Problems of Early Christianity

Notes on Some Comments on

"Born of a Woman"

I have to attend to the opinions of two scholars. One of them was the Professor of the Classics Department, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1985, who unfortunately met soon after with a terrible accident to his head depriving him of normal discourse.

I am afraid his observations even before this mishap do not show a very accurate mind on a subject which was couched originally in the New Testament's Greek, a language allied to those tackled in the Classics Department.

His concluding remark on my argument runs: "It is misdirected. One should not expect to find an historical account of this kind of event." The ruling here forgets the Professor's own approving statement about Raymond Brown in relation to my article: "...strikes me that Brown is more thorough and responsive to different problems." It happens that I have quoted Brown's response in full and he is concerned essentially with the same task of trying to find an historical account of the virginal conception through possible "implicit" references in the New Testament outside the "explicit" ones in the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke, which, though insufficient and unreliable no less than mutually contradictory, claim to be historical. Here Paul's Galatians 4:4-5, which is my point de depart, is the central topic. I don't challenge the Professor's preference of Brown to KDS, but I may observe that Brown is doing the very thing for which I am admonished - a "misdirected" argument looking for history in the wrong place, or looking for mystery in history.

As for Leviticus 12:1-8 and 15:18, the Professor's brief guide-lines seem superficial. Leviticus is ritualistic and serves only to direct one's attention to the ritualistic element in Job's locution. Here indeed loss of blood akin to menstruation is the major element and pertains to child-birth rather than to conception, but all that is needed by me is that the latter

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not be left out. Leviticus 15:16, 18 bear clear witness to my contention: "When a man has a seminal discharge, he must wash his whole body with water and he shall be unclean until evening.... When a woman has slept with a man, both of them must wash and they will be unclean until evening." The Jerome Biblical Commentary (p. 77, col.l) writes on verse 18: "Legal impurity resulted from sexual relations between man and woman whether the act was licit or illicit. The law was concerned with the male's loss of vitality and with the woman's uncleanness springing from contact with the male semen— This cultic unworthiness arising from sexual intercourse was common among the ancients, and its antiquity in Israel is reflected in 1 Samuel 21:4-5."

"Cultic unworthiness" - there we have perhaps a hint of what is explicit in Job, my main concern. Here the Professor is quite off the mark when he asserts: "The uncleanness of 'man born of woman' in Job is that of childbirth especially, if not entirely." I should say that this is to make the Job-uncleanness over-ritualistic, forgetting that all ritualistic uncleanness can be got rid of by certain prescribed measures as shown in Leviticus and that Job has in mind something more fundamental in alluding to man's unworthiness. If a man is born in the midst of some amount of blood he does not become fundamentally unclean and undeserving of God's regard. Job 15:14 asks: "How can any man be clean? Born of woman, can he ever be good?" Again 25:4 - "Could any man ever think himself innocent, when confronted by God? Born of woman, how could he ever be clean?" The term "clean" carries with it the nuance of "good" and "innocent" - "especially, if not entirely", as the Professor would put it. To be sure, merely ritualistic uncleanness falls into second place in Job.

As The Jerusalem Bible (p. 743, col. 2, note c) annotates:

"Job acknowledges man's essential vileness... The emphasis is

laid on the physical (and therefore ritual) uncleanness... 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

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as 'original sin' passed on from parent to child. Cf. Romans 5:12+." The Jerusalem Bible refers us to the penitential Psalm 51:5 - "You know I was born guilty, a sinner from the moment of conception." On p. 833, note c to this verse sends us not only to Proverbs 20:9 - "What man can say, T have cleansed my heart, I am purified of my sin?' " - but also to Genesis 8:21 where Yahweh says of man: "...his heart contrives evil from his infancy." So Job's "man born of woman" has powerful undertones beyond ritualism and Paul's quotation from Job was bound to bear more explicit suggestions of his developed doctrine of "original sin" transmitted from parent to child - that is, in the sex-act leading to conception. The Professor appears to be quite oblivious of subtle yet inevitable significances.

