Some two thousand years ago there is said to have appeared in the
notoriously rebellious province of Galilee, the headquarters of Hebrew
radicalism, a wandering teacher called Jesus, who passed from village
to village expounding certain ethical and socialistic ideas, which
were condemned by the Roman government and which resulted in this
man's arrest and subsequent execution. After his death, his various
pupils continued to preach his theories, and, separating, spread
these ideas over various parts of the then civilized world. These
pupils, naturally, having a firm belief in their former leader,
and desiring to strengthen in every possible manner their faith
as well as to increase the number of their proselytes, and, also,
being themselves more or less affected by the ancient messianic idea,
did not deny Jesus more than mortal powers, and allowed certain pagan
theories of deity to creep into their faith. Later, when the vicious
and crafty Constantine found it advisable for political reasons to
adopt Christianity as the state religion, the great mass of Roman
worshipers merely transferred the attributes of their ancient deities
to the objects venerated by the new sect.
There was nothing new in bestowing a divine origin on Jesus. All the
lesser gods of antiquity were the sons of Zeus, and, in later times,
monarchs were accorded the same origin. It was a common myth of
all ancient peoples that numerous beings derived their birth from
other than natural causes. Virgins gave birth to sons without aid
of men. Zeus produced offspring without female assistance. Almost
all the extraordinary men that lived under the old heathen mythology
were reputed to have been the sons of some of the gods. The doctrine
of the virgin birth is perhaps one of the oldest of religious ideas;
it is so universal that its origin is impossible to trace. Therefore,
no wonder is excited when we find that most of the religious leaders
have been of celestial origin.
Krishna, the Indian savior, was born of a chaste virgin called Devaki,
who, on account of her purity, was selected to become the mother of
God. Gautama Buddha was born of the virgin Maya and "mercifully left
Paradise and came down to earth because he was filled with compassion
for the sins and miseries of mankind. He sought to lead them into
better paths, and took their sufferings upon himself that he might
expiate their crimes and mitigate the punishment they must otherwise
inevitably undergo."
The great father of gods and men sent a messenger from heaven to
the Mexican virgin, Sochiquetzal, to inform her that it was the
will of the gods that she should immaculately conceive a son. As a
result she bore Quetzalcoatl, the Mexican savior, who "set his face
against all forms of violence and bloodshed, and encouraged the arts
of peace." The Mexican god Huitzilopochtli was likewise immaculately
conceived by a woman who, while walking in a temple, beheld a ball of
feathers descending in the air. She grasped this and placed it in her
bosom. It gradually disappeared and her pregnancy resulted. The Mexican
Montezumas were later supposed to have been immaculately conceived
by a drop of dew falling on the exposed breast of the mother as she
lay asleep.
The Siamese have a virgin-born god and savior whom they call Codom;
the Chinese have several virgin-born gods, one being the result of
his mother's having become impregnated by merely treading on the
toe-print of God; while the Egyptians bowed in worship before the
shrine of Horus, son of the virgin Isis.
Setting aside the mythological interpretation of the miraculous
conception of Jesus and the theory that his history is entirely
fictitious, and viewing his birth from a natural human standpoint,
even admitting that he may have been a "divinely inspired man,"
a little better than any other human being, there seems to be only
one explanation for his peculiar conception as recorded in Luke i.
Some critics of the rational school have not failed to notice
a solution of the problem in the appearance of the angel Gabriel
and his private interview with Mary (Luke i, 28-38). Say they very
pertinently, why may not some libidinous young man, having become
enamoured of the youthful wife of the aged Joseph, and, knowing the
prophecy of the messiah, have visited the object of his desire in
angelic guise and, having won her confidence in this rôle, gained those
favors that produced the miraculous birth? And such an explanation
is not improbable when we consider that it is an historical fact that
young and confiding women often resorted to the pagan temples at the
instigation of the unscrupulous, where they enjoyed the embraces of
ardent but previously unsuccessful lovers, under the impression that
they were being favored by deities.
