prophets), on the other regarding him as absolutely independent from history, from a past he will now transform from out of himself alone and beginning with an idea more significant than a conception through the spirit and a birth from a virgin body.
Metaphysics and biology are both impertinent. “The importance of the infancy narratives lies not in the precise historicity of the events but in what those narratives show about Jesus.”79 More precisely, and culminating in the gospel of Matthew, one event in particular will continue to influence, in meaning, subsequent events in the life of Jesus and in his ministry. The death of countless children – in Bethlehem after his birth, and in Egypt prior to the Exodus – will be a perpetual reminder of a history Jesus will commemorate; the memorial will not be one amongst others. He will be the first to acknowledge and remember all the first-born who perished in a horrifying night of death and liberation, with mothers in mourning and weeping for their sons and daughters. Exodus and the death of new-borns are inseparable; his own birth will inadvertently cause the brutal murder of the children of Bethlehem. Jesus will recollect both events and bring them into himself, as an act of reconciliation, of peace, an accomplishment intimated in the gospels if not sufficiently emphasized. Jesus’ revelations transform all historical determinants. In order for the future to be opened beyond customary expectations (as merely a function of time, with its incessant chronology, this and that) its horizon slackens its narrowness as Jesus returns to the past and, without changing events, redeems and renews their meaning for another time to come.
John and Mark may begin their account of the life of Jesus with a particular origin while, for their own reasons, omitting or ignoring the events of his birth. They are indifferent to his human birth and instead provide him with two distinct origins, as the pre-creation logos in John making him capable of a second act of creation, and in Mark when he emerges from the baptismal water with the spirit ←33 | 34→descending on and in him and confirming his regeneration. Matthew and Luke, on the other hand, are both concerned with presenting his virgin birth – an event that has elicited innumerable, and often diametrically opposed, responses, easily dismissed by the historian and a motivation for the theologian who reflects on the being of God and his intentions. The historian dismisses; the theologian submits.
Using a peculiar metaphor, Vermes tells us that the nativity story is “a million miles away from fact and reality.”80 Indeed, it is out of this world; and distance has nothing to do with it. Vermes cannot concede that history as a category (as a discipline) is unable to contain the virgin birth. On the other hand, N.T. Wright’s ultimate conclusion on the belief in the virgin birth can still surprise – and not simply for the affirmation of theological faith. He concludes his chapter on the “virginal conception” with: “if that’s what God deemed appropriate, who am I to object?”81 A hermeneutic reader restrains himself here: speculating on God’s intentions seems, at the very least, precarious. Brown believes that “infancy stories,” whether they were pre-Gospel or composed by Matthew and Luke, were written so they could be made “the vehicle of the message that Jesus was the Son of God acting for the salvation of mankind.”82 Needless to say, the metaphysical complication of such a belief leaves this reader with nothing to rely on but the narrative and what it accomplishes. On the other hand, and with the certainty of the skeptic (and, perhaps, with a little too much confidence in historical knowledge), Lüdemann tells us that “the statement that Jesus was engendered by the Spirit and born of a virgin is a falsification of the historical facts.”83 An agnostic could never be so presumptuous.
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History and theology are both in extremis. They exhaust themselves with presuppositions and conclusions. Now that two prevailing traditions of history and theology have been briefly considered, one more concern needs to be addressed before turning to the narratives proper to interpret their significance. Whatever the merits of Bultmann’s demythology, and he remains important by stressing meaning over any myth or fact, he tells us that the idea of a divine generation from a virgin is “completely impossible” in the Old Testament and in Judaism. Therefore, he concludes, “it was first added in the transformation in Hellenism, where the idea of the generation of a king or hero from a virgin by the godhead was widespread.”84 By reclaiming Jesus back into a Hellenistic narrative tradition, he is thereby reduced to being a copy, a model, mimetic. Jesus’ virgin birth cannot be equated or compared; it neither reflects pre-existing mythologies on the supposed extraordinary births of certain individuals (i.e. the emperor Augustus, with all the pretensions of divine origin) nor can it be included in a prior tradition – actual or narrative. “If the virgin birth,” writes Machen, “was not a fact, the idea of the virgin birth certainly was; and as a fact it requires some explanation.”85 It is, above all, the idea that is of interest and requires neither an appeal to its historicity nor to its theological importance, much less being modeled on some pre-existing narrative – be it poetry, folk-tale, or saga. The virgin birth demands some imagination; the narrative is open to such a reading. Equally if not more important, the entire sequence of the virgin birth narratives require to be interpreted so as to recognize the consequences of Jesus’ birth and the events to take place, none more important than Luke’s two births (of John and Jesus) and the slaughter of the innocents in Matthew and the repercussions it will have for the life and death of Jesus.
The relation of dead children in Egypt to the re-emergence of the Jewish people was foundational; both are implicated in a binding relationship. Jesus’ birth will initiate a radical disassociation from the past, first by distinguishing two pregnancies (by Elizabeth and his mother Mary, the first as an analogue of Sarah’s pregnancy and Isaac’s birth, the second as absolutely independent of all prior history and returning to transform the past during Passover), and then by substituting himself, in death, as a revelation necessary for the future. If the freedom of Exodus was dependent on an all-encompassing death of children, ←35 | 36→Jesus will return to the scene of liberation and death not to confirm prophecy, as the narrative insists, but to reclaim the past in order to anticipate a wholly different future. Only Jesus dares to remember the night of the Exodus from Egypt; and only he can dedicate a moment of his life to recognizing the anguish of Egyptian mothers in mourning and the experience of freedom of the Jewish people long enslaved, and with a commemoration not sufficiently stressed by Matthew even though he must be commended for being the only one to include the slaughter of the innocents of Bethlehem. However, always intent on a prophetic justification, Matthew believes the flight and return to Egypt has been foretold: “this was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, “Out of Egypt I have called my son”. ” (Matt. 2:15). Matthew relies on an interpretation of Hosea 11:1 to make Jesus’ sojourn in Egypt prophetic. “The quotations from Scripture in these stories were almost certainly introduced by Matthew.”86 By doing so, Matthew has neglected an absolutely crucial moment to occur much later in the future, when Jesus redeems the lives of the children who died on the night of the Exodus. The culpability of the Pharaoh and his people can no longer be imposed on the innocence of children. Jesus therefore relieves them of an undeserving death; he rescues all of them from out of their time and brings them into himself so that they will be able to accompany him during his own terrible night in the Garden of Gethsemane. Only the memory of dead children could console him as he struggled with the ordeal of an impending end.
The virgin birth has been, for obvious reasons, the subject of much debate and has exposed the vulnerability of commentators. A case in point, and one exemplary so as to be comparative: at the same time as Shenk, for example, writes that the virgin birth of Jesus means it is “a new birth for a new creation,” he then adds (and the two thoughts are incommensurable),
