Theology has been hampered by the term the “sinlessness” of Jesus, for a negative cannot be proved…

N Micklam, Professor of New Testament Literature and Criticism, Ontario

Christmas 3

Virgin Birth
Astronomical Origin of the Virgin Birth

Abstract

Christians never think it strange that the birth date of Jesus is the birth date of many of the incarnated gods of antiquity. That Pagans venerated the birthday of Christ as the birthday of their gods is beyond coincidence. At the winter solstice, the sun seemed to stop declining in the sky for three days. Its was at crisis point. It might die! Then it began to rise on the 25 December, the sun’s rebirth. Both the year and the day of Christ’s birth are unknown. There is no reason to suppose that Jesus the Nazarene was born on Christmas Day. The importance of 25 December to Pagans made Christians think it must have been the birthday of their messiah. When Constantine made Jesus a god, 25 December, the birthday of the sun gods and particularly that of the chief rival to Christianity, Mithras, was selected as his birthday. By celebrating at the same time as Pagan religions, the bishops accaepted Christ as a sun god, hoping to pull in Pagans worshippers. What are the origins of the various ingredients of the now traditional nativity scene?

Virgin Birth

How did it arise? One answer is that it was the work of an all-powerful God intervening in human affairs. For believers, in theological “logic”, such a statement is impregnable, but it is insufficient for those who demand natural explantions using standard historical methods. Recent scholarship, assisted by the Dead Sea Scrolls, has thrown much new light on the nature of the Judaism which produced the Christian “Jesus of Nazareth”. To understand the beginings of Christianity one must first understand the Jews of the first century AD.

Little in the New Testament is there by accident. Most of these writings has a purpose, but the authors of the New Testament had habits of thought which were alien to those of the twentieth century. They considered it legitimate to describe what ought to have happened without bothering too much about what did. They accepted the Jesus was the Messiah and so messianic things must have happened to him!

The sources for our Christmas story are the opening chapters of Matthew and Luke. The other two gospels, Mark and John, do not mention it at all, nor does any other part of the New Testament.

The authors of Matthew and Luke were evidently writing from different viewpoints—Matthew was aimed at a Jewish readership and Luke at a gentile one. Their accounts of what ought to have happened are also different and inconsistent.

In Matthew, the story is of a virgin, Mary, betrothed to a man called Joseph. Both, apparently, are residents of Bethlehem. Mary becomes pregnant and Joseph is assured in a dream that this is the work of the Holy Ghost and so he does not put her away. The baby is born in the ordinary way—with no mention of a stable or a manger—and soon afterwards the family is visited by wise men from the east who bring gifts. King Herod hears from the wise men of the birth of a royal pretender and orders all infants in Bethlehem to be slaughtered. But Joseph gets a warning in a dream of Herod’s intentions and escapes with his family to Egypt. Later, on the inspiration of another dream of Joseph’s, the family settles in Nazareth.

The Luke account, on the other hand, has no wise men, no slaughter of the innocents, no flight to Egypt and no dreams by Joseph. Here, a virgin, Mary, is betrothed to Joseph, both of them living in Nazareth. Mary becomes pregnant after a direct revelation to her from an angel. Joseph’s reaction is unrecorded. Because of a unique form of census, Joseph has to go from Nazareth to his ancestral town, Bethlehem, to be registered. There is no evidence, apart from Luke, that such a strange census ever took place. It would have been a chaotic affair, uncharacteristic of the Bomans. In Bethlehem, Joseph and Mary find the inn full up and the baby is born in a stable. Shepherds learn of the birth from an angel and go to the stable to be the first to adore Jesus.

Matthew tries to relate the circumstances of the birth of Jesus to traditions associated with the births of other Jewish holy men, notably Moses. These traditions are to be found both in the Old Testament and among non-scriptural Jewish legends. The Old Testament version of Moses is that he was born at a time when Pharaoh was slanghtering Jewish male babies. His mother saved him by hiding him among reeds on the edge of the river. Non-biblical writings supplemented this account by telling how both Pharaoh and Moses’s parents learnt through dreams of the future greatness of the infant. The parallel between the infancy stories is more than a coincidence.

Similarly, the star, the wise men, the placing of the birth at Bethlehem and Joseph’s descent from the royal House of David are all fitted to Jewish tradition and scriptural prophecies. The reasoning of the writer and the early editors of the script appears to have been that Jesus the Nazarene by his life has shown himself to be the Lord’s Messiah, so, his birth must have been in accordance with Old Testament prophecies. Individual Old Testament passages, collected together and interpreted in ways which then were normal, were picked out to form a birth story.

The Luke story is more consistent than that of Matthew and less related to Jewish requirements. It relies upon angels as messengers instead of upon dreams. It gives an active role to Mary and minimises Joseph. It also gives Joseph’s genealogy but with the names, even that of his father, completely different from Matthew’s version. The stable and the shepherds have little theological purpose except to copy other religions. The story creaks only in the census, which is a way of setting the birth in Bethlehem rather than Nazareth. Both the Matthew and Luke birth stories are apparently the newest part of the New Testament. Even after they were first written new material continued to be added.

