As the title of this blog indicates, I consider the Fourth Gospel ("of John") to be by far the most authoritative. Of the Synoptics, I consider Mark the most trustworthy, accepting the textual evidence that it is the oldest of the three and that Matthew and Luke are dependent on it.
The idea that Jesus had no biological father but was miraculously born of a virgin occurs only in Luke and Matthew. Let's look at what each gospel has to say about Jesus' parentage and birth.
⁂
John
The Fourth Gospel refers several times to "the mother of Jesus" but never names her. His father is apparently dead or otherwise out of the picture by the time Jesus' ministry begins, because he never appears in the story.
Jesus is twice identified as "the son of Joseph," with no indication that Joseph was his father in anything other than the ordinary sense of that word. After becoming a disciple of Jesus, Philip tells Nathanael,
We have found him, of whom Moses in the law, and the prophets, did write, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph. (John 1:45)
This indicates that Jesus was known publicly, and presumably identified himself, as the son of Joseph. Philip was willing to accept the son of Joseph as the Messiah; he did not expect the Messiah to lack a human father.
Later, Judaeans ("Jews") who had followed Jesus to Galilee said,
Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? how is it then that he saith, I came down from heaven? (John 6:42)
As far as the public knew, there was nothing at all unusual about Jesus' parentage. They knew who his father and mother were, and his father was Joseph.
The only possible hint that Joseph may not have been Jesus' biological father comes from this interchange with the "Jews."
They answered and said unto him, "Abraham is our father."
Jesus saith unto them, "If ye were Abraham's children, ye would do the works of Abraham. But now ye seek to kill me, a man that hath told you the truth, which I have heard of God: this did not Abraham. Ye do the deeds of your father."
Then said they to him, "We be not born of fornication; we have one Father, even God" (John 8:39-41).
Bruce B. commented,
I've heard people say that this statement was Jesus' opponents referring to his illegitimacy through Mary's "sin" (as they would have assumed). That it represented an escalation of the verbal sparring that was taking place in this passage.
I don't know if this is true.
It's possible that "We be not born of fornication" was a dig at Jesus, who they supposed was born of fornication, but I think it's more natural to read it as a response to Jesus' implication that they were not true children of Abraham. They meant that each of the fathers recorded in their genealogy was the real father, and therefore they were biological descendants of Abraham. The idea that Jesus was widely considered to be "born of fornication" and not Joseph's true son seems to be inconsistent with his being called "Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know."
The Fourth Gospel also contains Jesus' most explicit identification of himself the the "Son of Man." Jesus always speaks of the Son of Man in the third person, and it appears as if his disciples did not conclude until after the Resurrection that he had apparently been referring to himself all along. Even in the Fourth Gospel, confusion about the Son of Man is evident: "How sayest thou, 'The Son of man must be lifted up?' Who is this Son of man?" (John 12:34). However, I think the following passage establishes beyond doubt that Jesus did in fact see himself as the Son of Man.
Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you. Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day (John 6:53-54).
Son of man -- singular of children of men -- was simply an expression meaning "man." It is far from being the only way of expressing "man," though, and it is curious that Jesus should have adopted that particular label for himself if he was the only man in the history of the world to whom it did not literally apply.
Of course Jesus also repeatedly called himself the Son of God and referred to God as his Father -- more so in the Fourth Gospel than anywhere else. A literal interpretation of this -- as meaning that Jesus had been miraculously begotten by God himself, in the same way that Alexander was rumored to have been miraculously begotten by Zeus -- is the only ground in the Fourth Gospel for supposing a Virgin Birth. However, I think the Gospel makes it tolerably clear that such expressions are not literal. This is most clearly expressed in the prologue:
But as many as received him [Jesus], to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God (John 1:12-13).
Here it is stated that anyone who receives Jesus can become a Son of God -- though obviously, as Nicodemus pointed out (John 3:4), no man can "enter the second time into his mother's womb, and be born" to a different biological father. This passage also refers to being "born of" God -- an expression which, taken literally, would make God the mother rather than the father. I believe this makes it clear that being the "Son of God" has nothing to do with the circumstances of one's biological conception or birth.
