Nobody sane doubts the existence of Jesus

Good article here:

Outside this triangle of sceptics, accommodators and apologists there is another group of men and women who number in the thousands, whose works fill the academic libraries and journals of the world and yet whose views are rarely considered in popular discussion of this topic. I am talking about professional biblical historians: not professors of theology in religious institutions but university historians specialising in the language, literature and culture of the biblical period. Be they Christian, Jewish or agnostic, such scholars shun both overreaching scepticism and theological dogma. They approach the Gospels not as zealous fabrications or divine scripture but as texts comparable with any other from the period. All texts have blind spots and points to prove. If historians waited until they found a source with no angle, they would have nothing left to work with (ancient or modern). The goal is not to discover an agenda-less source but to analyse every source in light of its discernible commitment. This is how scholars read every ancient text, including the New Testament. They do not privilege the Gospels, but nor do they come to them with prejudice. Christians may be unsettled by this objective historical analysis of their sacred texts but there is no comfort here for the dogmatic sceptic either. For while mainstream scholars disagree on many things about the life of Jesus, there is a very strong consensus that the basic narrative of the Gospels is historically sound.

Take the question of Jesus’ existence. Dawkins may have his reservations; so might Onfray and Hitchens. But no one who is actually doing ancient history does. I contacted three eminent ancient history professors this week and asked if they knew of any professional historian who argued that Jesus never lived. They did not. Professor Graeme Clarke of the Australian National University was happy to go on the record as saying: “Frankly, I know of no ancient historian or biblical historian who would have a twinge of doubt about the existence of a Jesus Christ – the documentary evidence is simply overwhelming.” Dawkins inadvertently proves the point. In The God Delusion his sole example of a serious historical case against the existence of Jesus is that of “Professor G.A. Wells of the University of London”. Dawkins does not mention that George Wells is a professor of German language, not history.

That Jesus lived cannot be disputed…

Now the resurrection… that’s a different question – and the subject of my Easter morning sermon!

Bible meme

Tagged by Paul. Original spelling of ‘favorite’.

1. What translation of the Bible do you like best?
Probably the RSV but this is definitely in flux at the moment. I’m enjoying reading the New Living Translation on a daily basis. See this post. I don’t like the NIV much, no, not at all.

2. Old or New Testament?
I’m loving the Old more and more as time goes on, but I can’t see any real choice here for a Christian.

3. Favorite Book of the Bible?
The Gospel of John.

4. Favorite Chapter?
Either 1 or 6. The farewell discourse is pretty good stuff too…

5. Favorite Verse? (feel free to explain yourself if you have to)
Probably John 10.10. There are lots!

6. Bible character you think you’re most like?
St Paul.

7. One thing from the Bible that confuses you?
The book of Revelation. St Paul.

8. Moses or Paul?
Don’t really understand the question. Does it mean ‘Law or Grace’? But I’ve answered St Paul twice already, so the answer must be Moses.

9. A teaching from the Bible that you struggle with or don’t get?
There are lots in Leviticus (which I’m reading at the moment).

10. Coolest name in the Bible?
Elizaphan of course.

I tag: Michael, John, bls, Steve and, because I didn’t tag him on the other one, Tim.

The marginality of the Virgin Birth (12): Summary and conclusion

I want to bring this sequence to a close by spelling out the main planks of my argument. The spark for the series was Neil’s comment that I should resign my orders.

These are the main points that I would want to make:
1. The accounts of the VB are marginal in Scriptural terms.
2. The VB is marginal in doctrinal terms.
3. The nature of what is believed in accepting the VB has changed since the accounts were written, and that applies to both those who retain an acceptance of the Scriptural accounts in a literal sense, and those who reject it.
4. What the doctrine actually achieves in practice today is to undermine more important doctrines like the incarnation, and hence salvation. That is, the doctrine serves to prevent people coming to Christ, and the insistence upon a literal belief in it (in order to be saved) is a contemporary equivalent of tithing mint and dill and cumin.

I would want to emphasise that my rejection of the VB is not because I reject all miracles as impossible (I don’t), nor does it mean that I reject the resurrection (I accept it), nor does it mean I reject Scripture as a whole (I see it as God-breathed).

