"The Not-So-Virgin Birth of the Christmas Story": A Response

Not only when dealing with the Virgin Birth, reality proves we have entirely no New Testament textual evidence from the very center of Roman Palestine before circa 200 CE.  What we do in fact have are early manuscripts from Hellenistic Egypt (home of the Septuagint whose Greek theology is quoted almost exclusively as New Testament proof texts) as the location of our earliest manuscripts of the Gospels whose Greek Classical culture also gave birth to the Gnostic Gospels view (theology) that the material world and all flesh is evil or, as the New Testament puts it; sinful.

Be they the birth narratives, the life of Jesus, the crucifixion or the conflicting resurrection narratives, Gospels Harmonies have long been used apologetically to create a false sense of cohesion out of conflicting stories. 

The earliest Christian to harmonize the four Gospels was Tatian who was a student of Justin Martyr in Rome.  He created the first Synoptic (from the Greek, See (optic) Together (syn))  reading with his famous Diatessaron (circa 165 – 170 CE). (1)

The divinity of Jesus was problematic from the start in early in Christianity as seen the theological controversy known as the  Adoptionism  (“. . . sometimes called dynamic monarchianism, is a minority Christian belief that Jesus was adopted as God's Son either at his baptism, his resurrection, or his ascension.”) latter condemned a heretical.

Thought the Virgin Birth was clearly based on the matrix divinity of demigods of the Classical world, Jesus’ relation to God has been a major contention between how heresy and orthodoxy are defined by how men viewed the Jewish God now set in a context of polytheism or a theology  which the ruling Christianity majority tried to clarify with special councils, synods and creeds.  Ironically, after almost two-thousand years, the Virgin Birth (removed from its cultural religious context) only aggravates the concept of  who Jesus really is in his relation to God, a problem which the non-Biblical / theological term Trinity as made even more elusive if not downright ridiculous.

One point that Ms. Tarico failed to mention in relation to the birth narratives’ contradictions is the fact that in Luke 1: 41 we are told by the Gospel writer(s) that the yet unborn John the Baptist divinely knew exactly who the unborn Jesus was by the spirit of God, ( When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the baby leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit.).  Yet in Luke 7: 18 -20 / Matt. 11: 2 – 3, a now grown and confused John the Baptist has no knowledge of who Jesus is and must send his disciples to ask Jesus himself.  “John’s disciples told him about all these things. Calling two of them, he sent them to the Lord to ask, “Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?” When the men came to Jesus, they said, “John the Baptist sent us to you to ask, ‘Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?’ “

So then, who is Jesus and what is his relationship to God? Who knows!  Want proof?  Just ask a Catholic priest and then a Jehovah Witness for starters.  One thing is for certain, when it comes to the Virgin Birth and who Jesus is theologically, various reading of Christian hermeneutics prove denominations are as confuse as John the Baptist!

      (1)    See William L. Petersen, Tatian’s Diatessaron: Its Creation Dissemination Significance And History In Scholarship (Supplements To Vigiliae Christianae Texts And Studies Of Early Christian Life And Language), (Leiden, 1994), pp. 1 – 35.