Pagan Parallels
The third compelling argument against any possibility of history being behind the virgin birth is the obvious fact that, as already indicated, virgin births were a common feature of mythological solar and other deities or semi-deities in the ancient world. The reader is referred back to The Pagan Christ and the many other books cited there for further evidence that even the early Fathers of the Church felt some genuine embarrassment over the issue. Those deeply interested in the entire process whereby mythical characters become over the years the focus of seemingly historical trappings and an assumed historicity that is wholly unfounded upon actual facts of any kind should read Lord Raglan’s classic 1956 study The Hero: A Study in Tradition, Myth and Drama.
The virgin birth part of the Jesus Story fails to ring true as history not least, then, because it is really part of a formulaic element in the tales of most major heroes from great antiquity. (So too is the element of the threat to the newborn’s life. Herod’s slaughter of the innocents—for which there isn’t a shred of historical evidence—had many parallels. For example, at the birth of India’s Lord Krishna, King Kansa, a brutal tyrant, ordered the killing of all boy babies under two years of age.) But, in the case of Jesus, it has a remarkable, even central, esoteric message that for too long has been obscured by the furore over whether the virgin birth belongs to an authentically Christian faith or not. We need to move far beyond that theological debate now and explore what the inner meaning of the myth is saying to us about who and what we are.
The Meaning
By openly declaring that Joseph was not the actual begetter of Jesus, the Evangelists are saying that what mattered was not so much the natural side of Jesus’ humanity, but the divine side or spark of the Divine within him. If we probe further, however, and see this notion as part of the myth of the human Self, or of every man and woman born into this world, what it says at the most profound level is that each human being’s birth is a miraculous happening. We have a physical-psychical nature from our mother’s womb, but we are also begotten of God. This is why John in his opening chapter underlines that those who receive the awareness of the Christ principle or light within themselves are “born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.” We have a divine origin or a latent divinity within ourselves as a result of direct divine descent. As it says in the Book of Acts, “We are all God’s offspring.” This higher or more spiritual meaning is directly expressed in the prologue of John’s Gospel, where he says: “That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world” (King James Version).
Thus, for example, Joseph Campbell sees the mythic meaning of the virgin birth as the coming to full awareness by each individual person that he or she is more than a human animal concerned merely with reproduction and material things. It is “the birth of the spiritual as opposed to the merely natural life,” he says; the recognition that there are higher aims and values in living than self-preservation, reproduction, pleasure, the acquisition of money and things, and the struggle for power or status.7 It’s a birth in the heart, or the idea of being spiritually “born again” that Jesus spoke of and which has been so misunderstood by fundamentalists today.
So, the question posed to us by the virgin birth is not, Do you believe this literally? but, Have you truly experienced your own divinity within? Are you claiming your inheritance as more than a human animal—as a fully human being? To put this another way: Has the Christ principle been born in the manger of your consciousness? You don’t have to be a Christian or a member of any church for this to take place. As the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart once said in a sermon: “It is more worth to God his being brought forth ghostly [spiritually] in the individual virgin or good soul than that he was born of Mary bodily.”8 As Campbell points out, this kind of virgin birth within is well expressed in St. Paul’s statement in Galatians, “I live, now not I, but Christ liveth in me.”9
The whole allegory of the humble but royal birth in a cave or stable was based upon the archetypal idea of the kingly nature of the crowning of our evolutionary development by the advent of self-reflective consciousness. The concept of a Messianic or Christly “coming” therefore is the result of the ancient sages meditating upon this new and higher degree of intelligence and self-awareness. The former, purely animalistic mode of life gave way to the potential inherent in a seed of divine mind implanted in the order of nature from “above,” that is, by the mysterious omnipresence we call God. In reality, then, Christmas itself is, as the carol triumphantly announces, “the birthday of a king.” But this “king” is not a single individual who is believed to have lived in Palestine some two thousand years ago, but the glorious birth within each one of us of divine Incarnation. As St. Paul puts it: “Christ in you; the hope of glory.”
Thus, all the rites and practices of the churches at Christmastime are truly efficacious and meaningful only if the birth of the “Saviour Jesus” is understood as a symbol of the glorious “virgin” birth within ourselves. The joyful message is that Transcendence has broken into history and become part of every one of us. What we need is to have the eyes to see this glory within and all around. It is when we truly recognize who and what we really are that we are born again. As Hermes Trismegistus (“thrice great”) says to his son Tat in the passage of the Hermetica already referred to: “I am not now the man I was. I have been born again in spirit.”
At the Age of Twelve
One of the most obvious clues that in the Gospel narratives we are not dealing with anything resembling a biography of a historical person called Jesus or Yeshua of Nazareth is the fact that in all the Gospels except Luke there is a total silence about the entire period from Jesus’ infancy until the beginning of his public ministry at about age thirty. This is wholly unlike any other biography ever written, and is a bedrock fact that the historicizers and other literalizers of all schools must face at some point. We are asked by them to believe that the Gospel authors and editors knew in minute detail what Jesus is alleged to have said and to have done over a space of from one year to about three years, but that at the same time they could not remember one single incident, occasion or saying from all the years between! It defies reason.
In his two-volume work Ancient Egypt, The Light of the World, the scholar Gerald Massey makes the telling point that this same vacuum occurs in the various accounts of many other mythical Messiahs. For example, there is no recorded deed or history of the Egyptian “Christ,” Horus, between the ages of twelve and thirty years. Luke’s exception, the story of Jesus being taken to the temple in Jerusalem when he was twelve, the approximate age of incipient adulthood and personal responsibility to the Torah, deserves a closer look. It is a highly instructive stage in the unfolding drama:
Now every year his parents went to Jerusalem for the festival of the Passover. And when he was twelve years old, they went up as usual for the festival. When the festival was ended and they started to return, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but his parents did not know it. Assuming that he was in the group of travellers, they went a day’s journey. Then they started to look for him among their relatives and friends. When they did not find him, they returned to Jerusalem to search for him. After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers. When his parents saw him they were astonished; and his mother said to him, “Child, why have you treated us like this? Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety.” He said to them, “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” But they did not understand what he said to them. Then he went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them. His mother treasured all these things in her heart. And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favour. (Luke 2:41–52)
This passage reads clearly enough on the surface, but few stories in the overall drama are more frequently misunderstood and distorted in the retelling,
