12 - Appendix 03
X The Rev. Prof. H Bavinck, DD, Amsterdam, Holland This eminent Dutch theologian devotes considerable space to the right method of investigating the subject of the Virgin Birth. He contrasts the analytical method, common in scientific and historical investigation, which supposes that the inquirer does not know anything of the subject he inquires into, and proceeds by unbiassed consideration of the phenomena presented to it; and the synthetic, shown to be needful also in science, which starts from ideas already given. In every science both these methods are employed, and it is only a question of degree as to how far one or the other method has predominance.
Prof. Bavinck shows that the one-sided application of the analytical method to the Gospels can only lead to destructive and negative results, and illustrates from modern criticism. " The Virgin Birth especially is from the standpoint of analytical investigation a stumbling-block." The analytic method in theology, as in every science, needs to be completed by the synthetic. In psychology, the psychical phenomena lead up to the knowledge of the soul itself; but in the same way the knowledge of the soul helps us to understand and interpret the psychical phenomena. A man’s character may be explained by his words and deeds, but the knowledge of the person himself gives us more insight into his feelings and acts. . . . Life, conscience, will, religious and moral feelings, etc., are only understood because we bring" with us an idea about all these things, borrowed from our own living personality. . . . The words and the acts of Christ certainly shed light upon His Person; but the Person of Christ on the other hand makes clear His speech and deeds. The miracles of Jesus are seen from a quite different point of view, if I acknowledge Him to be the holy Son of God, from that in which they would if I honour Him only as a religious genius. And so it is with the whole substance of Christian belief.
Accordingly, Prof. Bavinck holds, in all these and other theological investigations, the principal and real question is: What think ye of Christ? Consciously or unconsciously, this question is always put in the foreground, and all investigations on either side are ruled by the answer to this question. . . . By this alone theology preserves its religious character. The answer does not depend on critical and historical investigation, but on the regeneration of the heart. No man speaking by the Spirit of God calleth Jesus accursed, and no man can say that Jesus is the Lord but by the Holy Ghost. In dealing with Christ’s image in the New Testament, Prof. Bavinck gives special attention to one point—the identity of the self-consciousness that we find in Christ everywhere.
It is always the same Person, the same I, that encounters us in the Christ of the New Testament. This self-consciousness is quite human, more human than in any one of us, but humanity is not the essence, but the form of its existence.
Later in the paper, Prof. Bavinck connects with this an argument with the Virgin Birth. Because Christ was an eternal divine Person,
He could not be quite passive in the moment of conception as we are: He was sent by His Father into the world, but he came also Himself with full consciousness and will. . . . He could not be conceived, as we are, quite passively, and could not come in this way into existence, but, because He previously existed, His conception was His own deed. He assumed consciously and freely our human nature.
Another point of view from which Prof. Bavinck argues the necessity of the Virgin Birth is the relation of Christ to the world as Saviour.
He did not become this by natural development of His earthly life in the way of evolution. He came as a Saviour, because He was such before according to the counsel and will of His Father. Then it behoved Him to be like unto His brethren in all things, but nevertheless to be a unique Person, not a common member of mankind, but the Head of a new Covenant, the root of a new generation.
He connects this with the terms of the old theology, that
He could not and might not be born under the Covenant of works, subordinate to Adam, and subjected to the guilt, sin, and death of the race. But, like Adam himself, He had to be formed directly by the hand of God, not of the dust of the ground, but of the human flesh and blood in Mary’s holy womb.
Unlike some others, Prof. Bavinck holds that, viewed in the light of the divine personality and redeeming mission of Christ, the Virgin Birth is not a strange fact in His life, not a superfluous addition without significance for His own Person and for our belief, but a natural and necessary event in the life of our Lord, as natural and necessary as His death and resurrection. It is in full harmony with the whole.
Rejection of this mystery is therefore not an innocent XI The Rev. Peof. E. Doumergue, D.D., Montauban, France
Prof. Doumergue describes his paper as " simply the reflections of an historian, who is accustomed to apply the historical methods."
