I beg to differ, I have never in all my life ever been to a church that even gave consideration to disputing the fact of the virgin birth.
That's not what I said. You probably would not hear it in a church service. However, you will find it discussed in even the most conservative seminaries in the country. Also, I am not taking issue with whether or not the virgin birth occurred, I was only noting to nihil that not all Christians who believe in Christ as the son of God also believe in the virgin birth.
Regarding those theologians that do not give much credence to the virgin birth, there are basically two groups.
The first are ultra liberals (such as Unitarians that nihil referred to), who basically underneath disbelieve the divinity of Christ, and things like salvation through Christ and the occurrence of miracles as cited in the scriptures. I think we can ignore these, because basically if you do not believe in the divinity of Christ, if you think he was basically a really great guy who had a lot of good things to say, you can't really claim to be a Christian.
The second group is composed of theologians, some of them very conservative, who believe that Christ was divine, that salvation is through Christ, and believe in all the miracles that Christ was noted as performing in the scriptures. Their issue is with the provenance of the virgin birth sections of Matthew and Luke. In particular, they note that Paul makes no mention at all of the virgin birth (in fact he specifically mentions Christ's lineage from David). It therefore appears that either Paul was not aware of this part of Christ's life, or else it was not at all important in Pauline and subsequent Biblical theology. The virgin birth is also not mentioned in the earliest Gospel, Mark. In fact, the earliest versions of Matthew and Luke (which have obviously not been canonized) began with the baptism of Christ by John the Baptist, as did the earlier Mark. Later versions came to include the virgin birth, which seems to have begun to be included from 115 - 125 CE.
Most of these scholars (who, contrary to your probable opinion are devout, Bible believing Christians) suspect that the story of the virgin birth was added during the period of ministering to the Hellenized Jews and Greek pagans, in order to make Christianity more easily understandable to the pagans who were converting en masse. At an earlier date, Jews converting to Christianity would not have expected a virgin birth -- indeed, they would have expected the Messiah to have been of the line of David, as Paul brings up.
Contrary to what you may think, this view is held by numerous conservative textual scholars who have spent decades studying the New Testament. At Baylor (the largest Southern Baptist university), I encountered it quite commonly among professors of the religion department (in general a pretty conservative bunch), mostly if you spoke with them in the privacy of their offices. Would they have addressed these issues openly in undergraduate classes? Probably not, especially because when I was there, there was a "witch hunt" being conducted by the inerrancy movement of the SBC against the Baylor religion department. Would you have heard it preached in a church? Probably not, because in general, congregations like the virgin birth, and they do not for the most part delve into the intricacies of early Biblical texts.
If it was not a virgin birth then Jesus would have been born with corruption. This is a doctrinal position, one that was largely predicated and developed off of the virgin birth itself. That is, since Christ was born of a virgin, why is it important? Because etc. Paul never mentions this issue, nor those after him. The virgin birth as doctrine does not even become important in the Church until the late 5th century, due to the struggle over Arianism (the idea that Christ, although divine, is still lower in stature than God) and the framing of the Nicene Creed. |
