Does Christianity Rise and Fall on the Virgin Birth?

A Brief Reflection on a Biblical Conception

Recently, I have had a number of people reach out to ask me how one can believe in Christianity given the historical problems associated with the birth narratives.

Their line of questioning runs something like this: ‘if I do not or no longer assent to the idea of a virginal conception, can I still believe?’ The operative assumption is that the truth of Christianity rises and falls on the historicity of this particular miracle.

I understand this concern. The virginal conception of Jesus is affirmed in both the Nicene and Apostle Creed, confessed by most Christians worldwide. Not to assent to this doctrine thus places oneself outside of the bounds of Christian orthodoxy.

At the same time, it does not seem to me – or to many contemporary New Testament scholars – that belief in a literal interpretation of Matthew and Luke’s story is integral to the substance of Christian belief.

To put it differently: I think there are ways to believe in both the Incarnation (the idea that Jesus is fully God and fully man) and in Scriptural revelation, without thinking that the virginal conception was the method by which the Incarnation unfolded.

In this piece, then, I want to do something rather unusual for the blog. I wish to offer some reflections on why the virgin birth may not be a sine qua non for faith.¹

The Complexity of the Biblical Sources

It is very common in theological interpretation of the Bible to assume that the Bible speaks with one voice. Guided by this assumption, we often assume that the New Testament has only one account of Jesus’ paternity: he was born of a virgin.

Yet biblical scholars generally do not work with this assumption. When they look at a question like Jesus’ paternity, they do not explore the texts as a unity, or disparate voices to be harmonised, but as individual sources which stand on their own terms.

With this in mind, a historian is well within their rights to ask: how widespread was the belief in the virginal conception in the early Jesus movement? Did all early Christians – if we can call them that – confess what later became orthodoxy?

At the time that Matthew and Luke were written, in the late first or early second century respectively, at least some Christians did believe in the virgin birth. Yet beyond these sources, it is very difficult to find traces of the notion in earlier texts.

Consider our earliest and most prolific New Testament writer: St Paul. On my reading, Paul believed in some form of the Incarnation (Phil 2:5-11); he believed that Jesus was a pre-existent divine being who took on human flesh.

Yet one struggles to find in Paul any hint that Jesus was conceived supernaturally. Some have pointed to his description of Jesus as ‘born of a woman’ as a thinly-veiled allusion to the belief in the virgin birth. Yet ‘born of a woman’ is the same phrase that the book of Job uses to describe a mortal man. Paul is emphasising Jesus’ humanity.

What then did Paul believe about Jesus’ origins? Unless we import later ideas into his letters, it seems that Paul held a standard view about Jesus’ origins. He describes Jesus as ‘born of the seed of David’, which in ancient Jewish terms, meant that his father was of Davidic descent. And he offers no qualification of that view.

Let us assume for a moment that this account of Paul’s belief is correct. We are then confronted with a New Testament witness which is more complex than many traditionally see it: while some NT writers (Matthew and Luke) held that Jesus was supernaturally conceived, other NT writers (like Paul) probably did not.

We might still think that the virginal conception is the majority position of the canon. Yet once again, we have writers who seem to know nothing about it. Mark says nothing of Jesus’ virginal conception (having his family think him ‘out of his mind’)², while John affirms the Incarnation but without any apparent need for a virgin birth.

All of this should raise questions for how central or important the concept of the virginal conception was to New Testament writers. This is not to suggest that it did not happen. But it is to suggest that if we are judging the New Testament followers of Jesus by the canons of a later orthodoxy, they might not meet the mark.