Several other things have become clearer to me in the course of writing this sequence:
– I really don’t take the birth narratives as literally true! I have avoided looking at the area too closely for quite some time, but I can’t avoid the conclusion;
– I remain persuadable that I’m wrong, but the persuasion needs to deal with my own objections, not generic ones (like Wright’s chapter does);
– my root problem is that I see no way to render an acceptance of the literal truth of the birth accounts compatible with an acceptance of the humanity of Christ (I think this was possible before) – and therefore, if the VB has to be believed in a literal sense, then I don’t belong where I am. Fortunately such a commitment is not required of Anglican clergy (what is required – and what I wholeheartedly affirm – is here);
– the contrast is between what is given more authority: Scripture or doctrine? I see the doctrinal effect (which I see as seriously negative) as carrying more weight than the negative consequences of abandoning a literal interpretation, not least because I don’t see it as either intellectually or theologically coherent to affirm something like inerrancy. However, it’s perfectly possible to judge these things differently without being an inerrantist. Wright, for example, a) gives more importance to the literal account, and b) sees no difficulty in reconciling the account with doctrinal truth. In this he is completely in tune with orthodox tradition, and I am not – which means I’m probably wrong;
– I am more convinced than before of what I originally wrote here: “My problem remains how to reconcile Jesus’ humanity with his special creation; or, put differently, I don’t see why God’s creative activity _has_to_ conflict with the normal processes of reproduction. Incarnation isn’t dependent on it; indeed, I suspect that the story was developed in order to support the doctrine of the incarnation and now works to accomplish the precise opposite. Either way it’s an extremely marginal belief and not essential to faith.”

The marginality of the Virgin Birth (11): Tom Wright

The first thing to say about Tom Wright’s perspective (taken from his book with Borg) is that he agrees with me (and the Pope) that the VB is marginal, beginning his chapter by saying “Jesus’ birth usually gets far more attention than its role in the New Testament warrants”, and ending it by saying “If the first two chapters of Matthew and the first two chapters of Luke had never existed, I do not suppose that my own Christian faith, or that of the church to which I belong, would have been very different”. Quite so.

He goes on to point out that attitudes to the VB function as litmus tests for orthodoxy as a whole, especially attitudes to the Bible and miracles (a point I’ll come back to in my concluding post) and admits that their historicity is suspect, saying “as a historian I cannot use the births stories within an argument about the rest of the gospel narratives.”

His more substantial point, however, on which the remainder of his chapter is based, seems to be a) you’ll only disallow miracles if you’re corrupted by Modernist attitudes [I agree, but this is one of Wright’s principal targets in the essay and my position is unaffected by it], b) this is how God chose to do it, c) who are we to disagree? concluding by saying “Nor will the high moral horse do any better, insisting that God ought not to do things like this, because they send the wrong message about sexuality or because divine parentage gave Jesus an unfair start over the rest of us. Such positions produce a cartoon picture: the mouse draws itself up to its full height, puts its paws on its hips, and gives the elephant a good dressing down.”

I think Wright is confused here, and the confusion runs through the whole chapter. The weight of his point depends upon the truth of b); in other words, is the elephant God, or is the elephant a fallible human being? It is the attitude to Scripture which is the fundamental plank of Wright’s case, ie these narratives must be understood to be literally true, which drives him to the conclusions he reaches in this chapter. However, it’s possible to show that, even on these terms, Wright is inconsistent (see below).

After a quick appraisal of the theological emphases in each account, which Wright ascribes in traditional terms to the differences between Joseph and Mary’s recollections, Wright gets to what, for me, is the heart of the matter. He writes “It will not do to say that we know the laws of nature and that Joseph, Mary, the early church and the evangelists did not”. This misses the point, however (my point, at least). It is not that these people didn’t understand the link between sexuality and procreation (which seems to be the burden of Wright’s point), it is that they understood the ‘humanity’ to come through being ‘born of woman’, not, in material terms, in equal parts from both father and mother.

Wright goes on to outline his substantial position, in three stages:
1. Acceptance of incarnation and resurrection opens up the possibility of something like the Virgin Birth. I agree with this point in principle.
2. “There is no pre-Christian Jewish tradition suggesting that the Messiah would be born of a virgin. No one used Isaiah 7.14 this way before Matthew did… Why, for the sake of an exalted metaphor, would they take this risk – unless they at least believed them to be literally true?” I think this is an interesting and a strong point, but one which isn’t conclusive; that is, it depends upon other factors being more or less probable relative to the unlikelihood of Luke and Matthew inventing the stories.
3. The previously existing models for a VB are all pagan in nature, and it is unlikely that a Jewish mentality would have told the story of a VB for Jesus unless it was true. Wright argues “This theory asks us to believe in intellectual parthenogenesis: the birth of an idea without visible parentage.” I’m not convinced by this, although I can see the logic of Wright’s argument. Two thoughts occur to me. One is that the influence from the Hellenic world had already had a few centuries to shape Jewish thought, and so the Jewish world-view was not so virginally pure as Wright needs to suppose (consider what language the stories are written in, after all). The second is that, despite a very well written and witty defence of his historical credentials, Wright by no means has the unanimous support of his peers on this point. It is a matter of weighting the probabilities and it seems to me that on this point Wright is letting his desire to retain a conservative account of Scripture condition his historical judgement.

