Problems of Early Christianity

"Born of a Woman"

As the Letters of Paul constitute the earliest Christian witness, an important question in regard to the earliest Christianity and hence by implication Christianity as originally promulgated is: Does Paul know the doctrine of Mary's virginal conception of Jesus?

Here the most discussed passage is one that occurs in Galatians. The eminent Roman Catholic commentator, Raymond E. Brown,¹ approaches it through a glance at the general New-Testament situation: "It is beyond dispute that there is no explicit reference to the virginal conception in NT outside the infancy narratives [in Matthew and Luke]. What is a matter of dispute is whether there are some implicit references.....In Galatians 4:4-5 Paul says, 'When the time had fully come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law.' Influenced perhaps by the (mis)use of the term 'virgin birth', some (Zahn, Miguens) have immediately thought of a virginal conception here, since only the mother is mentioned. To be precise, however, Paul is speaking about the reality of Jesus' birth, not about the manner of his conception. The phrase 'born of a woman' is meant to stress what Jesus shared with those whom he redeemed, precisely because it was applicable to everyone who walks this earth. It no more supports the virginal conception of Jesus than the figurative phrase 'born of the seed of David' in Romans 1:3 disproves it. A more serious argument for Paul's knowledge of the virginal conception has been advanced from Paul's custom of writing in terms of Jesus' being 'born' (the verb ginesthai in Gal 4:4; Rom 1:3; Philippians 2:7) rather than of his being 'begotten' (the verb gennan, used of Ishmael and Isaac in Gal 4:23, 24, 290). However, both these verbs in the middle or passive can mean 'be born' and 'be begotten'; and neither one really tells us anything specific about the manner of conception. For example, Matthew, who believes in the virginal conception, does use the verb gennan of Jesus once, at least, clearly with the meaning 'begotten' (1:20...). Without further indication of Paul's mind, it would

Page 22

be abusive to read a knowledge of virginal conception into Paul's use of ginesthai."

In the middle of his observation, after the words "applicable to everyone who walks this earth" Brown has the footnote: "See Matt 11:11 and Luke 7:28: Among those born (begotten) of women, none is greater than John the Baptist."

At the end of his treatment of "The Silence of the Rest of the New Testament", which takes up as "major texts that have been proposed" passages both from the Gospel of Mark and from the Johannine writings no less than the cullings from the Pauline Letters, Brown² pronounces: "In summary evaluation of the evidence, I would say that it is perfectly proper to speak of the silence of the rest of the NT about the virginal conception because not a single one of the 'implicit references' has any compelling force. On the other hand, one would misinterpret this silence if one concluded from it that no other author of the NT (outside of Matthew and Luke) knew of the virginal conception. Even where the virginal conception was known and accepted, it would have become the subject of preaching (and therefore likely to be included in the kind of writing we have in the NT) only when its christological significance was seen. What the silence of the rest of the NT does call into question is the theory that the memory of the virginal conception was handed down by the family of Jesus to the apostolic preachers and was universally accepted as fundamental Christian belief."

If the theory to which Brown alludes is seriously to be questioned, the odds against a neutral attitude towards the silence of the twenty-five out of the twenty-seven books of the NT seem rather heavy. They grow more patently heavy when we find Brown³ dismissing as "untenable" the "simplistic" thesis that the Matthean infancy narrative, in which the angel of the Lord announced Mary's virginal conception to Joseph, came from Joseph and that the Lucan infancy narrative, where the announcement is to Mary herself, came from her. The very idea of an angelic announcement or, to use the techi-cal term annunciation, derives, in Brown's opinion,⁴ from an

Page 23

Old-Testament pattern of describing divine revelation, and "thus there is no reason to think that a narrative about an annunciation came down from the parents". The crucial point for Brown to settle is "whether the experiential knowledge that the child had been conceived without a human father" had its origin in one or the other or both of them. He suggests that "the complete absence of Joseph during the ministry of Jesus makes Mary a more plausible channel". But "the real difficulty about a preserved family (Marian) tradition... is the failure of that memory to have had any effect before its appearance in two Gospels in the last third of the first century". Brown adds: "There is a strong tradition that the brothers of Jesus did not believe in him during the ministry 0ohn 7:5; Mark 3:21, 3:31) - did Mary not communicate his divine origins to them? Did not the virginal conception carry for Mary some implication as to who Jesus was? In the few ministry scenes in which she appears, historical or not, there is no memory that she showed any such understanding (Mark 3:31-35; John 2:3-4). And certainly she communicated no profound christolog-ical understanding to his followers who came to understand only after the resurrection and, indeed, at first seem to have proclaimed that Jesus had become Messiah, Lord, or Son of God through the resurrection, never mentioning the virginal conception. The family tradition thesis is not impossible, but it faces formidable difficulties."

