Of virgin births, Christmas stories and literal readings of the Bible

As Christmas descends on us with its annual obligation to be merry and supportive of consumerist nonsense, it’s time to revisit the old ‘Nativity’ story. That is, the story of Jesus’s birth as outlined in that compendium of books we call The Bible.

Now, we all know that The Bible fell onto Kenya with the missionaries, just as surely as criminal bombs fell onto the Aberdares during the Independence struggle, but how on Earth did it happen that we came to believe in some of the patently peculiar ‘miracles’ associated with Christianity and its scriptural works?

Well, it’s pretty clear that Christianity established itself here via The Bible in a numerous human-led ways, and yet most recently the North American method has been most visible: The Bible has simply been pressed onto us in fundamentalist fashion as the flawlessly infallible word of God, which it isn’t, it having been penned by very human hands, often long after the events chronicled.

Undeniably, most ‘Christian’ groups in Kenya now place literalist, fundamentalist readings of The Bible at the heart of a simplistic faith, so neglecting both the history of an accretionary religious tradition and the complexities of the present world. Sadly, The Bible is now often the sole foundation of contemporary Kenyan Christianity, and many professed Christians would appear to be, rather, adherents of a bibliolatry of the North American sort that sees The Bible excessively worshipped in itself. This is an extremely dangerous state of affairs if it is also one of very few books we’ve read or heard.

Humanising Jesus

Take the Nativity story of the ‘Virgin Birth’, for example. It’s not mentioned at all in the gospels of Mark and John. Only the later Matthew and Luke seem concerned to outline the supposedly miraculous events of Jesus’s birth, but even these two versions have so many inconsistencies that the impartial and reasonable reader is inclined to think the whole story a fiction.

The ‘Virgin Birth’ is the suggestion that Mary became pregnant and had a child, Jesus, without having sexual intercourse. We know that such things do not happen. Its impossibility has led not only card-carrying atheists to use the perceived ridiculousness of it as ‘evidence’ of God’s wider non-existence and the dubiousness of miracle-led religion in general, but has also led more progressive, liberal Christians to dismiss the virgin birth as one miracle among many that cannot be believed nor promoted without damaging the reputation of Christians as thoughtful folk; in a recent study of the established Anglican church in England, for example, approximately one third of priests questioned stated that they did not believe in the virgin birth.

Indeed, the impossibility of any such virgin birth has led many progressive Christians to downplay Jesus’s supposed divinity, stressing instead his (exclusive) humanity, even to the extent of arguing that he was not (as he himself also never claims) the ‘Son of God’. Increasingly, arguments in favour of Jesus’s full humanity only are coming to the fore, and Jesus is being viewed by some not as ‘The Christ’, but as a very human teacher, one of history’s admirable preachers of peace. By humanizing Jesus in this way, we make it easier to not only believe what we ourselves preach about his life and (non-miraculous) works, but also, by not making him supernatural, we make it easier to believe that we, as humans too, can emulate him, living well.

For some time now it has been known that the earliest Christians didn’t seem to believe in or mention anything like a ‘Virgin Birth’. The apostle Paul doesn’t mention it, and at times seems even to brief against such a thing, for example when he states that Jesus’ heritage proceeded ‘according to the flesh’, and that he was, rather typically, ‘born of a woman’. Mark’s gospel (the earliest of the four) makes no mention of a virgin birth. Only by the time of Matthew and Luke do we find a virgin birth mentioned.

Let’s take Matthew. He quotes from the Old Testament Isaiah to argue for a virgin birth: ‘a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel’. However, Isaiah in the original Hebrew text employs the word ‘almah’ (meaning only ‘young woman’), not the word ‘bethulah’ (meaning virgin).

