11 - Appendix 02
V The Rev. Canon R. J. Knowling, D.D., Durham, England
Canon Knowling’s paper, " Why I Believe the Doctrine of the Virgin Birth to be True," puts clearly the chief points with which readers of his excellent books and articles will already be familiar. The following paragraphs will be of interest: The testimony of St. Irenseus has just received a remarkable strengthening by the recent discovery of a writing of the same great saint, which is accepted by Dr. Harnack as coming beyond all doubt from him, a writing in which St. Irenaeus comes before us in the character of a catechist, seeking to build up his friend, Marcian, in the knowledge of the facts and of the doctrine of the Faith. In this newly recovered document we find frequent references to the fact of our Lord’s Virgin Birth, and inferences and lessons are displayed against those who refuse to credit it, and it is stated, as Irenseus so forcibly remarks elsewhere, that the tradition thus affirmed is the common tradition, not of any drawn from the acceptance of this fact; keen opposition is one church only but of the whole Christian world. . . .
Outside Christianity there were only two sources for the derivation of the story of the Virgin Birth—Jewish or pagan. But it is not too much to say that the whole tendency of Jewish thought was wholly different, and that such a fable as the birth of the Messiah from a Virgin could have arisen anywhere more easily than among the Jews. On the other hand, where was the Christian Church to be found which would have made itself responsible for this remarkable being? We have only to turn to the language of the early Christian Apologist, Aristides, and its horror of the impurities of gods and goddesses, to be assured that such a story would not have commended itself for a moment to the early Christian commissioners, unless it could be justified by the statements of the Evangelists. . . . The present writer has elsewhere laid stress upon the fact that St. Luke in his intercourse with James, the Lord’s brother, in Jerusalem, an intercourse attested by one of the " We " sections of the Acts (21:17) would have had means of learning the details of the Saviour’s birth. And he is glad to see that the same view is not only emphasised by the Bishop of Ely [Cambridge Theological Essays, p. 406], but is rendered possible and probable by Dr. Harnack’s own admission, that St. Luke had intercourse not only with Mary, Silas, Philip, but also with James, the Lord’s brother. (LuJcas der Arzt, p. 3.) . . . In this connection it is very difficult to believe that what was known to St. Luke was unknown to St. Paul, a point which the Bishop of Ely has recently emphasised. The present writer would express his strong conviction that far too much has been made of the silence of St. Paul in his Episties. Without going into the subject (upon which he has expressed himself elsewhere) he will simply quote the words of the famous Berlin professor, Dr. Weiss, that a new creative act of God, a cancelling of the natural continuity is " an almost indispensable consequence of St. Paul’s theology" [Bibl. Theologie des Ν. T., pp. 289, 290], in face of the fact that the second Adam is the pure and sinless head of humanity in contrast to the first Adam, by whom transgression and sinful taint has been inherited by every member of his race.
VI The Rev. Principal A. E. Gar vie, D.D., New-College, London
Principal Garvie entitles his paper: " The Doctrine of the Virgin Birth of Jesus Christ our Lord: a Psychological, Ethical, and Theological Investigation." He proposes to concentrate attention on " the relation of the fact of the Virgin Birth to the doctrine of the Person of Christ, His religious consciousness, and moral character."
He thus defines his personal attitude:
While himself prepared to answer affirmatively the question, Why I believe the doctrine of the Virgin Birth to he true? as regards the evidence for the fact he holds that it offers a high degree of probability, but not of absolute certainty; as regards the significance of belief in the fact, he holds that it cannot be regarded as essential to Christian faith in the divinity of Jesus, and yet that it is accordant with and confirmatory of that faith. There are too many exact scholars and genuine Christians on the other side to warrant a confidence, which would be both immodest and uncharitable. In bearing his own personal testimony he will endeavour to show that, in view of the universal sinfulness of mankind, the unique perfection of Jesus is explained most reasonably and credibly by the fact that His birth was due, not to natural generation, but to a supernatural act of divine grace, conditioned by human faith.
Dr. Garvie emphasises first "the Universal Sinfulness of Mankind." He remarks:
About this starting-point it might seem unnecessary to say anything, were it not that there is an opinion gaining currency in circles that are not thoroughly informed on these matters that somehow modern science has compelled Christian theology to rid itself altogether of the doctrines of original sin and total depravity. That the fresh light thrown on the beginnings of human history demands some modification in the statement of the doctrines may be freely conceded, but what must be firmly denied is that the words of the prophet, " All we like sheep have gone astray" (Isaiah 13:6), or of the Apostle, " All have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23), have become obsolete, and been superseded.
