1-11 The Virgin Birth
The record of Christ’s
conception and birth does not allow for the idea that he physically
existed beforehand. Those who hold the false doctrine of the ‘Trinity’
are driven to the conclusion that at one moment there were three beings
in heaven, and one of them then became the child in Mary’s womb,
leaving just two in heaven. We are therefore left to conclude from the
‘pre-existence’ belief that Christ somehow came down from heaven and
entered into Mary’s womb. All this complex theology is quite outside
the teaching of Scripture. The record of Christ’s beginning gives no
reason whatsoever to think that he left heaven and entered into Mary.
The lack of evidence for this is a big ‘missing link’ in trinitarian
teaching.
The
angel Gabriel appeared to Mary with the message that “you shall
conceive in your womb, and bring forth a son, and shall call his name
Jesus. He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the
Highest...Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I
know not a man? (i.e. she was a virgin). And the angel answered and
said unto her, The Holy Spirit shall come upon you, and the power of
the Highest shall overshadow you: therefore also that holy thing which
shall be born of you shall be called the Son of God” (Lk. 1:31-35).
Twice it is emphasized that Jesus would be the
Son of God on his birth; evidently the Son of God did not exist before
his birth. Again, the many future tenses need to be noted - e.g. “he shall be
great”. If Jesus were already physically in existence as the angel
spoke those words to Mary, he would already have been great. Jesus was
the “offspring” of David (Rev. 22:16), the Greek ‘genos’ implying Jesus
was ‘generated from’ David. He was born “of” Mary (Lk. 1:35).
The Conception Of Jesus
Through
the Holy Spirit (God’s breath/power) acting upon her, Mary was able to
conceive Jesus without having intercourse with a man. Thus Joseph was
not the father of Jesus. It must be understood that the Holy Spirit is
not a person (see Study 2); Jesus was the Son of God, not the Son of
the Holy Spirit. Through God’s use of His spirit upon Mary, “therefore
also that holy thing” which was born of her was “called the Son of God”
(Lk. 1:35). The use of the word “therefore” implies that without the
Holy Spirit acting upon the womb of Mary, Jesus, the Son of God, could
not have come into existence.
That
Jesus was ‘conceived’ in Mary’s womb (Lk. 1:31) is also proof that he
could not have physically existed before this time. If we ‘conceive’ an
idea, it begins within us. Likewise Jesus was conceived inside Mary’s
womb - he began there as a foetus, just like any other human being. Jn.
3:16, the Bible’s most famous verse, records that Jesus was the “only begotten
Son” of God. Millions of people who recite this verse fail to meditate
upon what it implies. If Jesus was “begotten”, he ‘began’ (a related
word to “begotten”) when he was conceived in Mary’s womb. If Jesus was
begotten by God as his Father, this is clear evidence that his Father
is older than he - God has no beginning (Ps. 90:2) and therefore Jesus
cannot be God Himself (Study 8 expands on this point).
It
is significant that Jesus was “begotten” by God rather than being
created, as Adam was originally. This explains the closeness of God’s
association with Jesus - “God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto
Himself” (2 Cor. 5:19). Christ being begotten by God, rather
than just created from dust, also helps explain his natural aptitude
for the ways of God his Father.
Is.
49:5,6 contains a prophecy concerning Christ as the light of the world,
which he fulfilled (Jn. 8:12). He is described as meditating on “the
Lord that formed me from the womb to be his servant”. Christ was
therefore “formed” by God in Mary’s womb, through the power of His Holy
Spirit. Mary’s womb was evidently the place of Christ’s physical origin.
We
have seen earlier that Psalm 22 prophesies Christ’s thoughts on the
cross. He reflected that God “took me out of the womb...I was cast upon
you from the womb: you art my God from my mother’s belly”
(Ps. 22:9,10). In his time of dying, Christ looked back to his origins
- in the womb of his mother Mary, formed by the power of God. The very
description of Mary in the Gospels as Christ’s “mother” in itself destroys the idea that he existed before his birth of Mary.
Mary
was an ordinary human being, with normal human parents. This is proved
by the fact that she had a cousin, who gave birth to John the baptist,
an ordinary man (Lk. 1:36). The Roman Catholic idea that Mary was not
of ordinary human nature would mean that Christ could not truly have
been both “Son of man” and “Son of God”. These are his frequent titles
throughout the New Testament. He was “Son of man” by reason of having a
totally human mother, and “Son of God” because of God’s action on Mary
through the Holy Spirit (Lk. 1:35), meaning that God was his Father.
