VIRGIN BIRTH

I. Definition. Virgin birth, as here considered, is a specific term. It refers only to Jesus Christ and the manner in which He came into the world, as described in Matthew and Luke, as believed by the Early Church, and as it has been held in the creeds through the centuries. The unique person and mission of Christ, as well as the specific manner of His incarnation, put this event in a class by itself. Comparison with other miraculous births, discoveries of birth myths, or even scientific experimentation and achievement in human methods of reproduction would neither support nor invalidate this unique and divine act of incarnation. This is the virgin birth in which, it is claimed, the Word was made flesh (John 1:14).

1. The fact. The gospel accounts are not presented as myths, legends, didactic devices, or “noetic” patterns to popularize Christianity to the naive masses (cf. Boslooper, The Virgin Birth, 227-230). They purport to state factually data needed to solve a crucial problem in the minds of believers: How could Jesus, a man, be the Son of God and Savior? The two parts of the explanation occur in the two gospels that the Early Church considered the earliest. The report was accepted as factual. The explanations were not repeated in later works. Before long, no one was baptized into the faith without expressing faith in the virginborn Christ. In the earliest lit. that reflects direct confrontation with pagan, Jewish, and heretical contenders, the fact of the virgin birth is defended as both true and fundamental.

2. Presupposition. Only in a certain context, of course, could this position be held. Both the Scriptures and the believers assumed the supernatural. God was no myth. He was the sovereign, transcendent Being, who was also Creator. He who made man in the beginning could accommodate to him and communicate with him. The early Christians saw no problem in a God who acts and speaks and redeems. In the context of Scripture and the faith of a regenerate and Spirit-filled Church, the virgin birth of Christ was no more unthinkable than the other three ways by which people have come into the world (Adam with neither father nor mother, Eve with no mother, and others with both father and mother). God was utterly real. His acts and words were fact and truth. Gnostics, Docetists, pagans, and unconverted Jews did not always share this context of faith. Therefore, they did not share the Christian belief in an actual incarnation by the virgin birth, but the belief survived in orthodox Christianity.

II. Importance. It is not contended that God could not have sent the Savior in any other way. It is simply affirmed, on the basis of Scripture, that this is how He did it. The virgin birth is consistent with the other great facts of redemption in a way that no other explanation is. Consistent orthodoxy demands the virgin birth. As Briggs says (Charles A. Briggs, “The Virgin Birth of Our Lord,” AJT, XII, 2 [April 1908], 201),

Undoubtedly the divinity of Christ is the most essential doctrine, the incarnation is secondary to this, and the virgin birth of a third grade of importance. I have already recognized that a man may doubt or deny the third without, in his own mind, denying the second, or the first. And yet, from a historic and dogmatic point of view, he surely has put himself in an untenable position, which he cannot maintain. Historically and logically the divinity of Christ and incarnation are bound up with the virgin birth, and no man can successfully maintain any one of them without maintaining them all.

1. In the Early Church. Accordingly, it is not strange that “there is no fact, no Christian doctrine that is more emphasized by the early Christian writers than that of the virgin birth of our Lord” (Briggs, op. cit., 199). They considered it essential, used it in the baptismal formula and the earliest creed, and vigorously defended it in the debates with non-believers. No voice of doubt or protest is recorded within the Early Church.

2. In modern times. The facts have not changed, only the climate. The authority of the Bible is still involved. Those who accept the Scriptures as the fully reliable Word of God do not doubt the virgin birth. The factual account must still be accepted or rejected. It is true or false. If redemption is not based on the kind of incarnation that is reported in the Scriptures, what can be believed about it? As Lange says of the virgin birth, “Its positive denial robs every other doctrine of Christianity of its full value. Neither the death of Christ nor His resurrection can be known in their whole significance, if His birth is positively misconceived. In this case, there is a crack in the bell, and its pure, full, penetrating sound is gone” (The Life of the Lord Jesus Christ, I, 279). Or, as Machen says, “Let it never be forgotten that the virgin birth is an integral part of the New Testament witness about Christ, and that that witness is strongest when taken as it stands” (The Virgin Birth of Christ, 396).

III. Source of the doctrine. It is often said that the doctrine of the virgin birth comes from the 2nd cent. This can hardly be true.