He shows how Mr. F. E. Tennant, "while denying any hereditary taint in the congenital instincts or appetites of the child, recognises that the desires, which may afterwards come into conflict with conscience in the child’s development have a long start of conscience, and that accordingly the moral life is a race in which every child starts handicapped: "When will and conscience enter, it is into a land already occupied by a powerful foe,’ " and he welcomes this statement as a proof that from a thoroughly modern stand-point the fact of the universal sinfulness of mankind is not denied, only the explanation of it hitherto given is modified. The modification appears to go further than the data allow. The moral resemblance of parents and children seems to require some explanation such as the influence of the early environment does not sufficiently give. Even if we admit that sin, as involving personal choice, cannot be transmitted; yet the possibilities—instincts and appetites—which through personal choice become actualities of sin we seem to be justified in believing are in some measure determined by heredity. To put the conclusion in the most guarded terms there does appear to be universal in the race, and continued from generation to generation, a tendency which is the potency of sin. With this is now contrasted " the Unique Perfection of Jesus ": The universal sinfulness of mankind includes religious defect as well as moral depravity; for moral evil is properly described as sin only in man’s relation to God, as distrust of and disobedience to God. The unique perfection of Jesus, which stands out in solitary splendour on that dark background, is in His religious consciousness as in His moral character. As regards the absolute transcendence of the moral character of Jesus there is general agreement. [Lecky, J. S. Mill, and Schaff are quoted.] . . . There is one thing altogether lacking in the moral experience of Jesus which is found in all the saints—there is no repentance of sin, and no prayers for pardon. Only if He was, as in the Gospels He is represented as being, an absolute exception to the race m having no sin to repent of or seek pardon for, can this be regarded as consistent with the absolute moral perfection. Even the memory of sin once committed would be sufficient to forbid such an attitude. If his moral life had been a race in which he had started handicapped, or if His will and conscience had entered "into a land already occupied by a powerful foe," to repeat Mr. Tennant’s figures of speech, would such a moral conscience have been possible? Even if we were to suppose that, when His moral life began, will had such energy, and conscience such illumination, that this most powerful foe had at once been reduced to subjection, we should only be shifting the miracle from the beginning to a later stage of His moral development. In either case the moral experience of Jesus presents to us a problem for which some solution must be found. But His religious consciousness of Divine Sonship, His filial dependence on, communion with, submission to God as His Father is no less absolutely unique in its perfection. Never before, or since, has God been so known, trusted, loved, obeyed, served. [Harnack is quoted.] . . . The vision, the confidence, and the obedience of faith were seen in Jesus as in no other. In this absolute perfection of Jesus, both as regards moral character and religious consciousness, there is so great a contrast between Him and humanity in its universal sinfulness, that He cannot be included in the normal process of evolution. . . . For those who deny this absolute perfection, or who doubt that it necessarily involves as absolute a transcendence of the ordinary conditions and limitations under which human personality has its start, course, and goal, there may be here no problem clamouring for a solution; but for - those who accept the Christian confession of Christ as Divine Saviour and Lord there is a question urgently demanding an answer. This leads to the consideration of the Virgin Birth of Jesus: The writer is persuaded that the fact of the Virgin Birth is one of the data to be recognised in any adequate answer. It is sometimes maintained that the Gospels offer us three alternative, and not complementary, answers to the question. The Johannine doctrine of the Incarnation of the Logos, and the Synoptic testimony to the descent of the Spirit on Jesus at His baptism are held to be rivals to and substitutes for the explanation of the higher nature of Jesus offered in the statement in Matthew and Luke regarding the Virgin Birth. It is to be noted, however, that the first and third Evangelists seem to have had no consciousness that they were offering two contrary explanations; and without laying any undue stress on the suggestion, the writer cannot rid himself of the impression that the very emphatic repetitions in John 1:13; regarding believers as the children of God, " which were born, not of blood (αίματωv, bloods), nor of the will of the flesh (σαρκός), nor of the will of man (ανδρός) but of God," contain a covert reference to the mode of the birth of the Logos, which is in the next verse described " the Word became flesh." Without pressing these arguments, we may discover on closer scrutiny that the three explanations harmonise. As has been already urged, Jesus must have been an exception to the universal sinfulness of the race from the very beginning of His moral development, and how could the descent of the Spirit in His thirtieth year explain the sinless childhood, boyhood, youth? Is it not probable that the σαρξ which the logos became was prepared for His habitation ? The humanity had to be so constituted that the personal unity with the divinity would find in it no hindrance. As will afterwards be shown, human faith was the condition of the divine grace in the supernatural act by which the humanity was constituted, and this seems to me a more reasonable and credible explanation than the assumption, which must otherwise be made, that from the moment of union the humanity was so overborne by the divinity as to be reduced to passivity, so that none of the congenital instincts or appetites could assert themselves before the emergence of will and conscience. In the faith of the mother and of Joseph mankind offered its welcome, rendered its service to the Incarnation of the Word. The additions of Roman Catholicism (immaculate conception of the Virgin herself, etc.) to this doctrine are dismissed as without warrant. The author proceeds: In endeavouring to show that the Virgin Birth does offer us some explanation of the unique, absolute perfection of Jesus, we must beware of too confident a statement. We are not in a position to affirm that it was only in this way and no other that it was possible for the personal development of Jesus in goodness and godliness to get such a beginning, without any handicap (to repeat the figure already used). We may, if we please, conjecture that even if Jesus had been born naturally, the divine grace might have so guarded the infant mind, heart, will, that no factor was allowed to enter into His personal development which could have hindered this unique, absolute perfection. But, while in the evangelical narratives we have no evidence for such an assumption, the record of the Virgin Birth lies before us, and this we are compelled to explain as a fable (an enterprise which in the writer’s judgment has been so far unsuccessful), or to accept as a fact to which either we can assign no significance or value, and which, therefore, becomes a burdensome mystery, or which, as the writer prefers, we must endeavour so to interpret that it becomes intelligible.
