Before you read this new thread, please take the time to read two other threads of mine. 1) "Can We Today Believe in Miracles?" Here I show the difficulty modern people have in believing in miracles. Then read, 2) "Can a Historical Religion Be Believed?' Here I go beyond just doubting whether miracles can be believed today, but I present the case that when it comes to reported miracles of the past that it is even much more difficult to believe such miraculous reports. If you don't take the time to read those two threads you will not appreciate this one.
Was Jesus Born in Bethlehem?
Craig Chester, then President of the Monterey Institute for Research in Astronomy, details an elaborate understanding of the rising star in the Bethlehem sky at Jesus’ birth, in “The Star of Bethlehem”
Imprimis (Dec. 1993). He claims it was Jupiter, the planet known to represent kingship to astrologers in the ancient East, which came into conjunction with Regulus, the star of kingship, which is located in the constellation of Leo, also known as the constellation of kings. This may explain some things the Magi saw, but E. P. Sanders asks, “Why take the star of Matthew’s story to be a real astral event and ignore what the author says about it?”
The Historical Figure of Jesus (p. 55.). How is it truly possible for the star that Chester describes to lead the Magi from Jerusalem to a specific inn located in Bethlehem less than five miles away? (see Matt. 2:9-10). H. R. Reimarus (A.D. 1768) observed long ago that even if it were some sort of comet with a tail, “it is too high to point to a specific house.” If it were a miraculous star then why didn’t everyone in the vicinity see it? Pope Leo I (A.D. 461) proposed that the star was invisible to the Jews because of their blindness. But then why did it appear to pagan astrologers?
Jesus was not born in Bethlehem, if Luke is taken literally. What husband would take a nine-month pregnant woman on such a trek from Nazareth when only heads of households were obligated to register for a census? This is especially true when we realize that the census itself wouldn’t have taken place on any certain date, but rather stretched out over a period of weeks or even months? But if he did, why did he not take better precautions for the birth? Why not take Mary to her relative Elizabeth’s home just a few miles away from Bethlehem for the birth of her baby? According to Luke’s own genealogy (3:23-38) David had lived 42 generations earlier. Why should everyone have had to register for a census in the town of one of his ancestors forty-two generations earlier? There would be millions of ancestors by that time, and the whole empire would have been uprooted. Why 42 generations and not 35, or 16? If it was just required of the lineage of King David to register for the census, what was Augustus thinking when he ordered it? He had a King, Herod. “Under no circumstances could the reason for Joseph’s journey be, as Luke says, that he was ‘of the house and lineage of David,’ because that was of no interest to the Romans in this context.” Uta Ranke-Heinemann,
Putting Away Childish Things, (p.10). The fact is, even if there was a census at this time, census takers travel to where people live. The whole story lacks historical credibility. [See E. P Sanders,
The Historical Figure of Jesus, Penguin Press, 1993, pp. 84-91).
“Luke’s real source for the view that Jesus was born in Bethlehem was almost certainly the conviction that Jesus fulfilled a hope that someday a descendant of David would arise to save Israel.” E. P. Sanders,
The Historical Figure of Jesus (p. 87.). This is because the messiah was supposed to be born in the city of David (
Micah 5:2).
Was Jesus Born by a Miraculous Virgin Birth?
“If we wish to continue seeing Luke’s accounts of angelic messages and so forth, as historical events, we’d have to take a large leap of faith: We’d have to assume that while on verifiable matters of historical fact Luke tells all sorts of fairy tales [just mentioned above] but on supernatural matters—which by definition can never be checked—he simply reports the facts. By his arbitrary treatment of history, Luke has shown himself to be an unhistorical reporter—a teller of fairy tales.” Uta Ranke-Heinemann,
Putting Away Childish Things, (p.14).
When Mary first hears from the angel Gabriel that she is to give birth she objects by saying, “How shall this be, since I know not man?” (
Luke 1:34). According to Ranke-Heinemann, “psychologically this sentence can never be spoken, because it states that Mary has relations neither with her husband nor with any other man. She does not say the only thing that she could have said: ‘since I have no sexual relations with my husband.’ Instead she says, ‘with man,’ meaning with any man. This proves that Mary’s objection to the angel is a literary invention.”
