At the beginning of last year the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, James Weatherhead, aroused fierce debate with his statements about the virgin birth of Jesus, denying its literal historicity but defending its symbolic significance. The Scotsman newspaper was central in stirring the controversy and it received an unprecedented postbag on the topic.

The debate about history versus myth rumbled on as his successor took the chair, and when the name of James Hark­ness was announced as the Moderator Designate for the 1995 Assembly The Scotsman immediately asked him for his opinions on the subject and received a diplomatically vague response. Weatherhead pro­voked over a hundred evan­gelical ministers of the Church of Scotland to sign a letter criticising his views and stating their adherence to the historic doctrine. Many within the Church of Scotland were sur­prised at the furore because Weatherhead was only articu­lating opinions held widely among their theological teach­ers, ministers and officebearers, who had long enjoyed liberty of thought and expression on the issue. It may be true that denying the factual reality of the virgin birth cannot be regarded as heresy in a Church which does not actually specify the sub­stance of the faith to which its officebearers are bound. How­ever, we applaud those evan­gelicals who have spoken out in favour of truths which we re­joice to hold with them.

In our affirming the his­toricity of the virgin birth and in refusing to relegate it to the realm of myth, we are being true both to the witness of the Scriptures and to the main­stream creeds and confessions of the Christian era. Controver­sial pronouncements on the is­sue from theologians and churchmen are out of step with these biblical and historic per­spectives. Even the most cursory survey of the great figures of the early Church, men like Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Origen, Athanasius and Augustine, finds them all as­suming and asserting the virgin birth as the Christological foundations for succeeding centuries are laid.

The same is true of the ecumenical councils, such as Nicea in 325 and Chalcedon in 451, the Nicene Creed stating "and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary". Whatever else we may criticise these theologians and councils for, their insistence on the factual reality of the virgin birth is never in doubt. In common with all the confessions inspired by the Protestant Reformation, our Westminster Confession as­sumes that catholic Christo­logical tradition, and we who are bound to its doctrine confess Jesus Christ "being conceived by the power of the Holy Ghost in the womb of the Virgin Mary, of her substance" (VIII:II).

Though we will use the popular language of virgin birth, the proper focus is on the vir­ginal conception of Jesus. Mary conceives her son without the involvement of a human father, through the dynamic and creative agency of the Holy Spirit. Ac­cording to Luke's Gospel, the angel Gabriel appears to the virgin and explains how her pregnancy will be possible: "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you" (1:35). In Matthew an angel appears to Joseph in a dream to allay his suspicions and fears, telling him to take Mary as his wife "because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit" (1:20). The how of this is beyond us, and bio­logical speculation is irrelevant and perhaps irreverent. The Holy Spirit is enough.

While the conception was supernatural, the birth was not. The child developed naturally in the womb, and when the normal term was up Mary gave birth to her firstborn (Luke 2:6-7). She was still a virgin, as Matthew 1:25 makes clear, but we should distance ourselves from the post-biblical superstitions which began to grow up around that fact. There was the belief that Mary's hymen was not broken so that her physical virginity was miraculously preserved through the actual birth. An insistence also on Mary's perpetual virginity be­came widespread. The notion that the marriage of Mary and Joseph was never consummated founders on the natural sense of Matthew 1:25, and on the ref­erences to Jesus' brothers and sisters (Matthew 13:55-56; Mark 6:3) — they were ex­plained away as Joseph's children from a previous mar­riage or as the cousins of Jesus. Even Calvin refused to declare himself for or against the per­petual virginity of Mary (on Matthew 1:25), and the mar­ginal notes of the Geneva Bible of 1560 defended the doctrine. Myths are dangerous things.

Myth and the New Testament⤒🔗

Modern theologians have grown fond of this category, and in using it have borrowed from all manner of disciplines. Classicists, anthropologists, students of religion, scholars of literature, linguists, philoso­phers and psychologists have all been studied for their insights. Clear definitions how­ever are not easy to find. Professor Howard Marshall of Aberdeen has written:

Myth is a confusing and slippery term in theology; it is used in so many ill-defined ways by in­dividual theologians that it would be no bad thing if its use were prohibited.

It should come as no surprise if conservative evangelicals are instinctively uncomfortable with the language of myth. The term mythos is used in the later epis­tles of the New Testament, and always in a pejorative sense. Timothy is to command certain men in Ephesus not to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies (1 Timothy 1:4), and he is to have nothing to do with godless myths and old wives' tales (4:7). He is told of a time when people will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths (2 Timothy 4:4), and Titus is warned of the danger of Jewish myths (1:14). Peter contrasts such stories with the historical rooting of his faith in time and place: "We did not follow cleverly invented myths ... but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty ... when we were with him on the sacred moun­tain" (2 Peter 1:16-18). The spectacular story of the transfiguration is placed firmly in the category of history confirmed by testimony.