As he has not said anything on KDS's "argument from Jesus' sinful body", I shall reserve my observations for whatever I have to say about James M. Somerville's letter which is a pleasure to read with its human as well as intelligent discussion of what he is moved to call my "fine paper".

At the very outset Somerville infers from scriptural evidence that there is no sign of the doctrine of virginal conception in the earliest Christianity: "I do think if Paul knew anything about the virginal conception, he would have adverted to it somewhere somehow... And perhaps the early Christians who held the virginal conception did so because they wanted to push back Jesus' sinlessness to his very first moment of earthly existence. But in this case the argument would be a 'logical' one and not based on any kind of revelation. So a good case can be made out for the later development of the virginal conception." By implication these statements assume the Pauline phrase "born of a woman" to mean that Jesus' origin from Mary was like that of any other man not only in his issuing from her womb but also in his beginning to be there.

I am, however, somewhat at a loss when Somerville later says: "Maybe Paul never heard of the Virginal Conception. It's quite possible. He was an outsider among the original 12

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apostles and didn't know everything, esp. some of the more esoteric aspects of the faith. And he was certainly wrong in his stress about the proximate Second Coming of Jesus. So Paul is not infallible. He may be less well informed than we like to believe. And, as for what Jesus taught - his moral doctrine - you can read Paul from top to bottom and learn almost nothing about the material contained in the gospels. Strange. Paul may not be the best witness to all the things early Christians believed, say in Egypt or Mesopotamia which he never visited - or even in Palestine, which he only visited briefly."

True, early Christianity was not single-strained. From Paul's own Letters we know of differences among the early teachers. But can we surmise that Paul never heard of the virginal conception in spite of the doctrine having been held among his contemporaries? This doctrine is not a small one. Paul who visited both Peter, the chief apostle, and James, "the brother of the Lord", in Jerusalem could never have come away ignorant of it if it was a part of their Christianity. Directly from Peter and James he must have heard of the "appearance" of Jesus to them and to the apostles. From it as well as from an "appearance" of Jesus to him he derived the belief in Jesus' resurrection. It is impossible to think that if Peter and James believed in the virginal conception Paul could have been unaware of the doctrine. The doctrine simply could not have been there in those early days. As to what early Christians believed in Egypt or Mesopotamia, not only Paul but nobody on earth can say anything. They are a total blank for all time, for no records exist. All we can learn about early Christianity is from Paul, since his are the first documents of the new religion. Knowledge, as distinguished from conjecture, can be obtained only from what he wrote.

Somerville is right to say that we can gather little of Jesus' moral doctrine from Paul. A few references are there to it, but nothing even remotely about the Sermon on the Mount. I should say that this gap speaks against Matthew rather than against Paul. And so does the absence of biographical ma-

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terial - except for a small number of stray allusions - in Paul. Somerville himself has averred: "...I would go along with Raymond Brown, and others, who do not hesitate to say that the gospels can be used only with the greatest degree of circumspection as a 'historical source'." Somerville is specifically sceptical over the historical value of John's "Maverick Gospel", but how are we to judge between this Gospel and the others? Just because the latter are "synoptic" in many ways they cannot claim greater historical substance than the former. It just means that they drew in large part on certain common traditions. Merely because they were a little earlier cannot confer more historical value on them either. I feel that Somerville will concur with me here since he writes that he agrees with those who "regard the Christ-event as extending beyond the life and death of the Man, Jesus". In explicit language what is meant is that, as Somerville admits, all this "makes the search for the historical Jesus pretty difficult". Thus what he calls "the material contained in the gospels", including the Sermon on the Mount about which, by the way, Mark no less than Paul knows nothing - all falls under scepticism. Paul's ignorance here is actually his negative knowledge: no more than what he offers us about Jesus can be taken as essentially correct. His Epistles are the nearest in time to the life and death of the Man, Jesus, and they were in touch with the information to be gleaned from those who had known Jesus the Man. Apart from Paul there really is darkness, no matter how fascinatingly filled with stories.

