a more quotidian explanation wherever possible, even if the sources were agreed that Jesus had been born of a virgin. This has nothing to do with whether miracles are possible and everything to do with the limits of history as a discipline. History, again, is largely about establishing probability, plausibility, and possibility in orbit around what genuine facta we can decide on from our sources. And whether miracles are possible or not—which is a philosophical and theological question—is separate from whether they have actually occurred. In other spheres, Catholics are often good at recognizing this distinction: the office of Devil’s Advocate, for example, opposing hasty canonizations since the possibility of saints and the actuality of saints are different. History can’t decide if miracles do or don’t happen: its magisterial jurisdiction ends when its sort of interpretive authority runs out of competence to adjudicate data. It can help us, though, in establishing the probability of a miracle, like the event horizon of a black hole, the threshold where one logic (physics as we know it) begins to break down and another takes over. And the historian would therefore evaluate our stories and conclude that the most likely origin of Jesus is as the natural son of Joseph and Mary. Jesus was reputed to be Joseph’s son; four of our six main sources about Jesus’s life credit him as Joseph’s son or say nothing about it; more sons are born the ordinary way than extraordinary ways, on any metric; ergo, historically speaking, Jesus was probably Joseph’s son.
History cannot rule out the virgin birth; that’s not what I’m saying. The virgin birth is the product of a different mode of discourse, a different kind of insight, than the historical: theology. Historia sees the past as subject to inquiry and operates by certain rules as it tries to reconstruct the past; oikonomia sees the past, as well as the present and the future, as one common “administration” of God, and tries to look through this divine activity as far as possible as theophaneia, the genuine manifestation of God, an intelligible revelation under the guise of the perceptible world. Where from history’s point of view every construction of the past is potentially an idol to be smashed, even if not especially sacred constructions of the past, the aesthetic of history, from theology’s point of view, is itself an icon in need of veneration.
So, in saying that the virgin birth is theology, not history, I’m not talking about whether or not it “really happened.” I can’t know, and neither can you: history is not the past itself but a logical reconstruction on the basis of rigorous inquiry, and it is always subject to the possible counterfactual that the way things seem to have been are not really how they were, or that the past is marked by events that genuinely exceed the grasp of historiography. No honest historian could deny that it is. That means that we cannot treat history’s word as final in all instances, but it also means, conversely, that we cannot confuse theological claims for historical ones, as though demonstrating something as theologically or philosophically true is the same as establishing its historical veracity, or the historical unlikelihood of something in every case nullifies its theological importance. That is to misunderstand the relationship of these modes of discourse.
In evaluating the virgin birth, then, I commend moving past the question of whether it happened (this is a question of faith) and towards treating the stories as verbal icons of the beliefs we have mentioned: Jesus as Son of David, and heir to the Davidic kingdom; Jesus as next great prophetic hero and savior in the history of Israel which has seen other such heroes and saviors; and Jesus as Son of God, not only from the moment of his resurrection, nor only from the moment of his baptism and the descent of the Spirit on him, but from the moment of his very conception and birth. These are the beliefs that the event as textualized by M and L is meant to convey: miss these, and one misses the point that M and L both want to make. As the story evolves in the second and subsequent centuries—as M and L’s stories are harmonized with one another, with John’s Logos Christology, and with apocryphal versions of Jesus’s birth like the Protoevangelium of James, the icon comes to represent more ideas becoming more valuable to Christians at the time: the virtues of celibacy and faith, the mystery of the savior’s incarnation, and the succession of Judaism by Christianity. Finally, as Christianity goes through the Nicene and Chalcedonian transformations of its dogma, the Christmas story becomes an icon of God’s unification of humanity with divinity by assumption, and therefore of the possibility of humanity becoming divine.
Consider the visual icon of the Nativity. As John Behr and Paul Griffiths have both written, the theological point of this icon is less a historical play-by-play or the circumstances of Jesus’s birth, and more meant both to imply the paschal mystery of Jesus’s death and resurrection on the one hand and the repetition of that mystery in the Christian soul on the other. The cave in which the Christ of the developed story is laid—as opposed to the room for animals in the public accommodations or family household of Luke’s Nativity—is the future tomb, in which a freshly swaddled Christ will again be laid, in the manger from which the whole world will take the eucharistic bread of his flesh. Mary is the ideal disciple of Christ, who is told she will miraculously conceive and give birth to Christ, and submits to the divine will: so may it be for all of our souls. The point of Christmas, as Meister Eckhart much later saw, is less history and more the mystery of deification itself: if one is stuck on how Christ was born in the past, and can’t progress to how Christ is born now, in you and me, one has missed the actual miracle—as much as the question of whether oil really lasted an additional seven nights or not is irrelevant to the genuine miracle which is that the light of Judaism has endured the long dark winter of pagan, Christian, Muslim, and fascist oppression for centuries and burns even now. Even if one believes the miracle happened, the efficacy of the miracle is not quarantined to the ad litteram sense but to the spiritual sense, to the allegorical, moral, and anagogical meanings of the miracle.