Myth and Modern Theology←⤒🔗

Our suspicions about myth are hardly eased when we ex­amine its pedigree in biblical studies. Nineteenth century German theology made in­creasing use of the concept as a way of understanding the mi­raculous elements in the Gos­pels. The most radical proponent of this was David Friedrich Strauss for whom the Gospels were filled with legend. The story had been mythically re­written to portray Jesus as ful­filling Messianic expectation. Accounts of miracle, from conception to ascension, were not records of historical events, but the means by which the idea of Jesus' messiahship was dramatically portrayed.

The most prominent name in the twentieth century discussion has been Rudolf Bultmann. His 1941 essay on the New Testa­ment and Myth was to have an enormous influence on theo­logical thought. Bultmann was extremely sceptical about the historicity of the Gospel narra­tives, and critical of the mytho­logical worldview which he said the New Testament assumed. He saw that as a primitive, pre-­scientific way of conceptualizing reality, one which could not be harmonised with modern knowledge. The early Christians had no other means of express­ing their understanding of Jesus' significance and their experience of the gospel. We however must engage in whole-scale demythologizing of the New Testament and its reinterpretation in exis­tentialist terms, so that modem people can encounter the gospel without the barrier of myth and miracle.

Bultmann was followed by many who continued his ap­proach or variants of it with reference to particular narratives or doctrines. In the 1960s for example Thomas Boslooper wrote an influential work on the virgin birth against this back­ground, arguing that the birth narratives were expressed in mythical form because that was the only shape in which their import could be communicated to "primitive" people. He chided those who confused the factual reality of the virgin birth with its significance. Much subsequent scholarship has maintained this disjunction of historicity and meaningfulness, and the media controversies inspired by Jen­kins in England and Weatherhead in Scotland have brought that discussion into the public domain once again. Recently the more conservative figure of Wolfhart Pannenberg has denied the historicity of the virgin birth, in the second volume of his Systematic Theology. He assigns the infancy narratives to the genre of legend, but also insists on their tremendous theological importance, in that they portray Mary as the mother of God and the model of faith.

It is surely ironic that when contemporary theologians turn history into myth, they will then accuse us of naivety for turning myth into history. Our response to all such attitudes must be to maintain the plain sense of the scriptural text, and to insist myth is an inappropriate herme­neutical tool for historical nar­rative. Those who argue for a mythic interpretation of these passages are applying a test in which the criterion is accept­ability to the modern mind. Along with that go patronizing references to the primitive mindset which had to be told biological absurdities before it could believe something was really important.

The approach which treats the stories as myth and as theologically significant is guilty of separating history and the­ology in a way which contradicts the nature of divine redemption, achieved in history by an inter­vening God. It is also evan­gelistically inept, because myth in popular parlance is equivalent to fiction. All attempts to censor the New Testament for the secular mind end at last in losing the Christ of the Gospel. As Gresham Machen wrote,

The New Testament without the miracles would he easier to be­lieve. But the trouble is, it would not be worth believing ... the thing that would be believed would be entirely different.

Myth and C. S. Lewis←⤒🔗

One very interesting ap­proach to the topic which has had a good deal of influence in evangelical circles is that of C. S. Lewis. He used the language of myth at the same time as he insisted on the historicity of virgin birth and resurrection, because for him the incarnation was myth become fact. As Lewis put it, he came to understand the story of Christ as "simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the other, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened." To understand what Lewis was saying we need to appreciate two things. First, he believed that in some way pagan myths prefig­ured the truth, so that God worked through their storytellers, sowing dreams which came to reality in Christ when the myth of imagination became historical fact.

Second, the literary scholar who was so deeply moved by the old myths maintained the terminology to encourage an aes­thetic and emotional response, "the same imaginative embrace which we accord to all myths ... For this is the marriage of heaven and earth: Perfect Myth and Perfect Fact: claiming not only our love and our obedience, but also our wonder and delight, addressed to the savage, the child, and the poet in each one of us no less than to the moralist, the scholar, and the philoso­pher." While we cannot endorse Lewis' high views of the pagan myths, we applaud his stress on historical fact and on personal wonder. However in view of the contemporary associations of myth, we believe its use in theology to be misleading and dangerous. It is a term to avoid.

The historicity of the virgin birth has been attacked on various grounds, and the objections have been well rehearsed in recent discussion.