There is an alternative thesis proposed. According to the narratives, "Jesus was born noticeably early after his parents came to live together. Is this an historical fact?"⁵ There is "the Jewish charge of illegitimacy as it is clearly documented from the second century onwards in both Christian and Jewish witnesses".⁶ If that charge circulated in the first century independently of the Gospels, Mary's pregnancy without her husband's co-operation would be taken by the Christians -unlike the opponents of Jesus who "would deem him illegitimate and Mary unfaithful" - as a sign of virginal conception, "for they had a widespread and firm belief that Jesus was totally free of sin (2 Corinthians 5:21; 1 Peter 2:22; Hebrews

Page 24

4:15; 1 John 3:5) and both Matthew and Luke present his parents as holy and righteous (Matt 1:19; Luke 1:42)".⁷ To this positive explanation, "perhaps... family tradition was an auxiliary". Brown sees "an interplay of many factors" building up the positive explanation, but he adds: "This complicated solution, although it reflects items from the meager evidence we possess, leaves many questions unanswered (e.g., Mary's understanding of all this); and so it remains tenuous."⁸

Besides, as Brown⁹ admits, "there is no way to know with certainty whether the post-NT charge of illegitimacy is an authentic recollection of Jewish charges that were circulating before Matthew composed his narrative." Nor does Brown¹⁰ discover any firm support in the two other Gospels - those of Mark and John - "for a Jewish charge of illegitimacy during the ministry of Jesus or even at a period contemporary with the evangelists."

However, in the alternative thesis Brown brings in an ingredient of family tradition as perhaps leavening the mixture of several factors - in conformity with his earlier granting that "the family tradition thesis is not impossible". But such a posture flies in the face of his own puzzlement as to why, if this tradition existed, it "surfaced relatively late and only in two NT writings".¹¹ The difficulties in the way are not merely "formidable": they appear to be insuperable.

All in all, Brown's stand that Paul is speaking about the reality of Jesus' birth and not about the manner of his conception is insufficient except for checking the habit of capital being made out of the fact that the mother alone is mentioned. On the commentator's showing the gap of family evidence, the expression "born of a woman" seems definitely to point in the direction of Jesus having been conceived in the ordinary manner. Only if we took this expression in a vacuum rather than in the context of the full NT situation would we be left in doubt about its negative bearing in the problem whether the doctrine of the virginal conception had a place in the earliest and original Christianity.

A comparative ambiguity in the last resort, accompanying

Page 25

a keen analysis of surface meanings and a rejection of pro-virginity readings, is the result in a more recent treatment of the subject. A collaborative assessment of Marian themes by Protestant and Roman Catholic scholars¹² deals with Galatians 4:4-5 along lines somewhat overlapping with Brown. After quoting the text with its ending which Brown has omitted -"so that we might receive adoption as sons" - and after a few introductory remarks the team tells us:

"One may debate whether 'His Son' implies pre-existence or not, but in any case Paul is certainly stressing Jesus' humanity ('one born of a woman') and his relation to Israel ('one born under the Law').

"The phrase, genemenon ek gynaikos, 'born of a woman,' is a frequently-used Jewish expression to designate a person's human condition. It reflects adam yelud'issah of Job 14:1, 'a human being (that is) born of a woman...' (cf. Job 15:14; 25:4). The phrase is found in the same sense in the NT, applied to John the Baptist, en gennetais gynaikon, 'among those born of women' (Matt 11:11; Luke 7:28). As a Semitic expression it is further found in Qumran literature from Palestine. Such a description simply stresses the human condition of Jesus. Thus no convincing argument for Paul's awareness of the virginal conception can be drawn from this phrase - nor from Paul's use of genomenon (ginesthai) instead of gennomenon (gennan...), nor from Paul's omission here of any mention of a father. (The implication that Paul should have said 'begotten of a man' is unfounded since there is no evidence that such an idiom existed as a ready alternative to yelud'issah.) Seemingly the apostle was simply making use of a stereotyped literary expression and not attempting to supply detail on how the Son became man.

"If one were to ask how Paul could write that Jesus was 'born of a woman,' or even that he 'came into being from a woman,' without implying some reference to Mary, one would have to answer that Paul does thus indirectly refer to her. But it is a reference to her simply as mother, in her maternal role of bearing Jesus and bringing him into the world. There is not

Page 26

the slightest hint here that Jesus was her 'first born' (see Luke 2:7) or that she was a virgin. Paul simply does not mention the virginal conception, and there is no reason to think that he knew of it. On the other hand, a christological affirmation such as Paul makes here is not at all incompatible with the christology of other and later NT writers who maintain the virginal conception.

