Miracles and the Virgin Birth

One of a series of lectures given at St Brides Liverpool in 2010 and 2011. The list is here.

The miracles in the Bible are often treated as a criterion for being a Christian. Many people say that if you want to be a Christian you have to believe that Jesus was born of a virgin and walked on water, and you can also find other people equally adamant that Christianity is irrational and unscientific because it tells you to believe impossible miracles. I hope that by the end of this lecture you will feel you can believe in God without believing literally the miracle stories in the Bible.

What I hope to show is that the way people think of miracles today is completely different from what they meant before the seventeenth century. I shall first describe how the idea of miracles has changed over time, leading up to the ideas we have today. I shall then go back to the Bible, focus on the virgin birth of Jesus, and ask what the authors were really trying to say.

Older accounts of miracles

At the time of Christ most people believed in a variety of different gods. They thought the way the universe works was the result of the gods doing whatever they wanted. From this perspective you would expect more order and regularity when a single god is supreme, and you would expect more chaos when the gods are fighting each other. The word ‘miracle’ comes from the Latin ‘miraculum’, which simply means something to be wondered at. We don’t wonder at the regularities of nature because we take them for granted: when something irregular happens, then we are astonished and wonder at it. That’s why the irregularities could be called miracles, but they believed the gods were just as responsible for the regularities as the irregularities.

To give an example, the Gospel of Mark describes Jesus performing some nature miracles. He walked on water, and he fed 5000 people with a few loaves and fishes. We might speculate about what actually happened, but what Mark believed was that God had appointed Jesus as the man to bring in the new age. Like many Jews of his time, Mark believed that in the new age people would carry on living in the same bodies in the same world, but the forces of nature would be different. These miracles were not proofs that God exists or that Christianity is true: they were signs that God had given Jesus power over the forces of nature. In the same way, in a culture which believed miracles were possible but significant, each miracle had its own meaning.

The first Christians inherited from the Jews the belief that there is only one God, who is in control of the universe. That made them expect the world to be more ordered and regular. Soon they came into contact with Greek philosophy. The Greek philosopher Aristotle had taught that God created the world but had no further interest in it. According to Aristotle, the world operates according to regular impersonal laws of nature. These laws of nature just automatically make things happen, and are nothing to do with God.

The early Christians combined the two ideas. They believed that God is interested in what goes on in the world, but they also believed the world is ordered and operates regularly. The fourth century bishop Basil of Caesarea suggested that in the six days of creation God created the laws of nature. The logic is that the laws of nature are God’s way of doing some things regularly. This became the standard medieval view: God does the regular things through the laws of nature, but there is nothing to stop God doing irregular things as well. A little later Augustine argued along the same lines:

We say, as a matter of course, that all portents are contrary to nature. But they are not. For how can an event be contrary to nature when it happens by the will of God, since the will of the great Creator assuredly is the nature of every created thing? A portent, therefore, does not occur contrary to nature, but contrary to what is known of nature (Augustine, City of God, 21.8).

The difference is really just that we think we understand the regular events but not the irregular ones.

If you can get over the use of the word ‘miracle’, this is actually a very good account of the way the world works. The point is that God makes natural processes appear to us as ordered so that we can use our freedom to make intelligent decisions. In addition, some things we know about appear to us as irregular. They are sufficiently rare that they do not undermine our intelligent decision-making, but they do reveal that we only partly understand how the world works.

Separation of laws from God

Why did they abandon this account and return instead to the ancient Greek one? Because church leaders got in the way of new research. As people started to study the physical world in greater depth, they produced new theories. Theologians would forbid them to teach something that contradicted a biblical text. Even today some theologians use the Bible to argue that the world is only 6000 years old, and others use it to argue that gay and lesbian lifestyles are immoral; but in the Middle Ages church leaders had much greater authority. So the people who wanted to pursue their research even when it contradicted the Bible needed some way of justifying it, and the way they did this was by arguing that they were not really talking about what God does – they were only talking about what the laws of nature do.

Here’s an early example, from William of Conches in the 12th Century:

It must be recognized that every work is the work of the Creator or of Nature, or the work of a human artisan imitating nature. The work of the Creator is the first creation without pre-existing material, for example the creation of the elements or of spirits, or it is the things we see happen contrary to the accustomed course of nature, as the virgin birth and the like. The work of nature is to bring forth like things from like through seeds or offshoots, for nature is an energy inherent in things and making like from like.

