Virgin Birth

This being Christmas, it occurred to me to contemplate the old Catholic doctrine I learned as a child. Not only is Jesus of Nazareth said to be the Son of God (he apparently never actually referred to himself with this term; he said “Son of Man” something else entirely, but nevermind), but also he is said to have been born to Mary, who “has not known a man.” That is, Jesus is supposed to have been conceived and born to a virgin, who was impregnated by the Holy Spirit, or God. In the gospel of Luke, this is made very clear by the dialogue between Mary and the Angel in the so-called Annunciation. In verse 31, the Angel tells Mary that she is to have a child, and she asks how this could be possible since she is still a virgin. The Angel then tells her that she will conceive “by the power of the Holy Spirit.” Then comes a reference to the Old Testament, to the verse of Isaiah 7:14, where it says “the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel.” The same is asserted in Matthew 1:18 where it is written that Jesus is born to Mary, who has become pregnant before having sex with Joseph (Italian popular culture has fun with this by referring to Joseph as cornuto, the cuckolded husband), before they even live together.  

            It should be noted that this alleged virgin birth differs from the other mystery attributed to Mary, the “immaculate conception.” I always thought the two terms referred to the same phenomenon, the conception by virgin Mary which results in the birth of Jesus.  But that is decidedly not the case. The immaculate conception refers exclusively to Mary before she was a mother, that is, to her own birth free of original sin. Her birth to her mother, St. Anne, is made to fit with Mary’s exalted position as the mother of God, when Mary is declared by Pope Pius IX to have been born, alone among humans, free of original sin:

In 1854, Pope Pius IX proclaimed the dogma of the Immaculate Conception and stated: “The most Blessed Virgin Mary was, from the first moment of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege of almighty God and by virtue of the merits of Jesus Christ, Savior of the human race, preserved immune from all stain of original sin’” (Caroline Bologna, Huffington Post, 12/21/18). 

Several things deserve comment here. To begin with, this dogma was issued very much later than the events referred to and appear nowhere in the New Testament. Second, the Pope who proclaimed this dogma was Pius IX, known to Italians as Pio Nono. He it was who reigned over Rome when the Italian revolution for independence, the Risorgimento, was gathering steam, and resulted in the assassination of his Minister of the Interior, Pellegrino Rossi. Following this, the Pope fled to Naples in fear, and this, in turn, was followed by widespread revolutions in 1848 and the establishment of the brief, but deeply significant Roman Republic of 1849, which Pio Nono bitterly opposed. In fact, he actually called for aid from the French monarch, whose army laid siege to and eventually bombarded Rome. The defeated Italian patriots excoriated Pio Nono for his perfidy, and this probably contributed to his being known as a gettatura, or one whose glance sowed misfortune (in the form of malocchio, or evil eye) wherever it fell. In sum, any dogma promulgated by a guy like this could be looked upon with more than normal scorn or suspicion. 

            But to return to the virgin birth. There has been much speculation about whether a woman could actually conceive without intercourse and/or the male sperm that is necessary for normal conception. Though there are now numerous recorded instances where some species—a python, several species of sharks, and recently, in the lab, artificially-fertilized mice—can reproduce without sex or fathers, it would be virtually impossible for a human to do so. Especially for a woman to give birth to a son. This is because in order to conceive, there have to be XX chromosomes from the female, and XY chromosomes from the male. This means that even if a woman could spontaneously conceive by herself, she could never provide the necessary Y chromosomes needed to engender a son. Those Y chromosomes could only come from a father. And though there can be the rare instance where a woman has a condition called testicular feminization, it would mean that Mary, carrying both an X and a Y chromosome, would have been a woman with ambiguous genitals that could have supplied that X chromosome. But she would have been sterile. In short, a highly unlikely pregnancy. 

            But there is one even more fatal problem with this whole business. Recall that both evangelists, Matthew and Luke, who wrote 70 years after Christ lived, wrote about his virgin birth to Mary not based on any eyewitness truth, but so that Jesus would be the fulfillment of that prophecy in Isaiah—the one where Isaiah said that “the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel.” There is a major problem with this line, however. Matthew is using the wording of the Greek translation of the Old Testament known as the Septuagint (translated some time in the third century BCE). And there is a serious mistranslation in Isaiah 7:14. The Hebrew word Isaiah used for the woman who is to conceive and give birth to Emmanuel is alma (Joel Hoffman, Salon.com, 3/13/16). Scholars know from other uses that this word does NOT mean “virgin” but simply a “young woman.” So where the Hebrew text refers to alma, a young woman, the Greek translation makes her a virgin, parthenos. And from this simple mistranslation stems a whole tradition that became dogma and has come down to us today: the Blessed Virgin Mary, who became the mother of Jesus, did not have to succumb to that degrading act of sexual intercourse with Joseph to conceive Jesus. She was kept free from that stain because God himself impregnated her. Though since Jesus had a brother James, one has to infer that she eventually did have intercourse with poor, patient Joseph. But I suppose that is another matter.

            Of course, the mass of people love miracles, and the virgin birth is one of the humdingers in Christianity. The Roman church was only too happy to supply it, and elevate it to the level of dogma. Perhaps it even has relevance to our own time as well. For isn’t a similar syndrome operating with Donald Trump? Don’t his most rabid followers actually believe in miracles—that this most boorish and vulgar and lawless of con men, this self-described pussy grabber, is in fact god’s instrument to bring about all that Christian fundamentalists long for: the defeat of science, of all the liberal atheists who scorn them and ridicule their beliefs, and the fulfillment, perhaps, of the end of days? The resemblances seem too suggestive to dismiss. 

In any case, Christmas has now passed, and with it another season of paying tribute, however preposterous it might be, to the virgin birth. And it does make for some nice music. 

Lawrence DiStasi