So those Christians whose reasoning powers will not allow them
to believe in the absurdity of an unnatural conception, and whose
superstitious adoration will not permit of their believing Mary guilty
of an intentional faux pas, try in this manner to reconcile the two,
and declare Joseph the guilty man.
According to the Gospels, Joseph, the husband, knowing Mary to be
with child, married her (Matt. i, 18); but that is no reason for
believing that he regarded the Holy Ghost's responsibility for his
wife's condition with faith. He told of a dream in which he had been
informed that such was the case (Matt. i, 20-23). He may have believed
the dream, and he may not. The most sensible view is that he, "being a
just man," took this method of preserving her reputation, and that he
himself was the actual parent. Having betrayed the girl, he honestly
married her, but, to defend her and himself from the accusation of a
serious misdemeanor among the Jews (Deut. xxii), he invented the dream
story to account for her unfortunate condition. Girls have ever told
improbable stories to explain like misfortunes. Danæ concocted the
shower of gold yarn; Leda preferred to accuse herself of bestiality
with a swan to acknowledging a lover, and Europa blamed a bull. Modern
damsels have invented more modern but just as innocent agents.
It would seem from the subsequent actions and words of Mary that
she must have forgotten that her son was miraculously conceived of
God, for we find her reproaching him for remaining in the temple of
Jerusalem to argue with the rabbis with, "Son, why hast thou thus
dealt with us? Behold, thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing"
(Luke ii, 48). Again, when Simeon and Anna proclaimed the messiahship
of Jesus (Luke ii, 25-32; 36-38), we are told that "Joseph and his
mother marveled at those things which were spoken of him" (Luke ii,
33). This would hardly have been the case had they already known him
as "the Son of the Highest, who shall reign over the house of Jacob
forever" (Luke i, 32-33). Neither would Mary, had she realized that
she was the mother of God, have considered it necessary to resort
to the temple (Luke ii, 22-24) to be purified from the stains of her
childbirth. Women, having borne natural children, were considered to
have become defiled in the act of parturition, through the contact
of the perpetually active agency of original sin, whereof they must
be purified. The mere fact of her submitting to such a churching is
evidence that Mary did not know that she had done anything remarkable
in bearing Jesus, and was ignorant of an unusual conception.
Their neighbors, despite the dream, always recognized Jesus as Joseph's
son (Matt. xii, 55; Luke iv, 22; John ii, 45; vi, 42; Nicodemus i,
2). The orthodox explain this on the supposition that Joseph and
Mary kept all these things in their hearts, and did not tell the
actual facts of the case, which seems unlikely. Joseph would want
to explain the early birth of Jesus, and Mary would be desirous of
saving her reputation, and both would naturally boast of the honor
conferred by the Holy Ghost, had they known of it, for in such case
Joseph's relation to his god was the same as that of the peasant to
his seigneur in the days of the jus primæ noctis. The liaison was an
honor, and would have been related to save Jesus from the disagreeable
allusions made by his neighbors regarding his birth (John viii, 41).
Conforming to the narrations of the miraculous conception in Luke,
Mary, and the Protevangelion, is an old miracle play called "Joseph's
Jealousy," in which we find a very natural picture of the good old
husband discovering a condition in his wife for which he is not
responsible and accusing her in plain old English of adorning his
brow with antlers. The following is the dialogue as given in Hone's
"Ancient Mysteries Described":
Jos. Say me, Mary, this childys fadyr who is?
I pry the telle me, and that anon?
Mry. The Fadyr of hevyn, & se, it is,
Other fadyr hath he non.
To which Joseph very naturally replies in a burst of anger:
Jos. Goddys childe! thou lyist, in fay!
God dede nevyr rape so with may.
But yit I say, Mary whoos childe is this?
Mry. Goddys and your, I sey, I wys.
Then in wrath at her obstinacy he breaks forth:
Jos. Ya, ya! all olde men, to me take tent,
& weddyth no wyff, in no kynnys wyse.
Alas! Alas! my name is shent;
All men may me now dyspyse,
& seyn olde cokwold.
