Rejoice! The Virgin's Child Is Born
Regardless of what the skeptics say, the Virgin Birth is still central to redemptive history.
Raise, raise a song on high
The virgin sings her lullaby
Joy, joy for Christ is born
The Babe, the Son of Mary
—What Child Is This
In the midst of all the holiday bustle, we ought not forget that whole Christ part in Christmas. The first Noel would never have happened had God not become “flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14 ESV). If God did not humble Himself by choosing to step into our world through the Virgin’s womb, not only would we not be giving gifts to one another this season, but we would lack the greatest gift of all—forgiveness of sins and eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord (Romans 6:23).
The Virgin Birth set off a rollercoaster in redemptive history. The long line waiting for salvation throughout the Old Testament and Silent Years was finally over. As the angels told the shepherds, “For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord” (Luke 2:11 ). Jesus’ birth through the Virgin Mary truly changed everything.
No wonder the world wishes it could simply brush this miracle away.
Over at The New York Times, columnist Nicholas Kristof did a little interview with Elaine Pagels, a professor of religion at Princeton. The piece is headlined “A Conversation About the Virgin Birth That Maybe Wasn’t.” Of course, neither Kristof nor Pagels are Believers, so it would be silly to expect them to accept the Virgin Birth. But their conversation does, however, reveal the silliness that comes with explaining away the Virgin Birth. There are several points made in the column I think are worth interacting with.
So, here goes:
Of the four Gospels, two describe the virgin birth of Jesus, and two don’t mention it. The Gospel of Mark has people of Galilee referring to Jesus as the son of Mary, when the norm was to describe somebody as the son of his father. So did the neighbors growing up with Jesus regard him as fatherless?
We don’t know. Mark is the earliest Gospel written; Matthew and Luke are basically just revising it. Mark has no suggestion of a virgin birth. Instead, he says that neighbors called Jesus “son of Mary.” In an intensely patriarchal society, this suggests that Jesus had no father that anyone knew about, even one deceased. Yet even without a partner, Mary has lots of children: In Mark, Jesus has four other brothers and some sisters, with no recognized father and no genealogy.
First off, I find it interesting that while Kristof and Pagels would largely reject most historical value in the Gospels, they’re willing to take a line from Mark and use it to seriously question the Biblical narrative. This certainly shows how many skeptics often selectively pick and choose which portions of Scripture they want to accept as maybe historically accurate. Predictably, they then use these passages simply to discredit the rest of Scripture.
Now, I want to point out the rather large leap that Pagels made in her answer: Because the Middle East was an “intensely patriarchal society” and Mark recorded Jesus as being called the “son of Mary” (Mark 6:3), then that suggests the identity of Jesus’ father was unknown. This assertion definitely feels like a bit of a stretch, especially since, as Pagels notes, Mary had lots of other children.
Notably, in a parallel passage in Matthew 13:55, it is recorded: “Is not this the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother called Mary?” Since the Gospel authors were writing from different perspectives, we don’t know if some members of the crowd referred to Jesus as both the “carpenter’s son” and the “son of Mary,” or that “son of Mary” was how Mark chose to record the crowd referring to Mary as Jesus’ mother, or whatever. You can’t infer anything too significant about Jesus’ perceived familial relationship from these passages. As Pagels said, “We don’t know.”
You note that Matthew and Luke both borrowed heavily from Mark’s account but also seem embarrassed by elements of it, including the paternity question. Is your guess that they added the virgin birth to reduce that embarrassment?
Yes, but this is not just my guess. When Matthew and Luke set out to revise Mark, each added an elaborate birth story—two stories that differ in almost every detail. Matthew adds a father named Joseph, who, seeing his fiancée pregnant, and not with his child, decides to break the marriage contract. Luke, writing independently, pictures an angel astonishing a young virginal girl, announcing that “the Holy Spirit” is about to make her pregnant.
While it is true that both Matthew and Luke give different details about the birth of Christ, nothing contradictory can be construed from the two accounts. They simply emphasize different aspects of the story of the Virgin Birth. And again, big leaps are being taken by Kristof and Pagels in their assumption that the accounts of the birth of Christ were simply added to reduce embarrassment.
But then they take even more leaps of skepticism:
The most startling element of your book [Miracles and Wonder] to me was that you cite evidence going back to the first and second centuries that some referred to Jesus as the son of a Roman soldier named Panthera. These accounts are mostly from early writers trying to disparage Jesus, it seems, so perhaps they should be regarded skeptically. But you also write that Panthera appears to have been a real person. How should we think about this?
