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Wednesday, December 06, 2023

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.

5 comments:

  1. Wow, it's striking that he's using that reference to evangelical scholars. The most prominent that I know of, of course, is Robert Gundry, who scarcely ranks anymore as an evangelical scholar but continues to be referred to as one. His commentary on Matthew was perhaps the worst major (in the sense of "large") piece of scholarship by an allegedly evangelical scholar in the past forty years. But Mike Licona of course has said similar things in a written debate with Bart Ehrman. Licona was merely cagier and said that he "doesn't know" if the infancy narratives are "midrash" (by which he meant, as the context made clear, heavily, non-factually embellished). Craig Evans has referred positively to Gundry's "midrash" view about Matthew, in a debate Q & A. Interestingly, in that context Evans spoke much like Singer (!!) by emphasizing Gundry's supposed "evangelical" status as a way of throwing the infancy narratives under the bus. Even Craig Keener has said something weaker than these others but still somewhat deprecatory. In Christobiography he says something to the effect that, after all, the infancy narratives recount events that would have taken place about a generation prior to the rest of the Gospel narratives, implying thereby that their factual reliability may be less. Singer may know of other evangelicals. Of course, some of these are weakly deprecatory statements. But in general, Gundry (who definitely views the Matthean narrative as largely invented) and various semi-approving evangelical citations of Gundry support a somewhat weaker version of what Singer said. Singer has probably become aware of this loss of appetite in evangelical circles for defending the infancy narratives.

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  2. Matthew and Luke mostly give different events of the nativity. The most prominent point where they vary is the genealogies. Most Christians, I believe, refuse to acknowledge Luke's account as Mary's. They think that lineage is through males in the Jewish system. This is fallacious since Zelophehad's daughters proves my point. If Christians were not so divided on this truth more progress would have been possible. Now scholars, having rejected sound principles, are flailing about blind to the obvious.

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    1. Well, any Christian who denies Luke's account as being Jesus's lineage through Mary is a retard. Obviously Mary's lineage can't contain Jeconiah, because if Jesus were a direct, blood-related, descendant of Jeconiah, He could not sit on the throne of David. Since Jesus's step-pappy, Joseph, was descended from Jeconiah, as Matthew relates, Joseph was in line for the throne, but could not sit on it. Yet Jesus could.

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  3. People might find this article of mine to be interesting:

    https://rationalchristiandiscernment.blogspot.com/2017/04/why-virgin-birth-matters.html

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  4. Tovia is not even Jewish. I bet he can't tell you when the last time he sacrificed a sheep to atone for his sins was. It doesn't matter anyway, since Judaism is not a religion. The Bible never mentions Judaism. In the 6000 years of earth's history and God's one and only true religion, which is that if Christianity, Jews were only considered to be God's people for a mere 800 years or so. Adam wasn't a Jew. Job wasn't a jew. Abraham wasn't a Jew. Moses wasn't a Jew. David wasn't a Jew. Even Solomon wasn't a Jew. It wasn't until after Solomon died that Israel split up into northern Israel and Judah. Around 800 BC, give or take a few years. So, poof! Jews existed. But their religion was not called Jewish. They were simply predominantly of the tribe of Judah, of Israel. So... Jew, schmew. Just Sayin...

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