Stress is laid on the ethical conditioning of the Incarnation : The features of this supernatural conception which are to be emphasised are on the one hand the divine grace which is spontaneously initiative, and on the other hand the human faith which is responsively receptive. ... In the Incarnation of the Son of God faith from the beginning was the accompaniment of grace. Our Protestant dread of the superstition of Mariolatry should not be allowed to prevent our frank and full recognition of the blessedness and honour of the mother of Jesus in the trust and the task committed to her. She was not "disobedient to the heavenly vision," nor distrustful of the heavenly race. "Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy Word" (Luke 1:38). We may venture to believe that this human faith was the necessary condition of the Divine grace in the supernatural act of the conception. . . . The faith of Joseph, also blessed and honoured of God as the chosen guardian of the mother and the child, must not be overlooked. He, too, had his trust and task from God. He humbly and obediently accepted the divine communication in regard to his betrothed. In their companionship during the trying days until the birth of the child doubtless his faith confirmed and sustained hers. If the paternal function physically was not his, it was his morally and religiously. He might be regarded as one of the parents of Jesus, not according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit. The reasonableness of the Virgin Birth is thus shown:
Granted the necessity that His personal life should not be a race in which He started handicapped, and that His conscience and will should not enter a land already occupied by a powerful foe, the postulate is fulfilled it may be maintained confidently, in the Virgin Birth in such a way as least disturbs the laws and order of human development. A heredity and an environment are provided, adequate to, and appropriate for, the absolutely unique result, in which the supernatural does not suppress violently, or expel entirely the natural, but completely pervades and transforms it. The divine initiative in the supernatural conception starts a process which runs a normal course, and yet attains the abnormal result. There is not a prodigality, but an economy of the miraculous. The essay closes by showing that the value of Christ’s life as a pattern is not affected by His supernatural birth.
VII The Rev. H. Wheeler Robinson, M.A., Rawdon, by Leeds, England The aim of Mr. Robinson’s very full paper is " to approach the Nativity narratives from the standpoint of men and women whose thought was dominated by the Old Testament Scriptures." In the difficulty of summarising a paper which involves so much detail, it may be simplest to give the author’s conclusions in his own words. He says: The points which have been ascertained may now be collected :
1. The mystery of the physiological process of conception and birth, regarded as a point of entrance for divine activity. The continuity of life, under divine control, from the moment of conception onwards.
2. The idea of Spirit as acting on and through persons to personal ends. The close interrelation of " soul" and " body " in the Hebrew idea of personality. The absence of any idea that Virgin Birth was necessary to eliminate the taint of sin from the personality of Jesus.
3. The absence of any Ο. T. prophecy of Virgin Birth, yet the consonance of such birth with Hebrew ideas of virginity. The author adds:
There is no need to appeal to direct Gentile influence on the formulation of the belief. Given these conditions of thought, and the unique personality of Jesus, we may proceed to explain away the narratives as a natural inference —if we want to explain them away. But this raises the whole attitude to miracle. . . . On historical grounds, we are driven to admit the truth of the Resurrection of Jesus in a unique way. Why may we not, then, accept a unique beginning as well as a unique ending to this unique life? The paper concludes: In accepting for himself the Virgin Birth in this sense, and on the lines here briefly outlined, the writer feels bound to state that it ought to be possible for Christians to find common ground, whatever their differences on the physiological question. If God is recognised to be in Christ, all theories of the manner of His presence are secondary to the fact itself. ... It is possible that there never will be agreement amongst believers on such a subject; and there is no New Testament warrant for the exclusion of any who cannot accept the Nativity narratives in the sense intended by their writers, which it has been the chief aim of this paper to elucidate.