"How unimportant the phrase 'born of a woman' really was for Paul may be shown by the fact that, of the three things asserted about Jesus in v. 4 (Son, born of a woman, born under the Law), only the first and third are taken up in the parallel description of Christians in v. 5 (he redeemed those under the law; he brought it about that we receive adoptive sonship)."

The consensus of the Catholic and Protestant scholars involved in the discussion is: Paul betrays no knowledge of the virginal conception, but the words "born of a woman" are so neutral that they can not be posed in opposition to anyone's statement of such a conception. The flaw in the consensus is that if Paul attaches little or no importance to these words there was for him nothing of note in the birth of Jesus and they carry the suggestion of the birth being quite ordinary, a product of two human parents. Again, the inference could be that in Paul's time - the time of Christianity at its earliest and in its original form - the virginal-conception doctrine was non-existent.

Evidently, to arrive at the correct conclusion in the controversy we must explore the exact meaning of those four words of Paul's. Let us see whether we can reach that meaning from some remarks of that well-known British scholar and religious popularizer, William Barclay. Apropos of the sixth and seventh lines of the Apostles' Creed -

Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost,

Born of the Virgin Mary,

he¹³ writes on Paul and the "Virgin Birth":

"There is no mention of it either in Paul's letters or in

Page 27

his sermons as related in Acts. It is sometimes claimed that Galatians 4:4-5 where Paul speaks of Jesus as being born of a woman, born under the law, is a reference to the Virgin Birth. But born of a woman is the standard description of an ordinary man born in the usual way. 'Man that is born of a woman is of few days and full of trouble' (Job 14:1). 'How can he that is born of a woman be clean?' (Job 25:4). Certainly the phrase 'born of a woman' has nothing to do with the Virgin Birth. That Paul does not speak of the Virgin Birth is no proof that he did not know of it and believe in it; but it quite certainly is proof that he did not set either the doctrine or the belief in it in the forefront of his gospel, nor did he regard knowledge of it and belief in it as in any way essential to salvation."

Barclay's delineation of Paul's attitude towards "the doctrine or the belief" is accurate from the evidence to be gleaned from that apostle. But one is at a loss what to make of the rest of Barclay's exposition. At its face-value his statement that the Pauline phrase "is the standard description of an ordinary man born in the usual way" is in stark contradiction to the later assertion that Paul's silence on the Virgin Birth does not prove lack of knowledge of it and belief in it on his part. Surely, "the usual way" for "an ordinary man" to be "born" is from the cohabitation of two human beings? Barclay would seem to have a different phenomenon in mind. He must mean simply the emergence of a child from a womb into earth-life, so that Jesus was like any other man when he took birth. Then the mode of being born shared by him with the whole race provides no indication of a Virgin Birth, but neither does it negate such a nativity. The context of the phrase "born of a woman" does not at all raise the issue of our answering "Yes" or "No" about it: this appears to be Barclay's point. Although his "ordinary" and "usual" are suggestive of a different view, he is fundamentally at one with the thinkers we have quoted, except that while they indicated a possible pristine Christianity without the doctrine in question he lets us suppose its presence in a very minor key.

Barclay is open to criticism on two scores. First, is it rea-

Page 28

sonable to think that so out-of-the-cornmon, so miracle-lit a doctrine would remain in the background? Faith in it may not be necessary to salvation: even now only the ordinary magisterium has declared it infallible, it has not been universally and consistently proposed by the Church as an intrinsic constituent of divine revelation. Still, if it had been a part of the apostolic tradition and if Paul had known of it and held it, he would not have been utterly devoid of any recognizable reference to it. Secondly, is it coherent to argue from the query in Job 25:4 - "How can he that is born of woman be clean?" -that Jesus, if he were born of a virgin who had no intercourse with a man, could yet be considered as emerging from a womb into earth-life like every other man in a state which in any sense would be regarded as unclean? Barclay on his own data impresses us as having failed to gauge the proper association of Paul's phrase.

Unwittingly, however, he has given us a cue to look at this phrase in its total historical nuance rather than in isolation. Neglecting that nuance, all the commentators we have noticed may be taken to have missed making explicit the exact drift of the phrase. We must press beyond the surface connotation of it which has passed into current literary usage and attend to the peculiar Biblical aura around its formulation by Paul's pen.

Although in general it connotes "mortal man"¹⁴ and appears neutral as to the manner of birth - sexual or virginal - it has scripturally much more to it. We must assess with care its pre-Pauline associations. The old classic references are eminently in Job. There are three of them, as marked in Mary in the New Testament. To respect orthodoxy let us draw upon the versions in the prestigious Roman Catholic production, The Jerusalem Bible:

(1) Man, born of woman,

has a short life yet has his fill of sorrow.

 He blossoms, and he withers like a flower;

fleeting as a shadow, transient.

And is this what you deign to turn your gaze on,

Page 29

him that you would bring before you to be judged? Who can bring the clean out of the unclean? No man alive: (14:l-4)¹⁵

(2) How can any man be clean?