Thus William revives Aristotle’s theory, arguing that what nature does is different from what God does. He does this because he wants to study nature without worrying about contradicting the Bible. The problem carried on: 500 years later educated Europeans took it for granted that the laws of nature are real forces causing nature to operate the way it does, and the only things caused by God are occasional miracles. This was context in which the modern idea of miracles became popular.

Locke on miracles

The two central figures in producing the modern debate were John Locke and David Hume. Locke was an early Enlightenment philosopher who tried to show how reason could produce complete and certain knowledge of the world. But how could he prove the truth of Christianity? To do this, he appealed to the miracles in the Bible.

Locke was writing after the Reformation but before modern biblical scholarship. He took it for granted that the stories in the bible were literally true, so the miracles must have happened. But the miracles broke the laws of nature. Only God can break the laws of nature. Locke argued that God performed the miracles in the Bible in order to show that the Bible is a true witness to God. It was God’s way of showing that everything else in the Bible is true. So Christianity is the true religion.

That’s Locke’s argument. What’s he doing? Firstly, he’s accepting the idea that the laws of nature are real forces operating independently of God, so God’s actions are revealed only in miracles. Secondly, by using miracles as his key argument in favour of Christianity, he changes the significance of miracles. Before Locke each miracle in the Bible had its own significance. From Locke onwards they all had the same significance. They were all proofs of the truth of Christianity. They were God’s stamp of approval. At around the same time Samuel Clarke used a similar argument from the prophecies in the Bible: because the prophecies came true, they prove that Christianity has divine authority.

Needless to say, not everybody agreed. Believers used three arguments. Firstly, if that was the reason for the miracles, God could have chosen better ones. Did God really have to send those demons into the Gadarene swine and curse a fig tree in order to prove that Christianity was true? Are not these acts unworthy of a divine power?

Secondly, if God’s intention had been to prove the truth of the Christian faith by means of the miracles in the Bible, it didn’t work too well. There were too many people in the world who had never come across the Bible.

Thirdly, Protestants had for a long time been treating Catholic miracle stories as mere superstition. If they were, why not reach the same conclusion about the miracle stories of the early Church?

Hume

The most influential response to Locke came from David Hume in the middle of the eighteenth century, as part of his case against religious belief. Miracles, he says,

are observed chiefly to abound among ignorant and barbarous nations; or if a civilized people has ever given admission to any of them, that people will be found to have received them from ignorant and barbarous ancestors… When we peruse the first histories of all nations, we are apt to imagine ourselves transported into some new world; where the whole frame of nature is disjointed, and every element performs its operations in a different manner, from what it does at present… It is strange, a judicious reader is apt to say, upon the perusal of these wonderful historians, that such prodigious events never happen in our days.

Hume also produced a theoretical argument. To say that an event has happened which breaks the laws of nature, is to say that something has happened which cannot happen.

As a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined… There must, therefore, be a uniform experience against every miraculous event, otherwise the event would not merit that appellation. And as a uniform experience amounts to a proof, there is here a direct and full proof, from the nature of the fact, against the existence of any miracle’.

Here Hume is taking for granted that the laws of nature cannot be broken. Writing about 50 years after Locke, he turns Locke’s argument on its head. Locke said the laws of nature cannot be broken so God must have performed the miracles in the Bible; Hume agrees that the laws of nature cannot be broken, but concludes that the miracles in the Bible cannot have happened.

There it is: the debate we have got today. Both sides agree that the laws of nature cannot normally be broken. One side argues that they have been broken so there must be a God; the other side argues that they cannot possibly have been broken so the Bible tells lies.

Two months ago I described how the nineteenth century religious revivals were driven by anxiety that religious belief would be disproved. Hume’s scepticism was a major influence. Many Christians reacted by going back to Locke’s arguments, and that’s why conservative Christians today so often insist on believing the miracles in the Bible. Before the seventeenth century people did not believe the laws of nature were unbreakable. They took for granted that miracles could happen, so they did not attribute the same meaning to them as people do today.