VIII The Rev. Prof. Theod. Zahn, D.D., Erlangen, Germany This distinguished scholar contributes a paper which is in part a confession of personal faith, and in part a discussion of points in the testimony of the Gospels— especially of the Gospel of John. To the question, " Why do I believe the doctrine of the Virgin Birth to be true ? " he replies: My answer to this question can be given in very few words: I believe that that doctrine is true, or, in other words, I believe that the miraculous event which is set forth in that doctrine did actually happen, because I believe in Jesus Christ, who did redeem me and will redeem me from the guilt of sin and from the power of Death. These words contain everything that I can give in answer; but they do not say everything that is to be said to-day. The same disturbance of the Christian minds of all countries and of all denominations, which has been the occasion to ask a number of theologians, of English, Erench, and German speech, about their personal attitude towards that doctrine, renders some explanation necessary of my above-given confession of faith.
Later he says, after contrasting the primitive with the " modern " faith: " Therefore my faith in Jesus as my Redeemer stands and falls with the grateful recognition of the facts which form the contents of the Gospel." Do these facts include the Virgin Birth ? He grants, " No word of Jesus has come down to us which refers to it distinctly. Nowhere did Paul unequivocally declare his belief in it." Yet he contends: " The Virgin Birth of Christ was an article of faith of the Church as early as the first century, and we may assume that it will be so as long as there is a Church, for that article is a necessary element of the faith on which the Church lives."
Dealing with the testimony of the Fourth Gospel, Zahn takes up a number of points to show that John was not unacquainted with, or indifferent to, the earthly origin of Jesus. His characteristic positions are seen in the following:
We can no more imagine that John did not know the tradition of the Virgin Birth than that he did not form any opinion about that report. Not only the unanimous tradition of the ancient Church, but likewise the comparative study of the Gospels forces us to recognise that the Fourth Gospel was written later than the other three, and that the author expected his first readers to have a knowledge of the fundamental outlines of the Synoptical tradition. Since, further, the accounts in Matthew i. and Luke i. manifestly originated independently of each other, it follows that the essential features in which both accounts agree was a matter of general knowledge at the time when these Gospels were composed, and it results from Luke 1:2 ff., that this occurred at the time and under the eyes of the " eye witnesses from the beginning." Besides, Matthew, ch. i., already takes into consideration the Jewish slurs cast upon the respectability of the birth of Jesus; the latter, of course, are nothing but a malicious caricature of the Christian tradition of the Virgin Birth. Therefore, even the Jews of Palestine knew that tradition as a common belief of the Christians among them. Considering all this, it is incredible, from a historical point of view, that that tradition did not arise until after the years 60 to 70, and it is as incredible that it was unknown to the Fourth Evangelist and his first readers. If Cerinthus denied it, John knew it, and we may suppose that he confessed his faith in it. This can even be proved.
According to the usual text of John 1:13; this passage treats of the men to whom Jesus has imparted the right and the capacity to become children of God. That applies to all who in the time of the Evangelist believed in the name of Jesus (John 1:12). Of these, he says that they are begotten and born, not of double blood, that is, by the mixture of the blood of two people, not of a will of the flesh, not of the will of a man, but of God. Even if there did not follow the statement in John 1:14; that the Logos became flesh, it could not be misunderstood that verse 13 says of the birth of the children of God exactly what is said by the tradition of the Virgin Birth of Jesus. The begetting and the birth of the Only Begotten Son of God is directly used as the model for representing the begetting and birth of children of God, who have become so through Him. For, why else should John nor have been satisfied to deny that the children of God are products of a will of the flesh like the children of man ? Why does he assert beyond that negatively that they were not called into being by the mixture of the blood of a man and a woman and not by the will of a man ? Just this triple denial seems unnatural, even if John wanted to compare the birth of the children of God with the Birth of the Only Son of God. Why is he not satisfied with the simple opposition of flesh and spirit as Jesus uses it according to John 3:6; where he speaks expressly of the Second Birth in opposition to the natural birth. To that we must add some grave stylistic objections to the traditional text of John 1:13. Its connection with John 1:12 is very hard; for, not the definition of the faith in the name of Christ, which forms the close of John 1:12, but the definition of the quality of being a child of God is what is determined by John 1:13. Just as unnatural seems the connection of the clause about the incarnation of the Logos in John 1:14 with John 1:13 by an " and." Wherever in the Prologue John passes to a new sphere of thought, he uses the asyndetic form (John 1:3, John 