John Spong's
Born
of a Woman.
In the book, Spong argues against the traditional
understanding of the virgin birth (more accurately deemed the virginal
conception). He considers it mythological and thinks it contributes to an
unhealthy perspective on women (identified in terms of their sexuality rather
than individuality). I know that this book has disturbed the faith of a lot of
people, so I thought I might review it.
First of all, let me say that Spong isn't completely
whacko. Of course there are a few places where he might as well be writing a
novel as commenting on history. But I would say that after finishing the book,
the difference between him and me is mostly one of "cup half empty"
versus "cup half full." I would not dispute a good deal of the
"data" he discusses in this book. What I dispute is his dismissal of
faith in the virgin birth as ignorant, irrational, or impossible given the
evidence. By the way, I'll continue to use the phrase "virgin birth"
in reference to the conception of Jesus apart from human sex, just because
that's how we all use the term.
What is at stake in the virgin birth?
It seems to me that two things are at stake. One appears to be a view of the
biblical texts as straightforwardly historical or as mostly historical. The
other is that we would be rejecting something the church has believed for
nearly two thousand years, a unanimous element in Christian belief that is a
part of the Apostle's Creed. It seems to me that is
pretty significant.
What is not at stake?
1. The divinity of Christ is not at stake. This is very important to note.
Orthodox Christian faith believes that Jesus was fully human and fully divine. We don't believe that Jesus
was a demi-god: half man, half God. Whatever the
divine part is, it is not a matter of human sex. It is something different from
his humanity. As far as I can tell, Jesus could have been just as divine if he
had come by way of human sex as he was via the miraculous way God chose. The
only difference is where the Y chromosome comes from. By human sex it would
have come from Joseph. As it was, God made it ex nihilo, out of nothing.
2. The sinlessness of Jesus is not at stake. Surely
no one who knows genetics today seriously thinks that sin is based in any
simple way on a Y chromosome or interaction with a Y chromosome. Paul certainly
did not process sin in this way. To him, sin was a power with a foothold in my
flesh. However we might translate this concept into our worldview (with
cerebral cortexes and such), the Y chromosome is certainly not to blame.
Otherwise, all women would be without sin.
Spong may be correct that the early church saw a
woman as an "incubator" and the man as the exclusive provider of
seed. Certainly they did not process the virgin birth the way we do, and they
did not understand genetics and "the flesh" the way we do. (By the
way, I don't think that we necessarily consider the thought processes of the
authors that did not make their way into the text to be inspired anyway. This
statement raises a lot of fascinating issues about whether the original meaning
of the text is the inspired meaning, but I'll let it go.)
Does that mean the virgin birth didn't happen? No, it just means the stakes
were higher for them than they are for us. While I disagree with Wolfhart Pannenberg, I think
he'll be in heaven. Pannenberg believes that Jesus
rose from the dead and was God in the flesh. But he does not believe in the
virgin birth.
Spong is probably correct when he implies that the
virgin birth plays no significant theological role in the original meaning of
the New Testament as a whole. It is never mentioned outside a few verses in
Matthew 1 and Luke 1. In other words, the virgin birth does not affect any of
the theological claims of Paul, Mark, John, and not really any of those even in
Matthew or Luke (the significance of the birth narratives is borne out
theologically by other parts of these gospels).
While I consider the virgin birth a core belief of Christianity, I do so
because of the gospels and the long standing belief of the church. But
Christianity does not rise or fall on this belief. It seems to me that historic
Christianity rises or falls on the incarnation and the resurrection.
Spong's Half Empty Cup
As I moved through Spong's book, I found a lot of
data that seems fairly clear from the New Testament (for example, that the
focal point of calling Jesus Lord was the exaltation of Jesus to God's right
hand). In these cases, the difference between Spong
and me is the significance
and implications of the data
to each of us more than what the data actually is. He consistently takes the
"half empty" conclusion. I take the "half full" one.
For example, it is very
difficult to fit the two birth stories together. If all we had was Matthew, we
would think Joseph and Mary were from
Can we fit the two narratives together? There have of course been ingenious
suggestions of how to do it. Can we fit the two together without violating one
of the texts or the other, twisting it to say something it probably does not?
