07/15/2020 – Was Mary A Virgin?

Was Jesus’ mother Mary a virgin? Will this one be controversial? Not at all. Stick around. This is TenOnReligion.

Hey peeps, it’s Dr. B. with TenOnReligion. Mary the mother of Jesus has had a long history in the Christian tradition, especially in art and literature, but we’re going to focus on specifically the question of how and why Mary was a virgin in the New Testament.

Why do the birth narratives indicate that Jesus was born from Mary and, eh, how shall we say this in a politically correct manner, through no help from Joseph? Jesus is almost always referred to as Mary’s son rather than Joseph’s son. This is a bit unusual in the Jewish culture of the day.

A quick disclaimer before some of you start throwing rotten eggs and tomatoes at your screen while watching this. If you didn’t watch my vlog on the historical-critical method go back and watch that one first before you watch this. Those who have not been exposed to the academic field of religion may not realize that there’s a big difference between historical claims and theological claims and we’ll be analyzing this issue from a historical-critical perspective.

Before diving in, we have to mention two quick things.

First, what are the sources? Of the four gospels in the New Testament, the gospel of Mark was written first. There is no birth account in this gospel because when it was written one of the dominant views of Jesus was that he was born human but later exalted into divine status. In the later gospels of Matthew & Luke, the dominant view changed to Jesus being God from birth, thus the necessity of the virgin birth narratives. In the even later gospel of John, the timeline is pushed even farther back to creation, but more on that later. The divinity of Jesus is a complicated topic in history, so we’ll have to save a more robust explanation for a future vlog.

Second, some people confuse the virgin birth of Jesus with what’s known as Mary’s perpetual virginity and that’s a mistake. These are two different issues. The perpetual virginity of Mary, the view that Mary was never with any man and Jesus was her only child, does not come from the New Testament gospel accounts but from later church leaders.

So we’ll talk about these two issues in the order they appeared in history and start with the issue of the virgin birth accounts.

For many Christians, the virgin birth is not only a huge part of their belief system, but also motivates the devotional aspects of Mary. This may come as a surprise to some people, but the belief in the virgin birth of Jesus and Mary as a virgin is not something that all Christians view as a necessary part to the Christian faith. Many Christians don’t believe in it and view the story as communicating a theological point but not as history. Now the interesting part of this is that the two birth narratives in the gospels of Matthew and Luke are not only not the same, but in some points contradictory. If you are interested in this topic and want to do a fun exercise, read the first two chapters of each gospel and write down each event that happens and then compare the two lists. Try to figure out what is the same and what is different in each version of the story. How many of the differences are things that could be complementary to each other and how many are discrepancies which could not be reconciled? You might find more in the latter category than you expected. For example, did the family flee to Egypt as in Matthew, or return to Nazareth as in Luke? Given the timeline in each story it does not seem like it could be both.

But the biggest difference between the two accounts is the motivation of each narrative for why there needs to be a virgin birth in the first place. Let’s take a closer look.

Both Matthew and Luke’s gospel cite the same Jewish scripture as evidence, Isaiah 7:14, but historians are a little unclear exactly what drew both of them to this passage. And in addition to that, both authors apparently only had access to the Greek version of the Isaiah text, not the original Hebrew rendering. This will become a very important point.

But first, what is the story in Isaiah all about? An ancient king of Judah named Ahaz is unhappy because Jerusalem is under duress by two foreign armies. The prophet Isaiah tells him to not be upset because God’s got your back. Isaiah then gives this anecdote: An almah has conceived and will bear a son and she will name him Immanuel. Now there’s a lot going on here in this one verse, because most notably, in the original Hebrew, the text that Jesus and his first followers would have been familiar with, an almah was a young girl, or a maiden. This was a word that was likely used for young Hebrew females in their late teens. This almah will name her child Immanuel, or “God with us,” because he is a sign that God’s presence is among the people. Before the child is old enough to discern right from wrong – probably meaning in a few years – the leaders of the foreign armies will withdraw and Jerusalem will be all good again. Notice that in this story, the almah has already conceived, was already pregnant, and the idea is her son will not be very old before the political disaster will be resolved. This verse really has nothing to do with a virgin (a woman who has never been with a man), nor does it have anything to do with messiahs, it was simply a strange way of measuring time.