1:6, John 1:9), and by the word " and" he adds only such sentences as belong to the same sphere as the preceding idea. Compare the sentences in John 1:1, John 1:4, John 1:10-14. All these objections disappear, if we recognise as the original text the reading which in any case is exceedingly ancient and which says, " He was not born of double blood and not of a will of the flesh, nor was He born of a man’s will, but of God, and the Logos became flesh and we saw His glory," etc. This is not the place to show in detail that these clauses without any connection in relative form with John 1:12 could be read in all Church copies of the Occident from Irenseus to the last years of the fourth century, and that the reading even left its traces in the far-off Orient. Tertullian was probably right in accusing the Valentinians of being the first to change the singular in John 1:13 to the plural. That this reading passed into Church copies of the Greek Orient is readily understood. Since in verse 14 the subject is not left indeterminate, as in John 1:10-11, but is given by the name of the Logos, it seemed as if the Logos and His entry into human life was mentioned here first, and not in John 1:13. But just in John 1:14 the use of the name of the Logos was necessary, because John wanted to remind of verse 1 and wanted to say that He who at the beginning was God with God, had become, by the begetting and birth described in verse 13, a man of flesh and blood and at the same time the One Begotten Son of God. It is very easily understood that some orthodox Greek connected John 1:13 with John 1:12 by an interpolated relative pronoun; that way, the interpretation of that clause as referring to a special class of select spiritual men, which was popular among the Gnostics, was rendered impossible, and its interpretation was insured as referring to all faithful Christians.
John has therefore not only indirectly shown his familiarity with the Virgin Birth of Jesus and omitted any opposition to it, but he has confessed it with full sounding testimony. If the Fourth Evangelist is the disciple who, in compliance with the last will of the dying Jesus, took Mary into his house (John 8:26) we cannot imagine any stronger testimony than this; for, what men can know of the birth of Jesus, that was known to the mother who has borne our Lord.
IX The Rev. Prof. R. Seeberg, D.D., Berlin, Germany
Prof. Seeberg’s discussion of the article, " Born of the Virgin Mary," turns in part on his peculiar Christology, which he explains to mean that the Divine Spirit as the Personal Redeeming Will of God (dogmatically the " Logos ") united Himself with the man Jesus so as to become One with Him, penetrating Him by His energy, and forming Him to be His organ. His paper, however, is a very thorough handling of the crucial points in the controversy, with the result of showing that the derivation of the Virgin Birth from pagan myths or from Ο. T. prophecy is inadmissible, and that nothing militates against the acceptance of the historical fact. He sums up in the following propositions: The result of the historical examination is therefore briefly this:
1. The miraculous origin of Jesus, reported by Matthew and Luke, has the meaning that God created Jesus as He created Adam, in order that He might be His organ.
2. That miraculous origin of Jesus is to be recognised as an historical fact, because well-informed authors report it without any tendency or object in view, and because it is testified to by the unprejudiced belief of the entire ancient Church, as well as by the Jewish slanders of Mary.
3. On the other side, the denial of the Virgin Birth on the part of the radical Jewish-Christians is caused by a tendency.
4. The efforts to show the story to have been a myth, either by falling back on pagan myths or on Jewish conceptions or views, are historically untenable.
5. The silence of the old source of the Gospels, of the primitive Christian Baptismal Confession, of John, of Paul, and of the other authors of the New Testament, is unintelligible as long as we face it from the point of view of the modern popular Dogmatics; but it is readily understood, if we take the question up from the point of view of the original Christology.
He asks in closing whether the article has a religious significance which warrants us retaining it in our Creed, and answers the question in the affirmative. " We have," he says, " to pay regard to the ’ weak in faith,’ but we must not make them masters of the faith of the Church." He shows that a profound doctrinal interest is involved in the Article, when taken in connection with a just view of Christ.
If we now look at the resistance we men make to God, and see how our whole nature, burdened and weakened by the long inheritance of sinful tendencies and habits, opposes the will and the truth of God, we can hardly understand how a man who has that tendency towards evil in him from his birth could become the organ of God in the absolute way that Jesus did. The more closely we become acquainted with the man Jesus, with the absolute truth of His words, with the perfect union of His will with the divine will within Him, with the freshness and originality of His powerful human individuality, the more loudly does the question arise whether this man really could have originated like all other men, open from the first to evil, and inclined towards it. . . . Here is the point where the history of the miraculous birth of Jesus comes in. It solves for us a riddle which is much greater than the riddle which it itself presents to us.