Which seems a harsh point, and one I am not qualified to render, but for one thing – the argument that Wright makes with regard to apocalyptic language, which is a point I fully agree with and one which seems to have a very large role in his overall historical reconstruction of Christ’s life and mission. Wright says (in the first of his major books) “Within the mainline Jewish writings of this period, covering a wide range of styles, genres, political persuasions and theological perspectives, there is virtually no evidence that Jews were expecting the end of the space-time universe. There is abundant evidence that they knew a good metaphor when they saw one, and used cosmic imagery to bring out the full theological significance of cataclysmic socio-political events. There is almost nothing to suggest that they followed the Stoics into the belief that the world itself would come to an end; and there is almost everything to suggest that they did not.” In other words the writers of the time were perfectly able to use language creatively to make a theological point. Why then are Luke and Matthew not able to do something similar when writing their birth narratives? Where I think Wright is confused is that he seems to be applying different criteria in these two areas, and the reason for applying different criteria appears to be his desire to preserve a traditional understanding of the VB. Yet he hasn’t made that case; it may well be possible to do so, but, at least to my understanding, he hasn’t achieved it here.

One more post…

The marginality of the Virgin Birth (10): Marcus Borg

This is a quick summary of Borg’s points to do with historical plausibility in the book he wrote with Tom Wright. To begin he writes “I do not think the virginal conception is historical… they are not history remembered but rather metaphorical narratives using ancient religious imagery to express central truths about Jesus’ significance”.

Borg has three main grounds for doubting the historicity of the narratives:
1. The narratives are late, only being mentioned in two places. It’s clearly possible to write a gospel without it, so either the other authors “didn’t know about it or didn’t consider it important enough to include. Or the tradition didn’t develop until quite late and the reason most New Testament authors do not mention it is because the stories did not yet exist”.
2. Reinforcing the first point are 5 principal distinctions between Luke and Matthew:
– significantly different genealogies (Matthew emphasises Jewish Kingship and traces the lineage from Abraham through Solomon; Luke emphasises outreach to the gentiles and traces the genealogy from Adam through the prophet Nathan);
– different homes for Mary and Joseph (Nazareth in Luke, with trip to Bethlehem; Bethlehem alone in Matthew);
– different birth visitors (wise men in Matthew, shepherds and angels in Luke);
– Herod’s plot (in Matthew, with accompanying flight to Egypt, but absent from Luke);
– use of the Hebrew Bible (Matthew uses prediction-fulfilment formulae five times; Luke echoes the language without treating it as the fulfilment of a prophecy).
In Borg’s words “these are enough to make the point that we have two very different stories”.
3. “The stories look like they have been composed to be overtures to each gospel”. In other words they exemplify the themes which each evangelist wishes to emphasise, ‘King of the Jews’ for Matthew, mystical prophet reaching to the world for Luke. “In short, the stories look like the literary creation of each author.”

I don’t want to say much about Borg as I basically agree with him. I’ll say more about Wright’s chapter in the next post.

The meaning of Jesus (Marcus Borg & Tom Wright)


Stimulating and interesting. Borg isn’t as much of a liberal as I have previously supposed, although I still find Wright more persuasive on most points. Borg makes a telling point about Wright’s methodology being ‘flat’, ie Wright pays no systematic attention to the high probability that Matthew (and Luke to a lesser extent) used Mark, and that therefore some of the material in Matthew or Luke is less historically reliable. I think that there are ways to respond to that, particularly for theological purposes, but historically Wright’s stance seems problematic. I have his more substantial books on my shelf, as yet unread, so he may not be vulnerable to that criticism.

In any case I’d happily recommend this book to someone just starting to engage with the issues. It’s pretty clear and it gives a good feel for the shape of most of the debates.

Three schematics for the place of Scripture

This is following up on one of Tim’s comments. Tim was arguing that someone like Cranmer wouldn’t have understood the role of Scripture in the way that I do, and I’m wanting to get a handle on how they would have done, so because I think this way, here’s another triangle:

This one still has Christ as the highest authority, and under that Scripture, then tradition and reason etc. The latter lead into the former, but it is the former which must be accepted in order to gain access to Christ. (As I understand the RC position, the blue area is higher than the green, but still with Christ at the top).