Matthew didn’t go back to the original Hebrew, but relied instead on a Greek translation of the Old Testament, which had already (mis)translated ‘almah’ into ‘parthenos’, a Greek word that misleadingly implies virginity. Translation errors are very human mistakes. The supposed ‘miracle’ had, therefore, been occasioned by inaccurate translation across numerous texts; an inaccurate set of translations that has ended up in most well-known versions of The Bible as ‘virgin’.

Some recent Bibles have tried to correct Matthew’s error by using ‘young woman’ in place of ‘virgin’, but after so many centuries of establishing itself as a myth, the damage is probably already done. Try telling your local church leader that ‘Mary wasn’t a “virgin”, but just a young woman’, and see what s/he says in return! For all your scientific reasoning about the impossibility of virgin births and your arguments about the history of biblical translation, you will probably be told off, partly because, as your pastor might respond, ‘[My outdated version of] The Bible tells me that Mary was a virgin, as does the creed’!

In short, in an attempt to make the birth of Jesus fulfill Old Testament predictions about the birth of ‘Our Lord Immanuel’, Matthew probably got carried away and felt that he had to argue for a virgin birth for Jesus because that’s what his erroneous Greek translation of Isaiah implied.

And Luke, writing for more literate audiences that would have expected ‘virgin births’ of the sort that other religions were already promoting (Mithras, Perseus, Krishna, Horus and Zoroaster, amongst others as prophets, gods or heroes, supposedly had ‘virgin births’), probably felt obliged to deliver similarly miraculous goods, in order that ‘The Christ’ might not seem less powerfully grand than these other religions’ personages.

So, the very first miracle surrounding Jesus (that is, the miracle of his conception), becomes questionable. To many critical readers and scholars, this early forced attempt to make a miracle where there was none casts serious doubt upon other of the reported ‘miracles’ of Jesus’s life. For, if Jesus was, as consequence, fully human, then he also did not rise again during Christianity’s most important festival, Easter.

Such doubters are not to be dismissed as heretics or blasphemers. Rather, they are frequently members of deeply important, socially admirable denominations such as the liberal Quakers or the Unitarians, which have existed for centuries, and which participate often fully in interdenominational debates and organizations in the countries where they exist.

For many Unitarians, for instance, the divinity of Jesus is a myth, and his full humanity a reason to celebrate. For such ‘Christians’, Jesus’s birth was not miraculous (although it was, historically, important), and his death was a human’s sacrifice for a cause he believed in and the rights of others to follow causes that they, too, believe in, in line with peace, humble equality and love.

To such religious folk, the example of an absolutely human Jesus is a challenge to us all not to just rely on some ‘magician God’ to do things for us or to give us succour until a mythical ‘afterlife’ occurs, but rather is a call to perform really humanly good actions on Earth now, while we live.

Pagan traditions

Such liberal religious folk also tend to have a healthy skepticism regarding the infallibility of The Bible, aware as they are of the literary history of translation and the importance of reading its occasional miracles (which John anyway calls ‘Signs’, not magical ‘Miracles’) with a pinch of salt; a pinch of salt offered by their experience of the realities of the non-magical world and the tested truths of science.

Consequently, they tend to be less narrow-mindedly pious, more welcoming, more adaptable to change, more capable of loving without conditions, and much less likely to burn you at the stake or stone you to death or dupe congregations or throw grenades.

A couple of thousand years ago (but not on December 25, not to a virgin, and not surrounded by braying donkeys), a child was probably born who grew up to be a great teacher whose words, due to their dissemination by others (sometimes peacefully, sometimes by the sword), definitely led to a great religion that still occasionally does some good, as all religions can.

We may enjoy Christmas (a feast that brings with it many old pagan traditions of raucous carnival or Yule, such as gift-giving, eating and drinking), and may choose to at the same time (or not, if we’re not Christian) to celebrate the symbolic birth of Jesus; and yet we should do so without feeling the obligation to swallow the whole traditional story, hook, line and sinker. We are, after all, capable of reading, reasoning and believing as we will.

Have a Merry Christmas.