3.03. The Great Miracle — A Study in Theology

CHAPTER III The Great Miracle — A Study in Theology THE supreme if not the sole interest with which wo are drawn to a character so simple and a life so obscure as the character and life of Mary is found in the fact that she was the mother of our Lord. The uniqueness of His being makes her relationship to Him unique. Of all things in the world the most beautiful and Divine is motherhood; but here we have a glory of motherhood entirely without parallel in history. Mary’s honour is incomparable with the honour of the mother of a man of highest genius and most transcendent goodness; because the holy Being to whom she gave birth was more than man, was the only begotten Son of God.

Every one of the writers of the New Testament bears witness to the Divinity of Christ; or if it be thought that the two brief references to Him in the epistle of St. James (Jas 1:1; Jas 2:2) are too meagre to express that idea, still they are not inconsistent with it, and indeed they are entirely in accord with what is certainly the unanimous testimony of all the other writers. This truth has been accepted by the great body of Christians from the time of the apostles down to our own day. To many of us it is the only possible explanation of the life and work of Jesus as they appear in the gospel records. At the same time most of the New Testament writers, believing, as all of them do, in the full and perfect humanity of Jesus, also recognise that He came into the world by birth from a human mother. While this is clearly narrated by two of the evangelists — St. Matthew and St. Luke — it is also implied by the others, both St. Mark and St. John making mention of the mother of Jesus. St. Paul also distinctly writes of Him as having been “born of a woman.” [1] The docetic notion that the Christ was a Heavenly Being who simply appeared on earth in a phantom form finds no lodgment in the New Testament.

When, however, we bring these two facts into juxtaposition, when we consider the birth of Jesus in the light of His Divinity, we are face to face with the most stupendous miracle the mind of man can conceive of. The miracle of miracles is the Incarnation. If we believe this we need not stumble at other miracles in Scripture; for they are all of less magnitude. Besides, if the very being of Jesus involves a miracle of such a character as this, is it surprising that His deeds should be miraculous? On the other hand, if we cannot accept this fundamental miracle, it is of little moment whether we believe the gospel statements about any other miracles, and quite superfluous to endeavour to prove the reality of them, for in that case the value has entirely disappeared. This is the great miracle that constitutes the foundation rock of the Christian faith — a woman gave birth to the Son of God!

Now, it is a further position to assert that with this miracle of the Incarnation and the birth of Christ from a woman, in Divine as well as human nature, there is associated the miracle of the virginity of the mother. This may be regarded as an additional miracle. We could not have assumed d, priori that it would have been present. It comes into the history on the testimony of two of the evangelists; and this testimony is most explicit, St. Matthew and St. Luke leaving us no room for doubting what their meaning is. They both deny that Joseph was the father of Jesus; they both assert that Mai-y Avas a virgin when she bore her Son. But it cannot be ignored that in the present day many people find difficulty in accepting these statements. It is pointed out that, beyond the two gospels referred to, we have no word concerning them, that all the rest of the New Testament is silent on the subject. Neither St. Mark nor St. John have anything to say about it; St. Paul never alludes to it; it is absent from the utterances and writings of St. James, from the two epistles ascribed to St. Peter, from the epistle to the Hebrews, from the Apocalypse, and from St. John’s three epistles as well as his gospel, already referred to. Moreover, the accounts in the first and third gospels vary considerably, and therefore it has been concluded that they are not derived from the Logia, a document that is supposed to have contributed the greater part of the common matter in Lidce and Matthew which is not to be found in Mark. Thus, neither of the primitive witnesses, Mark and the Logia, contains any reference to the virgin birth.

It must be admitted that the evidence concerning the mode of the birth of Jesus is much less full than the evidence for the Divinity of His nature — which, as we have seen, is overwhelming, and practically universal. Now, the first consideration to be noted here is that these two must be kept distinct. Disastrous consequences to Christian faith are threatened by the reckless and irrational habit of confounding them together that has been allowed in some writers and speakers. The matter of infinite importance to us is the Divinity of Christ. If that is lost to faith, everything is lost. Surely, then, it is a great advantage to be able to point to the evidence for it in all the rich and manifold forms in which this evidence is accumulated; and it is little less than fatal folly to mix it up with the question of the virgin birth, profoundly interesting as that is on its own account. The direct result of such a misguided policy is to open the door for doubts as to the vastly more important truth.

