Mythology

This instance illustrates the second tendency at work in gospel narratives, observable in Luke as well as in Matthew, to find in the life of Jesus a recapitulation of the experience of Israel, as well as that of Moses, since Jesus was for the gospel writers the new Moses as well as the new Israel. The slaughter of the children by Herod and the escape of Jesus and his parents recapitulate the slaughter of the male Hebrew children in Egypt by the Pharaoh and the preservation of Moses. That there was such a conscious or unconscious patterning of the birth narratives in Luke on Old Testament models has been well brought out in a recent article entitled ‘St Luke’s Genesis’, to which reference may be made. [1] The third tendency at work in the Matthaean birth narrative raises the larger question of the borrowing of mythological material from pagan sources. [2] We have already seen that, in describing the divine activity in Creation the Hebrew writers made use of Sumerian and Babylonian Creation myths, and that in their treatment of such material might be seen the beginnings of a new use of myth as a vehicle of revelation. We have, therefore, a precedent for the use of myth in a way transcending its original function in early religions. The problem meets us in its acutest form in connexion with the Christian dogma of the virgin birth. It is possible to read the statement in Luke I:35 as implying divine intervention of the same type as is found in the Old Testament accounts of the births of Isaac or of Samson, although the words in Luke 3:23, in the genealogy of Jesus, ‘being, as was supposed, the son of Joseph’, show that Luke himself believed that Jesus had no human father But the Matthaean statement is unequivocal. Mary is ‘found with child of the Holy Ghost’; and the gospel writer goes on to declare that the event is a fulfilment of an oracle of Isaiah which he quotes from the Greek Septuagint version of the Old Testament. This version reads, ‘Behold, the virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel.’ Here the point turns on the Greek word parthenos, which is rightly translated ‘virgin’. The Hebrew word, however, ‘almah, which the Septuagint translators have rendered parthenos, does not mean ‘virgin’, but ‘young woman’, that is, any young woman of marriageable age. If the Isaianic oracle be examined in its context, it will be seen that, in a time of trouble and the threat of a foreign invasion, the prophet urged King Ahaz to ask Yahweh for a sign, and when he refused to do so, told him that Yahweh would give him a sign; this was to be the birth of a child to an unnamed young woman; the child was to be named Immanuel, and would grow up to experience the privations which would result from the Assyrian invasion of Judah predicted by the prophet. The primary reference of the sign was to the situation in which it was given. The name given to the child must be considered in connexion with the names given by the prophet to his own children as signs, and, its meaning, ‘God with us’, was intended to tell the king and his panic-stricken people that Israel’s God was in command of the situation. If the oracle in Isa. 9 :6-7, ‘Unto us a child is born’, refers to the same child, then the sign of Immanuel would seem to have had a Messianic significance for the prophet, and to have referred to a future Davidic king; but there is no suggestion in the Hebrew text of a miraculous birth from a virgin. Hence the Christian writer’s claim that the virgin birth of Jesus is a fulfilment of the Isaianic oracle is based on a mistranslation of the Hebrew. But the fact that Matthew or his source could interpret the oracle in this way shows that the belief in the virgin birth had already taken root in the early Christian community on other grounds. In the first place, it is clear that by the time the canonical gospels were in circulation the divine Sonship of Jesus had been fully recognized, carrying with it the implication of complete sinlessness. On theological grounds the sinlessness of Jesus was thought to be secured by his conception through the operation of the Holy Spirit without the intervention of

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