1. Earlier than creeds. The virgin birth was as explicit in the early Rom. form of the Apostles’ Creed as in the 5th- or 6th-cent. Gallican form. Tertullian and Irenaeus used the creed; therefore, it must have been extant by the middle of the 2nd cent. Indeed, Kattenbusch placed it at about a.d. 100 (Das Apostolische Symbolum, ii [1900], 328) and Zahn supposes that the baptismal formula attained essentially the form which it has in the old Rom. symbol at some time between 70 and 120 (Das Apostolische Symbolum, 2te Aufl. [1893], 47). Since no new, strange, or debatable doctrine would be incorporated into the baptismal formula or into so brief and elementary a creed, the doctrine must have been old when the creed was established. This places the doctrine well back into the 1st cent.

2. Earlier than Apostolic Fathers. Apostolic fathers, in the first half of the 2nd cent., are as explicit as the creeds. Justin Martyr defends the virgin birth at length against Jewish and pagan objections and shows familiarity with its mention in Christological summaries, such as are used in exorcism (Machen: The Virgin Birth of Christ, 5). Ignatius, who died in a.d. 117, in debate with Docetists who deny the real body of Jesus, insisted not only on Jesus’ birth but also on its having been a virgin birth (Smyrna I, 1). Harnack says that “Ignatius has freely reproduced a ‘kerygma’ of Christ which seems, in essentials, to be of a fairly historical character and which contained, inter alia, the Virgin Birth, Pontius Pilate, and the ἀπέθανεν” (“Apostolisches Symbolium,” in Herzog-Hauck, Realencyklopadie fur protestantische Theologie und Kirke, I [1896], 751).

The testimony of each is unequivocal. They are not dealing with a new doctrine. No protest within the Church has to be answered. The only objectors are on the outside. All believers were baptized in this faith. The one alleged and much publicized exception to universal agreement within the Church is in Justin Martyr’s statement (Dialogue with Trypho) when Justin argues that some Jews accept the messiahship of Jesus without accepting His preexistence and virgin birth. This has been misread as saying “our race” instead of “your race” and so has been applied to Christians. Harnack exposed the error. Machen explains and confirms his findings (op. cit., 15, 16). The situation is clear. The virgin birth was already an old and long-established distinctive of the Christian Church early in the 2nd cent.

3. In the family. The time and manner of the first public statement about the virgin birth is a matter of conjecture. It cannot be later than the gospels that bear the account (Matthew and Luke). The facts may have been known earlier, at least by some. The moves from Nazareth to Bethlehem, to Egypt, to Nazareth may have permitted Mary and Joseph to keep the secret from all but the most trusted confidants until God’s own time of vindication. When faith in Christ had already been demonstrated, the explanation solved a problem. Where such faith was lacking, the account would have been abused or rejected if given prematurely. Orr thinks the two gospels are the source of any public knowledge of the birth of Christ (The Virgin Birth of Christ, 67). Sooner or later the facts had to be shared by Mary and Joseph. Is it not reasonable to suppose that the report would be given to the leaders of the Church and esp. to those who were committing the Gospel to writing?

IV. Gospel accounts. The whole NT presents a divine-human Savior. Only Matthew and Luke explain the means of the Incarnation. Repetition is unnecessary. Consistency with the revelation is sufficient.

1. Linguistic factors. Mary is called a virgin (παρθένος, G4221) in Matthew 1:23 and in Luke 1:27. The latter is said to fulfill the prophecy of Isaiah 7:14, where it is said that a virgin (עַלְמָה, H6625, LXX, παρθένος, G4221) is to conceive and bear a son. In Biblical usage, these words always may and often must be construed to mean an unmarried young woman. The connotation of “pure” is often associated with at least the NT usage. Both words have been demonstrated to have a broader extra-Biblical meaning at times. Linguistic evidence, then, renders the virgin birth probable, but needs the support of the positive statements in the context for certainty.

2. Literary factors. All alleged ambiguity vanishes when the passages are read in full. Specifically, it was “before they came together” that Mary “was found to be with child of the Holy Spirit” (Matt 1:18). The assertion is repeated that Joseph “knew her not until she had borne a son” (Matt 1:25). Luke is no less specific. Mary’s response to the annunciation was one of bewilderment. She said, “How can this be, since I have no husband?” (Luke 1:34). The answer was, in effect, “No husband is necessary. God will cause you to conceive” (v. 35). These are the clear affirmations of the virgin birth. They cannot be explained away by textual evidence. They can only be accepted or denied. The reporting is modest but clear. It is history or the boldest fiction.