Let us recollect that those New Testament teachers who betray no knowledge of the miracle of the virgin birth are unhesitating in their faith in the Divinity of Christ. Nothing can be more evident than the inference that they at least did not need to be first assured as to the mode of His entrance into the world before they would yield the submission of intellect and heart to His highest claims. To them the reasons for believing in Christ and accepting His Incarnation were wholly independent of His birth mystery. Whatever that might be, their thought of Him would be the same, and nothing that might be revealed concerning it in later years could in any way affect their faith. The case of their immediate converts must have been similar, because these people were won to belief in Jesus Christ and His claims without hearing one word about the nature of His birth. It was enough for them that He was the Lord’s Christ, both Divine and human. Why should not their faith be ours? And yet there are people who persistently confuse these two very distinct questions, declaring that the Incarnation and the virgin birth must stand or fall together, and boldly asserting that if they lost belief in the latter they would give up faith in the former.

It is said that the virgin birth alone preserves the possibility of the Divinity of Christ; that He could not be the Son of God if this had not been His earthly origin. But is it not rash and hazardous to venture on any positive assertions as to what could, or what could not, occur in the realm of the superhuman? If the Incarnation is itself a tremendous miracle, how can any man say what may be its conditions, or within what limits it may be possible? All things are possible with God. Reasoning of this sort implies the half-hearted faith that tries to eke out its feeble energy by leaning on little props of rationalism. If God works so great a miracle as to send His Son into the world in a human life, we may be sure He can work it in whatever way He pleases; it is not for us to say how it might or might not be done.

Then it has been supposed that the virgin birth is the one security for the sinlessness of Jesus, that if He had not come into the world precisely in this way He must have been born with the taint of hereditary evil. The same answer serves for this assumption. It professes to define the limits within which God may be permitted to work a miracle. How do we know what are the conditions that make sinlessness possible? But more may be added here. In any case Jesus had a human parentage, if only a maternal parentage, since Mary was human. Then why should not Jesus inherit sin from her 1 If we only thought of natural consequences this would seem to be inevitable, for nobody in the present day could agree with St. Augustine’s gross conception of the mode in which sin is transmitted from parent to child. If we are to enter into the physiology of the question, we must recognise the fact that, on the whole, while daughters tend to inherit the characteristics of their fathers, sons are more inclined to derive hereditary traits from the mother’s side. Hence it might be argued that in the birth of a son it was the mother who should be dispensed with rather than the father, or else that Mary’s child should have been born as a woman. It is only necessary to state these conjectures to show how unworthy they are of the great and solemn subject with which they are brought into connection. We trifle with the profound mystery when we bring our petty physiological rules and examples into any relation with it whatever. Therefore the argument that would rest the freedom from original sin on considerations of this order must be dismissed at once as quite unsuitable, and not to be thought of for a moment in such a connection. The field being thus clear of irrelevant ideas, we can keep the two truths distinct, and take each on its own merits. The great miracle is that of the Incarnation. It stands alone, superb, sublime, unapproachable, hushing and awing our speculations, subduing and winning our faith, flooding our lives with the love of a Saviour who is at once our Lord and our Brother. But the secondary miracle has an interest of its own. We are now free to examine it calmly as it comes to us in the record of history. It is not an article of faith in the sense that faith depends on it; for, as we have seen, the faith of most of the early Christians had nothing to do with it. But it is a subject of interest, as any fact touching the life of Jesus must be; and it is of especial interest to us here for the light it throws on the experience of Mary.

Approaching the subject then with a certain degree of mental detachment — without a shadow of that feverish anxiety of the drowning man clutching at a straw that appears to be the unhappy mental attitude of perturbed minds when this is assumed to be a question of life and death to the faith — are we yet to give way before the clamour of criticism, and set the narrative of the miraculous mode of the birth of Jesus by the side of the stories of Buddha and Cyrus, of Romulus and Augustus, as an indication of the marvels with which a fond tradition delights to encircle the cradles of the great?