That's a more difficult question.
But Spong himself mentions a significant overlap
between the two accounts (page 47-48). Here's a point of choice. Spong sees the cup as half empty--because they disagree he
assumes all of it is "myth." But you could also see the cup as half
full: given the tensions between the
two accounts, it seems all the more likely that their common points are
historical.
What are these common points? The most important ones are that Jesus was born
in
Indeed, it is surely noteworthy that Spong himself acknowledges the historical possibility that
Jesus' birth was scandalous in some way (e.g., 21, 181). Take the following
comment: "Perhaps there was an early memory that supported the tradition
that Jesus was born too soon after Mary and Joseph came together to live as
husband and wife" (73). Without intending to do so, Spong
here inescapably implies that the virgin birth is possible given the evidence.
Therefore, if he were fair, he would say that he finds the virgin birth
unlikely, although theoretically possible given the evidence. This is the case
even if one adopts his hyper-pessimistic reading of the data.
Spong's Tone
Spong is incredibly dismissive in this book. He has a
kind of "everyone who disagrees with me is stupid" air about him.
Take the following quote: "Is there any possibility that the narratives of
our Lord's birth are historical? Of course not. Even
to raise that question is to betray an ignorance about
birth narratives" (59). Wow! What a statement! He so much as says, you'd have to be an uneducated ignoramus to believe in the
virgin birth. I know Tom Wright cried for months after he read this quote and
discovered how stupid he was.
On the one hand, I agree that "origin tales" were primarily
"commentaries on adult meaning" (59). What this means is that ancient
biographers told the stories about a great person's birth and childhood in such
a way as to evoke who they were as adults.
However, if I might adopt Spong's tone, you'd have to
be completely ignorant of how oral tradition is passed on in an oral culture to
think traditions like these didn't usually have a core of historical basis to
them. Spong's generation of thinkers, since they view
these things through the eyes of a literary culture, assume that stories get
completely messed up when things aren't written down for a few years.
Let me note the important differences between Jesus' virgin birth and the other
virgin births Spong mentions on p. 56. First, most of
these names are about gods who no one ever claimed to be humans (
A Point of Strong Disagreement
One point where I want to take strong exception to Spong
is in his explanation of resurrection faith. He argues that the earliest
Christians thought of Jesus being exalted to heaven, not resurrected in a way
that would involve an empty tomb. Let me say that it is at this point that I
find Spong's perspective highly problematic, even if
many scholars continue to express this point of view.
Since this review is about the virgin birth rather than the resurrection, let
me just make two points:
1. First, I find ludicrous Spong's suggestion that
"Easter broke, I believe, not so much with a supernatural external miracle
but with the dawning internal realization that this life of Jesus reflected a
new image of God, an image that defied the conventional wisdom, an image that
called into question the exalted king as the primary analogy by which God could
be understood" (39). With due respect to this beautifully worded thought
(not original to Spong), I find this
"cause" entirely insufficient to account for the "effect"
we find in the early church.
Let me explain further by recourse to the second point:
2. One cannot easily dismiss Paul's claims in 1 Corinthians 15 that Peter saw
the risen Lord along with many others, nor Paul's insistence that Jesus was the
first of the general resurrection. We cannot dismiss them because the Corinthians seem to know of Peter and his movements, not to
mention Barnabas (e.g., 1 Cor. 9:5-6). Since Paul had
opposition at
And of course Dunn has recently debunked the whole "gap theory" that Spong, the Jesus Seminar and all of these "sixties
seminarians" have long used to propose a complete difference between Jesus
and Paul (it's actually a much older suggestion). The little book A New Perspective on Jesus is very
helpful in this regard.
I personally believe that the best an atheist can really claim with integrity
is that Peter only thought he saw the risen Christ. Whether you believe in the
resurrection or not, Peter certainly thought that he had seen the risen Jesus,
and he was willing to die for that convinction.