Born of woman, can he ever be good? (15:14)¹⁶

(3) Could any man ever think himself innocent, when

confronted by God? Born of woman, how could he ever be clean? (25:4)¹⁷

Two motifs are evident here in interconnection: human birth and uncleanness. The Jerusalem Bible¹⁸ annotates the first passage (14:1-4): "Job acknowledges man's essential vileness but pleads it as an excuse. The emphasis is laid on the physical (and therefore ritual) uncleanness which man contracts from the moment of his conception, cf. Leviticus 15:19f, and birth, cf. Lev 12:2f, since he is born of woman, Job 14:1, cf. Psalms 51:5. But this ritual uncleanness involves a corresponding moral weakness, a tendency to sin, and Christian interpretation has seen in this passage at least an allusion to what was later recognised as 'original sin' passed on from parent to child. Cf. Romans 5:12+." We may infer, from the comment as well as from the passage, that "Man, born of woman" implies human beings in their natural process of birth and must involve for Paul both physical uncleanness and moral frailty, a normal unredeemed state of original sin in which human beings are born from the usual cohabitation of two partners. The phrase, in its total significance, cannot admit any shade related to a sexless virginal conception - and it was coined such obviously because there never was a question of so uncommon a mode of birth.

Paul has employed a turn of speech which before him had no application outside of common human nativity due to sex-contact and which was shot through with a sense incapable of including anything else. Even after him it was never applied otherwise in scripture, as is shown from Brown's references¹⁹ to the Gospels: "See Matthew 11:11 and Luke 7:28: Among those born (begotten) of women none is greater than John the

Page 30

Baptist." John the Baptist had a birth by two human beings cohabiting. Thus the same Evangelists who posit the virginal conception happen to reinforce - and that too in a declaration by Jesus himself - Paul's implication of mortal men entering the world by the natural process of conception as well as birth. Here is a fixed form of words which had an unequivocal drift and on no occasion gave room for the nuance "born of a virgin".

It suggested the very absence that we can discern of an extraordinary nativity in some of Paul's other proclamations about Jesus. Romans 8:3 runs in The Jerusalem Bible: "God dealt with sin by sending his own Son in a body as physical as any sinful body, and in that body condemned sin."²⁰ At the third occurrence of the word "body" we are pointed to a note: "Lit. 'in the likeness of sinful flesh, and in that flesh...'".²¹ It should be plain that there could be no real condemnation of universal sin in a body of Jesus' self-sacrifice unless the body he had taken were built in the same way as all "sinful flesh", even though he himself committed no sin. This posture of salvific action is underlined in the note preceding the one we have quoted: "Christ alone, who by his death destroyed our unspiritual nature (lit. 'flesh') in his own person, could destroy sin whose domain the 'flesh' was. Man formerly carnal is now, through union with Christ, spiritual."²² The identical posture is brought home to us in 2 Corinthians 5:2: "For our sake God made the sinless one into sin, so that in him we might become the goodness of God."²³ At the word "sin" we are sent to the note: "By a kind of legal fiction God identified Jesus with sin so that he might bear the curse incurred by sin, Galatians 3:13; Romans 8:3."²⁴

To sum up: Paul's "born of a woman", viewed in the right perspective of Biblical usage and perceived with its true implications in the Pauline theology, rules out the idea of the virginal conception and proves the original apostolic Christianity to have had no link with it.

Page 31

References

1. The Birth of the Messiah: A Commentary on the Infancy Narratives in Matthew and Luke (Garden City, New York: Image Books, A Division of Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1979), pp. 518-19.

2. Ibid., p. 521.

3. Ibid., p. 525.

4. Ibid., p. 526.

5. Ibid., p. 527.

6. Ibid., p. 534.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid., p. 537.

10. Ibid., p. 541.

11. Ibid., p. 525.

12. Mary in the New Testament, edited by Raymond E. Brown, Karl R Don-fried, Joseph A. Fitzmyer and John Reumann (Bangalore: Theological Publications in India, 1981, originally published in London by Cassell Ltd., 1978), pp. 42-44.

13. The Plain Man Looks at the Apostles' Creed (Glasgow: Collins, Fount Paperbacks, 1979), p. 77.

14. The Concise Oxford Dictionary (1964), p. 1502, col. 2.

15. The Jerusalem Bible (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1966), The Old Testament, p. 743.

16. Ibid., p. 745.

17. Ibid., p. 756.

18. Ibid., p. 743, col. 2, n.c.

19. The Birth of the Messiah, p. 519, fn. 5a.

20. The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, p. 278.

21. Ibid., p. 279, col. 2, note d.

22. Ibid., note c.

23. Ibid.,p.3U.

24. Ibid.

Page 32