BIBLE STUDY BOOKLET

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	THE VIRGIN BIRTH By Theo Todman THE THEOLOGY OF THE VIRGIN BIRTH

Why was the Lord Jesus Christ born of a virgin, and how important were the peculiarities of this event? What was achieved by this special generation that could not have been achieved by a normal conception? These and many other questions are not easy to answer from Scripture alone because of the very limited amount of reflection on the subject within the pages of the New Testament. Hence, though we will start by considering the Scriptural pointers, we will continue by considering the theology of the early church Fathers as it touched on this subject. For this I am indebted to the work of von Campenhausen. I am doing this not because I consider the Fathers to be authoritative, but because they were the first to consider the matter, to raise the various issues and to ask the questions of meaning. Their thoughts are stimulating even though sometimes we must reject their conclusions.

As has been noted, neither of the two evangelists who record the virgin birth spends much time reflecting on its significance. Matthew quotes from Isaiah 7:14, which reads:

Matthew adds the interpretation of "Immanuel" as "God with us". This is another allusion to Isaiah, who, in Isaiah 8:8, referring to Immanuel's land as about to be over-run by the King of Assyria, continues in verses 9 and 10 to proclaim:

In Isaiah, "Immanuel" is chosen as a name to signify that "God is with us", that is, God is the protector of Judah and Jerusalem. However, Matthew sees in this verse the remoter reference to "God with us", i.e. to Jesus Christ. It seems, therefore, that Matthew connects Jesus' deity with his conception and birth from a virgin. However, he does not stop to explain this further. Does Luke offer more light?

Luke records the following response to Mary's question in Luke 1:34, "How will this be, since I am a virgin?", when Gabriel says, in verse 35:

According to Bauer's Greek Lexicon, the Greek dio kai, here translated "So" in the NIV, is an inferential conjunction and means "'Therefore ... also", denoting that the inference is self-evident. The rest of the sentence may be variously translated, but most literally as "what is born will be called holy, Son of God" (Moffatt). From this we may observe that Gabriel intends two clear inferences to follow from Jesus' generation by the Holy Spirit, namely, that he will be holy and that he will be the Son of God.

It is the first of these two observations that is peculiar to Luke. What does Gabriel mean by "holy' (Greek hagios)? The Septuagint regularly translates the Hebrew root qdsh by hagios and its cognates. It may be, therefore, that there is here an allusion to Numbers 6:8, which says of the Nazirite that:

This would reflect the meaning of "holy" (Hebrew qadosh, here translated "consecrated") as "given over to God" or "set apart to God", separation (Hebrew Nazar) being of the essence of the Nazirite vow. Presumably, some such idea is behind the significance found by Matthew (2:23) of Jesus having dwelt in Nazareth.

Another allusion would be to Exodus 13:2 :

Here "consecrate" is a verbal form (qaddesh) of the Hebrew for holy (qadosh). This passage links in with the idea of Jesus as the firstborn and the true redeemer and saviour, though Luke does not translate Jesus' name as 'saviour' at this point as does Matthew.

However, it may be that "holy" should be loaded with all its overtones of personal sinlessness which in the saints (believers, "hagioi" in Greek) exists only by imputation, but which in their Saviour was true by reason of his nature, person and birth. However, we will leave it to the Fathers to point out the possible connection here with Jesus' freedom from original sin and his qualification as a sin offering.

In his book The Virgin Birth in the Theology of the Ancient Church, Hans von Campenhausen gives the following outline of the way in which the doctrine was accepted in the early church.

There appears to have been some early difference of opinion concerning the importance, or at least the essentiality, of belief in the doctrine of the virgin birth as a proof of genuine faith. Ignatius (died c. 125 AD) regards the virgin birth as essential doctrine whereas Justin Martyr (died 165 AD) acknowledges that there exist Jewish Christians who deny it, though he is not satisfied by their attitude. However, the liberal attitude was soon lost and by the time we get to Irenaeus (died c.200 AD), such Jewish Christians, known as Ebionites, are classed as heretics, though they are no longer well understood. For instance, Irenaeus thinks their founder was a certain "Ebion", when in fact their name stems from the Hebrew for "poor"!

During the second century there were two extremes of heretical beliefs about the Lord's manner of birth. On the one hand, as we have seen, were the Ebionites, joined by the Adoptionists, who believed that Jesus was conceived and born normally, but acquired his spiritual nature at his baptism. On the other hand there were the Gnostics who denied that Jesus had been born physically at all. For instance, Marcion taught that Jesus came down from heaven as a fully grown man in the 15th year of Tiberius!

The Fathers' approach to the problem posed by these heresies was to stress the Lord's pre-temporal birth (along the lines of the prologue to John's Gospel) when condemning the Ebionites and Adoptionists and to stress his physical birth when arguing against the Gnostics. This tended to make the virgin birth irrelevant to the issues at hand, and it was affirmed by the orthodox mainly as a piece of authentic apostolic tradition.

The doctrine could therefore be accepted by all but the most extreme heretics. For instance, the Valentinian Gnostics accepted it under the assumption that Christ took nothing earthly from Mary, but passed through her like water through a channel. We will come across a variant of this idea elsewhere in this booklet, so it is interesting to know that Irenaeus and Pseudo-Tertullian considered this form of the doctrine to be a heresy as well!

Finally, with the decline of extreme sects, the doctrine of the virgin birth became generally accepted.