Virgin Birth

So what can we make of miracle stories in the Bible? The Bible was written at a time when everybody took for granted that miracles sometimes happened, so each miracle story had its own significance. I am going to focus on the virgin birth of Jesus because it’s a classic instance of a story which has been co-opted for the modern theory that you have to believe it if you want to be a Christian. Biblical scholars explain it differently.

The virgin birth of Jesus appears in two texts, at the beginning of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.

Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit…

All this took place to fulfil what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: ‘Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel’, which means, ‘God is with us’ (Matthew 1:18, 22-23).

In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary….

The angel said to her, ‘Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favour with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High…

Mary said to the angel, ‘How can this be, since I am a virgin?’ The angel said to her, ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you: therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God (Luke 1:26-27, 30-32, 34-35).

Most Christians today absolutely love these stories. They remind us of childhood, Sunday Schools, school nativity plays, and the whole Christmas experience. I don’t want to spoil it, but if you want to appreciate what Matthew and Luke meant, treating them as literally true is the wrong place to start. The question to ask is not ‘are they true?’ but ‘What were Matthew and Luke trying to say?’

Evidence against literal truth

The New Testament itself provides plenty of evidence that they were not literally true. Firstly, they are completely different from each other. Matthew and Luke agree that Jesus’ mother was Mary who was due to marry Joseph and the birth took place in Bethlehem. That’s pretty well all they have in common. In Matthew Joseph and Mary lived in Bethlehem, but after the birth they fled to Egypt to escape the slaughter of the babies, and later they settled in Nazareth. In Luke they lived in Nazareth and had to go to Bethlehem because of the census. In Luke Mary was a virgin at the time the angel came but we are not told that she was still a virgin when Jesus was conceived.

Secondly, the virgin birth stories are inconsistent with other parts of the New Testament.

He came to his home town and began to teach the people in their synagogue, so that they were astounded and said, ‘Where did this man get this wisdom and these deeds of power? Is not this the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother called Mary? And are not his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and Judas? And are not all his sisters with us? Where then did this man get all this?’ (Matthew 13:54-56)

Nobody said ‘This is the man who was born when his mother was still a virgin’; or even ‘This is the man who was born when that star arrived over Bethlehem’ or ‘This is the man who was given gold, frankincense and myrrh at his birth’. At the very least Mary and Joseph ought to have been able to tell their neighbours what had happened. But there is no hint of it.

Both Matthew and Luke give genealogies of Jesus. Matthew traces his ancestry from Abraham to Joseph, all the way through the fathers, concluding with:

… and Eliud the father of Eleazar, and Eleazar the father of Matthan, and Matthan the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called the Messiah (Matthew 1:15-16).

Luke gives a different genealogy, starting with Jesus and going back all the way to Adam:

He was the son (as was thought) of Joseph son of Heli, son of Matthat, son of Levi… (Luke 3:23-24).

In other words both Matthew and Luke trace Jesus’ genealogy through Joseph, with a brief note to the effect that Joseph wasn’t his father anyway. But why list the genealogy of Joseph at all, if he wasn’t the real father? Scholars believe the birth stories were the last parts of the gospels to be written. In some ways the gospels would have made better sense without them.

The earliest New Testament author was Paul, who appears not to have known about the virgin birth:

Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the good news (gospel) of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures, the gospel concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead (Romans 1:1-4).

If these stories are not literally true, if Matthew and Luke made them up, then what were they doing? What they were doing is something we do all the time. It’s a matter of knowing the conventions. Here’s an example. There was an Englishman, a Scotsman and an Irishman. What’s coming next? As soon as I say ‘There was an Englishman, a Scotsman and an Irishman’ you are expecting a joke. You expect it because you know the English language conventions which operate today.

Matthew and Luke were using the conventions of their day. Their stories of the birth of Jesus are full of miracles. Matthew’s story is full of fulfilments of prophecies, and people being told things in dreams. Luke’s story has lots of angels. All these features of their stories, the prophecies, the angels, the dreams, were conventional ways of saying ‘The event I’m describing now is a major event’.

So what conventional meaning did it have to claim that someone was born of a virgin? We can answer that by looking at who else was born of a virgin.