Putting Away Childish Things, (p.16-17). The way it’s phrased is to justify her virginity to the reader rather than historically retell what might have actually been said.
David L. Edwards in
Evangelical Essentials, (pp. 190-193): “Paul’s surviving letters do not refer to the virgin birth. Mark’s gospel also does not mention this miracle. John’s gospel is also silent about a miraculous conception, except that all Christians are ‘born’ not through sex but ‘of God’ (1:13). The story of the Messiah’s birth—of the miraculous star or the appearance of the angels to the shepherds—is said to have been known widely in Jerusalem (Matt. 2:3;
Luke 2:17-18). Yet the story is apparently not known by anyone who meets the adult Jesus. The adult John the Baptist, for instance, doubted whether Jesus was the Messiah (
Luke 7:19), although we are told that his own mother had fully shared Mary’s experiences before the miraculous birth (
Luke 1:39-45). Herod’s massacre of ‘all the boys in Bethlehem…’ is not mentioned in the indignantly careful list of Herod’s atrocities given by the Jewish historian, Josephus. But it is suspiciously like the story of Pharaoh’s massacre of Hebrew boys in
Exodus 1:22. In Luke’s narrative the characters, sayings and experiences of John the Baptist’s parents (1:5-25; 57-80) are suspiciously like those of Abraham and Sarah in the book of Genesis, and Mary’s song (1:46-55) resembles the song of Hannah (
I Sam. 2:1-10).”
“My own answer is that the virgin birth story is probably fictional. While Mary says, “nothing is impossible with God” (
Luke 1:37), we have to consider what is probable. Many legends of miracles surrounding the births of heroes exist in the world’s literature. It is striking that within the Christian Church itself the legend developed that Mary was a perpetual virgin, even though Mark’s gospel speaks plainly of four brothers of Jesus, and sisters (6:3). It seems clear, although tragic, that births avoiding human sex were thought of as being purer and more wonderful than the mystery of the sexual creation of a new human being.” (Edwards, p. 194)
In
Matthew 1:20-23 the author claims that
Isaiah 7:14 refers to Jesus’ virgin birth: “Immanuel with us.” The context for the prophecy in original Hebrew Isaiah tells us that before any “young woman” (not virgin) shall conceive and bear a son who grows to maturity that Syria, the northern kingdom of Israel, along with the southern Israelite kingdom of Ahaz would all lie devastated. The prophecy in Isaiah says nothing whatsoever about a virginal conception. And it says nothing about a messiah, either. God will indeed be with Ahaz, but not in salvation, but in judgment. “Clearly, somebody went seeking in the O.T. for a text that could be interpreted as prophesying a virginal conception, even if such was never its original meaning. Somebody had already decided on the transcendental importance of the adult Jesus and sought to retroject that significance onto the conception and birth itself. I understand the virginal conception of Jesus to be a confessional statement about Jesus’ status and not a biological statement about Mary’s body. It is later faith in Jesus as an adult retrojected mythically onto Jesus as an infant.” John Dominic Crossan, Jesus:
A Revolutionary Biography, (Harper, 1989, pp. 16-23).
Today, with the advent of genetics, Christian thinkers try to defend the virgin birth on the grounds that the humanity of Jesus was derived from Mary, and his sinlessness and deity were derived from God. They do this because they now know that Mary must have contributed the female egg that made Jesus into a man. [Jesus, being a male, could not have been her clone, otherwise he would be a woman, and if cloned purely from Mary’s genes would nullify the claim that he was God’s son, too]. But the ancients commonly believed that the woman contributes nothing to the physical being of the baby to be born. The mother was nothing but a receptacle for the male sperm, which grew to become a child. The ancient and medieval church believed that Jesus’ humanity was a new creation, and therefore sinless. Modern genetics have forced Christians today to take a new view of the virgin birth based upon genetics. But even with that new view, it doesn’t adequately explain how Jesus is a human being, since a human being is conceived when a human male sperm penetrates a human female egg. Until that happens you do not have the complete chromosomal structure required to have a human being in the first place.
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Jesus Was Not Born a Virgin in Bethlehem!
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