The opening chapters of Matthew and of Luke explicitly teach the virgin birth of Christ. When the best attested text is accurately translated, these two passages bear clear testimony that Jesus Christ was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary.
According to the First Gospel, an angel of the Lord guided Joseph to take unto himself Mary his wife by applying to her problem pregnancy the messianic prophecies of Psalm 130:8 and Isaiah 7:14. The Third Gospel gives Mary’s account of the things she treasured up in her heart concerning God’s miraculous dealings with her. The Spirit uses these two independent witnesses to bring many to receive this as God’s authentic Word.
Some people reason that since Paul and John, the chief New Testament expounders of the faith, never mention the virgin birth, one is free to disregard or to reject it. I invite them to reread Paul and John, for I am convinced that what is explicit in Matthew and Luke is implicit in Paul and John.
We all find the substance of our faith in the Fatherhood of God revealed to us in Jesus Christ. And the beginning of God’s revelation of himself as Father to and through Christ is found in this: that through the virgin birth God was Jesus’ sole Abba, Father.
Both explicitly and implicitly, the New Testament community, led by Jesus, testifies to the incarnation of God wrought through the virgin birth of Christ. Thereafter this conviction is expressed by the representative fathers, Ignatius, Justin, Irenaeus, and Tertullian, in the eucharistic service of The Apostolic Tradition, in The Odes of Solomon, in the Te Deum Laudamus, as in the creeds, and in Tatian’s harmony (Diatessaron).
The things that “the eyewitnesses and ministers of the word delivered unto us” (Luke 1:2) they delivered unto Paul as truly as they did unto Luke. The close contacts between Paul and Luke recorded in the New Testament and echoed in the early Church indicate a give and take between these brethren; one would certainly share such an important matter with the other. (See also my article, “A Restudy of the Virgin Birth,” Evangelical Quarterly, October–December, 1965.)
Paul: The Argument From Silence
Let us look more closely at the argument from silence. Reasoning from silence is always precarious. But if it is to be applied by those who reject the virgin birth, it may also be used by those who defend the reality of this event.
Paul speaks of the birth of Jesus four times. Jesus was made or born of the seed of David according to the flesh, Romans 1:3; he was made or born of a woman, Galatians 4:4 (“the son of a human mother,” Today’s English Version); he was made or born under the law, Galatians 4:4; and he was made or born in the likeness of men, Philippians 2:7.
Two different verbs in the Greek are rendered in recent versions “born.” In the cases referring to Jesus’ birth, Paul uses the one and avoids the other. He uses forms of the verb ginomai, which means born in the sense of come into being, become, made. The King James Version renders this world “made” in each case.
The other verb, gennao, is also translated “born.” This other verb has the connotation of begotten and is often rendered “begat.” As Professor Raymond E. Brown has noted (The Gospel According toJohn, 1:12), “although the verb can mean ‘born’ … the idea of agency implied in ‘begotten’ is clearly more appropriate.” It so regularly implies a human father that any exception calls for an explanation. Thus when Matthew 1:16 speaks of Jesus’ being begotten of Mary, verse 20 promptly makes it clear that this was a begetting of the Holy Spirit, not by a human father.
In Galatians 4:23 and 4:29, Paul uses this other verb, gennao, to assert that Ishmael was born, begotten, according to the flesh, and that Isaac was born, begotten, according to the promise. In the same fourth chapter of Galatians Paul twice speaks of the birth of Jesus. In doing so he avoids using the verb gennao, which carries the connotation of begotten and ordinarily implies a human father. This chapter refers to four different kinds of births—Ishmael begotten according to the flesh, Isaac begotten according to the promise, Jesus born, made of a human mother, and our rebirth by the Spirit of adoption.
The description of our sonship as wrought by “the Spirit of his Son” reaches its full implication only on the assumption that the Spirit acted in his most eminent way in God’s sending forth his own Son, as the son of a human mother. That is, as Hans Küng says, “the existence of Jesus Christ Himself is already grounded in the being and action of the Holy Spirit (conceptus de Spiritu Sancto)” (Justification, p. 82). Analogies of this tremendous miracle are seen in God’s mighty works in making us sons of the Father and Isaac’s being born according to God’s promise.
If one is to press the argument from silence: Paul four times asserts the birth of Jesus, including the assertion that God’s own Son was born, made, of a human mother; but four times Paul avoids asserting the birth of Jesus by means of a human begetting.
Scholars place the three passages in which Paul four times mentions the birth of Jesus as texts that the Apostle is quoting from his predecessors. Three years after his conversion Paul went to Jerusalem to inquire of the primitive disciples about Christ. He spent fifteen days with Cephas (Peter) and conferred also with James, the Lord’s brother (Gal. 1:18). Certainly, Cephas and James were among the primary eyewitnesses and ministers of the Word “who delivered unto us”—that is, to Paul as well as to Luke—“the things which have taken place among us.” Now since Paul’s four references to Jesus’ birth with their avoidance of the verb gennao come from the same pre-Pauline sources as do the data of the pre-Lucan birth accounts, it seems proper to interpret the one in accord with the other. This means that Paul’s avoidance of a verb that implies a human father is to be understood in the light of Luke’s account of His virgin birth. And conversely, during Paul’s visit to Peter the data of the birth narratives could well have been “delivered unto us”—that is, to Paul and later by him to Luke.