Mary tries to explain and says that her child is from God alone and
that she was so informed by an angel. The suspicious Joseph will not
be deceived, and gives way to some words that have since been accepted
as a true explanation of the miraculous conception:
Jos. An A'gel! alas, alas! fy for schame!
Ye syn now, in that ye to say;
To puttyn an A'ngel in so gret blame.
Alas, alas! let be do way;
It was s'n boy began this game,
That closhyd was clene and gay,
& ye geve hym now an A'ngel name.
The old prophecy in Isaiah (vii, 14) that a virgin shall bear a son
loses its utility when we recognize that this was the sign given Ahaz
that God would preserve his kingdom, although he was then threatened
by a coalition of the kings of Ephraim and Syria. If the prophecy
referred to the Christ, how could it have any influence on Ahaz? How
could he be calmed and made to preserve his courage in the face of
danger by a sign which would not be given until centuries after he
slept with his fathers? But such was not the case. Isaiah made his sign
appear as he had promised (vii, 16), "Before the child shall know to
refuse evil, and choose the good, the land that thou abhorrest shall
be forsaken of both her kings" (the rulers of Israel and Syria). Now,
this prophecy was fulfilled, either by the trickery of the prophet or
the compliance of a virgin, for we find in the next chapter (Isaiah
viii, 3), "And I went unto the prophetess; and she conceived and bare
a son." And that is the whole story. To apply it to the mythical
birth of Jesus is puerile. No one can doubt that so good a Jew as
Josephus believed in the prospect of a messiah, yet so little did
Isaiah's prophecy impress him that he did not even mention the virgin
episode. Probably, on the whole, he thought it a rather contemptible
bit of trickery and rather detrimental to the memory of Isaiah.
James Orr, in his treatise written expressly to prove the historical
fact of the virgin birth, denies that the prophecy of Isaiah could be
applied to Jesus. Here we have an orthodox writer who firmly believes
in the miraculous conception, shattering the great cornerstone of the
church's foundation for this belief. He says that the word "almah"
was not Hebrew for virgin at all, but meant only a marriageable
young woman. He says it can have no connection with Jesus, and thus
he agrees with Thomas Paine, but for opposite reasons.
While Orr evidently considers that all pagan tales of divine paternity
are legends, he affirms that the case of Jesus is genuine. Just why God
became Deus Genetrix only once, he does not explain. If God approved
of this method of creation, he would surely have performed it more
than once. That he should have chosen a woman at all seems strange,
when he could have produced Jesus without female assistance. Why
should he have given his son, coexistent with the father, and,
as such, undoubtedly of a fully developed intelligence, all the
discomfort and danger of infantile life? If Jesus were but another
phase of the godhead, one of the divine eternal trinity, it was
degrading and ridiculous to have inflicted him with the processes of
foetal life, with all the embryonic phases of development from ovule,
through vertebrate and lower form to human guise; to have given him
the dangers of human gestation and parturition, the inconvenience
of childhood, with teething and other infantile discomforts, and the
slow years of growth. Why did he inflict all these things on a part,
a third, of himself, in many years of preparation for but a few years
of preaching, when he could have produced the Christ in a wonderful
manner, full grown in all the beauty and dignity and strength of
perfect and sublime manhood? Probably some will answer that then Jesus
would have been regarded as an impostor. But no more doubt could be
cast on such an appearance than has been thrown on the doubtful story
of the purity of Mary. Orr, in his haste to prove his belief, gives a
very good argument against it (page 82) in the words, "The idea of a
Virgin birth ... was one entirely foreign to Jewish habits of thought,
which honored marriage, and set no premium on virginity." Therefore,
it could not have been of Jewish origin. The Jews never accepted it,
and it grew up only under the influence of Gentile converts.
It was an idea of classic paganism, an adoption of universal
phallism, this conception of a divine impregnation. The doctrine
that by conjunction with a woman, God begat the Christ is merely
another phase of the phallic idea of the procreative principles of
the deity--it is another form of the deus genetrix, the generative
principle of male procreation.