It's going to air on December 10. I plan to watch it, and I'll probably post about it again after doing so, but I want to make some preliminary comments.
I doubt he'll go much beyond the book Andrew Lincoln published on the topic a decade ago. Go here to read my review of Lincoln's work. Everything I've read about Ehrman's webinar to this point suggests that it's going to largely, if not entirely, be a reformulation of Lincoln's approach.
Since I was going to post an article about how to argue for the virgin birth this Christmas season, I'll go ahead and include that material here. After I address that subject, I'll add some further comments about interacting with Ehrman in particular.
More of a case can be made for the virgin birth than what's usually offered. And there's a large number and variety of approaches that can be taken, in isolation or in some kind of combination. For example:
- We have good reason to believe in the Divine inspiration of scripture (prophecy fulfillment, Jesus' miracles, etc.), and we can accept the virgin birth on the basis that scripture affirms it.
- The miracles of Jesus' adulthood, such as his resurrection, add credibility to the miracles associated with his childhood. For an expansion of that argument, see here.
- To the extent that we have good evidence for other miracles surrounding Jesus' birth, the virgin birth claim is more credible accordingly. And we do have good evidence for some miracles associated with his birth, such as prophecy fulfillment (Davidic ancestry, the Bethlehem birthplace, the timing involved in Daniel's Seventy Weeks prophecy, etc.).
- The general credibility of an author who affirms the virgin birth and related matters gives us reason to accept the virgin birth. Regarding the related matters I just referred to, think of all of the connections between Elizabeth and Mary in Luke 1, for example. It would be surprising if the two women's pregnancies were associated as Luke reports, in contexts like the timing of the pregnancies and each woman's supernatural knowledge of the other's pregnancy and some surrounding circumstances, if Mary's pregnancy was not only not supernatural, but even sinful. The same can be said of John the Baptist's leaping in Elizabeth's womb when he did and other matters that are connected to the virgin birth in some relevant way. You could argue that Luke was wrong about all of the issues involved, but the evidence we have for his general credibility goes against that, and it's worth noting how much you'd have to reject in order to justify rejecting the virgin birth. For some discussions of the evidence for Luke's general reliability, see here, here, and here.
- The same principles are applicable to the other relevant sources, like Matthew. We have less evidence for Matthew's general credibility than we have for Luke's, largely because Matthew wrote so much less and in a narrower context, but much of what's said about Luke above can be applied to Matthew as well.
- That also goes for Paul. He seems to refer to Luke's gospel as scripture in 1 Timothy 5:18. That carries with it the implication of agreeing with and affirming the virgin birth. We also have other evidence that Paul accepted it. The premarital timing of Mary's pregnancy is unlikely to have been fabricated by the early Christians. So, given the likely historicity of the premarital timing of the pregnancy, why wasn't that premarital timing more of a scandal among the early sources? If knowledge of the premarital pregnancy was accompanied by the claim of a virgin birth, then the lesser degree of scandal becomes more coherent. Christians would have thought that no premarital sex was involved, and non-Christians would have known that any claim of premarital sex that they alleged would be disputed. They'd still make the accusation to some extent, but they'd probably make less of an issue of it than they would have if premarital sex had been acknowledged by the early Christians. So, widespread early Christian belief in a virgin birth makes the most sense of the situation. And that includes Paul's letters. For these and other reasons, it's likely that Paul accepted the virgin birth. His general credibility is relevant, then, as with Luke and Matthew.
- An indirect argument can be made from the fact that Mary and other close relatives of Jesus identified themselves as Christians during a timeframe when the virgin birth claim seems to have been widely circulating and widely accepted. For further discussion of that line of evidence, see here.
Having said all of that, here are some further considerations in anticipation of Ehrman's webinar:
- I've responded to Ehrman on the virgin birth before. I reviewed a 2021 discussion he had with Michael Shermer, which was partly about the virgin birth.
- The promotional material for the webinar suggests that Mark's gospel will be one of the sources Ehrman will highlight. See my post last year about Mark's relationship with the infancy narratives and other sources relevant to Jesus' childhood. As that post explains, critics (including Ehrman) often appeal to the unbelief of Jesus' relatives as evidence that miraculous events, like the virgin birth, didn't occur in Jesus' childhood. But where do they get the conclusion that Jesus' relatives were unbelievers? Not from an early pre-Pauline creed, song, or other such source. Not from Paul himself. Not from the other New Testament letters. They get it from the gospels. And they engage in harmonization in the process. They harmonize what the gospels say about the relatives' unbelief with the references to their status as believers in Paul and elsewhere. And people like Ehrman do that sort of thing in other contexts as well. They interpret an earlier source in light of a later one. See my post linked above and my response to Andrew Lincoln for further discussion. So, people like Ehrman should have no upfront objection to people like me interpreting a source like Paul, Mark, or John in light of what other sources tell us about the virgin birth. I'm just doing the same thing these critics do in other contexts. As I noted in my response to Lincoln, all of us do this sort of thing in our everyday lives. We wouldn't be able to function without doing it. We allow what's said by one source to be qualified by what's said by another (e.g., the normal conclusion that a father/son relationship is biological can easily be overridden if another source reports that the relationship is adoptive rather than biological). Christians should agree with people like Lincoln (and Ehrman) that certain New Testament passages and documents are most naturally interpreted as denying a virgin birth when considered apart from certain contextual factors. If all we had were passages W and X or documents Y and Z to go by, we'd conclude that Jesus probably was conceived in a normal manner. That shouldn't be denied. Rather, it should be supplemented by the other factors that make a reading consistent with a virgin birth more likely on balance. Similarly, some references to an older man as "father" in some letters exchanged between the older man and a younger one would suggest a biological relationship when considered in isolation, but evidence that the relationship was adoptive instead could easily override that.