This beautiful arrangement is nullified if Mary was not an ordinary
woman.
“Who
can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? Not one...What is man, that
he should be clean? and he which is born of a woman, that he should be
righteous?...how can he be clean that is born of a woman?” (Job 14:4;
15:14; 25:4). This puts paid to any idea of an immaculate conception
being possible, either of Mary or Jesus.
Mary
being “born of a woman”, with ordinary human parents, must have had our
unclean, human nature, which she passed on to Jesus, who was “made of a
woman” (Gal. 4:4). The language of his being “made” through
Mary’s agency is further evidence that he could not have physically
existed without his birth by her. The Diaglott renders Gal. 4:4:
“Having been produced from a woman”. The Saviour was to be “the seed of the woman” (Gen. 3:15) - which promise occurs in the context of the record in Genesis of many male-based genealogies.
The
Gospel records frequently indicate Mary’s humanity. Christ had to
rebuke her at least thrice for a lack of spiritual perception (Lk.
2:49; Jn. 2:4); she failed to understand all his sayings (Lk. 2:50).
This is exactly what we would expect of a woman who was of human
nature, whose son was the Son of God, and therefore more spiritually
perceptive than herself, although he, too, shared human nature. Joseph
had intercourse with Mary after Christ’s birth (Mt. 1:25), and there is
no reason to think that they did not have a normal marital relationship
from then on.
The
mention of Christ’s “mother and his brethren” in Mt. 12:46,47 would
therefore imply that Mary had other children after Jesus. Jesus was
only “her first born”. The Catholic teachings that Mary
remained a virgin and then ascended to heaven therefore have absolutely
no Biblical support. As a human being of mortal nature, Mary would have
grown old and died; apart from this we read in Jn. 3:13, “no man has
ascended up to heaven”. The fact that Christ had human nature (see Heb.
2:14-18; Rom. 8:3) means that his mother must have had it too, seeing
his Father did not have it. She saw herself as “the handmaid [female
servant] of the Lord” (Lk. 1:38 cp. Ps. 86:16) - not ‘the mother of
God’.
The
whole record of the virgin birth makes a nonsense of the claim that
Jesus pre-existed as a person before His birth. This has even been
recognized by theologians: “Jesus’ virgin birth stands in an
irreconcilable contradiction to the Christology of the incarnation of
the preexistent Son of God” (1). James
Dunn likewise denies the literal pre-existence of Jesus: “There is no
evidence that any NT writer thought of Jesus as actively present in
Israel’s past, either as the angel of the Lord, or as “the Lord”
himself” (2). A
pre-existent Jesus is merely a continuation of the old pagan idea that
the gods came to earth and had relations with innocent women (cp. Acts
14:11). Or take C.F.D. Moule: "There is no doctrine of Christ's pre-existence in Acts, though there is ample stress on foreknowledge and God's predetermined plan (see, e.g., Acts 4:28; 9:15; 10:42; 13:27,48; 16:14; 17:31). Neither is such a doctrine entertained in the Gospel: the Lucan allusions to the virgin birth certainly do not imply it" (3).
The Genealogies Of Jesus
The
genealogies of the Lord Jesus given at the beginnings of Matthew and
Luke are surely impossible to square with the idea of His personal
pre-existence before birth. How ever could the Gospel writers have
seriously believed that, and yet written such genealogies? Are we
really to imagine that they intended us to believe in the Lord's
pre-existence when they wrote up the genealogies as they did? Marshall
Johnson comments on them: "Jesus is Son of God not through the
categories of pre-existence or metaphysical relationship between Father
and Son, but through the line of OT patriarchs... Conzelmann seems
correct when he describes Luke's conception of the title, Son of God,
as connected with a subordinationism that reveals in itself a complete
lack of the idea of pre-existence" (4)
Notes
(1) W. Pannenberg, Jesus- God And Man (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1968) p. 143.
(2) J.D.G. Dunn, Christology In The Making (London: SCM, 1980) p. 158.
(3) C.F.D. Moule, Forgiveness And Reconciliation (London: S.P.C.K.,
1998) p. 74.
(4) Marshall Johnson, The Purpose Of The Biblical Genealogies (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2002) pp. 237,8.