Let us now proceed to consider whether there are any facts tending to forbid that conclusion. In the first place, it is no small thing that we have the testimony of the first and third gospels. There is good reason to believe that Matthew was written before the destruction of Jerusalem, that is to say before the year 70. If the author did not obtain his information directly from the lips of Mary, he must have been in close contact with those who moved in her circle. His work therefore contains well-nigh contemporary evidence. We have no time for the formation of a myth. Legends of shadowy character demand more scope for their development. It is coming to be widely recognised that the third gospel was written a little after the overthrow of Jerusalem; but although this opinion gives it a somewhat later date than Matthew, it still belongs to the same cycle of literature. Moreover, in his preface St. Luke describes how carefully he searched for evidence from first-hand witnesses. That preface, evidently honest, is a strong guarantee of historical accuracy. It is not easy to believe that the man who wrote it was the victim of idle fancies that had sprung up almost in his own lifetime. He who doubts the miracle of the virgin birth has two stubborn witnesses to face, and the more closely they are examined the more difficult will it be to set aside their testimony.

It has been objected that the narratives are very distinct in several points. That may be admitted; but it only strengthens the case, for it proves that they are independent. Evidently neither evangelist had seen the work of the other. Yet they are agreed on this fact concerning the birth of Jesus. Two independent streams of testimony here coincide, though they have come from different sources. They are mutually confirmatory of one another; and the more so from the very fact that there are divergencies with regard to accessories.

But, further, it is objected, the two genealogies give the line of Joseph. How can they show the Davidic origin of Jesus if He is not Joseph’s son? It might be replied that quite apart from this question some commentators have taken one at least of the lists to refer to Mary. But if, as most now believe, they both belong to Joseph, that fact must have been known to the two evangelists; and certainly in direct statement they do ascribe them to the husband. But these are the very writers who narrate the virgin birth — the only New Testament writers who do so. Then they must have faced the obvious inconclusiveness of their position — either intending simply to assert the legal rights of Jesus derived through His putative father, or assuming that Joseph followed Jewish custom in marrying in his own tribe and family connection. At all events they must have been aware of the objection. If we had met the statement about the virgin birth in one document, and the genealogy of Joseph in another, critics would naturally have pounced on the latter as a disproof of the former. The case is very different where the two apparently conflicting statements lie side by side in the same works. A strong confirmation of the truth of the narratives of the birth of our Lord in Matthew and Luke may be found in a comparison of these narratives with the apocryphal gospels of the infancy, fantastic, and in some instances irreverent productions altogether unworthy of the subject.

Here the facts are recorded with a dignity and a reserve of manner entirely lacking in those puerile productions, which represent just what might be expected of the unfettered imagination of primitive Christendom. If our gospel accounts are to be traced to the same origin, how comes it that the character of them is entirely different? The sobriety of treatment throughout, and the solemn grandeur of the Bethlehem scenes as they lie before us on the pages of the New Testament, speak for their own veracity.

Further, it is to be observed that while the miracle of the virgin birth is not narrated anywhere else in the New Testament it is never denied. Among all the allusions to Jesus and His human life there is not one that in any way conflicts with the mystery of His origin as that is revealed by two of the evangelists. Is not that a singular fact if the narratives of the nativity are to be reckoned as the products of superstitious imagination 1 Joseph, it is true, is referred to as the father of Jesus; but that is the case more emphatically and frequently in Matthew and Luke than anywhere else in the New Testament — again the verbal discrepancy appearing in the very documents that record the virgin birth! Evidently, therefore, the narrators of that mystery see no difficulty in employing the convenient popular language according to which Joseph and Mary were described as the parents of Jesus.

Quite recently attempts have been made to explain away the gospel narratives of the nativity by reference to curious Jewish legends about the Messiah. It is not at all certain how ancient these legends may be, the Talmud in which some of them are found not having been written till long after the time of Christ, so that, although doubtless it contains the traditional lore of many centuries of Judaism, we cannot tell to what extent Christian notions may have been unconsciously admitted. Whether that be the case or not here, the instances that have been cited are only parallel in character to those found in the apocryphal gospels for triviality, grotesqueness, and coarseness.

