Can you question the Virgin Birth and still be a Christian?

[hrmjustin]

Kimberly Winston

(RNS) It’s a tough sell: A young, unmarried teenager gets pregnant, but the father isn’t a man but God himself. And the girl is a virgin — and (some believe) remains one even after she delivers a strapping baby boy.

That’s the story of the Virgin Birth, one of the central tenets of faith for the world’s 2 billion Christians. The story is embraced by every branch of Christianity, from Eastern Orthodoxy to Mormonism, Catholic and Protestant.

And yet, many theologians, pastors and other Christians say the Virgin Birth gets short shrift at Christmastime. Finding the idea hard to swallow, many believers would rather focus on the cute little baby in the manger instead of the unusual way he got there.

Yet for other Christians, the Virgin Birth is a deal-breaker. You can equivocate about other biblical miracles, such as whether Mary’s son was really able to turn water into wine, but the Virgin Birth must be accepted as gospel.

http://www.religionnews.com/2014/12/23/can-question-virgin-birth-still-christian/

I believe in the virgin birth but I question it from time to time.

[still_one]

1. And is the 25th of December the actual time Jesus was born?

[hrmjustin]

2. no. it was chosen by the church to get people to stop celebrsting the pagan festivals around

this time.

[Smarmie Doofus]

3. Is a "virgin birth" a uniquely christian idea?

Or does it have precursors in pre-christian ( or pre judeo-christian) traditions?

I think it ( the idea) was around for a long time before 0 CE.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

[hrmjustin]

4. Yes, there were older religions with virgin births in their faith structure.

Can't remember them off hand.

[okasha]

5. I have to disagree witb Justin on this.

Every non-Christian "virgin birth" narrative is actually a story of a hero--male or very occasionally female--fathered by a god. The mothers might have been virgins before their encounters with a male deity, but they certainly weren't virgins afterward.

[hrmjustin]

6. I defer to you on this.

You knowledge on ghis mucg greater than mine on this.

[eomer]

7. A hero fathered by a god - isn't that the story of Jesus?

Are you saying that earlier narratives contain explicit wording saying that the god had physical intercourse with the human mother? If not then what specifically is the distinction between the conception of Jesus and the other narratives?

[okasha]

9. I would say that most literature

relating the divine paternity of heroes, unlike Luke and Matthew, does not have a.canonical form. There are, however, plenty of narratives that make quite clear that physical sexual intercourse is involved. Here are a few:

Amun visits Pharaoh Hatshepsut's mother in the bodily form of her husband, giving Hatshepsut a better claim to the Evyptian throne than her nephew, Thutmose III.

Isis constructs a prosthetic phallus for Osiris before she reanimates him to conceive Horus. Not to mention that Isis and Osiris had been married literally from birth.

Poseidon visits Theseus' mother in the guide of the Athenian King Aegeus.

Krishna is his mother's eighth child. It's asking a
bit much to believe she remained a virgin through
seven pregnancies.

There are many more examples, but those should give you an idea of how these narratives approach the subject.

Jesus'

[goldent]

11. I think you can always find similarities between stories if

you look hard enough. Often when you get into the details the stories are not as similar as some would have you believe.

[eomer]

8. Obviously it depends on who you ask.

Some would say that Liberal Christianity that focuses on the teachings of Jesus without a belief in miracles (including the virgin birth) does not make one a Christian. Others would say that's exactly what being a Christian is.

[carolinayellowdog]

10. Fiction, facts, faith, and foundations

Not being a Christian, I won't opine about who is and isn't. But as someone who finds Hermeticism the most appealing religion, I am deterred neither by the fact that it is extinct (in a sense) nor by the well established fact that Hermes is a legendary rather than a historical figure. It seems sad to me that SOME Christians, Muslims, atheists, etc. etc. get hung up on the idea that if the historical narrative is fictional, there can be no spiritual truth in the tradition. You recently posted a story that two thirds of US Christians believe the birth narratives in the Gospels. Yet my understanding is that NO well educated seminarian believes them. From the pulpit of the Methodist church I grew up in, I heard in recent years the preacher acknowledge (gently) that the Christmas story is mythical. Years ago I devoured a dozen or more "historical Jesus" tomes and the bottom line is that the birth narratives were solidly and unanimously rejected whether the scholar was a Christian or not.

