Virgin birth unique to the Gospels

Critics allege that since there is evidence of a similar idea in another culture then the gospel writers borrowed the idea from that earlier source. This claim with its line of reasoning has been extensively examined in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by several scholars, the most accessible books being, possibly, James Orr, The Virgin Birth of Christ, 1929, and J. Gresham Machen, The Virgin Birth of Christ, 1958.

These two writers highlight a few things about people who make the contention and argue the way we indicated earlier.

First, they seem unaware of the fact that neither similarity of idea, nor being later in time necessarily proves dependence or borrowing.

Secondly, they have been unsuccessful in showing how Matthew and Luke (Jewish-Christian in worldview and thus averse to anything smacking of heathen idolatry), came to know of and be influenced by the alleged parallel from a heathen or pagan culture.

Thirdly, and most critically, they have not been able to establish a real, historical case of virgin birth in any other culture.

James Orr says, “ With respect now to my main contention, it must strike you, I know, as strange to hear that the heathen world has no proper doctrine of a Virgin Birth, so continually are you told that pagan mythology is full of parallels of this kind.”(In The Virgin Birth of Christ, 167)

Orr then considers “the popular mythological conceptions of the Greeks and Romans”, such as “the fables of Hermes, of Dionysius, of Aesculapius, of Hercules, and the like” and concludes, “ A god, inflamed by lust, Zeus is a chief sinner surprises a maiden, and has a child by her, but it is by natural generation. There is nothing here analogous to the Virgin Birth of the Gospels.” (168)

The central point is the absence from the literature, mythical, not historical of a virgin giving birth!

FABLES

Next for consideration by Orr are “ the fables set afloat about a philosopher like Plato, or rulers like Alexander or Augustus”. (170) Apart from the fact that the fathers and mothers of these individuals were well known, the claims made for them are not so much that their mothers were virgins, but that each was sired by a god.

Plutarch, (c. C.E. 46-c. 120), in one of the accounts of Alexander’s special birth, has his mother saying about her son’s boast of being a child of Zeus, “Will not Alexander cease slandering me to Hera?”

Augustus promoted the idea that Apollo was his father. The claim was that his mother fell asleep in the temple of Apollo and was visited by the god in the form of a serpent.

Concerning Plato, Plutarch suggests that the begetting was before marital intercourse between Plato’s parents, but we are not sure of the mother’s premarital behaviour.

Diogenes Laertius (3rd century C.E.), drawing on the works of three writers before his time, including Speusippos, Plato’s nephew and successor at his Academy, says that they all mention a story circulating in Athens that Plato’s father, Ariston, tried unsuccessfully to get his mother, Perictione, pregnant. The god Apollo succeeded.

The central point again is the absence from the literature of a virgin giving birth!

Orr then turns his attention to “the legend of Buddha”, (171) and in passing, indicates the problems concerning the dating of traditions about the birth of the Buddha.

J. Gresham Machen says, “ Our earliest source of information about [Gautama’s] life and teaching is found in the writings of the Pali canon . . . In the Pali canon, nothing is said about the birth of Gautama which could by any possibility be brought into comparison with our story of the virgin birth. But in the introduction to the Jakata book, which dates from the fifth century after Christ, we have the well-known story of the white elephant that entered the body of Maya, Buddha’s [married] mother, at the time when her child was conceived.” (In his The Virgin Birth of Christ, 339)

Once again, the central point is the absence from the stories of a virgin giving birth!

Orr closes by examining the unsuccessful attempts to find virgin birth parallels in Egypt, Babylon, Arabia and Persia. (172-176) With specific reference to Egypt it must be noted that the mythical Horus, was the son of the mythical Isis and Osiris and the issue of a virgin birth for Horus does not arise in the Egyptian myth.

Since ‘virgin birth parallels’ are missing, the careful reader of Matthew and Luke must deal with the virgin birth claim against the proven backdrop of the evangelists’ credibility and reliability as writers of material purporting to be history.

Let me close by saying that we must welcome all ideas, theories and claims, irrespective of how uncomfortable some of them might make us feel. What is of critical importance is that we subject all ideas, theories and claims to logical analysis as we probe the truth-content of all such ideas, theories and claims!

- Rev Clinton Chisholm is a retired Jamaica Baptist Union pastor, holds an MA in biblical languages from Sheffield University in England and was a teaching assistant in Hebrew in the university’s Biblical Studies Department. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and clintchis@yahoo.com