Yes, these stories circulated after Jesus’ death among members of the Jewish community who regarded him as a false messiah, saying that Jesus’ father was a Roman soldier. I used to dismiss such stories as ancient slander. Yet while we do not know what happened, there are too many points of circumstantial evidence to simply ignore them. The name Panthera, sometimes spelled differently in ancient sources, may refer to a panther skin that certain soldiers wore. The discovery of the grave of a Roman soldier named Tiberius Panthera, member of a cohort of Syrian archers stationed in Palestine in the first century, might support those ancient rumors. [Emphasis added.]
So, we went from rejecting plain accounts of the birth of Christ to seriously entertaining “circumstantial evidence” that maybe Jesus was actually the son of a Roman soldier named Panthera. If Jesus’ father was unknown to his neighbors, as Pagels and Kristof would suggest, then how did the identity leak out to critics of Christianity?
Of course, you can’t say conclusive evidence that satisfies every critical angle on the Virgin Birth exists. It takes faith to accept that Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary. But besides Scripture, the earliest Christian sources have always affirmed the Virgin Birth. Considering the existing evidence, it takes a lot more faith to believe that Jesus was the son of a certain Panthera than it does to accept the biblical accounts.
Putting aside all of its objections to the Virgin Birth, what I found the most notable about this interview was Pagels sharing her faith journey. For Pagels, her problem with the claims of Christianity does not rest in a simple search for truth, but in her resistance to accepting Jesus for who He is. As she put it:
When some Christians said to me that non-Christians are going to hell, I left their church. That made no sense to me. What about Jesus’ message of God’s love? At that point I left Christianity behind. For some people, there’s no middle ground. You’re either in or out—that’s how it’s often practiced. So for years I was out, although I knew that something powerful was there. But after years of being out, I kept wondering, what made that encounter with Christianity so powerful?
This testimony from Pagels is not unique to her. It is all too common for individuals to be enchanted by the emotionalism associated with many churches but to never fully embrace the Cornerstone of the church. Rather than following the Christ of Scripture, who said, “No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6), she followed the Christ of her own imagination. When Jesus did not meet her expectations, she stopped bothering about practicing the faith.
Still, as she admits, she could never escape the power of Christianity. Unfortunately, she has only approached the faith through a skeptical, though respectful, lens. She still likes the perks of Christianity, whether they be prison outreach programs, “treat[ing] other people well,” and the beauty of a Christmas Eve service. She just doesn't want the commitment that comes from following Christ. It’s too bad.
The Virgin Birth is a glorious truth—a truth being missed by so many. As Patrick Schreiner recently put it, “The Virgin Birth is certainly amazing because Jesus was born of a virgin, but it’s equally amazing that God himself was born.” Scripture says that God “laughs” at His enemies and “holds them in derision” (Psalm 2:4). Because we have all sinned against this holy God, we are His enemies if we are without Christ. We’re worthy of His derision. We didn't deserve Christ the God-Man to dwell among us, die on the cross for our sins, and rise again to offer eternal life to all who believe. It would have been perfectly just for God to leave us lost in our sins and separated from Him forever, but…
“while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die—but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
Romans 5:6-8
Christ is the “firstborn of all creation” (Colossians 1:15), but He humbled Himself to be born of a poor maiden, live as a simple carpenter, preach the gospel of the kingdom in the face of the hostile religious establishment, and die naked on a cross. He did all that for us, so that we “who once were alienated and hostile in mind” could be “reconciled in his body of flesh by his death” (Colossians 1:21-22).
This is the real “message of God’s love” that Pagels is still missing. It is easy for the world to dismiss miracles such as the Virgin Birth and come up with their own theories about Christ’s advent, but by doing so, they are lacking the joy that comes with accepting Christ for who He said He was.
The Virgin Birth itself is one of God’s greatest acts of love. If Christ wasn’t born, His death, burial, and resurrection never would have happened. We would be without hope and doomed to eternal separation from the Lord.
Pagels mentioned at the end of her interview that she “still love[s] the midnight service on Christmas Eve, where the story is gloriously told and sung as miracle.” Though she is still a skeptic, I’m glad she gets the opportunity to hear the story of Christ’s amazing birth every year. Maybe someday, she (and Kristof) will stop clinging to doubt and trust the Christ born of a virgin as her Lord and Savior.
Joy immeasurable awaits all those who find the answer to the question: What Child is this?
Merry Christmas!