Stories that could not be quoted on a decent page would never have been the seed-bed of the simple, lofty, beautiful narratives in Matthew and Luke. When we pass beyond the period of the New Testament we are confronted with a singular unanimity of opinion in the great body of the Christian Church. It is impossible to say how early the phrase in the Apostles’- Creed, “Born of the Virgin Mary,” became a recognised part of the confession of faith. It is now known that the creed did not originate with the apostles themselves. Still there is reason to believe that the great central truths which it contains were those held to be most important by the primitive Church. We may suspect tradition, and we may point out how readily it accretes error; but there are memories so reverently cherished that we may be sure they are not of yesterday, and there is a time so ancient and so near to the events that we must accord to its traditions more or less of the character of history. In fact there is a point where tradition and history meet, where the one merges into the other.

Now, this is virtually the case with the clause in the Apostles’ Creed cited above. The ideas it contains are in early Church writers who were either themselves in direct communication with men of the Apostolic time, or who at least could reach back to that time by means of but a single connecting link. Thus Ignatius, stating what reads very like a confession of faith, describes “the one and only Physician,” as “ of flesh and of spirit, generate and ingenerate, God in man, true Life in death, Son of Mary and Son of God, first passible and then impassible, Jesus Christ our Lord.” [1] The phrase “ Son of Mary and Son of God “recalls in particular St. Luke’s way of describing the birth of Jesus, where the angel promises Mary that her Child shall be “the Son of the Most High,”[2] and “the Son of God.”[3] Read in the light of the third gospel, the phrase in Ignatius certainly appears to suggest that Jesus had but one human parent, and even apart from this comparison the language seems to point to the same conclusion. Now Ignatius was a disciple of the Apostle John, to whose charge Jesus had committed His mother. He was therefore in closest touch with the Apostolic tradition, and his testimony on so personal a matter as this is certainly more than the record of a vague floating tradition, more than the repetition of a mere baseless legend.

Justin Martyr is of peculiar interest to us in this connection, for while he wrote a little later than Ignatius, in the middle of the second century, he was a native of Samaria, and he had much intercourse with Jews and knew the Jewish Christians. This Father appeals repeatedly to the Old Testament for predictions of the. virgin birth. Thus, in his First Apology,[4] he discusses the application of the prediction in Isa 7:14, “ Behold, a virgin shall conceive,” &c, to the birth of Jesus Christ, having alluded to this a little earlier, writing, “In these books, then, of the prophets we found Jesus our Christ foretold as coming, bom of a virgin”. Again he writes, “ But why, through the power of the Word, according to the will of God the Father and Lord of all, he was born of a virgin as a man... an intelligent man will be able to comprehend from what has been already so largely said.” In his Dialogue with Trypho he argues against the Jewish interpretation of the passage from Isaiah.[2] We are not here concerned with his argument — the logic may be faulty; nor is he to be appealed to on the grounds of patristic authority. The simple fact is that he is a witness to a very ancient general belief among the primitive Christians.