He dismisses the a priori objection to miracle, and limits himself to pointing out that the miracle of the Supernatural Birth is really " less miraculous than, for thing. One cannot defend such a rejection by an appeal to the silence of the Apostles. Though we believe in the supernatural birth of Christ, we do not mention it every day in our preaching. The central facts of the Gospel are the death and resurrection of our Lord, not His supernatural birth and incarnation. The Cross of Christ has therefore been the herugma of the Apostles, and ought to be ours also. But though we do not mention this mystery every day, it is quite another thing to deny and reject it. That the Christian Church has never done. From the first, when Mary told this mystery of her heart, the Church believed her. There has not been any opposition to this doctrine but from the side of the Ebionites and the Gnostics—not on critical and historical, but on dogmatic grounds. And just so in these days, the rejection of the Virgin Birth is generally combined with the rejection of the Apostolic testimony about the resurrection and ascension, the Messiahship and divine Sonship of our Lord. instance, the Resurrection." " No doubt, we can find for the Resurrection certain analogies in nature; but the analogies for the miraculous Birth are of a different and more significant character." He instances the facts of Parthenogenesis. With reference to " legends," he asks whether these do not rather speak to " a human need, a human instinct," to which the miraculous birth of Christ corresponds.
He then comes to the great argument, the direct, positive argument in favour of the Supernatural Birth. It is the corollary of the entire Life of the Christ, and of the part (role) which the witnesses of that Life, the Evangelists and the Apostles, attributed to the Christ. The present crisis, which is so troublesome, so harassing, is the result of the contest between two theologies: one leads quite naturally to the affirmation; the other leads, no less naturally, to the denial of the Supernatural Birth.
It is on that fact, and because of that fact, that the two schools separate; much more than because of any other fact, even the Resurrection, And why? Because, very logically, the decisive question is always the question of origin and of nature. Whence does the Christ come? Whence does Christianity come? What is the nature of the Christ, and of Christianity? One Theology answers: the Christ is God who has become a man; the other Theology answers: he is a man who has become God. Heavenward! Earthward! That is exactly, precisely, the special point—the point, however, on which everything depends, on which the present theological discussion in the entire world turns.
He illustrates the character of the new humanity-theology from Wernle, who contends that, though Jesus had a sort of moral divinity, " in spite of it all, he did not pass beyond the limits of pure humanity " (des rein menschlichen). In dealing with the argument from silence, he has an interesting quotation from Biedermann:
One understands how as rationalistic a theologian as Biedermann, who does not admit for himself the miraculous birth, writes: " John does not explain how the Logos became flesh, but he knows, evidently, the Miraculous Birth."
He points out that " in order to originate, to form, to develop, a legend needs time," and the time in this case is wanting. The style of the reports of Matthew and Luke shows that " these reports belong to the most ancient documents which are contained in the New Testament" He adopts the view of Zahn that Matthew’s narrative is a protest against the slander that Jesus was the son of Mary conceived in adultery. But if Matthew protests against the slanders, to what epoch must those slanders go back, which were older than the epoch in which Matthew wrote? Again we are face to face with a primitive belief.
We can, therefore, at the least, conclude with Bovon, the dogmatist of Lausanne, who is so independent of traditional orthodoxy: " In the present state of the question, it would require a great deal of assurance to declare that Jesus was not born as the Biblical authors report."
XII The Rev. H. C. G. Moule, D.D., Bishop of Durham The Bishop of Durham furnishes a succinct and devout statement of the reasons for believing in the Virgin Birth of our Lord, which it is to be hoped will be published in another form. He builds his argument largely on the character of Jesus in the Gospels, regarding which he says: " More and yet more, as life advances, and as experience tests and discriminates opinions and arguments, the supreme and self-evidential value of the Evangelic Portrait of our Lord affirms itself to my deepest reason."
It is perhaps only necessary here to quote a striking passage on the contrast of the Canonical with the Apocryphal Gospels, and his closing summary.