Now what’s the big deal? The issue is, the gospel of Matthew is not quoting from the Hebrew version, but the Greek version of the same verse coming from the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible documents dating from the 200’s BCE. For unknown reasons, the translators hundreds of years earlier chose a particular Greek word which slightly alters the meaning. Instead of using the Greek word for “young girl” – neanis – the Greek translation uses the Greek word parthenos – or virgin. But in Hebrew, the word for virgin is beteulah. Now of course, one could be an almah, young girl, and be a virgin, but that is not the main connotation of how the word is normally used as its main feature is age, not virginity.

When the gospel of Matthew used this verse as support for the argument in the Jesus birth narrative, the understanding was that Isaiah was not talking about a child born in the day of Isaiah, but a future child to be born of a “virgin.” Why? Because the prophet must be predicting a future savior and that prophecy must be fulfilled. Even though the female who gives birth to a son in Isaiah 7:14 is a “virgin” only in the Greek text of the scriptures, the verse becomes “messianized” for the purposes of the narrative. It was all part of God’s plan. The messiah must be born in Bethlehem since he is to be a descendent of David, and strangely enough, in Matthew’s gospel, he must be raised in a small little town called Nazareth to fulfill another prophecy that he will called a Nazarene. One slight issue is that there is no prophecy about a messiah becoming a Nazarene in any of the ancient Hebrew documents, so there’s a lot of poetic license going on here. But the key for the gospel of Matthew is that as long as the birth of Jesus fulfills prophecy, even if the prophecy is mistranslated, misunderstood, or nonexistent, we’re still good. But remember, the gospels’ primary purpose is to convince others through a narrative telling of the story, not to relay accurate history in the way that we understand what history means today. The gospel of Matthew starts the entire story of Jesus’ life with the formula of prophecy fulfillment and it continues throughout the entire gospel.

On to the gospel of Luke. This gospel does not have the same formula of prophecy fulfillment. The purpose of the virgin birth is different. The virgin birth is in the narrative not to fulfill prophecy but to ensure there is no impediment to Jesus being viewed as the son of God. In the narrative in Luke, Mary is pregnant, not from her future husband Joseph, but from the spirit of God. When the angel Gabriel visits her to relay the information, she is quite taken aback and surprised. She initially does not fully understand nor believe what she is hearing. After further explanation, she gets it. God’s spirit will come upon her and the reason for that is so her son can be called the son of God. With a virgin birth, no human father can claim ancestry as Jesus will be God’s son. Although this then opens up all sorts of questions about how Jesus is descended from David, but we’re not going to get into that one right now.

Maybe this will come as a surprise to some Christians today, but having a divine parent was not all that unique. Ancient Greek writers, such as those that composed the gospel accounts in the New Testament, would have been well-versed in Greek and Roman literature. Ancient Greek stories were not only commonly known, they were tremendously popular in Roman culture as well. So much so, that Roman authors adapted and changed them for Roman audiences. One such popular story was that of Heracles, son of the Greek god Zeus and his beautiful human consort Alcmene. He became a Greek divine hero which later was adapted into the Roman hero and god Hercules. These Greek stories, and others like them, likely have at least an indirect influence, if not a direct influence, as inspiration for the birth narrative in Luke. A god impregnates a human so the offspring could be a divine hero. In Luke’s gospel, the mother of the messiah, Jesus, had to be a virgin if he was to be claimed as the son of God.

Even though both gospels, Matthew and Luke, used the earlier gospel of Mark as a source for writing their version of the story, the dominant view is that there is no known direct connection between them. Most historians believe their accounts were written independently of each other. Because of that, the gospel of Matthew’s insistence on the virgin birth being a fulfillment of prophecy and the gospel of Luke’s insistence on the virgin birth being necessary for Jesus to be the son of God are more like complementary themes in the two accounts than necessarily contradictions. But the two themes are different. Later readers would sort of combine them and think they were saying the same thing even though they weren’t.

One thing that is interesting in both of these gospel accounts is that Jesus was conceived. In neither account did Jesus exist prior to conception. In the much later gospel of John, the narrative surrounding Jesus changes again as he is some preexistent divine being. Greek philosophical ideas have a large influence on the gospel of John and the timeline of Jesus’ existence is pushed back to creation itself. This is a very different picture than Matthew or Luke’s portrayal.