The ancient Greeks and Romans believed in a large number of gods, and also believed some very special humans became divine. One such person was the Roman Emperor Augustus. Augustus brought 20 years of civil war to an end by defeating Antony and Cleopatra in war. He also brought to an end the Roman Republic and reigned as Emperor for 40 years. He was worshipped as a god even before his death, which for Romans was unusual; but then he knew how to promote himself.

It was as true then as it is now that the way to climb the greasy pole is to flatter the people with the power. Whoever dreamed up this story, it won’t have done his career any harm at all.

When Atia had come in the middle of the night to the solemn service of Apollo, she had her litter set down in the temple and fell asleep, while the rest of the matrons also slept. On a sudden a serpent glided up to her and shortly went away. When she awoke, she purified herself, as if after the embraces of her husband, and at once there appeared on her body a mark in colors like a serpent, and she could never get rid of it; so that presently she ceased ever to go to the public baths. In the tenth month after that Augustus was born and was therefore regarded as the son of Apollo (Suetonius, The Deified Augustus, 94.4).

This is the nearest contemporary equivalent to the virgin birth stories in Matthew and Luke. Here’s another story from the same author:

A few months before Augustus was born a portent was generally observed at Rome, which gave warning that nature was pregnant with a king for the Roman people; thereupon the senate in consternation decreed that no male child born that year should be reared (Suetonius, The Deified Augustus, 94.3).

This is the nearest contemporary equivalent to Matthew’s story of King Herod killing all the babies.

Archaeologists have unearthed countless inscriptions to Augustus. Here’s an example, from 9 BC, dripping with flattery:

Since the providence that has divinely ordered our existence has applied her energy and zeal and has brought to life the most perfect good in Augustus, whom she filled with virtues for the benefit of mankind, bestowing him upon us and our descendants as a saviour – he who put an end to war and will order peace, Caesar, who by his epiphany exceeded the hopes of those who prophesied good news (gospel), not only outdoing benefactors of the past, but also allowing no hope of greater benefactions in the future; and since the birthday of the god first brought to the world the good news (gospel) residing in him…

It goes on to establish a celebration on Augustus’ birthday.

On other inscriptions, common titles given to Augustus are: Divine, Son of God, God, God from God, Lord, Redeemer, Liberator, Saviour of the world. These are all titles which the early Christians gave to Jesus.

Putting the evidence together, it is quite clear that the early Christians were setting up Jesus as an alternative to Augustus. Why?

Augustus was treated as divine because he won the war and brought peace and prosperity to the empire. He had complete power. Now let’s be realistic. Despite all the flattery, in practice power like that leaves the defeated bitter and the powerless resentful. The bitterness and resentment sow the seeds for the next conflict.

The early Christians had a different account of who saves people, who brings peace and who is worthy of divine honours. One of the well known parts of Luke’s birth story is the Magnificat, where Mary sings this about God:

His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. 51 He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. 52 He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; 53 he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty (Luke 1:50-53). 54

So when Matthew and Luke describe the virgin birth of Jesus, that virgin birth is just one of a rich array of associations which compare Jesus with the most powerful man in the world. The people who first read the gospels would have understood this all too easily. Just as it is obvious to us today that a story about an Englishman, a Scotsman and an Irishman is not supposed to be taken as literal fact, but is a joke, in the same way it would have been obvious to them that Matthew and Luke were saying ‘Jesus is our emperor’.

Matthew and Luke probably wrote their gospels during the reign of the Roman emperor Domitian. At the time Christians were being persecuted for their disloyalty to the emperor, and some were being put to death. It’s hardly surprising. Those stories about the birth of Jesus, and the kings and the shepherds and the cattle and the angels, which seem to us so beautiful and Christmassy, were intended as a statement of political dissent.

So these stories were written to say something utterly different from what most people associate them with today. We could say the same of other miracles. None of the miracles in the Bible were written to show that God exists, or that you have to believe them in order to count as a Christian. When Christians today treat miracles as what Christians have to believe, they are confusing Christianity with what Christians used to believe in a pre-scientific age, and thereby making it harder for people to believe in God today. When we find out what the miracle stories were really trying to say, sometimes we discover a message which is just as relevant today as it was 2000 years ago.

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