In The Meaning of Jesus, N.T. Wright argues for the historicity of the virginal conception. He does so in three stages.
First, The Arena of Assumptions. If we assume that God raised Jesus from the dead and that Jesus was the incarnation of God, then it isn’t too big a leap to assume that God could’ve “sown” Jesus into a virgin womb. Think about it: “Miracle, in the sense of divine intervention ‘from outside,’ is not in question. What matters is the powerful, mysterious presence of the God of Israel, the creator God, bringing Israel’s story to its climax by doing a new thing, bringing the story of creation to its height by a new creation from the womb of the old. Whether or not [the virgin conception] happened, this is what it would mean if it did.” (176)
Second, Originality. As Wright puts it, “[There] is no pre-Christian Jewish tradition suggesting that the messiah would be born of a virgin. No one used Isaiah 7.14 this way before Matthew did. Even assuming that Matthew or Luke regularly invented material to fit Jesus into earlier templates, why would they have invented something like this? The only conceivable parallels are pagan ones, and these fiercely Jewish stories have certainly not been modeled on them. Luke at least must have known that telling this story ran the risk of making Jesus out to be a pagan demigod. Why, for the sake of an exalted metaphor, would they take this risk—unless they at least believed them to be literally true?”
Third, the liberal take on the conception doesn’t make sense. Liberals who attribute the virginal conception to paganization are working backwards; liberal scholars speculate that the early church, coming to see Jesus as divine, and being greatly Hellenized, invented stories to bolster or support Jesus’ divinity that would’ve been derived from pagan backgrounds. Wright argues, “[The] only models for virginal conception are the nakedly pagan stories of Alexander, Augustus, and others. We would have to suppose that, within the first fifty years of Christianity, a double move took place: from an early, very Jewish, high Christology, to a sudden paganization, and back to very Jewish storytelling again. The evangelists would then have thoroughly deconstructed their own deep intentions, suggesting that the climax of YHWH’s purpose for Israel took place through none other than a pagan-style miraculous birth.” (176-177)
Focusing on the liberal scholars’ belief that the virgin birth was a pagan construction, Wright asks what would’ve had to transpire for the liberals to be right. Breaking it down into several stages on page 177, Wright sketches what would’ve had to have happened:
(a) Christians came to belief that Jesus was in some sense divine.
(b) Someone who shared this faith broke thoroughly with Jewish precedents and invented the story of a pagan-style virginal conception.
(c) Some Christians failed to realize that this was historicized metaphor and retold it as though it were historical.
(d) Matthew and Luke, assuming historicity, drew independently upon the astonishing fabrication, set it (though in quite different ways) within a thoroughly Jewish context, and wove it in quite different ways into their respective narratives.
All this would’ve had to happen within half a century. “Possible?” Wright asks. “Yes, of course. Most things are possible in history. Likely? No. Smoke without fire does, of course, happen quite often in the real world. But this smoke, in that world, without fire? This theory asks us to believe in intellectual parthenogenesis: the birth of an idea without visible parentage. Difficult. Unless, of course, you believe in miracles, which most people who disbelieve the virginal conception don’t.” Wright adds, “No one can prove, historically, that Mary was a virgin when Jesus was conceived. No one can prove, historically, that she wasn’t. Science studies the repeatable; history bumps its nose against the unrepeatable.”
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