Near the end of the Gospel, Jesus tells Mary Magdalene, "go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God" (John 20:17). Bruce Charlton has suggested that he said this because Mary was his wife and thus God's daughter-in-law. However, the word translated your is plural and refers to Jesus' "brethren." Whether he meant his biological brothers or his disciples, the implication is clear: that God was their Father, too, and that therefore having God as one's Father does not preclude having an ordinary biological father as well.
All in all, nothing in the Fourth Gospel supports the idea of a Virgin Birth. It does not prove that Jesus was not born of a virgin, of course, but if the Fourth Gospel were all we had, we would never suppose that he had been.
⁂
Mark
The Fourth Gospel mentions Joseph by name but not Mary. In Mark, the reverse is true.
"Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James, and Joses, and of Juda, and Simon? and are not his sisters here with us?" And they were offended at him. (Mark 6:3)
The fact that Jesus is identified as the son of his mother, rather than of his father, does imply that his biological father's identity may have been unknown. Another possibility is that his father had died when Jesus was young, so that he was more closely associated with his mother -- much as Hiram of Tyre was called "the widow's son."
Note that Mary is the mother not only of Jesus but of James, Joses, Juda, and Simon. Later in the Gospel, reference is made to "Mary the mother of James the less and of Joses" (Mark 15:40), "Mary the mother of Joses" (Mark 15:47), and "Mary the mother of James" (Mark 16:1). It seems highly unlikely that this is a different woman -- it would be just a bit too much of a coincidence if Jesus just happened to be have a female follower with the same name as his mother who also happened to have two children with the same names as his brothers! Assuming this is the same Mary, why is she not identified in these passages -- where she witnesses Jesus' crucifixion and then visits his tomb -- as the mother of Jesus, that surely being the most relevant fact about her in this context? Is the text possibly trying to hint that Mary may not have been his real mother at all? There may have been an expectation that the Messiah would appear mysteriously, without human father or mother. "We know this man whence he is," said the citizens of Jerusalem, "but when Christ cometh, no man knoweth whence he is" (John 7:27).
Now that I've noticed this, the idea does seem to have some support elsewhere in Mark.
And the multitude sat about him, and they said unto him, "Behold, thy mother and thy brethren without seek for thee."
And he answered them, saying, "Who is my mother, or my brethren?"
And he looked round about on them which sat about him, and said, "Behold my mother and my brethren! For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother" (Mark 3:32-35).
These are just faint hints, of course, but insofar as the Gospel of Mark hints at anything unusual about Jesus' parentage, it is not so much a matter of a virgin birth as of having no ordinary birth at all.
⁂
Matthew and Luke
These are the only two gospels that tell the story of the conception and birth of Jesus, and there is virtually no overlap between their two accounts.
In Matthew's version of the story, Joseph finds Mary pregnant and plans to break off the engagement, but an angel appears to him in a dream and tells him to go ahead and marry her, because "that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost" (Matt. 1:20). He is also told by the angel to name the child Jesus. Jesus is born in Bethlehem in Judaea, apparently because that was where his parents lived. A year or two after his birth, magicians from the East come looking for the newborn "King of the Jews," having followed a new star. Herod the Great determines to kill this potential rival, and Jesus' family flees to Egypt for safety. An angel again appears to Joseph in a dream to inform him of the death of Herod, and they return to Israel. Finding that Herod Archelaus, Herod the Great's son, now rules Judaea, they settle instead in Nazareth in Galilee.
In Luke's version, Joseph and Mary are already living in Nazareth when the angel Gabriel appears -- to Mary, not Joseph -- and tells her that she will miraculously conceive while still a virgin and that she should call the child Jesus. (The text of the Hail Mary is mostly drawn from Luke.) Later they have to travel to Bethlehem for a census because Joseph's distant ancestor King David was from there, and Jesus is born during their stay there. He is laid in a manger, visited by shepherds, etc. -- the traditional "Christmas story" (with the exception of the "wise men") is from Luke. They stay in Judaea for a short time to do the traditional ceremonies associated with the birth of a firstborn son, and then they return to their hometown of Nazareth.