3. Documentation. The facts formed a network of interlocking prediction and data that broadened the witness and reduced the normal probability of chance fulfillment to absurdity. What if Elizabeth or Mary had borne a girl? Or what if something else had broken the predicted pattern? Abundance of detail guaranteed the authenticity of the accounts. This birth is not only an event in time; it is the event from which, as if arranged by a true instinct, time is reckoned forward and backward. It is a historical fact full of the mysteries of both the divine and the human. It is the handle by which one can take hold of God’s greatest self-revelation in Jesus Christ, Son of God and Son of man. If this is not the true explanation, no one will ever know how the Redeemer came. No other adequate explanation has been given.

V. Alleged silence. It has been objected that the virgin birth cannot be true in view of the silence of the rest of the NT.

1. Doubtful silence. Explicit statement is indeed lacking, except in Luke 1; 2 and Matthew 1; 2. Are there not allusions, inferences, and expressions that could hardly be understood apart from such a belief? How did Mark think Jesus could be the “Son of God” (Mark 1:1)? Why did Mark quote reference to Jesus as “the carpenter” when Matthew called him “the carpenter’s son” (6:3; Matt 13:55)? Was it not to avoid a misunderstanding, whereas Matthew had answered the question by his opening chs.? John dwells continually upon the divine glory and attributes of Jesus but gives no account of His birth. The “Word became flesh” (John 1:14). But how? Paul’s emphasis is on the death and resurrection of Christ, not on His birth, hence not on the virgin birth. How does one explain Paul’s strange ways of referring to the coming of Christ as “being sent” (Rom 8:3), having “emptied himself” (Phil 2:7), “taking the form of a servant” (ibid), etc.? Did he know how it occurred? Undoubtedly he did if Luke, his assistant, did. Irenaeus said (Adv. Haer. iii. 1): “Luke, a companion of Paul, wrote in a book the gospel preached by the latter.” In any case, the Early Church had no doubt of the intention of the Scripture writers or of the fact of the virgin birth. Their testimony is so clear that Briggs dares to affirm (op. cit., 199) that “it is therefore a perversion of history for anyone to say that ‘born of Mary the virgin’ means any less than what St. Luke gives us, or that Ignatius, Justin, Irenaeus, Hippolytus and Tertullian battle for.”

2. Reasons for silence. In the nature of the case, the report of the virgin birth does not need constant repetition. If the explanation is available and known, that is enough. This is esp. true in view of the nature of the first transmission of the gospel facts. They were reported as good news (εὐαγγέλιον, G2295, Mark 1:1) or as a proclamation (κήρυγμα, G3060, 1 Cor 2:4). They were not a committee report evolving from dialogue or even from the life of the Church. They were a tradition (παράδοσις, G4142, 2 Thess 3:6) handed down by the apostolic witnesses. This content of the oral and written gospels was not debated but accepted. This tradition, in its written form at least, included the virgin birth. It was accepted and became a pillar of the faith, expressed in the baptismal formula and the earliest creed. Debate would have been considered irreverent except to convince pagans, heretics, and unbelieving Jews.

VI. Conclusion. The faith of the Early Church included belief in the virgin birth because it was a clear teaching of the NT. To reject it would have been tantamount to denying the Word of God and being aligned with the pagans, heretics, and unbelieving Jews. The virgin birth was not a stumbling block. It was a pillar of their faith. So it has continued.

Bibliography J. Lange, The Life of the Lord Jesus Christ (1872) I, 276-302; A. Edersheim, The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah (1886) I, 144-159; W. Ramsay, Was Christ Born at Bethlehem? (1898), 73-91; L. Sweet, The Birth and Infancy of Jesus Christ (1906); J. Orr, The Virgin Birth of Christ (1907); C. Briggs, “The Virgin Birth of our Lord,” AJT, XII, 2 (1908), 189-201; F. Ramsay, The Virgin Birth (1926); J. Machen, The Virgin Birth of Christ (1930); D. Edwards, The Virgin Birth in History and Faith (1943); D. Moody, “Isaiah 7:14 in the RSV,” Review and Expositor, 50 (1953), 61-68; “On the Virgin Birth of Jesus Christ,” RE, 50 (1953), 453-462; “The Miraculous Conception,” RE, 51 (1954), 495-507; RE 52 (1955), 44-54, 310-324; T. Boslooper, The Virgin Birth (1962).