And so, for Spong's explanation of resurrection to
work in reality, over time Peter would have had to mistake a "dawning
internal realization" he had for having had an actual vision of the risen
Jesus. Wow, I don't think I could do that.
Spong and Speculation
As someone who likes to play at novel-writing, there are points where Spong's book gets really "fun." So Spong wonders whether the story of the woman caught in
adultery was placed where it was because people thought of Jesus' mother as an
adulterer (170). Spong suggests that the accusations
of Jewish leaders might imply Mary was raped (171). He wonders if Jesus' words
about tying up a strong man were reminiscences of something that happened in
his childhood (162). Of course I can't prove that the Jewish leaders didn't
think such things, but we lack far from enough evidence even to argue for these
kinds of things. It is Spong gone speculative.
One funny thing about all this speculation is that Spong
pretty much assumes that John gives us straightforward historical portrayals of
events and the things people said and did in Jesus' life. Remember, he called
anyone ignorant who would do this with the birth narratives. He took great
pains in previous chapters to argue that the gospels are not historical but
"midrashic" (which he basically defines as
imaginative retellings of stories in the light of the Old Testament). So why
does he take John so historically--if he is consistent with his own method?
Indeed, John is more often considered by scholars the least straightforwardly
historical of the gospels!
For example, Spong says at one point that John
"was written, as most scholars believe, by a disciple of John Zebedee" (192). Ha! Fine with me and many conservative
scholars! Nice of Spong to side
with us conservatives. It seems deeply ironic to me that Spong is uncritically literal with what "most
scholars" take to be the most symbolic of all the gospels!
One feature of John that is very important when reading these texts is irony.
Sometimes John tells of people saying something where the audience is meant to
smile because they know something the people in the story don't.
So when Caiaphas says it is better for one man to die
than for all the people to (John 11:50), the audience should smile--we know
that the one man Jesus did die so that the whole world wouldn't. Similarly,
when the crowds suggest that Jesus can't be the Christ because he isn't from
By far the most entertaining part of the book to me are
Spong's speculations about whether Mary Magdalene
might have been Jesus' wife. This is a really popular idea today with the Da Vinci Code and what not. Spong suggests that the wedding at
On the one hand, I'm not sure it would affect any doctrine of the church or the
inerrancy of the Bible if Jesus had been married. The Bible doesn't say he
wasn't! And we only find out that the disciples were married because of a
completely unnecessary side comment Paul makes (1 Cor.
9:5). If anything, we get the impression that the wives of these men were so
irrelevant to the biblical writers that no one bothered to mention them. There
is no conspiracy of suppression--only the possibility that these men
undervalued their wives.
At the same time, I don't see why Luke wouldn't go ahead and say Mary was
Jesus' wife if she was (I don't buy Spong's conspiracy
theory of suppression here). And the scandal of an illegitimate birth would
have played right into Luke's emphasis on Jesus' ministry to the poor and the
oppressed. So why doesn't Luke go ahead and portray Jesus this way? Why does
Luke present the virgin birth and refrain to tell us of a marital association
with Mary Magdalene?
Could it be because Jesus was
born of a virgin and wasn't
married to Mary?
Closing Remarks
In closing, I didn't quite see the connection between the portrayal of Mary in
the gospels and the ongoing oppression of women today. I will readily admit
that the New Testament is often patriarchal in its assumptions. I am willing to
admit that church history has often filtered the words of the Bible through a
sexual lens that is inappropriate to the gospel. But I don't see how the virgin
birth is to blame for all this. Just because someone abuses something doesn't
mean that it isn't legitimate. "Abuse is no excuse.
In the end, Spong's argument is all too familiar. We
have seen it in the eighteenth century Hume, the nineteenth century Renan, the twentieth century Bultmann.
These individuals have come to the data with an antisupernaturalist
presupposition. Clearly the data can be interpreted coherently in terms of such
a presumption. But since none of these individuals have disproved that God
exists and sometimes acts in history, the data can also be interpreted
coherently with a supernaturalist presupposition as
well.
It is the same data, but the interpretation is different in accordance with two
different faiths.