These are two completely different stories. All they have in common in this:
- Mary became pregnant as a virgin, while engaged but not yet married to Joseph, and an angel said (to someone!) that the conception was "of the Holy Ghost" and that the child should be named Jesus.
- "Jesus of Nazareth" was actually born in Bethlehem, not Nazareth.
But some said, "Shall Christ come out of Galilee? Hath not the scripture said, That Christ cometh of the seed of David, and out of the town of Bethlehem, where David was?" (John 7:41-42).
The Fourth Gospel lets this criticism go unanswered -- it never says that Jesus actually was from Bethlehem -- but it is only natural that rumors to that effect would spread through the early Christian community. I therefore do not think Matthew and Luke's (mutually contradictory) stories about the birth in Bethlehem have much value as evidence that Jesus really was born there. I assume that he was born in Nazareth.
As for the other point they have in common, it's not surprising that people would take "Son of God" literally and conclude that Jesus could not therefore be the biological son of Joseph. I do find it intriguing, though, that both Matthew and Luke have Mary conceiving as a virgin, before her marriage was consummated, but apparently that was normal for people who were secretly the sons of gods. Similar rumors circulated about Alexander, as reported by Plutarch: "The night before that on which the marriage was consummated, the bride dreamed that there was a peal of thunder and that a thunder-bolt fell upon her womb," meaning that Zeus was the true father of the child.
In Matthew's case, he tells us that Jesus was born of a virgin "that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet" in Isaiah 7:14 -- "Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel" (Matt. 1:22). In context, though, Isaiah was clearly talking about a child (named Immanuel, not Jesus!) who was to be born during the reign of Ahaz of Judah, more than seven centuries before Christ; and the word that means "virgin" in Greek has the more general meaning of "young woman" in the original Hebrew of Isaiah. This is not a Messianic prophecy and does not say there will be a virgin birth.
Not -- let me be clear -- that that necessarily invalidates Isaiah 7:14 as having anything to do with Jesus. I can hardly blame Matthew for finding that verse and noticing its applicability to Christ, without reference to the authorial intentions of Isaiah himself -- because it's exactly the sort of thing I do all the time! It would not be a "prophecy" in the strict sense but a synchronicity. If Matthew had not done so first, I could easily see myself discovering it: "In Isaiah's prophecy of the overthrow of Rezin and Pekah, he predicts the birth of a child named Immanuel. When the Septuagint translation was made centuries later, but still long before the birth of Christ, they translated it in such a way as to suggest that Immanuel would be born to a virgin. And what does the name Immanuel mean in Hebrew? 'God is with us.' What are the chances?"
The question is which came first for Matthew, the "prophecy" or the fulfillment? Did Matthew already know that Jesus had been born of a virgin, and then find that this was foreshadowed in Isaiah? Or did he read Isaiah in Greek, find that a virgin birth had been prophesied, and assume that therefore Jesus had been born of a virgin?
This is Matthew, so I tend to assume the latter. The key to Matthew's method is the episode where Jesus rides into Jerusalem on the backs of two animals, an ass and her colt, the author explaining that "this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying . . . thy King cometh unto thee, meek, and sitting upon an ass, and a colt the foal of an ass" (Matt. 21:4-5). Jesus very obviously did not ride two animals at once like some kind of circus performer -- or if he had done such an outlandish thing, the other gospel writers would have noted it as well. Therefore, for Matthew, fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy is a premise, not a conclusion. Jesus fulfilled prophecy; therefore, he must have ridden an ass and a colt, in accordance with a ridiculously literal reading of Zechariah 9:9. (Had Matthew had access to the works of Kipling, he would surely have concluded that Bobby Wick divided into two Bobby Wicks when he "became an officer and a gentleman"!) Every time Matthew writes "This was done that the prophecy might be fulfilled," we should read it as, "I assume this to have been done, on the grounds that prophecy -- translated into Greek, ripped from context, and interpreted literally -- must be fulfilled."
⁂
My conclusion for now is that I lack any positive belief in the Virgin Birth. It could be true, but I haven't seen any good reason to think so.