I call attention here, as we may do everywhere in the Canonical Gospels, to the eloquent contrast between the restraint and sober dignity of their narratives, which yet are so full of wonders, and the narratives of the so-called Apocryphal Gospels and the kindred literature; such as the Gospel of the Infancy, the Anaphora Pilati, and the lately recovered fragments of the Gospel of Peter. These writings, broadly speaking, emanate from the same age of the world and from the same race and region as the Canonical Gospels. But compare the character of the two literatures, in their picture of the supernatural. The canonical writers never, for a moment, give us the grotesque, the gigantesque, in their accounts. The apocryphal writers revel in such things. The flight into Egypt appears in them as a succession of fantastic miracles. The dying thief addresses the Lord on the cross in a long oration; he is sent with a written order for admission to the guardians of Paradise; he appears in regal pomp after death in Galilee. The Lord’s resurrection in the Gospel of Peter, is described as the exit from the sepulchre of a Being whose head is higher than the clouds in the sky, and the cross moving automatically, follows him as he steps forth. I know few methods at once so simple and so impressive for revising a consciousness of the majestic sanity and veracity of the Canonical Gospels as to peruse, in close succession, a few pages of the apocryphal stories and then, let us say, the last two chapters of St. John or the first two chapters of St. Luke.
Yes, the great yet tender narrative of Annunciation and Nativity bears in its very tissue all the deepest characters of truthfulness. Some of its finest and most beautiful lines suggest powerfully that its writer drew his knowledge from a quarter authentic above all others, from the Holy Mother herself. Nothing is more easy than to think that St. Luke had ample opportunity for consulting her. . . . So I close my answer to the question at the head of my essay. To sum it up in an inverted order, beginning from the end: I believe the spotless Virgin Birth of our most Holy Lord because I have a strong confidence in the trustworthiness of the original assertion of it in the Gospels. I believe it because I take it to be supremely and profoundly congruous with the altogether unique Person and Character of Him of whom it is asserted. I believe it in harmony (a harmony which is a powerful aid to a reasonable faith) with a continuous belief, unbroken throughout the whole Christian era from the apostolic age to ours, and which has found a continual verification, from the spiritual view-point, in the adoring faith of the saints of God.
XIII The Rev. W. H. Griffith-Thomas, D.D., Oxford
Dr. Griffith-Thomas entitles his paper, " The Virgin Birth—Reasons for Belief," and aims at stating " in brief and popular language the general position." " Without concentrating on any particular arguments in favour of the doctrine it is proposed to give several reasons which singly and cumulatively support a belief in the Virgin Birth." It is another paper to which general currency should be given. The author follows lines analogous to those in the foregoing lectures in discussing the genuineness and integrity of the Gospel records, the early witness of the Church, and the necessity of the miraculous birth to account for the uniqueness of the life of Jesus. " It may fairly be contended that such an unique life demands an unique origin and entrance into the world."
" The one rock," he argues, " on which all non-miraculous theories are shattered is the historic Person of the man Christ Jesus. He has to be accounted for. The effect demands an adequate cause, and we Christians claim that the Virgin Birth alone gives this adequate explanation of His mode of entrance upon His earthly life." On the silence of the Apostles, Dr. Griffith-Thomas remarks: The preaching of the fact of the Incarnation rather than the mode is the true method of presenting the Gospel; first what Christ is and only then how He came to be what He is. In these considerations of the true perspective of Christian teaching we may rightly explain the silence of St. Paul and St. John. There was no need of the Virgin Birth for evangelistic purposes, but only for the intellectual instruction of Christian people. Adequate reasons could be given for silence on this point in the earliest years of the Church, but to argue from this silence to a disbelief, or at any rate to an ignorance of the doctrine on the part of the early Christians, is not only precarious in the highest degree, but really contradicts the facts associated with the early date of Luke’s Gospel.