But these are mythical stories about a real person (Bart Ehrman is right that 99% of religious historians think so whether or not they have any supernatural beliefs about Jesus, which he doesn't) that illuminate what he means to people.

For a good while in Hellenistic Alexandra, anyone whose literary inspiration was Hermetic signed his/her work as "Hermes." We don't have to throw away all the insights of all those authors, just because they used a pseudonym of a Greek god. And we don't have to repudiate Christmas as meaningless or Jesus himself as mythical, to acknowledge that the Christmas story is a legend.

Believers who think that the validity of their faith relies on the literal accuracy of everything in the Bible remind me of the parable of building a house on sand. The historical accuracy of the Bible is a very weak, unstable, and unsuitable foundation. Just as the story of building on sand doesn't have to be inspired by a real beach house washing away in the tide, to express a truth.

[goldent]

12. From a historical perspective, all I take from the Bible is that there was

this guy Jesus -- IMO that is well established. Any the fact that the Bible exists provides another historical fact that there were a number of people in the 1st century (starting as early as 60 or 70) who wrote the stories down, at a time when eyewitnesses would still have been living (or certainly within a generation). This is something to ponder.

[carolinayellowdog]

13. Executed for causing a disruption at the Temple during Passover-- posthumous visions by disciples

All that seems TOTALLY PLAUSIBLE to me as a nonbeliever, far more plausible than that all these stories were concocted out of thin air within a generation or two of a nonexistent person's non-demise.

The resurrection stories are far more intriguing to me than the birth narratives, because AGAIN it is totally plausible that after the execution of a charismatic figure, his followers would have visions of him. Suspending judgment of how "real" any of those posthumous encounters were, I still don't consider them coordinated fraud. Maybe wishful thinking, as encounters with recently dead relatives, friends, etc. are NORMAL psychologically rather than some weird aberration.

[okasha]

14. What I find amusing about the mythecist premise

is that an allegedly fictional Jesus had a clearly historical brother, as well as independently documented bit players in his story.

[goldent]

15. This to me seems like a rational view by a non-believer

Obviously something was going on in the first century when the early books of the New Testament were written. This we know because these writings exist and we can date them to that period. From that point on you can use the principles of Occam's razor, academics and theologians, and of course your own feelings, to form an opinion of what is true.

My opinion is that the New Testament is full of flaws (some are well documented), but has some great teachings, and that the story of Jesus is not the story of a regular man.

[TreasonousBastard]

16. Of course, just as one can question the resurrection...

and most, if not all, of the rest of early Christian mythology.

First, questioning is not denying-- it is searching for truth. But, in the event you actually meant denial, that shouldn't preclude being a Christian, either.

Of course, this all depends on one's definition of "Christian". There are OT prophecies that had to be fulfilled in the mythology and there are some statements in the NT that seem to narrow the definition, but nothing, absolutely nothing, survives from living witnesses of Jesus' time on the planet. Much was destroyed by the early church, and the surviving Apocrypha hints at what else might have been out there.

So, if one insists on absolute belief in the written Word (and often only one "approved" version of said Word) there are damned few Christians in this world. Even the most fervent of fundies manage to explain away passages they don't buy, whilst the rest of us prefer to buy into a fairly loose understanding of the mythology with a belief that might be a mile wide but a half-inch thin.

Pretty much every religion has a divine mythology, some more detailed than others. But, nobody really believes, or ever believed, the Earth sits on a stack of lesser gods, or that the sun was really a flaming chariot. I'll leave it to the anthropologists to explain how and why myths develop, but develop they do and they tend to come in handy at times. With Christian mythology, we really aren't any more bound to believe the details than the Greeks were to believe thunderbolts were from a pissed off Zeus.

The myths, like parables, illustrate underlying beliefs and ethical codes.