This is different to my triangle:
…because with my triangle it is possible to gain access to Christ independently of Scripture (eg through the church community).

In my post on conscience I was arguing (in effect) that the first position was the equivalent of fundamentalism. That was question-begging, because another diagram will express how I see fundamentalism(!):

In other words, for me, by definition fundamentalism isn’t in touch with the living Christ (the yellow cross). I think that the first triangle above – call it the ‘Reformed’ model – can and does provide access to the living Christ. What I wonder is whether it’s possible to preserve a communion between those who accept the two different triangles. Because they are really quite different theologically. I may go into that in greater detail later on; for now, I’ll let the question stand.

A point of clarification on conscience

Tim said in a comment “both sides in the current dispute claim to be [following their conscience], and yet you seem to be saying that somehow the ‘conservative’ side isn’t doing it right – or, they’re drawing the wrong conclusion from what they’re hearing. I’m just not sure on what basis you make that judgement, Sam – because make no mistake, it is a judgement.”

I think I need to expand on this, because I don’t want to argue that holding the conservative position is necessarily against conscience – I don’t believe that it is – I just think that one form of the conservative stance (possibly the dominant and most vocal one) seems unsupportable (that is, those who use this argument are precisely ‘not doing it right’).

I think there is a difference between these two positions (both forms of the conservative perspective):
1) the expression of homosexual desire is sinful; it is destructive of the soul and pernicious; and Scripture and tradition have unanimously taught us this from the beginning;
and
2) the expression of homosexual desire is contrary to Scripture, and therefore it is sinful, destructive of the soul and pernicious.

The first recognises some reality beyond itself, to which Scripture is a revelatory witness, and therefore implicitly recognises that IF it could be established that the expression of homosexual desire (in the context of permanent life-long union etc) were not sinful, destructive, pernicious etc THEN we would need to reinterpret Scripture. This I think is a position which is tenable and responsible and ‘on the same playing field’ as those who precisely want to argue that such a re-interpretation is right and of God. The community both for and against the change can thereby discuss what is right and true about Scripture and the expression of homosexuality and seek an understanding of God’s will. This, I think, is the position that Rowan is defending.

The second, however, does not recognise anything outside of “Scripture”; which then becomes reified and absolutised. There is no place from which it is possible to argue that – for example – Scripture is silent on the specific subject being argued about (which is a view I am sympathetic towards). It’s not possible to interpret Scripture creatively or in a new way. I see this approach as a) a breach with traditional forms of interpretation in and of itself and b) highly prone to subordination to political objectives. This seems to me to be the position adopted by a great many people in the debate, and I don’t recognise it as defensibly Anglican. (It may be defensibly Christian, but of a non-Anglican sort).

As I see it, the more thoughtful and reflective conservatives are arguing option 1), and Rowan in particular is arguing it from a position (assuming he hasn’t changed his mind) which doesn’t agree with option 1) but is ‘in the same ballpark’. That is, Rowan personally believes that our view of Scripture needs to change and develop, but that this change needs to be done in the right way – and he’s now embedded in an argument for that right way being established (and he sees the establishment of that right way as being more important than the public acceptance of LGBT ministry). I’m sure that what Rowan would like to see is a) an establishment of the Windsor Covenant, followed by b) an endorsement by that covenanted community – at some point down the line – of the acceptability of LGBT relationships etc.

My problem is with the advocates of option 2) which have, from my perspective, an anachronistic, Modernist and idolatrous understanding of Scripture, ie I think they’re fundamentalists. That’s why my longer post was about ‘The authority of Scripture’ as such – it’s independent of what position is held on the current dispute. It’s possible to hold both a conservative position and to hold that view of Scripture. It’s also possible – of course – that I’ve got it wrong. But that’s why the blog is so useful – I can rely on people pointing out errors of fact and logic in my position!!

The marginality of the Virgin Birth (1): Scripture

Neil (OSO) objected to my brief post on the VB where I said “it’s an extremely marginal belief and not essential to faith”. Well. Whilst I’m on the subject, let’s dig in a bit more. Or: I may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb! I think there are two broad grounds for saying the the VB is a marginal belief, the first is Scriptural, the second doctrinal. The Scriptural side is short and sweet, which means I can fire this one off immediately. The doctrinal one may have to wait until after Christmas (dependent on how my sermon preparation goes today…)

The VB is testified to in 2 places in Scripture, the prologues to Matthew and Luke. It is not mentioned in Paul, Mark or John or any of the other writings. As such – given that we can be confident that they both had copies of Mark’s gospel in front of them – we can say that the account is a late development in Scriptural terms.