This only makes the case stronger. Both Paul and his predecessors taught that Jesus was made or born of a human mother, but never suggested a begetting by a human father. As he had no divine mother, so also he had no human father.
John: The Argument From Analogy
The Gospel of John is not as silent on the virgin birth as is sometimes asserted. Two of the oldest Latin fathers, Irenaeus (Against Heresies, III, xvi, 2; xix, 2) and Tertullian (On the Flesh of Christ, xix) quote John 1:13 in the singular. Tertullian charges the Valentinian Gnostics with changing this text into the plural. In the singular, the text reads: “To those who believe on the Name of Him who was begotten not of bloods, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of a husband—but of God.” Since there are no known Greek manuscripts of this verse as old as these Latin fathers, several of the ablest scholars, such as Theodor Zahn, C. C. Torrey, and Oscar Cullmann, regard the singular as the original reading. And, of course, the rendering of the verse in the singular is a direct reference to the virgin birth of Christ.
In any case, the use of the singular shows that the plural of the Greek manuscripts is built upon the analogy of Jesus’ virgin birth. And the analogy implies the fact. As he was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary, so Christians are born from above not of a human father but of the Spirit, as is set forth in John 3:5 and in the common reading of John 1:13.
Abba: Jesus’ Father
In his first recorded sentence, Jesus affirmed that his Father was not Joseph but God (Luke 2:49). This is the more significant when we realize that Jesus was using for Father the nursery term, Abba, Daddy, Pappa, which the little brothers and sisters used for Joseph. Evidently as the younger children came—James, Joses, Juda, Simon, and the sisters—Mary told Jesus the facts of life concerning these little ones and the special case of his own conception as we have it in Luke. Likewise from Joseph came the Matthean story of how an angel of the Lord assured him that the babe Mary was carrying was of the Holy Spirit, not of any human father. With these accounts the Father who reveals himself to babes (Luke 10:21) gave his Holy Spirit to bear witness with Jesus that God was his only Abba.
Though it brought opprobrium upon him, Jesus continued to call no man on earth his Father, knowing that his Father was in heaven (Matt. 23:9). For this he was derided as “the son of Mary” (Mark 6:3), “a glutton and a wine-bibber, a friend of tax-collectors and outcasts” (Matt. 11:19; Luke 7:34; 5:30; 15:2). To His affirmations, “I am from above,” “I am not of this world” (John 8:23), his critics replied, “You are a Samaritan and have a devil” (8:48) but “we were not born of fornication” (8:41). He endured the mockery that went with confessing no human father so that we might abide in the everlasting arms of the heavenly Father.
In the Nazareth home, to and through this Son whose only Abba was God, the gracious Father revealed himself as One who delights to hear and answer the prayers of his children. The heavenly Father is more ready to give good gifts, even his Holy Spirit, to his children than Mary to give bread—not a stone—to little James, or Joseph to give an egg—not a scorpion—in answer to Juda’s request (Luke 11:9–13). The story of the friend knocking at midnight is told from the inside, as though it were Joseph who first refused to open and later relented and gave the neighbor as many loaves as he needed (Luke 11:5–9). And even the widow and the unjust judge could well be Mary asking justice from one who was defrauding her of the payment due Joseph (Luke 18:1–8). It would seem that the petitions in the Lord’s Prayer took their embryonic form when Jesus was the baby sitter in the Nazareth nursery and, after Joseph passed on, when Jesus became “the Carpenter,” that is, the breadwinner for the family. Twenty out of twenty-one of Jesus’ recorded prayers are addressed to God as his Father.
The revelation of God as our Father shines through every part of Jesus’ ministry. In the Sermon on the Mount, the eye of the Father is upon every facet of life. In the parable, the arms of the Father are ever open to receive the prodigal, and his heart humble enough to go out and invite the elder brother to come in (Luke 15:11–32). Some 171 times the Gospels place the word “Father” upon Jesus’ lips, five times in the two verses of Luke 10:21, 22. In the agonies of Gethsemane he stayed himself on the will of his loving Abba (Mark 14:36). He died praying, Father, forgive; Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit (Luke 23:34, 46). The word of the Risen Lord is: “I ascend to my Father and your Father” (John 20:17).
Out of the glory he had with the Father before the world was (John 17:5), the eternal Son came to reveal the Father of whom every fatherhood in heaven and earth is named (Eph. 3:15). And the virgin birth of Christ is the beginning of this gracious revelation of himself as Father that God made to and through Jesus, and to whom the Holy Spirit bears witness as he enables us (Rom. 8:15, 16) to pray Abba, our Father who art in heaven.
THE LOWLY ETERNAL
Once more the pageant has been seen:
Once more the miracle has come.
We who donned burlap and gauze
Have worn silk:
We who are penniless
Have given gold.
Mere men,
We have been shepherds and angels,
Prophets and kings:
What is more,
We have mingled as friends.
Is there no end
To what the Child can do?
No end!
CHARLES A. WAUGAMAN
George M. Marsden is associate professor of history at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan. He has the Ph.D. (Yale University) and has written “The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience.”
