Days before Christmas — one of the most holy Christian holidays — the New York Times pulled a predictable stunt.
Ignoring two millennia of Christian tradition holding to the virgin birth of Jesus, the so-called “newspaper of record” published an editorial column with a historian titled, “A Conversation About the Virgin Birth That Maybe Wasn’t.” The point of the interview with Dr. Elaine Pagels, a scholar of early Christianity, was to sow doubt that Mary was a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus.
‘Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.’
The New York Times published the interview on Dec. 21 online but printed it in the Christmas Eve edition of its physical newspaper.
The interview centers on Pagels’ forthcoming book in which she argues, according to NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof, that “Jesus might have been fathered by a Roman soldier, possibly by rape.”
Seriously?! Yes, unfortunately.
Alleged evidence for this claim in Pagels’ book, Kristof noted, includes anti-Christian writings from the generations after the apostles that claim Jesus is the son of a Roman soldier named “Panthera.”
Pagels told the New York Times:
Yes, these stories circulated after Jesus’ death among members of the Jewish community who regarded him as a false messiah, saying that Jesus’ father was a Roman soldier. I used to dismiss such stories as ancient slander. Yet while we do not know what happened, there are too many points of circumstantial evidence to simply ignore them.
In the interview, Pagels’ argument appears to rely heavily on inaccurate conclusions about the Gospel of Mark.
For example, Pagels notes that “Mark is the earliest Gospel written.” That’s true. But she also claims that “Matthew and Luke are basically just revising it.” That is not true.
The Gospel authors, under inspiration of the Holy Spirit, each advanced the same polemical goal: to show that Jesus is, in fact, the Christ, the long-awaited and promised Jewish Messiah. But each author used slightly different methodologies to accomplish his goals, which explains the differences between Matthew, Luke, and Mark.
What is true is that, according to a popular scholarly theory, the authors of Matthew and Luke used Mark’s Gospel and an additional source called “Q” to compile their writings. But in no way, shape, or form are Matthew and Luke mere “revision” of Mark’s Gospel.
Pagels then added:
Mark has no suggestion of a virgin birth. Instead, he says that neighbors called Jesus “son of Mary.” In an intensely patriarchal society, this suggests that Jesus had no father that anyone knew about, even one deceased. Yet even without a partner, Mary has lots of children: In Mark, Jesus has four other brothers and some sisters, with no recognized father and no genealogy.
But this is a fallacy: Pagels is arguing from silence.
Just because Mark’s account does not include a genealogy of Jesus — which is included in Matthew and Luke — does not mean that Mark is somehow leaving open the possibility that Jesus was not born of the Virgin Mary.
Importantly, Christians see Jesus’ virgin birth foretold in Isaiah 7:14, which says, “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.” Matthew famously cites this prophecy in Matthew 1:22-23.
Unfortunately, the theory Pagels and Kristof advance is not new.
In fact, it is a fringe theory in biblical scholarship that is widely discredited. There are many problems with it, including a blinding and deafening absence of historical evidence to prove its reliability, the clear polemical motive to discredit Christianity, linguistic problems, the issue of the Gospels’ reliability, and a lack of similar arguments from other early anti-Christian writers.
One of the chief problems with claiming the virgin birth is not true is that it discredits Christianity wholesale.
“This truth about the conception of Jesus is not expendable. If Jesus were conceived in the way everyone else has been conceived, then the Gospel writers are telling falsehoods,” explains Dr. Mitchell Chase, a professor at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. “And if Jesus were conceived in the way everyone else has been conceived, then his human nature has been corrupted by sin. If Jesus were corrupted by sin, then he wouldn’t be able to bring salvation because he himself would need salvation.”
The virgin birth, according to Chase, is therefore not “some extraneous issue.” Rather, it is “integral to what we Christians confess about Jesus.”
“Through the incarnation of the Son of God, the light of salvation dawned upon the world,” Chase explains. “He is the Son of God, with truly divine and human natures. He was born without sin and lived without sin, so that he could die beneath our sin. Now, raised and ascended, the incarnate Son is our perfect mediator and sin-pardoning savior.”
This is not the first time the New York Times has tried to stir up doubt about the virgin birth in the days before Christmas. And sadly, it probably isn’t the last.
It’s a predictable attack on a fundamental Christian doctrine that every Christian — Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant — shares.
One is left to wonder, however, why the NYT never attacks the first proposition of the Bible — that God created everything — or the resurrection of Jesus. For those concerned about the believability of “miracles,” those two propositions are much more thorny. If God created everything and Jesus was raised from the dead, the virgin birth of Jesus is easy to “accept.”
And yet: The pre-Christmas attacks always center on this one “miracle.”
Perhaps it’s because critics of the virgin birth know that if you can discredit the beginning of Jesus’ life, then you can discredit the end — and with it, Jesus’ whole life.
Thankfully, Christians have truth — in Jesus — on their side.
“I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6).
Virgin birth, Mary, Jesus christ, Jesus, Incarnation, Bible, New york times, Legacy media, Media bias, Faith