Part 6: The Alleged Pagan Origins of the Virginal Conception Accounts

Pagan mythological accounts of men or heroes raised to divine status actually do not arise in the Greco-Roman world until the second century A.D., long after the Christian, gospel accounts were written of the divine Son become man, born of a virgin. So the Gospel writers cannot be copying a pagan religious trend of their day 

Part 6: The Alleged Pagan Origins of the Virginal Conception Accounts

By Robert Stackpole, STD

In this weekly web series, Dr. Robert Stackpole, emeritus director of the John Paul II Institute of Divine Mercy, leads us step-by-step through the life of the Founder of Christianity, from Bethlehem to Galilee to Jerusalem. Along the way, we pause to consider in-depth the historical debate over the gospel stories of the virginal conception and nativity of Jesus, his message of the Kingdom, his embrace of persecution and death on the Cross, and his glorious bodily resurrection from the dead. Finally, we plunge into the great mystery of the Incarnation, and show how it actually shines through the whole gospel story from beginning to end.

Read the series from the beginning.

The most popular objection to the historical reliability of the story of the virginal conception is that the early Church must have utilized pagan, mythological sources for the creation of this tale. However, scholars of antiquity cannot find similar stories of this kind of miraculous origin. Greek gods fall in love with mortal women, and have intercourse with them (sometimes with virgins), and barren women in the Old Testament receive their fertility again from God — but none of these are virginal conception tales. All presuppose some kind of sexual intercourse.

Widely-respected scholar Raymond Brown, in his massive 560 page tome The Birth of the Messiah (1977), summed up the evidence like this: “In short, there is no clear example of virginal conception in world or pagan religions that plausibly could have given first-century Jewish Christians the idea of the virginal conception of Jesus” (p. 523). Furthermore, the passages from Matthew and Luke about the conception of Jesus by the Holy Spirit are strongly Jewish in literary style and atmosphere, full of allusions to the Old Testament. They show no literary signs of borrowing from any known pagan source.

Luke's literary style
In fact, the New Testament scholar John Drane explains that St. Luke’s account may preserve literary traces of an earlier, Palestinian source:

The whole of Luke 1-2 has a very primitive kind of character compared to the rest of Luke’s writings. Though some scholars believe this to be a deliberate devise used by Luke in imitation of the style of the Greek Old Testament (the Septuagint), others have argued that Luke’s Greek is of a sufficiently consistent character [elsewhere in his gospel] to suggest that he is here [in his Nativity stories] quoting or depending on an Aramaic source. If that is true, then he must have obtained these stories of Jesus’ birth from the very earliest group of Christians in Palestine itself, the only Christians ever to speak Aramaic. [1]

In other words, even the literary style of St. Luke’s virgin birth story is consistent with the tradition that Luke received his account from the Palestinian, Aramaic-speaking mother of Jesus herself.

Some scholars have argued that early Christian belief in the virginal conception arose from a desire to exhibit the personal deity of Jesus Christ: that is, to “deify” him so that he would be more like the gods and heroes of the pagan world, and therefore more marketable to a Gentile audience. But this simply does not fit the facts of history.

The truth is that throughout the first two centuries of the Christian movement, we do not have on record a single instance of any early Church Father or Christian apologist using the virginal conception story to bolster an argument for the divinity of Christ. On the contrary, oddly enough the virginal conception was usually mentioned as evidence of Jesus’ humanity, since there were numerous “Gnostic” sects at the time that claimed that Jesus was a purely spiritual being who only appeared to have human flesh and blood, when in reality, they claimed, He did not have a human body at all. The mere fact that Jesus was “born” of the Virgin Mary, therefore, attested to His full humanity.

Furthermore, historians of the early Church know that far from making the gospel message more attractive to the non-Christian, pagan world, the tale of Christ’s virginal conception originally was mocked and derided — at least by the Gentile “intelligentsia.” For example, in 178 A.D. the pagan philosopher Celsus wrote sarcastically about God’s love-affair with a Jewish peasant girl.

Humanized God, not Divinized Man
Pagan mythological accounts of men or heroes raised to divine status actually do not arise in the Greco-Roman world until the second century A.D., long after the Christian, gospel accounts were written of the divine Son become man, born of a virgin. So the Gospel writers cannot be copying a pagan religious trend of their day (besides, the gospel story tells of the “humanized God,” so to speak, rather than of a “divinized man”).

Moreover, as we have seen, the virginal conception story probably goes back to the earliest decades of the Christian movement. That means it would have arisen in a Christian community that was overwhelmingly Jewish in background — and Jews were the very last people on the planet who would be likely to want to copy the myths and legends of the pagans, much less to exalt a human being to fully divine status (see MK 2:7; Jn 10:33). [2]

Some critics claim that the virginal conception story must have arisen because of a negative attitude toward sexuality that infected the Christian movement in antiquity. But once again, the claim does not fit the historical facts.

At the time the gospels were written (in the mid-first century A.D.), and especially among the Jews dwelling in Palestine, conjugal relations were valued as good and wholesome, one of God’s created blessings. We cannot account for the origin of the virginal conception tale in terms of a pessimism about sexuality that really only arose in the Greco-Roman world from the second century onward. Besides, it is difficult to see how the story of a virginal conception by the power of the Holy Spirit is necessarily a slur against the natural goodness of conjugal love.

As C.S. Lewis once pointed out, we might just as well say that the story of Jesus feeding the five thousand by multiplying loaves and fishes is an insult to bakers!

In other words, the extraordinary is not necessarily a denigration of the ordinary.

Next: Part 7: The Silence of Mark and John, and the Rest of the New Testament.
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Notes
[1] John Drane, Introducing the New Testament (Lion Books, 1999), p. 30-31.
[2] The Seattle Statement of The Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission, Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ (2004), summed up the historical evidence regarding the virginal conception stories in the Gospels in a way similar to what I have argued in this article: 
         "Given its strongly Jewish matrix in both Matthean and Lucan versions, an appeal to analogies with pagan mythology or to an exaltation of virginity over the married state to explain the origin of the tradition is implausible. Nor is the idea of virginal conception likely to derive from an over-literal reading of the Greek text of Isaiah 7:14 (LXX), for that is not the way the idea was introduced in the Lucan account. Moreover, the suggestion that it originated as an answer to the accusation of illegitimacy levelled at Jesus is unlikely, as that accusation could equally have arisen because it was known that there was something unusual about Jesus’ birth (cf. Mk 6:3; Jn 8:41) and because of the Church’s claim about his virginal conception." (Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ, section 18, fn 2)
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