It is needless to point to the unanimous belief of later fathers, because with them we pass beyond the limits of testimony — even traditional testimony, and find ourselves in the region of settled faith. This chorus of unanimity is only broken by some who reject the chief positions held by the main body of the Christian Church. No early Christian believer in the Incarnation is to be found among those who deny the virgin birth. Logically tenable as such a position might be if there were reasons for taking it up, in point of fact it never was taken up. But the denial of the Incarnation did not spring out of doubts as to the virgin birth. It was always the other way. First the Catholic view of the nature of Christ was rejected; and then as a consequence the accounts of His birth found in Matthew and Luke were set aside. The denial was found in two opposite directions. The first case that appears is that of Cerinthus, an Egyptian Jew contemporary with St. John, who asserted that the Christ descended on the man Jesus at His baptism and left Him at His crucifixion. That is to say, he denied the Incarnation. According to his teaching Jesus was simply a man on whom the Divine Christ rested for a time. The Ebionites were Jewish Christians who also denied the Incarnation; but their position was like what we call Unitarian. Very different is the position of Marcion who came to Rome from Pontus, in the reign of Hadrian, on a great reforming mission to revive interest in the teachings of St. Paul, The only gospel he accepted was Luke, which he mutilated, cutting out the narratives of the infancy of our Lord. This, however, he did on doctrinal, not on critical grounds. Now, ho too denied the Incarnation, but by denying the humanity of Christ, who, as he taught, suddenly appeared in the Capernaum synagogue, under the form of a man, yet not wearing a real human body. With Marcion the humanity of our Lord was but a phantom appearance. Of course, docetism so pronounced as this was forced to repudiate the narratives of the birth of Jesus; not, however, on account of any peculiarities in them, but simply because it denied the birth of Jesus from a human mother in any way. Cerinthus, therefore, and Marcion cannot be cited as witnesses against the narratives in Matthew and Lulce. It is perfectly clear that they were not troubled by doubts on historical grounds; they simply brought their idea of the facts into line with their theory. In the Syrian palimpsest of the gospels which was discovered by Mrs. Lewis at the monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai there are some curious various readings relating to the birth of Jesus. Mat 1:16 — “ Joseph, the husband to whom was betrothed Mary the Virgin, begat Jesus, who is called the Christ; “ and Mat 1:25, referring to Joseph, reads — “ And she bare him a son.” Singularly enough these startling variations in the text are found side by side with the full narrative of the virgin birth as that appears in our Matthew. They only make the Syriac manuscript inconsistent with itself; and therefore there can be no doubt that they do not represent the original text on which the version was founded or even the original form of the Syi’iac version, though the question of their origin is very obscure. For this reason they cannot be allowed to throw any serious doubt on the narrative as that appears in our generally accepted texts.

It is hardly necessary to point out that the rejection of the Christian teaching concerning the birth of Jesus by the Jews is no evidence whatever against the truth of that teaching. In his great work, Against Celsus,^ Origen refers to the calumny that had introduced a man called “ Panthera “ as the father of Jesus. This very name is a proof that the calumny had no historical basis, for it is evidently a play on the Greek word for “virgin“ — Parthenos.

Then it may be pointed out that although certain speculative ideas of Alexandrian or Rabbinical thought might be supposed to favour the notion of birth from a virgin, the trend of Jewish thought generally, and especially that of the popular Messianic ideas in which the early Christians had been brought up, was quite in another direction. The prophecy from Isaiah quoted by St. Matthew is used as a favourite argument by the fathers. There is a growing conviction on the part of criticism that in the original Hebrew that passage cannot be certainly applied to a virgin birth, the word translated “virgin” meaning “young woman.” Still the Greek of the Septuagint is Parthenos —the usual term for “virgin “; and it was the Greek version that the Christians mostly used. But to suppose that this word gave rise to the narratives is to hang them on a very slender thread. On the other side we must place the fact that the Jews held marriage in the highest honour. Yet these narratives are found in the most Jewish parts of the Kew Testament, There, of all places, it would be least likely for the time-honoured expectation that the Messiah would be born in due course of natural Jewish parentage to be set aside.

Probably all these considerations will count for very little with most people who are reluctant to accept the gospel narratives of the Nativity, because their real objection is found in the miraculous character of those narratives, and of course if it is enough to say, “ miracles do not happen,” these narratives must go the way of the myths of the credulous. But, as we saw at the commencement, the miracle of the virgin birth only comes before us as an adjunct and appendage of the most stupendous of all miracles. If it stood by itself we might be shy of it. When it is associated with the Incarnation — and it has no place apart from that marvel and mystery — to object to it simply as a miracle, and yet to believe in the Incarnation, is to take up a very inconsistent position. For this reason we cannot help the case by attempting to drag in biological analogies of parthenogenesis. The feeble rationalism that this method of arguing illustrates simply disgusts the men of science whom it aims at conciliating. Let it be frankly admitted that no freak of nature could account for this thing; if it could be so accounted for its significance to religion would forthwith cease. The sole value of the wonderful birth rises from the fact that it is the manner in which the Son of God came into the world when taking upon Himself human flesh, and the credibility of the narratives of the Nativity rests on the assurance that they describe the Advent of One whose existence from His birth to His resurrection was throughout a perpetual miracle.