Actually, for once I am in agreement with Chris. While you purport to scholarly statements, your intent is simply to ridicule. Any Biblical scholar would tell you that Lev 16:8 intends more or less the ancient equivalent of “choose for it” (that is, by random means) and has nothing to do with those who used such devices to prophesy and foretell the future.
It is full of statements that show Jesus is not God or even divine. The virgin birth and immaculate conception is constanty ignored or denied.
This is pretty shaky nihil. Do you really think a text canonized and reviewed and re-reviewed by thousands of members of the Church, both Catholic and Protestant, for tens of centuries, would accept any text that somehow genuinely denied Christ’s divinity, either openly or by implication? Whether you believe that Christ is the son of God is your business. But the New Testament itself is clearly predicated on the divinity of Christ. There were various documents floating around especially in the one or two hundred years CE that were considered cultic and/or gnostic and were rejected.
First, to correct one common misuse of terminology, “immaculate conception” does not refer to the virgin conception and birth of Christ, and I believe you are implying it does. It is a purely Roman Catholic dogma that refers to the idea that Mary herself was the product of a virgin conception and birth.
Next, as to the virgin birth, many Protestant theologians of both the most liberal and the most conservative bents either do not pay any attention to it, or else deny it outright. It has nothing to do with their contention that Jesus was the son of God. There are scriptural bases both supporting and contradicting the virgin birth.
Those who believe in the virgin birth principally point to the citations of Matthew and Luke (both written somewhere around 90 CE), and accept it on that basis. For example:
Luke 1:26 – 35 "In the sixth month, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendent of David. The virgin's name was Mary...The angel answered, 'The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God.' " (NIV)
Those who do not believe in the virgin birth point to various scriptural supports, particularly Paul’s epistle to the Romans, written in 57 CE. Paul (one of the earliest and most important Christian apostles) makes absolutely no mention of the virgin birth, so either it was not incorporated in his understanding of the life of Christ, or else he knew about it and did not consider it important, which would seem rather doubtful. In fact, he states at the very beginning of Romans that Christ is of the seed of David. Joseph was of David’s lineage, not Mary:
Romans 1:1,3: “Paul, a bond-servant of Christ Jesus, called as an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God. Which He promised beforehand through His prophets in the holy Scriptures, concerning His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, who was made of the seed of David according to the flesh.” Furthermore, Revelation 22:16 contains the same contention of lineage: "I, Jesus, have sent My angel to testify to you these things for the churches. I am the root and the offspring of David, the bright morning star."
Furthermore, the story of the virgin birth does not show up in the Gospel of Mark, which is universally considered to be the earliest one by about 20 years. It also does not show up in John, which was written after Matthew and Luke were written. Many theologians believe that the Gospel of John was written by a group of authors working together. The writers(s) did not mention the virgin birth. They must have been aware of the belief, since the Gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke would have been widely circulated for 5 to 15 years by the time that the Gospel of John was written. For whatever reason, they elected to omit it. In John 1:45 they refer to Jesus specifically as "the son of Joseph."
Most Protestant theologians who do not believe in the virgin birth are to one degree or another “adoptionists,” a doctrine that the Roman Catholic church considered heresy. Pure adoptionists (and there are few of them) believe that Christ was not divine until his baptism by John the Baptist, that God actually made his choice of Christ then. Other adoptionists believe that God had made his choice of Christ even before his birth, but only let it be known fully to Christ and others in the world at the time of his baptism. Most Protestants consider Christ’s baptism a far more crucial event than the circumstances of his conception and birth, in any case, because it was after his baptism that his mission of salvation actually began.
After Luther (who fervently believed in the virgin birth), there developed within Protestantism a strong movement against various “poperies” of the Roman Catholic church, in particular a movement called “Anti-Marianism,” which opposed the “cult of Mary” both in the Catholic dogma and in various devotionals. The virgin birth was strongly de-emphasized, and even completely denied by some churches, leading to various rewrites of the Nicene Creed to exclude the virgin birth. It was actually referring only to the belief in the virgin birth, and not to the divinity of Christ, that Thomas Jefferson said: "The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.”
The differences of opinion over the virgin birth remain just as prevalent today. In a poll taken several years ago, it was determined that more than half of Methodist ministers, one half of Presbyterian ones, and about a third of Baptist ones don’t believe in the virgin birth (although the belief is much stronger in congregations). Virgin birth belief is far higher among Lutheran ministers (about 80 percent believe it), as it is a very centralized church and the virgin birth is very strongly stressed by the central Lutheran church bodies such as the Missouri Synod.
Actually, as I think about it, of all the sermons I’ve ever heard in Protestant churches, I’ve never heard a single one that focused on the virgin birth, even at Christmas. |
