Tovia Singer Is Wrong About The Origins Of Belief In The Virgin Birth

His YouTube channel recently put out a video on the virgin birth. He repeats a lot of claims I've addressed before. See here for resources on how much Matthew and Luke agree concerning Jesus' childhood, what they say about the timing of the family's residence in Bethlehem, etc. There are too many false claims in Singer's video for me to interact with all of them here. He refers, for example, to how "many" Evangelical scholars say that the infancy narratives are "hopelessly unreconcilable". He provides no documentation. I've reconciled the narratives, and so have other people. And I can cite non-Evangelicals acknowledging that the material can be reconciled. Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, two very liberal Jesus Seminar scholars, acknowledged, "It is not impossible to harmonize them." (The First Christmas [New York, New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2007], 23) But the subject I want to focus on here is what Singer claimed about the origins of the virgin birth belief.

Early in the video, he tells us, "The idea of a virgin birth develops in the 80s". Later, he tells us that Matthew and Luke were composed "like in the mid 80s", and he alleges that he's being "very conservative" with the dating. He goes on to contrast his dating with the suggestion of some people that Luke wasn't written until "much later", so he's focusing on how his dating of the two gospels supposedly is "very conservative" in a way that's favorable to Christianity. Just afterward, though, he refers to how the virgin birth tradition predates Matthew and Luke and developed "further and further" in different parts of the world before appearing in those gospels. By the time the virgin birth appeared in the two gospels, Singer tells us, the virgin birth tradition had "completely developed independently" to produce two different versions of the tradition in the two gospels.

So, does he think the virgin birth idea originated in the early to mid 80s, then went through this process of development he refers to before appearing in two different gospels in the mid 80s? That doesn't leave much time for development. On the other hand, if by "developed in the 80s" he was just referring to how the tradition grew after originating earlier than the 80s, then his initial comments about the 80s are misleading and not of much significance accordingly. If the virgin birth idea was circulating earlier than the 80s, then his focus on that decade is problematic.

He acknowledges that Matthew and Luke drew from earlier sources. And Christians should agree with that. Neither gospel author claims to be an eyewitness of the events surrounding Jesus' birth, and what's reported about the authors early on suggests that neither was an eyewitness of Jesus' childhood. This is something both liberal and conservative scholars and everybody in between can and should agree about. That means, then, that the New Testament reflects at least a few sources' belief in the virgin birth (the author of Matthew, the author of Luke, and their source[s]).

That raises the issue of the reliability of Singer's dating of the gospels. He's wrong. As I've argued elsewhere (here and here), we have multiple lines of evidence suggesting that Acts was completed in the early to mid 60s. And Luke should be dated earlier than Acts. The evidence for dating Acts no later than the mid 60s includes what the opening of the third gospel says about the scope of that document, what the opening of Acts tells us about that book's scope, and the earliest external source to comment on the dating of the gospel of Luke. There's a lot of other evidence for dating Luke earlier than Singer does, but those three lines I just cited are the most significant internal and external evidence we have. They all support a date earlier than Singer alleges.

And one of those lines of evidence, the citation of Luke's gospel as scripture in 1 Timothy 5:18, is problematic for another claim Singer made. At one point in his video, he says that the virgin birth isn't found in the thirteen letters of Paul. My article on 1 Timothy 5:18 here and my material on the dating of Luke and Acts linked above explain why we should think the passage is referring to the gospel of Luke as scripture, and those articles explain why the reference to Luke's gospel as scripture is significant regardless of whether we think Paul wrote 1 Timothy. Not only is 1 Timothy an early source, but it's also one that clearly is at least Pauline, regardless of whether one thinks Paul wrote it. But Singer doesn't dispute Paul's authorship of the document in this context. He could say that 1 Timothy 5:18 just refers to Luke as scripture without affirming the virgin birth, but that would be an insufficient response. Affirmation of the scriptural status of Luke most likely implies agreement with what Luke says about the virgin birth.

Furthermore, Paul's lack of concern for addressing the premarital timing of Mary's pregnancy is best explained if belief in the premarital timing of the pregnancy was accompanied by belief in the virgin birth. 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. That includes Paul's letters. It also includes other New Testament sources Singer brings up.

Then there's the widespread acceptance of the virgin birth among the earliest sources outside the New Testament, including Pauline and Johannine individuals and churches, for example. For documentation, see here.

Celsus and his Jewish source(s) have Jesus claiming that he was born of a virgin (in Origen, Against Celsus 1:28), which also places the virgin birth claim early. If the claim didn't originate until around half a century after Jesus' death, as Singer has suggested, then why would both the earliest Jewish opponents of Christianity and the earliest pagan opponents refer to the earliness of the claim rather than making an issue of its lateness? Singer isn't just disagreeing with the early Christians. He's also disagreeing with the earliest non-Christian sources, including at least one of his Jewish predecessors.