- Opponents of the virgin birth often suggest that early Christian sources surely would have mentioned the virgin birth if they believed in it. But it was one miracle among many others, and the author of the fourth gospel (who's often cited against the virgin birth) refers to how there's much about Jesus that he didn't include (21:25). We repeatedly see a later gospel not mention a miracle brought up by an earlier gospel. For example, John leaves out Synoptic material on Jesus' exorcisms, but it's unlikely that the exorcisms are unhistorical, were unknown to the author of the fourth gospel, or were viewed negatively by him. It's more likely that he knew of the exorcisms and thought positively of them, but didn't want to address the subject, because he thought the Synoptics had covered it adequately or for whatever other reason. Similarly, though Paul puts a lot of emphasis on his previous unbelief (1 Corinthians 15:8-9, Galatians 1:13-23, etc.), he doesn't mention the previous unbelief of Jesus' brothers. That doesn't prevent people like Ehrman from appealing to the unbelief of Jesus' brothers and other relatives. Ehrman, who's a harmonizer like the rest of us, knows that the best way to harmonize Paul and the gospels (and other relevant sources) is to conclude that the initial unbelief of Jesus' brothers is likely, even though Paul doesn't mention it in the midst of putting so much emphasis on his own prior unbelief. Similarly, somebody like the author of the fourth gospel could believe in the virgin birth, yet decide to focus on other miracles instead, miracles that were, after all, more recent, more verifiable, less open to ridicule, and such. In other words, critics like Ehrman don't follow the "surely they would have mentioned it" reasoning when considering an issue like the unbelief of Jesus' relatives, so he should allow for advocates of the virgin birth to depart from that sort of reasoning when warranted. The reasons why something like the virgin birth or the unbelief of Jesus' relatives isn't mentioned in particular sources can vary. But the point I'm making is that it's not enough to just cite a motive for mentioning the concept in question (e.g., the virgin birth is a significant miracle, the unbelief of the relatives of Jesus adds evidential weight to their testimony on subjects like Jesus' resurrection). There are plausible motives for not mentioning such things as well, even if the source in question held the belief under consideration.
- Two parts of my review of Lincoln's book, here and here, document how widespread belief in the virgin birth was among the sources of the earliest centuries. That's a major problem for the idea that the virgin birth was rejected by such significant sources as Paul, the author of Mark, and the author of John. My post earlier this week on Jesus' childhood in early Ephesian sources is also relevant here. Notice that we have so many early Pauline and Johannine sources (Ignatius and the people he wrote to, Papias, Polycarp, etc.) affirming the virgin birth and doing so just after the time when the large majority of scholars, including liberals, think John was written. For example, as I've noted before, the influence of the Johannine writings on Papias is evident, and he refers positively to Matthew's gospel, which affirms the virgin birth. (The usual passage in Papias cited regarding Matthew isn't all that's relevant here. See my discussion of another relevant passage about Matthew, a passage that often gets overlooked or underestimated, in the sixth paragraph here. For a fuller discussion of the topic, go here.) If 1 Timothy is attributed to somebody other than Paul, the document is still an early Pauline source referring to Luke's gospel as scripture in 5:18, which implies agreement with the virgin birth. As I discuss in the post here, Clement of Alexandria referred to an early account of the composition of the gospel of John in which the author of that gospel agreed with the Synoptics and wanted to supplement them. These are just a few examples. Others are addressed in posts like the ones linked above. If individuals like Paul and the author of the fourth gospel contradicted the virgin birth, why do we find the earliest sources influenced by them affirming the virgin birth? The idea that it was widely and prominently contradicted early on offers a much weaker explanation of how widely and deeply held the concept was just afterward.
- It looks like Ehrman will raise the issue of how Jesus could be a descendant of David under a virgin birth scenario and why the genealogies focus on Joseph rather than Mary. I addressed those issues in a post around three years ago. See, especially, the second and third hyphenated sections of that post and the article by Caleb Friedeman cited there.
- Keep in mind what I've said in the past about a common skeptical inconsistency on issues like the virgin birth. If they're going to propose that there were a few or more sources behind the parts of the infancy narratives affirming the virgin birth, that the gospels came from groups, such as a community or school, and so on, then it follows that a larger number of early sources advocated the virgin birth accordingly. You can't propose that there was a larger number of sources behind the New Testament in one context, then turn around and object in another context that there was a smaller number of sources who affirmed the virgin birth than your other claim implies.
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