Heads up! I'm fairly excited for my upcoming 9,000 worded paper, "Did Virgin Mary Give Birth to the Son of God?" It's to appear on my page at the Secular Web within a couple of weeks. [The following essay was first published in December 2023]
"How the New Testament
Writers Used Prophecy" by John W. Loftus.
One of the major things claimed by the New
Testament in support of Jesus’ life and mission is that Jesus fulfilled Old
Testament prophecy (Luke 24:26–27; Acts 3:17–24). If God cannot predict the
future as time moves farther and farther into the distance, as I questioned
earlier, then neither can any prophet who claims to speak for God. As we will
see with regard to the virgin birth of Jesus, none of the Old Testament
passages in the original Hebrew prophetically applied singularly and
specifically to Jesus. [In chapter 18, "Was Jesus Born of a Virgin in Bethlehem?"]. Early Christian preachers simply went into the Old
Testament looking for verses that would support their view of Jesus. They took
these Old Testament verses out of context and applied them to Jesus in order to
support their views of his life and mission.9
I've had some difficulty posting these slides from an online debate with Jimmy Akin, which was hosted by Capturing Christianity. Initially we had agreed to 20 minute openers but decided 10 minutes was enough. Below is my 20 minute slide presentation, which I extended a bit. It puzzles me a great deal why this information doesn't cause more believers to abandon the virgin myth. This is what led me to doubt the gospels as a whole. Enjoy. Please share!
My debate opponent believes a virgin named Mary gave birth to a divine child named Jesus over two-thousand years ago. The most significant problem is that theologians cannot explain how a human being and a god can be one and the same, that is, 100% human and 100% divine, with every essential characteristic of humanity and divinity included. How can a god be a god if he has a body? How can an infinite timeless god exist in time? Conversely, how can a human be a human if he or she doesn’t have a body? How can a finite human take on eternal godlike characteristics and still remain a human being? How can a human be perfectly good incapable of being tempted to sin, and yet also be tempted to sin? Christians themselves have shown the incoherence of a divine/human being by their 2000 year long disagreements over it.
Make no mistake about it. This is what my debate opponent is aiming at in this debate. The virgin birth is a first step toward claiming Jesus was God incarnate. My aim is to stop him short of this first step, even though his case isn’t done until he tackles the second step by dealing with some formidable philosophical objections to a divine/human being. With no such being there's no virgin birth either.
Let’s start by talking about the kind of evidence we need.
You would think that if Jesus was born of a virgin, and that such a belief is important to Christianity, the Christian clergy would all believe it. But significant numbers of them don't:
http://www.wnd.com/2015/12/christian-preacher-nativity-story-just-fairy-tale/
According to a 1998 poll of 7,441 Protestant clergy in the U.S., the following ministers said they didn’t believe in the virgin birth:
American Lutherans, 19 percent
American Baptists, 34 percent
Episcopalians, 44 percent
Presbyterians, 49 percent
Methodists, 60 percent
Yet another poll, in 1999, surveyed 103 Roman Catholic priests, Anglican priests and Protestant ministers in the U.K. That poll found 25 percent did not believe in the virgin birth, according to ReligiousTolerance.org. A 2004 survey of ministers in the Church of Scotland found 37 percent don’t accept the virgin account.
The clergy are educated Christians and they have much more at stake in maintaining their faith as traditionally believed. We would not expect so many of them to reject the virgin birth. The fact so many of them do so shows the evidence for the virgin birth is not there.
