Born of a Virgin?

"Yes, it’s nice to have one Brit and a recent book — the most recent I’ve read on the subject. He’s one of our two best New Testament theologians in England. The reason I included it was the sheer theological seriousness of it. This is a heavyweight book of theology on a subject I wouldn’t have thought it was still possible to write a major treatise. He’s saying, ‘Here’s something which some Christians think is absurd to think happened. Others think it’s really important that it’s historically accurate—fundamentalists really do think that—so let’s try and understand both sides and see all the different layers of meaning.’ What matters is what it means, but to unpack that, you have to get at why some people think it’s important that it happened, and to get the two sides to able to talk to each other — so that you don’t have the absurd situation where some Christians are not talking to other Christians because they think the others have got it all wrong. He could have written a commentary on this like the Ray Brown book, but actually to have a big theological reflection on it, including what the greatest 19th century theologian—there is a chapter on Schleiermacher, the founder of modern of theology in the book—made of it all, is an amazing achievement He says all the things an exegete is going to say by looking at the text. But he also explains how it’s been understood in the subsequent Christian tradition, ancient as well as modern. And a certain amount about what it means to be a Christian today, which is to be loyal to the tradition but also critical of it. If you’re an intelligent Christian you need to see how you understand the tradition and he makes it clear how he does. I find it persuasive, right across the board. It’s a little theological education in itself, this book: you understand what it means to be a New Testament theologian by seeing him reflecting on these texts. That’s just level one. Is it historical? Now, for those of us for whom it isn’t historical that’s just mentioned to be got out of the way. Questions of DNA or the biological issue are a total non-issue for us. But they might be for someone who thinks these things actually happened. Lincoln realizes that a lot of Christians still think it is historical, so you’ve got to engage with those questions, and give reasons why others think it’s not historical. That has to do with the kind of writing we’ve got here. It’s more a story than a history. Then, going into what people have thought and why they’ve thought it. Joseph doesn’t appear in the rest of the gospels. There’s a reference to Jesus in Matthew as the son of the carpenter, but Mark’s earlier account says ‘Is not this the carpenter?’ Presumably Joseph had died. But whether or not Joseph or somebody else is the father—and there’s all sorts of guesswork, even somebody saying Mary was raped by a Roman solider and goodness knows what—Christians would still say he is the revelation of God. Or that he is the son of God, meaning the revelation of God. It’s not an either/or between son of Joseph or son of God. Lincoln is more generous towards conservative views than many, but he’s a critical theologian too. In the introduction, he mentions how he said what he believed when he’d applied for a job at a conservative institution once. They wrote back saying, ‘Don’t bother to turn up for your interview!’ He’s a very impressive man, and has written a great commentary on St John’s Gospel as well. I don’t know but I think they strongly believed that, ‘God is truth.’ So they weren’t scared to use their heads. Also, Christianity is a religion of the person, rather than a religion of the book. It centers on the person of Jesus. That means that we can challenge even something that the New Testament—which bears witness to Jesus—says. The decisive thing for modern, rational people is that religion can be self-critical and in the last 300 years, and earlier with Erasmus and others, Christianity has been very good at being self-critical and self-reforming. That is exemplary for religion in a pluralist world."