For one thing, the paucity of its New Testament attestation is held against it, our only sources being the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. It should be noted however that the other Gospels do not deal with Jesus' birth and infancy at all, and so the two which do are united in unambi­guous testimony to a supernatural conception. Their clear witness should settle the matter. However there are other passages in the New Testament which may re­flect the belief, in the allusions and ironies of Johannine litera­ture and the meticulous vocabu­lary of Paul. For example, the likely reading of John 1:13 which refers it to Christian experience may also hint at the pattern of Christ's birth: "…children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband's will, but born of God". The retort of John 8:41, "We are not ille­gitimate children", may reflect Jewish suspicions about the cir­cumstances of Jesus' birth, which John presumably knows was the result of virginal conception but which these Jewish precursors of liberal slurs assume was illegitimate.

Conservative scholars have long seen significance in Paul's careful choice of language in connection with Christ's coming into the world, in Romans 1:3, Galatians 4:4 and Philippians 2:7. He never uses the normal word gennao of the birth of Jesus, but the more general gi­nomai. The fact that he wishes to make a distinction is highlighted in the Galatians passage when in verse 23 gennao language is used of Ishmael's birth. Of course, those who use Paul's silence to cast doubt on the virgin birth should be ready to have the argument turned against them. Paul is also silent on any human father for Jesus. Is that because he knew Jesus had no human father?

Many have criticised the Gospel narratives themselves, but these passages can bear the most stringent scrutiny. Their genuineness is demonstrated both in that they breathe a Jewish atmosphere which takes us back to the earliest traditions, but also in that they are integral to the Gospels to which they properly and unmistakably be­long. So for example, scholars have recently argued that the Greek of Luke 1-2 is full of grammatical and stylistic traits which reflect a Hebrew or Aramaic source, and also that Luke 1-2 includes some of the, major themes which are developed in the rest of a Gospel, which is so demonstrably a theological unity.

Different — but Not Contradictory←⤒🔗

These two infancy narratives are very different from one an­other, but not contradictory, independent but complementary. The argument for historicity is buttressed by having two witnesses, each telling his version of the story from his own angle, what Don Carson describes as "the strength of mutual com­patibility without collusion". Matthew focuses on Joseph, so that even the miraculous con­ception is addressed in terms of how its discovery affected him, whereas Luke's story concen­trates on Mary and may be assumed to go back to her memory of events.

Those scholars who believe Matthew and Luke to be so di­vergent as to be incompatible claim the problem of the gene­alogies of Jesus in Matthew 1:1-17 and Luke 3:23-38 as their strongest suit. Among possible responses the most popular is that Matthew gives Joseph's ancestry and Luke supplies Mary's, but the more likely resolution is that Matthew offers the legal succession-list by which Joseph could claim to be a legitimate heir to the throne of David while Luke gives Joseph's actual parents and their family tree. Biblical interest in Joseph's genealogy is sometimes adduced as evidence against the virgin birth, since if he is not the father his ancestry is irrelevant, but Joseph would have been re­garded as Jesus' legal father. References to Jesus' father and parents (Matthew 13:55; Luke 2:27, 33, 41, 43, 48; 4:22; John 1:45; 6:42) are to be understood in the light of Joseph's legal paternity and not as witness contrary to a virgin birth.

Matthew's account has been under particular attack, charged with creating the myth of the virgin birth on the basis of Isaiah 7:14, which he reads as,

The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel.

This ap­proach ignores the independent evidence of Luke's Gospel which makes no use of the text. It is also obvious from the flow of Matthew's narrative that his story is not based upon the Old Testament citation, but that the verses which contain the quota­tion are his explanatory inser­tion. Isaiah 7:14 is clearly con­sonant with the virgin birth, and can be seen to have been pre­dictive of it, but that is very different from saying that it was such an obvious candidate for the creative imagination of Mat­thew that it explains the resul­tant tradition.

Matthew's difficult use of other Old Testament citations in his infancy narratives is often held to betray scant concern for history. The assumption is that he created events out of Old Testament texts, but verses like Hosea 11:1 and Jeremiah 31:15 are so problematic that it is difficult to understand why they would be seen as Mes­sianic unless actual events first suggested them.

The contemporary criticism that Matthew's use of the Old Testament shows he was writing midrash rather than history also runs counter to the evidence, if midrashim are understood as using stories for illustrative comment on an Old Testament passage. Matthew does the op­posite, in employing Old Tes­tament texts to illustrate and confirm the story. Matthew writes history, concerned always to show that what he records is salvation-history, fulfilling Old Testament expectation.