In this context it will be appropriate for me to comment on Somerville's sentence towards the close of his letter: "Obviously if one does not believe in miraculous conceptions the scriptures that proclaim it must be wrong." In my opinion, one's belief or not in miraculous conceptions is irrelevant in our sphere of discourse. The pertinent points here for proclaiming Matthew and Luke wrong are: "How does Paul, the earliest witness we have, come to be utterly unaware of the doctrine of virginal conception - why did it surface relatively late and only in two New-Testament writings out of the seven-

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teen or so that are posterior to Paul, including even the earliest and the latest Gospels?"

Now for the problem of Jesus' sinlessness and his sinful body. Somerville attends only to the former topic and formulates the situation thus: "Paul does say that Jesus was sinless (he does not say whether this sinlessness refers only to his life after birth or includes freedom from 'original sin' prior to his birth, e.g. in his conception)." I should think that the second alternative is out of place in Pauline theology. To Paul Jesus is sinless not only after birth but also before it because he was pre-existent in the Divine Reality. Philippians 2:6 tells us about him that "his state was divine" and he had "equality with God"; and, in my view, that is why 2 Corinthians 5:2 calls him "the sinless one", which phrase would suggest his being without sin during earthly life too. A virginal conception is not needed at all, in Paul's vision, for Jesus to be sinless before birth. At the same time it is excluded in order that Jesus may have a sinful body. Philippians 2:6-8 tells us that Jesus "did not cling to his equality with God" but "emptied himself to assume the condition of a slave, and became as men are; and being as all men are, he was humbler yet". The quote from 2 Corinthians speaks of God making, for our sake, "the sinless one into sin" and Romans 8:3 refers to Jesus' body as being "as physical as any sinful body" or, literally, "in the likeness of sinful flesh". There can be no doubt that Paul, wanting to drive home the full reality of Jesus' sacrifice for man's redemption from sin, presents Jesus as becoming a man in the same sense as any Philippian or Corinthian or Paul himself. Although the non-committing of sin, unlike all these people, is necessary to render the sacrifice that of a divine being, yet to act divinely in a body like all "sinful flesh" rather than in a specially conceived frame which would not be "as men are" - this also is a necessity for the completeness of the salvific work.

In Paul's theology the expression "born of a woman" must carry the same significance as it would for all those people and the same background as for them of a sexual parental act. Nowhere in the Pauline Letters is there anything to hint at a

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reservation as in the Apostles' Creed about Jesus being fully man and yet figuring as one

Who was conceived of the Holy Ghost,

 Born of the Virgin Mary.

I appreciate Somerville's treatment of my article and the encouragement he gives for its publication in one or another of the scriptural reviews in the USA or in England. His "thinking out aloud" has helped me to attain greater clarity in my own views and I thank him for writing of my work: "What he has to say about his three primary sources and his citations from them are well said." What a difference all round from the summary dismissal by the Professor in the Classics Department:' "Interesting,... but I do not find the argument convincing."

P. S. One point in Somerville's thinking aloud I have inadvertently passed over. He writes about Paul: "...he was certainly wrong in his stress about the proximate Second Coming of Jesus." The word "wrong" is ambiguous. Was Paul wrong because there was no proximate Second Coming? Evidently he was a grossly mistaken prophet there. But was he wrong in the sense that he misrepresented Jesus? I don't think so at all. The synoptic Gospels are at one with Paul in this respect. Each of them represents Jesus as expecting the end of the world and the Son of Man to come in his glory very soon - even in the lifetime of some who were listening to Jesus. If Paul is proved, as Somerville puts it, "not infallible", so is Jesus himself. For, if there is one motif running almost through the NT it is this - beginning with Paul and the Synoptics and ending with the Apocalypse and 2 Peter. That is why it is at times said that Jesus brought an interim religion, a religion of what he conceived to be the earth's final days, and not one intended for ages to come, with a Church meant to last even when, in Macaulay's famous fantasy, a native traveller from Newzealand stands on a broken arch of London Bridge to contemplate the ruins of St. Paul's.

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