"The Virgin Birth story is not an original part of the Christian tradition," I began. "It did not come into Christianity until the writings of Matthew in the 9th decade. Paul, who wrote all of his epistles between the years 50 and 64, appears to have known nothing about any miraculous birth tradition associated with Jesus. Of Jesus' origins, Paul says in Galatians only that he was "born of a woman; born under the law!" The word "woman" carried with it no connotation at all of virginity. Paul was saying that he was born like every other human being is born, and because he was a Jew then like every Jew he was born under the law. The closest thing to the claim of an extraordinary birth for Jesus in the writings of Paul was his statement that Jesus "was descended from David according to the flesh." I tried to go on to note the fact that Mark, the first gospel to be written (70-72 C.E.) has no miraculous birth story in it. Mark sees Jesus rather as a fully human person, who becomes God-infused, through the action of God pouring the Holy Spirit upon him at his baptism. Dan Damon, however, interrupted me to say that this was not a time for debate or argument, he just wanted to establish that traditional Christian belief contains the Virgin Birth and that I appear to be denying its historicity. "This is not argument or debate," I countered, "These are just facts. I cannot address your question unless we can establish some commonly agreed on facts." There was obviously no time in this discussion for facts.
If it is heresy to deny that the Virgin Birth is literal biology, then both Paul and Mark, neither of whom appears ever to have heard of this tradition much less to have believed it, must be called "heretics," an idea Dan Damon could not have imagined. I could have gone on to show that the author of John's gospel also does not contain a story of a miraculous birth and actually refers to Jesus on two occasions (John 1:45 and 6:42) as the son of Joseph, but there was no time. It is not possible, in my opinion, for John, who wrote his gospel between 95-100, not to have heard of the Virgin tradition since it had appeared in both Matthew (82-85) and Luke (88-93), well before John's gospel was written. John appears to have determined that this tradition was not worthy of inclusion. The facts are that two of the major New Testament writers, Paul and Mark, appear never to have heard of the Virgin Birth and a third, John, appears to dismiss it. How then does the Virgin Birth become the litmus test for heresy? If I had been able to make these points, the focus of this program on heresy in contemporary religion would have become irrelevant. So once again, Dan Damon interrupted and tried to keep to his script. He moved on to his Rabbi and his Imam to examine how they too had deviated from their "orthodoxy."
The Bible has been distorted for so long in Christian history by means of the use of false assumptions and the unwillingness of literalists to engage biblical facts that this BBC interview was not unusual. When fundamentalists like Pat Robertson or Albert Mohler claim that the Bible is the "inerrant word of God," it makes the same sense that people make when they assert that "the earth is flat." It is simply profoundly uninformed. These fundamentalists have either never read the Bible or they have read it within a mindset that does not allow reality to interfere with their convictions. When Anglican bishops in the Third World, supported by the Archbishop of Canterbury, contend that "homosexuality is condemned by scripture and therefore cannot be accepted in any part of the Church," I gasp at their ignorance. Have they read nothing in the last hundred years about the reality of homosexuality? It is not a sin to be ill-informed, but it is a sin to use one's ignorance in the public arena to attack the integrity of others and to avoid having your prejudices tempered by new information.
Christians must embrace the fact that using the literal Bible to provide answers on contemporary issues is nothing but religious propaganda. That tactic was discredited when Christians quoted the Bible to oppose Galileo's new insight that the earth was not the center of a three-tiered universe. Galileo was convicted of heresy, forced to recant and died under house arrest. The fact is, however, that Galileo was right and the Bible and the Church were wrong. The Vatican finally admitted that in an official letter issued in 1991, some four decades after human beings had begun space travel. If false teaching is the meaning of heresy, was it not the Pope and the Vatican leaders who were the heretics? Is there anything different about Christians demanding that a view of creation, compatible with the Bible, must be taught in public schools as an alternative to evolution? In that debate facts are discounted to make their theory plausible.
Examine the way the Bible was quoted in Christian history to justify slavery, segregation and apartheid. Examine the way the Bible has been used to deprive women of equality, education, the right to vote, to enter the professions and to be ordained. Examine the abuse that is still today poured out on gay and lesbian people by scripture-quoting religious people. That is where one must look if one wants to see heresy today, for that is false teaching. I wonder why that did not that occur to the host of this BBC program.
Embracing new truth in the midst of a dying tradition that is either unable or unwilling to hear or to comprehend that new truth, is the only hope Christians have for a Christian future. I do not know of a single biblical scholar of world rank today who treats the Virgin Birth as either history or biology. Does that make those of us who agree with this almost universal scholarly consensus heretics? I do not know of a single biblical scholar of world rank today who thinks the story of the resurrection of Jesus is about the physical resuscitation of his three-day dead body. Does that make those of us who have read and been convinced by this consensus heretics? Such charges of heresy are little more than the frightened responses of the religiously insecure who can not seem to comprehend that the gospels did not drop from heaven fully written. They were composed some 40-70 years after the crucifixion of Jesus and in a language neither Jesus nor his disciples spoke. The heresy hunters do not understand that the creeds were hammered out in a Church convention in the fourth century and that neither Paul nor the disciples of Jesus would have recognized the concepts in which that debate was carried out. Christian truth is not contained in static propositional statements. It is ever changing and constantly evolving because it is always an attempt to place a timeless experience into the time limited vocabulary of the speaker's generation.
The future of the Christian faith does not require that we hold tightly to yesterday's formulas, but it does require that we be willing to step beyond the patterns of the past in order to embrace new insights. When I finally had the chance to make this point during the interview, Dan Damon said, "But you are upsetting people. People want certainty and you disturb certainty." Marx was correct when he asserted that religion is for many little more than an opiate to allow them to hide from reality. It is sustained by the belief that partial truth is absolute truth. That is the heresy that must be rooted out of the Church if we are to have a future.
The great value in this BBC program was that I discovered both a Rabbi and an Imam who are doing in their traditions what I seek to do in mine. That was worth the time.
JSS
Thoughts, comments?? Roger