But in the Matthew and Luke narratives, the gospel writers are not doing history in the way we understand that term today. They are not consulting some archive or historical record of Jesus’ birth. There was no such thing. They are not even trying to make a plausible reconstruction. The situation is quite the opposite: ancient authors exhibited significant literary freedom. In this specific case, the gospel writers’ goal is less about preserving memories of history and more about persuading their hearers and readers about the messianic identity of Jesus. They are proclamations. If the Hebrew biblical tradition said the messiah would come from the line of David, and David was from Bethlehem, then somehow Jesus also had to come from Bethlehem and his parents had to be in the ancestral line. If Jesus was the son of God, then his mother had to be a virgin, at least as far as a human partner was concerned. Boom…there you have it.

Now the problem is, what do we do with this? Emperor worship, starting with Julius Caesar, was common and expected. Even the emperor Octavian Augustus had a divine birth narrative and was known as the son of a god. Should all such divine birth narratives be taken literally and miraculously? Or are they all theological and metaphorical? Since divine concepts were quite acceptable and not unheard of during the time the gospels of Matthew and Luke were written, the argument was not that Jesus was unique because he is the product of a divine conception. The argument was who is “really” divine? Augustus or Jesus, make a choice. Excuse me, will the real divine figure please stand up? [laughter]

Now a few quick thoughts about another related issue. The virgin birth of Jesus is mentioned only in the gospels of Matthew and Luke. It is never mentioned in any of the earlier sources of Christianity such as Paul’s letters, the gospel of Mark or the earliest Christian creeds. But it became a popular theme, in fact, so popular, that the perpetual virginity of Mary appears in the late 300’s. The perpetual virginity of Mary is the idea that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was not only a virgin when Jesus was born but was a virgin throughout the rest of her life as well and never had any children. The strange thing about this is that the gospel of Mark mentions Jesus’ four brothers and several sisters. Before the late 300’s, just about all of the early Christian writings take for granted that the brothers and sisters of Jesus mentioned in this gospel were the natural-born children of Joseph and Mary. But after the late 300’s, the view changed to the idea that Jesus’ brothers were not related to Jesus by blood because they were not the children of his mother, Mary.

The motivation behind this idea was that Mary, because she bore and gave birth to the son of God, could not have had a sinful nature or else she would have passed it on to her son Jesus. Creating a child, during this time, was apparently considered a sinful activity. Thus, later in history, the doctrine of the immaculate conception became popular, meaning Mary was born without original sin. And after that, the assumption of Mary became popular whereby she was taken up into heaven rather than dying a normal human death.

Those who held the perpetual virginity of Mary explained the New Testament’s passages on Jesus’ brothers in different ways. The older tradition, from the churches on the Eastern side of the Roman Empire, said that the brothers of Jesus were actually children of Joseph from a previous marriage and this is why Joseph was later portrayed as being an older man despite there being no evidence in the New Testament documents regarding Joseph’s age. The later tradition, from the churches on the Western side of the Roman Empire, was that the brothers were cousins of Jesus. The main problem with either view is that when the New Testament talks about Jesus’ brothers, it uses the Greek word that literally refers to a male sibling. There is a different Greek word for cousin, so the cousin argument doesn’t work historically. Since neither the gospel of Mark (which first mention Jesus having four brothers and several sisters) nor the letters of Paul give any indication at all of knowing anything about Jesus being born of a virgin, the most natural assumption is that they both thought that Jesus’ parents were his real parents and had real children. Paul actually mentions that he knows one of these brothers personally, specifically James. It is hard to get much closer to the historical Jesus than that.

So from the historical perspective, Jesus’ mother Mary is a virgin in Matthew to fulfill prophecy and in Luke so Jesus can credibly claim divine status similar to other ancient narratives, and the perpetual virginity of Mary is entirely a theological claim since the earliest historical documents indicate Mary had other children.

Well I hope this vlog has helped you better understand this topic. Until next time, stay curious. If you enjoyed this, please like this video and subscribe to the channel. This is TenOnReligion.