He concludes:
We see no reason for rejecting the testimony of the Gospels and the witness of the whole Church to the Virgin Birth. If the narratives of the Gospels are not true they are a deliberate fiction, for there is no other alternative. And if the Church has been mistaken for centuries it is certainly the greatest and most widespread persistent delusion that has ever been known. Two almost insuperable difficulties appear in this connection. (1) How did the idea of the Virgin Birth arise so soon if it was not based on fact? (2) How were the narratives of the Gospels accepted so early and universally if they were not historical? . . . The ultimate decision will only be arrived at by settling the question what Jesus came in the world to do. If the one thing that man needs is illumination, then ideas will suffice and no Divine Incarnation is necessary, but if there is such a thing as sin in the world we must produce a Divine Sinless Redeemer to deal with it. For such a Redeemer the only adequate explanation, so far as His earthly origin is concerned, is the ancient belief of the Church Universal that He was "conceived of the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary."
XIV The Rev. Prof. Henry Cowan, D.D., Aberdeen, Scotland
Prof. Cowan writes on the " Testimony of the Sub-Apostolic Age to the Virgin Birth of our Lord," and his paper is a carefully marshalled statement of the evidence on that subject. The testimonies of Ignatius, Aristides, and Justin are presented. The Pastor of Hernias is one of the books sometimes alleged to be silent on the Virgin Birth, but Prof. Cowan points to a passage " in which the Virgin Birth appears to be alle-gorically declared." He shows how the Apocryphal Protevangelium of James and the pseudonymous Gospel of Peter attest (the former directly, the latter by suggestion) the Virgin Birth. The fact is made use of that " several heretical sects which nourished in the Sub-Apostolic Age either accepted the Virgin Birth or adopted a Christology suggested by it, and thus recognised the authority of the tradition regarding it." Later testimonies—Christian, heretical, Jewish—follow. As respects results: The general belief of the Church in the closing years of the Apostolic Age has a bearing on the genuineness and historicity of Matthew i., ii., and of Luke i., ii.; on their genuineness because such belief removes any a priori reason for supposing that the narratives of the Infancy had no place in the Gospels as originally composed; on their historicity because if the records of those four chapters were in any important particulars untrue, the errors must have been repudiated by many instead of being generally accepted by the Church.
He thus comments on the alleged silence of St. John:
Whatever weight, rightly or wrongly, may be attached to this silence is outweighed by that belief in the Virgin Birth which sub-apostolic testimony shows to have been general during the closing years of St. John’s life. For surely if such belief was really unfounded, St. John must have known it to be so, owing to his special intimacy with Mary, who was consigned to his care and lived in his home. The propagation, moreover, of the alleged error took place before his very eyes; for he lived in his old age at Ephesus, the capital of that province of Asia where the Virgin Birth is specially known to have been acknowledged.
If John, then, knew that the belief which had become so widespread among the Christians around him was erroneous, can we conceive of him, as an honest man, sanctioning by silence the growth of what he knew to be a fable into a prominent part of the Christian Creed? Silence in such a case would have been unpardonable; while on the other hand, any protest which he made could not but have been memorable and effective. The absence of protest on his part is explicable only on the supposition that the Church’s belief in her Lord’s Virgin Birth was well founded.
XV Mr. Joseph Jacobs, Litt.D., Yonkers, Ν. Y.
Mr. Jacobs writes as a Jew on " The Virgin Birth from the Standpoint of Jewish Science and of Folklore." His blunt position is: " There is no Jewish standpoint with regard to the Virgin Birth."
