Tom Wright (23:20)
Yeah, the question underneath this question is basically looking at everything from God's point of view. Why would you want to do that? And I'm always suspicious of the attempt to get, as it were, behind God's intentionality and say, now if you were God, you would of course want to do it like this. Because again and again, what the Bible does is simply tell you stories about what God's done and what God's got up to. Sometimes we can see into the background and see, oh, my goodness, yes, this makes sense, because. But many times people want to know, why did God do this or that or the other? It's rather like the Book of Job, what's going on? Why is God allowing this or whatever. And again and again, in the Bible and in real life, in my experience, we are not told why. We are told, wait, be faithful, believe, carry on. You know, all will be well. But you're not necessarily gonna get the answer to this right off the top. Obviously, many theologians have wrestled with this question and have come back with some very intricate theories about grace, that Jesus is the embodiment of the grace of God and therefore the idea of his conception in Mary's womb being an act of pure grace. I mean, as it says, as the angel says to Mary In Luke chapter 2, verse 35, the Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore, the one who is to be born of you will be called Holy, the Son of God. Now, we've got several Jewish texts of the time which speak about a Son of God, referring back not least to Psalm 2, where God says, you are my Son. This day have I begotten you. But as you said, none of those texts that we're aware of, somebody might dig another one up in the sands of Jordan, who knows? But we haven't got such a thing. None of those. Say, of course, he will have to be born of a virgin because of either theological reasons or because of a reading of Isaiah 7:14. And you're quite right that Isaiah 7:14 has this Hebrew word alma, which is often translated young woman. Now, whereas the Hebrew word bethulah is the more normal word for virgin. At the same time, if you check out the Hebrew concordance and look up all the occurrences of alma, you'll see again and again and again that these are young women who have not known a man, et cetera. So it's perfectly reasonable to read the text in the way that was done, that way. But what one has to say is that when Matthew in chapter one quotes that verse, he is not standing in a long tradition of Jewish exegesis. It looks as though, I mean, some people have said, oh, well, he invents this story in order to fulfill the scripture. But we don't have a long Jewish tradition of people saying, how's this scripture going to be fulfilled? And Matthew then saying, I'll show you how. Rather, it looks as though Matthew is aware of something very strange about the circumstances of Jesus conception and birth. And he is maybe struggling a bit, but finds this, this verse in order to say, well, it is at least in line with this, just like in the genealogy of Jesus, he also includes several other strange and unexpected births. Obviously the birth of Isaac when Abraham and Sarah were way past the age, et cetera, that was itself extraordinary. But then you have Tamar, you have Ruth, you have the lady in Jericho. Sorry, I'm just losing names here. Rahab, of course, Tamar, Rahab and Ruth, all of whom come into this genealogy strangely, as though to say God is doing all kinds of odd things here. Don't be surprised if when push comes to shove, the ultimate one is a very odd thing as well. But then I think we need to remind ourselves that if we didn't have Matthew chapter one, and if we didn't have Luke chapter two, we would not know anything about this at all. John does have one passage where the Judeans say to Jesus, we weren't born on the wrong side of the blanket, we were not born of fornication. Which sounds as though there's been a rumor around that something was very odd about Jesus birth. And people have been whispering and gossiping and maybe this, and who knows that Et cetera. Likewise Mark, though I suspect that the beginning of Mark's Gospel may be lost. But we don't have anything in Mark about virginal conception. We don't have anything in Paul. Paul says Jesus was born of a woman, born under the law, but he doesn't say born of a woman who by the way was a virgin. So Hebrews doesn't, Revelation doesn't, one, Peter doesn't. So I wanna say if it was that load bearing, I think we would have seen the whole question much more magnified in the New Testament you could take out the story of Jesus conception and birth and you'd leave a hole at the beginning of Matthew and Luke. But the rest of the story would. Whereas if you took out say the crucifixion or the resurrection, game over. There is no story of Jesus if we're short of that. So it's really worth saying that because since the 18th century, with the deist skepticism that's been around in Western culture, people have honed in on the miraculous, of which the two obvious examples would be the virgin birth and the resurrection. I once heard Ed Sanders do a talk where he said, and that people seem awfully concerned about Mary's womb and Jesus. And it got a little sort of ripple of laughter from sniggering people at the back. But you know, why those two? And the answer is because Christianity is still trying to address the deist skepticism, the sort of post Hume skepticism of the 18th century. But if we're thinking New Testamently, then let's just ramp down the heat a bit here. Not to say it's not important, cause it is important, it's there in Matthew and Luke. But I want to say they tell us enough to make us curious and to make us want to ask the kind of questions that the correspondent asks. I don't think they tell us nearly enough in just the two or three verses that we have there to enable us to say now if I was God and I wanted to become incarnate, of course it would have to be through a pure virgin. And let's get clear from our minds any suggestion that the act of physical intercourse is somehow sinful. So Jesus had to be born without the sinful act of intercourse. And therefore let's also get rid of the medieval theory that Mary herself was sinless, which is one of those classic examples of people taking a dogma and then saying, well if that was so, then that would probably be so. And that would probably be so.