This, too, helps to determine the value of the miracle for theology and for history. Some defenses of the virgin birth seem to invest no further meaning in it that could not be achieved by asserting a simple, albeit anomalous, case of parthenogenesis of the historical Jesus (possible, theoretically, however much a biological fluke it is): if the point is just that this is necessary for Jesus to be God or the messiah or something (it isn’t), then all one has really done is asserted a sci fi story of Jesus’s birth and defended its historicity against all claims to the contrary. One has not philosophized the myth, thereby freeing its transformative meaning and power, but historicized it, which has limited relevance to the present. Philosophizing myth can include historicization: when Plutarch says that demigods are born by infusion of pneuma into their mothers, not by actual, fleshy sexual liaisons between gods and humans, he is both finding a way to include demigods in a respectable history, as well as to open the reader to the possibility that divine pneuma might also help one elevate their own intimacy to the divine. Philosophy adds something extra and sapiential to the myth that history alone cannot supply. So too the virgin birth: for Mary to have been a virgin when Jesus was born only matters insofar as it can become an indwelling archetype in the soul. Otherwise, Christmas just becomes an episode of Doctor Who or The Twilight Zone: a bizarre abnormality in the flow of the world, a prodigium in the ancient sense whose meaning might once have held relevance at the time but no longer does, the way one might treat any other omen.
The archetypical approach, I wager, is also the correct way to understand the rest of the theological assertions about Mary in the Christian Tradition. Mary’s immaculate conception (or at least miraculous conception, in the Protoevangelium), her Davidide ancestry, her perpetual virginity, and her dormition and assumption are even harder to establish as historical facta than Jesus’s own virgin birth, and some of these ideas at least are problematized by the details we get about her in the Gospels. Moreover, these seem clearly to be expansions on Mary’s significance by later generations reading her into and from Jewish Scripture; for late antique Christians in the Roman Empire, it seems obvious too that her developed cult is the successor to various goddess cults of pagan antiquity, at least taking the devotional role played by such deities in previous affections. Immaculate Mary, the Ever-Virgin Theotokos, the Virgin Daughter of Zion, the Champion General and Heavenly Queen, ideal disciple of Christ, true contemplative, is a theological point of view on Mary of Nazareth, not a historical one.
By way of conclusion: Christians in the modern world are often touchy about the disciplines that they take to undermine their distinctive theological claims. In their defense, there are sometimes hills worth dying on (if Jesus did not rise from the dead in some way, there really is no point in being Christian, though even if he did, that is it quite enough to justify all of subsequent Christian confession); moreover, scholarship and science can be weaponized by radical skeptics against Christians and people of faith more generally in the popular sphere. This has encouraged a wave of Christians in scholarship and science trying to reverse the polarity, so to speak, by seeking to leverage their work in favor of a maximalist approach to biblical historicity and science, and the unchanging integrity of Christian dogma. These projects always involve a compromise of academic integrity somewhere, one that shifts their scholarship into modes like apologetics. NT Wright is the avuncular patron of this kind of thing with, for instance, his claim that the sarkic resurrection of Jesus is the historically inescapable conclusion of the data: crucially, many Christian scholars, including Christian scholars of the historical Jesus like James Dunn and Dale Allison, disagree with him about this. So too the virgin birth and the extensive Mariological tradition descended from it: there are scholars who seem to think that the biblical, literary, or theological elements of these stories are arguments in their historical favor, that the “Jewish roots”, of Christian Mariology underlines the historicity of later Christian beliefs about Mary, or that the power of the Christian Tradition (as invested in whichever organ one finds relevant) to decide on matters of faith and morals includes an infallible power to remember and interpret history. All of these approaches reflect methodological confusion of the highest order: they do not seem to grasp what history is and is not, as well as what theology is and is not. They are also approaches visibly motivated by fear: fear that history is going to disprove something we believe, or that the loss of one belief will lead to the whole edifice crashing down.
I believe that Jesus was born of a virgin: whether I believe it in the sense of a real, flesh and blood event or a pneumatic infusion into the normal gestative and partitive process varies based on my context. I cannot prove that it happened historically and even have hefty historical reasons to doubt that it actually happened, based on the available sources read in context and with one another. Theologically, though, I believe it because I affirm the things that the ancient people who crafted the stories wanted to affirm about Jesus and because I find in the image of his Mother given by the Tradition an integral image of sophianicity, of the world’s own virgin motherhood patient to the Lord’s generative power and co-active in bringing forth the incorporeal Logos, who contains God’s poetic knowledge of the world in his mind, into embodiment in the plastic world of spacetime, bringing forth God’s ktisis, the eschatological new creation. Whether this transhistorical vision is in fact grounded in an intrahistorical set of events disappears from view, for me, in the wake of the larger calling that I render my own soul and body patient to the indwelling Word, that I may become both the opening womb and empty tomb through whom Christ comes into the world, in whom that eschatological creation continues to be realized.
Hey, I really appreciated this piece. I've been in the process of reflecting on my commitments and such and my interpretation of them--deconstructing, as it were--and this was helpful in making further progress in that.
Your piece strikes me as reasonable; someone gave me a treatment of the census issue in Luke from Jimmy Akin, and I would love to have your take on it if you have time. (I distrust Jimmy Akin as a source and the sources he uses (because they all _need_ things to be true, more than simply wanting some things to be true), but still, it seems like something that should be dealt with by someone,) Here it is: https://jimmyakin.com/2022/03/the-enrollment-of-jesus-birth.html?fbclid=IwAR2ISHq1uCv6NBdVz4wFh_bB0OcNB0mcKVFO5HETjWc1n1tGP_nJ9WBfsvw
Great piece! Also worth noting that in ancient bioi birth/origin stories could often be conjured, in the absence of knowledge on the characer's provenance, for the authors to stress a particular point about the life of the subject. For me as an Orthodox, growing up around icons, I find in the icon of the nativity yet another illustration of the one who became poor so that we might become rich, the crucial insight into the movement from kenosis to theosis that lies at the heart of so much of our hope and the kerygma.