Throughout the wide extent of Jewish literature there is not a single passage which can bear the construction that the Messiah should be miraculously conceived. The passage (Isaiah 7:14-16) is now universally recognised by Christian scholars to be entirely mistranslated by the Septuagint and by the Gospel of St. Matthew. The only basis for any such construction being put upon the passage is a mistranslation of the Septuagint of a word which in Hebrew has no reference to virginity. The word, ’almah used in that passage is derived from a root meaning to be mature, and simply implies that the young woman in question is of a marriageable age. The fact that it is used in Proverbs 30:19; of " the way of a man with a maid," is sufficient to prove that there is no idea of virginity attached to the word. This is now recognised by all scholars, Christian as well as Jewish. The fathers of the Church took the opposite view for obvious reasons, and their theories prevailed to the end of the eighteenth century, when, to use the words of the Rev. Dr. Skinner in the Cambridge Bible for schools, "it began to be recognised that on the philological question the Jews were right." . . . The Jewish interpretation of the Scriptures never saw in this passage anything corresponding to a Virgin Birth. , This is sufficiently indicated by the absence of any suggestion in the very wide apocryphal and apocalyptic literature of the Jews which can be dated before the birth of Christ. These visions and prophecies are filled with innumerable traits of a supernatural kind, but they never suggest that the Messiah shall be born otherwise than as a man. The traits of the Jewish Messiah in these works have been brought together in an excellent work by Prof. James Drummond, The Jewish Messiah, a Critical History of the Messianic Idea among the Jews, from the Rise of the Maccabees to the Closing of the Talmud. There is not a scintilla of evidence in all this literature of anything corresponding to the Virgin Birth. Indeed, in the celebrated dialogue between Justin Martyr and the Jew Trypho, who has been identified by some with the Rabbi Tarphon of the Talmud, the latter distinctly remarks of the Jews of his time: " We all expect that the Christ will come into being as a man for men" (Dialogue, XI, 9).
During the Middle Ages several renegade Jews tried to convince their former co-religionists of the truths of Christianity from the traditional Scriptures and holy books revered by the Jews. The whole of the two Talmuds of Jerusalem and Babylon and the Midrashic literature connected with them were ransacked to prove the Trinity, the Virgin Birth, etc., but not a single passage could be discovered which directly, or by implication, implied that it was the Jewish belief that the Messiah would be born in any supernatural manner. Mr. F. P. Badham, in The Academy of London (June 8, 1895, pp. 485-7) has brought together eight passages from the mediaeval controversialists which might seem to have some bearing on the subject. The majority of them no longer exist in the MSS. of Rabbinic literature, and are quoted by apostates whose bona fides leaves one in doubt. Most of the passages come from Raymond Martini’s Pugio Fide, who had access to books no longer extant, but, even granting the authenticity of these passages, they are much too vague to bear the interpretation placed upon them by the Dominican monk. 1. The latter part of the paper is taken up with examples borrowed from Hartland, Charency, etc., to show that virgin birth is a common feature in the folk-lore of nations. " In Greek mythology it was quite usual to consider the birth of many deities and demigods as occurring without the intervention of a father." He instances Semele, Cybele, Adonis, HephaBstus, etc. Miscellaneous legends are cited from Persia, Tartary, Korea, Japan, China, Peru, etc. He says, " Perhaps the most remarkable analogy of the virgin birth of Jesus is that of the virgin birth of Plato as reported by Diogenes Laertius in his life of Plato." " Thus," he says, " from all portions of the globe evidence accumulates—and I have given only a selection of the most striking cases—that it is the natural instinct of the folk to claim for their heroes and demigods a supernatural birth, in most cases through Parthenogenesis." One remark more: " To an outsider, indeed, it appears that all these attempts to prove the supernatural character of Jesus’ birth and family are logical consequences of the attempts to give Him a divine character."
[Dr. Jacobs has been misled by his authorities. The cases he cites from Greek mythology (Perseus, Adonis, _______________________________________________________ 1 See above, pp. 168ff
Cybele, etc.) were not, even in the legend, cases of virgin birth (cf. Smith’s or other Classical Dictionary), and in no case did they relate to historical personages. It is not alleged in the worthless fable of Diogenes Laertius that Plato was born of a virgin (cf. Gore, Dissert. p. 291). The unsifted stories from other peoples are useless for comparison with an historical account, and in any case bear no analogy to the Virgin Birth of Jesus. Even if fables be found of a boy growing out of an egg (Korea), or of the Japanese god of fishes being born from the hand of the first woman, or of a woman conceiving from eating a red fruit which she found, and giving birth to the ancestors of the Chinese Emperor, what has this to do with the stories in the Gospels ?] XVI Prof. Ismar J. Peritz, Ph.D., Syracuse, Ν. Y.