Gospel, Apocrypha and Legend←⤒🔗

The Gospel narratives are sober and restrained, another piece of evidence in favour of their authenticity. The infancy gospels of the New Testament Apocrypha embellish the his­torical record, no doubt seeking to satisfy Christian curiosity about the birth and childhood of Jesus. So in the second century the Protevangelium of James tells us that the animals and the river nearby were motionless as Jesus was born, while in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas the child Jesus performs miracles to amuse himself and to impress others. However difficult the non-Christian mind finds the wonders of the canonical infancy narratives, they are of a com­pletely different character from the fancies of the Apocrypha.

For several generations of scholarship, many critics have focused on a very different area, the alleged parallels to the virgin birth in the legends of the an­cient world. In tales that are of­ten as crude as they are absurd we hear of heroes of classical mythology being born as a result of gods having sexual inter­course with women. We learn also of the births of historical figures, such as Plato who was said to be the son of his mother by Apollo, or Alexander and Augustus where in each case a god in the form of a serpent had intercourse with the mother. We are also taken to Egypt where each new king was the son of the god Ammon who had slept with the queen, after having first as­sumed the form of her husband, the reigning king. It is difficult to see how these alien myths could actually have been sources for the early Christians, and even if they had access to such stories it is impossible to imagine them using pagan material to explain the coming of their Saviour. The crucial point however is that none of these claimed parallels is actually a real one. They do not tell of virginal conceptions, but of conception resulting from physical intercourse between a god and a woman.

It was perhaps a mistake for some early apologists to use accounts from mythology as analogies to encourage pagans to believe in the virgin birth. Ter­tullian insists on the contrast: "It was not His lot to have as His father, by incest with a sister, or by violation of a daughter, or another's wife, a god in the shape of a serpent, or ox, or bird, or lover." The more one looks at such stories, the more one is aware of the world of difference there is between them and the content and style of the biblical narratives in all their profundity and delicacy.

Virgin Birth and Miracle←⤒🔗

At root however, many who deny the facticity of the virgin birth are motivated by an embarrassment about miracle or even an antipathy to it. They proffer historical objections, which are then patiently an­swered by conservative scholars, but still the stumbling block remains. At one level it might be argued that we are merely deal­ing with an alternative view of Scripture. We accept historical fact without question where the Bible presents it as such, whereas our opponents are open about their unwillingness to place themselves under an in­errant Scripture. Our position was neatly summed up a long time ago by Jerome: "We be­lieve that God was born of a virgin because we read it". At a deeper level though we are dealing often with a different view of God.

Our perspective is that the one who created all things, who is transcendent over what he brought into being and who is ceaselessly active within it, is able to intervene dramatically in what we call miracles. The regularities which we observe in the universe are God's customs, his ordinary way of working, and they allow us to predict what will happen on the basis of precedent, but the universe is always open to a God who is free to do the unprecedented. It was to the power of this God that the angel appealed when Mary ex­pressed her puzzlement: "For nothing is impossible with God" (Luke 1:37). The God of Scrip­ture was able to bring about the virginal conception, and the Scriptures of that God testify that he actually did so. We bow humbly before his Word, and we exult in the freedom and dy­namism of his grace.

The grace of God is pro­claimed by the virgin birth only if it really happened. Any approach which severs meaning from event here is guilty of double-think completely foreign to the biblical authors and of double-speak rightly mocked by the contemporary world. Divine grace is highlighted in the virgin conception in that through it God himself comes to be with us and for us. The par­ticular miracle is singularly appropriate, because this is not the origination of a person as in every other conception, but the advent of a divine person, the incarnation of the pre-existent Son. In the virginal conception he comes to be present in flesh, El now Immanuel, the creative and sanctifying activity of the Holy Spirit ensuring his real and sinless humanity from the mo­ment of conception. As there could be no hope of redemption arising out of the stream of sinful human history, so God breaks into the normal flow of events, intervening in sovereign grace, the miracle stressing the fact that the initiative is his alone.

The incalculable potential of his grace is hinted at in the promised overshadowing of the Spirit in Luke 1:35, recalling Genesis 1:2 and the story of creation. This child is conceived as the harbinger of a new crea­tion, and he enters history as the covenant head of a new hu­manity, come to do all that is necessary to save his people from their sins. The virginal conception functions also as a pointer to the mystery of this Jesus, whose depths we will never fathom, and as a sign of his uniqueness, which we con­tinue to assert in a world of competing saviours. We affirm the miracle as both history and sign, as a real historical event with tremendous symbolic significance, wholly congruent with the biblical portrayal of the Son of God and superbly elo­quent of the glory of divine grace.