Yet the Scriptural point goes rather deeper than this. It’s not simply that the story is only mentioned in late strata, it’s that there is no ‘echo’ of the story at any other point. To bring this out, let’s compare the Scriptural witness to the Virgin Birth with the Scriptural witness to the resurrection.

The resurrection is testified to throughout Scripture, from the earliest to the latest, and, more crucially, it is testified to implicitly as well as explicitly. The text might rightly be described as saturated with the resurrection. It is the precondition for there being testimony about Jesus at all. Any recognition of Christ as Lord is dependent upon the resurrection in that without it he is simply a criminal condemned to a shameful death, and bearing the curse from God that results. Without the resurrection there is no gospel.

The same cannot be said for the story of the Virgin Birth. It is not a precondition for communicating the gospel – or else Mark and (most especially) John would have needed to give an account of it. Paul would have made some mention or reference to it; given all the things that he DID talk about it would be odd if something so allegedly central were not referred to, particularly given his appeal to a gentile audience (after all, it’s the sort of story that such an audience could expect to understand swiftly). Indeed there is at least an indication that Paul believes things in contradiction to the VB – consider Romans 1.3, when he says of Jesus that he was “as to his human nature a descendant of David” – how does that reconcile with Joseph not being involved in his paternity? There is no clear prophecy of it in the Old Testament either – despite Matthew’s attempts to find one, again, in contrast to other features of Christ’s life, death and resurrection.

One can ask – if the story is removed from the New Testament, how much damage would be caused? (For comparison: if the resurrection were removed from the NT, consider how much damage would be caused!) For we would not need to remove all the details of the two (different) birth accounts; we would merely need to remove the word ‘virgin’ and the sentences reinforcing it. Would anything else be removed at the same time? Well, all the accounts about Joseph can be left in place. All the language about Mary saying ‘yes’ to God can still be in place, and the Magnificat is untouched (hooray!). If, for example, we hypothesise either an illegitimate union between Mary and Joseph, or, perhaps, a rape of Mary or something like that – ie something which gives rise to some ‘scandal’ and which needs to be overcome by angelic support to both Mary and Joseph – then I don’t see what of any substance is lost. We can still talk about God’s being the prime mover in a situation, and there’s no need to abandon any parallelism with the Genesis account of the spirit moving over the face of the waters.

To my mind, nothing is lost, and potentially a great deal is gained. But the gains can’t be considered without going into the doctrine, ie what is at stake in this insistence that the story of the VB is true? That’ll come later.

A sermon on the Virgin Birth

I preached this three years ago, on the texts that have come round again for tomorrow morning. After the service I was told that I was ‘very brave’, but reading it through again I’m not sure that I was…

20041219A virgin shall conceive

I like to think of myself as quite a conservative sort of Christian. That is, although I came into the church through the liberal door, I have found that the more I study the faith, the more comfortable I find myself with the classical formulations, and the greater weight I place on the Church Fathers and how they understood what Christianity is all about. However, although I’ve come quite a long way from my liberal beginnings – to the extent that I would now find it quite an insult to be labelled as a liberal – there is still one area where I can’t quite overcome that liberal inheritance. And our readings this morning bring my one remaining qualm directly to the surface.

Let’s begin with Isaiah. In our Old Testament reading this morning the Prophet Isaiah is predicting the birth of a child to a young woman. The political context is quite fraught, and I shall give a rapid explanation – those of you who have been coming to the Learning Church sessions will recognise some of this. Isaiah is writing in the 8th century BC, and this is a time when the united kingdom under David and Solomon had split into two Jewish kingdoms, Israel in the North and Judah in the South. Assyria was the rising local superpower, and Israel and the neighbouring state of Damascus were seeking Judah’s assistance in fighting against Assyria. The king of Judah, called Ahaz, didn’t want to go along with this, and so Israel and Damascus besieged Jerusalem, to try and engineer regime change and the installation of a more favourable ruler. Now the issue confronting Ahaz is whether he should seek a political alliance with the Assyrians, to defend his own position, or whether he should trust in God for protection – and as you can imagine, Isaiah is quite clear about the choice that should be made. Isaiah says to Ahaz that a young woman will give birth to a child, and before that child has come to maturity, the powers that threaten Ahaz will have been defeated. What Isaiah is doing is setting a time frame for how long Ahaz would have to wait – and, indeed, less than twelve years later, before such a child would have reached maturity, the kingdoms of Damascus and of Israel have been defeated by Assyria. So in Isaiah, there is no sense of the birth-process being somehow miraculous; indeed, had Isaiah wanted to make a point about virginity, he would have used a different word. That is, he uses the word ‘alma, meaning young woman, instead of the word betula, which would have specifically meant virgin.