Dr. Peritz writes as a Jewish convert on " The Hebrew-Christian Attitude Towards the Virgin Birth." He divides Jewish converts to Christianity into three classes, according as their training and habit of thought have been: 1. Talmudic; 2. Historical; and 3. Critical. He finds in the Talmud, Targums, and later Jewish literature, certain ideas which prepare the way for the teaching of the New Testament on the Virgin Birth of Christ—especially the ideas of the pre-existence of the Messiah, of the Memra-Logos, and of the Metraton (an angelic representative of the Divinity). He indicates certain parallels to the Virgin Birth in a Midrash of Rabbi Moses Hadarshan, a French exegete of the eleventh century, who " had evidently imbibed Christian conceptions." On the historical side, he dwells on the services rendered by Hebrew-Christians in modern times to the defence of the Virgin Birth, instancing specially Neander and Edersheim. In the critical field, he gives an account of the labours of Dr. G. Dalman, who, though he " does not specifically discuss the Virgin Birth, deals with it in part in connection with his treatment of the title ’ Son of God.’ " He claims that the representative Hebrew-Christian attitude is in harmony with that of the New Testament, and is on the side of the unique birth, life, character, and mission of Jesus the Messiah.
XVII Pasteur Hirsch, Paris This writer discusses historically " The Evolution that has led from the Miraculous Birth of Jesus Christ to the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception."
XVIII The Rev. Prof. Gabriel Oussani, D.D., Dunwoodie, N. Y.
Prof. Oussani writes from the Roman Catholic point of view, and likewise traces " The Various Developments of the Doctrine of Christ’s Virgin Birth in the Catholic Church." On the Virgin Birth itself he makes a strong point of the patristic testimony, and of the inseparable connection between this doctrine and the dogma of the divinity of Christ. His argument is thus put:
Granted that the Eternal Son of God did at a certain moment of time take flesh by a real incarnation in the Womb of Mary; granted that He was born as man, without change of personality or addition of another personality, but simply by the assumption of new nature and by an entrance into new conditions of life and experience; granted in this sense the Incarnation of the Son of God in the womb of Mary—can we conceive it to have taken place by the ordinary process of generation? Do not we inevitably associate with the ordinary process of generation the production of a new personality? Must not the denial of the Virgin Birth involve the position that Jesus was simply a new human person in whatever specially intimate, relations with God? And this argument becomes almost irresistible when the question is removed from the idea of incarnation strictly considered, to the associated idea of the sinless humanity, the humanity of a second Adam.
Christ was a new departure in human life, a marvellous phenomenon, which becomes still more marvellous, more impenetrable and altogether unintelligible were we to ascribe to Him the same process of generation as to other mortals. With reference to the later developments he is careful to put them on a different basis from the doctrine of the Virgin Birth. Thus, the dogma of Mary’s perpetual virginity has a powerful support in early Christian tradition, theology, and worship. It must be admitted, however, that viewed as an historical fact it has no explicit support in Scripture. The dogma must therefore be considered as the result of a development, which development, strictly speaking, does not necessarily imply its theological or historical truth or falser hood. As regards Joseph’s perpetual virginity, it has no ground whatever either in Scripture or in early Christian tradition and literature. The Gospel’s statements, were they to be rationally interpreted, are explicitly against it, although, as a specimen of dogmatic or rather theological process of evolution, it falls quite naturally within the sphere of progressive development, so apparent and visible in both Catholic and Protestant theology alike. And generally:
It is evident, however, that if a process of development can be shown to have taken place in the second and especially the third stage of the doctrine concerning the parentage and birth of Christ, no such process can be shown to have taken place in the first stage of the doctrine, as it is perfectly demonstrable that the doctrine, in its first stage, relating to the divine conception of Christ and His Virgin Birth, was the primitive belief of the apostles, evangelists and disciples of our Lord, and at a time when theological development could not yet have taken place in the Church. Hence, if the doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Mary and of Joseph can be attacked on Scriptural and critical grounds, that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus stands as solid as a rock. The remaining part of the paper discusses the theories of the origin of the doctrine of the Virgin Birth from Jewish and pagan sources.