Around this time of year, it is de rigueur to wheel out the trite and usually entirely false liberal myth-busting Christmas nonsense. An old favourite is that the virgin birth never happened and is entirely made up by Matthew and copied by Luke. You don’t have to look very far to see people making hay with the meaning of the Hebrew word almah. So, I thought I would re-share this old post of mine addressing this common trope.
The big point (TL:DR and all that) is that it is actually more awkward to reject the virgin birth narrative than it is to accept it. Not only does it make life difficult textually, it causes both contextual, theological and historical problems for us too. It similarly leads us down a line where – with some degree of frequency across the 66 books of the Bible – we run into impossible sounding stuff being claimed with ‘miraculous event’ being given as the only suggestion. We are faced with a multiplicity of authors – who were all very well aware that these sorts of things didn’t just happen in the ordinary run of things (miracles are, by their nature, not ordinarily possible) – all citing the same given reason. If we want to throw out the virgin birth – largely driven on by the belief that virgins don’t give birth (who knew!) and the suggestion is therefore impossible – we end up throwing out vast swathes of the Bible on the same materialistic assumption that what it claims throughout its pages is otherwise impossible too.
A point I don’t make in the original post, but worth bearing in mind nonetheless, is the materialistic claim that there couldn’t be a virgin birth is question begging at any rate. It usually runs something like this:
- Virgins cannot give birth
- Mary gave birth
- Therefore, Mary was not a virgin when she gave birth
The problem is, the conception begs the question by assuming the conclusion. The entire claim is that Mary was a virgin. If premise one begins ‘virgins can’t give birth’ it is simply assuming the conclusion rather than proving it. The premise is undermined immediately by the question at hand, ‘wasn’t Mary a virgin who gave birth?’ ipso facto the premise is false and, therefore, its conclusion does not logically follow. Incidentally, It is worth noting this same question-begging logic when it comes to materialistic arguments against the resurrection. They almost always begin with the premise, ‘dead people do not come back to life’. This is to presume the conclusion of the question at hand without arguing for it and is undercut by someone asking, ‘didn’t Jesus – and, indeed, a bunch of other people – come back to life?’ It is logically illiterate.
Nevertheless, we must beware those who would save us from the embarrassing and awkward bits of scripture like virgin births. The problem is that they may just prove too much (such as they actually prove anything at all). We may just start finding lots of other embarrassing bits of scripture too and, before long, finding very little of left to believe or be embarrassed by.