So where has Matthew got his text from? For clearly, in verse 23 he is quoting Isaiah as referring to a virgin conceiving a child. The answer to this is quite straightforward. In the third century in Egypt, following the expansion of Greek culture after Alexander the Great, the Hebrew bible was translated into Greek, and it was the Greek text that Matthew was quoting from, not the original Hebrew. And the Greek text translated the word meaning ‘young woman’ with the word parthenos, meaning virgin. So, in the translation from Hebrew to Greek, the element of virginity has been brought in, and it is this which underlies Matthew’s text. For it is very important to Matthew to establish the way in which Jesus is the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecies. Five times in these early chapters Matthew uses the expression ‘this took place to fulfil what had been spoken by the prophet’. Matthew is talking to an audience of Jewish Christians, and he is very concerned to establish the connections between the Old Testament and the New Testament – think of the Sermon on the Mount echoing Moses on Mount Sinai for example – and this is guiding his interpretation here.

So where does that leave the doctrine of the virgin birth? Well, within Greco-Roman culture the story of the origins of an heroic figure was quite a well-established form. Hercules, for example, was given the story that his mother was impregnated by Zeus, and this accounts for his superhuman strength. And of course, in our own day, the same understanding can be seen in children’s comics. Think of Superman – his wonderful powers require an explanation, and that is given by his origin on the planet Krypton. The real truth about Superman is that he is not one of us.

Which brings me to what my real qualms about the virgin birth consist in. For the standard liberal argument against it is to simply say ‘that sort of thing doesn’t happen’. That doesn’t carry much weight with me, largely because I don’t give science and scientific explanations the importance that our culture does – they are much too partial and prejudiced to be substituted for religious truth. If the living God could raise Christ Jesus from the dead – which is something, let me be clear, I’m quite happy with – then I can’t see any reason why the much less difficult matter of a virgin birth should be beyond Him. No, my worries come from a different direction.

One of the images in the New Testament which means the most to me is the tearing of the curtain in the temple. I read this as the abolition of the dividing line between God and humanity, that in Christ, the one who is both fully human and fully divine, this division is overcome, and all of the religious obstacles that had been put in the way of a living relationship with God – all of the Pharisaic legal traditions, the money changing in the temple, the religious purity laws – all of these have been overcome through Christ who is, as the letter to the Hebrews puts it, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith. But Jesus can only do all this if he is in fact human in the way that we are human. The church father Gregory of Nazianzus put it like this: what he has not assumed, he has not healed. In other words, if Jesus was like Superman – who appeared to be from earth but was actually from the planet Krypton – then he cannot save. He cannot take on the burden of our sins and he cannot show us the way of life. For where Supermen can go, mere mortals cannot go. So my worry about the virgin birth is not at all that it was impossible. My worry is that it diminishes Christ’s humanity, and that means that he is no longer my friend, he is no longer the one who can speak to me as a brother; instead he is an alien, totally other. I can’t reconcile my faith with that.

However. I should reiterate that my worries on this score make me unorthodox, and that means that not only am I officially wrong on this, but, if the past is any guide, in a few years time I will, through God’s grace, have gained understanding of the mystery of the virgin birth, and accepted it. If that proves to be the case, I promise to come before you again and explain the how and why.

But in the meantime I struggle with texts like the one we had this morning from Matthew. I wrestle with my doubts, I try and reach some sort of understanding that will make the texts come alive with meaning for me, in the way that the tearing of the curtain in the temple speaks to me. What gives me joy is that I work in a church which isn’t afraid of this sort of exploration, that instead teaches us that our reason is a gift from God, which, if we let it, will lead us further into the mystery of our salvation, and the truth of the Incarnation of the Son of God, whose festival we shall be celebrating together at the end of this week. And surely that is the right way, for in Christ all truth finds its expression, and if we hold fast to truth, we will always come back to him. For Jesus Christ is our Saviour, the one ‘declared to be Son of God with power according to the Spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead’. May he guide us into all truth, throughout this Christmas time, and always. Amen.