However, the virgin birth was not to be found in Jewish tradition, but only in gentile Pagan mythology. Mainstream Jews, unlike some Pagan groups, attached no religious value to virginity, though one section of the Essene sect, described in the Dead Sea Scrolls, had introduced to Judaism the practice of celibacy. Some Jewish heroes had been born of mothers who had passed the ordinary age for child-bearing, as with Sarah and Isaac or Hannah and Samuel. There was a special divine providence to “open the womb” but no suggestion that a human father was unnecessary.

Matthew is far from clear on the “virgin” birth. What exactly was a “virgin” in those times? There were two definitions. The first corresponded to the modern one, that of a girl whose hymen remained intact, but a second appears in the earliest Jewish legal codes, the Tosephta and the Mishnah, both of which belong to the first two centuries AD. One rabbi quoted in the Tosephta is Eliezer, who was flourishing in the period 90-l30 AD. Eliezer is asked: “Who is a virgin?” His answer is: “She who has never seen blood, even if she is married and has had children”. The Mishnah, the main rabbinical work of the same period, fits in with this. A virgin is “she that has never yet suffered a flow, even though she was married”. These statements reflect the Jewish distaste for mensruation inherited from the Persian religion. In this period, if a man touched a menstruating woman, even accidentally, he was accounted defiled.

In Jesus’s time it was possible for a woman to bear children without ever having menstruated. A girl was counted marriageable when she was 12 years old and many girls were married at that age. Many such young wives would not have reached puberty in those times when food was harder to come by and everyday life harder than today. They could have been experiencing sex with their husbands without having yet ovulated. At their first ovulation they could have conceived a child. To be “born of a virgin” in this sense might have been not uncommon, but might have marked out sons as specially holy because they had been born of a woman who had never been defiled by menstruation.

How did the non-Jewish theme of a supernatural virgin birth take root in Matthew? The question is especially puzzling in view of the pains taken in the opening verses, before the virgin birth is mentioned, to set out Jesus’s genealogy, the purpose of which was to prove that Jesus was Joseph’s son and an heir of the House of David. The relevant passage ends: “…Jacob begot Joseph the husband of Mary. Of her was born Jesus”. This, in various translations, is the accepted, orthodox text of Matthew. But in one very early version, discovered during the nineteenth century, the relevant passage states specifically: “Joseph, to whom was betrothed the virgin Mary, begot Jesus”.

A possible clue to why the virgin birth got into the text can be found in Matthew’s quotation from Isaiah: “The virgin will conceive and bear a son”. This, at first sight, would appear to bring the idea of a virgin birth within the range of Jewish prophecy, but the quotation is based on a mistranslation. In the original Hebrew, the passage refers not to a “virgin” in any sense of the word but to a “young woman”. The word “virgin” crept in by error in the Greek translation, the Septuagint. The existence of this error is accepted today by all scholars, including the Roman Catholic ones who prepared the Jerusalem Bible. “Virgin” is no longer used in Isaiah, although necessarily it has to be retained in Matthew’s quotation of it.

But once the word “virgin” became part of the Greek version of Matthew, it is easy to imagine a non-Jewish person taking it literally, and erecting a theology upon it. The process would have been the more obvious because he was accustomed to myths of supernatural births. The Greek hero Hercules, to take only one example, was supposed to have been born of a union of Zeus with a mortal woman.

Astronomical Origin of the Virgin Birth

The tradition of divine saviours being born of undeflowered women has an astronomical aspect. It has been said:

The adventures of Jesus Christ are all depicted among the stars,

and this is why the Romans saw him as a sun god like Mithras with whom he eventually became identified.

The myth of the Star of Bethlehem comes from the prophecy of Numbers 24:17:

There shall come a Star out of Jacob, and a Sceptre shall rise out of Israel, and shall smite the corners of Moab, and destroy all the children of Seth.

This is a text often quoted by Christian writers as having a prophetic reference to the Christian Messiah. The same text goes on to say, “It shall destroy the children of Seth”, a prophecy which is plainly false if it is meant, like the rest of it, to apply to Jesus Christ. This prophecy is obviously a prophecy of a traditional victorious messiah of Israel, modelled on king David.

The star of Jacob or Judah, both being the same, is shown on astronomical maps as prominent in the constellation Virgo, the Virgin, called by the Hebrews, Ephraim. It was known in the Syrian, Arabian and Persian Systems of astronomy as Messaeil and was considered the ruling genius of the constellation. Messaeil is “Messa El” (The Anointed or Son of God)—apparently the star, Spica. The star of Jacob was evidently a figure from astrology, in which the virgin is shown rising with an infant son of God in her arms.

The virgin, with her god-begotten child, the bright star, Spica, represented as an ear of corn (the meaning of the name of the star), was pictured in the heavens from time immemorial. They are present in the Hindu zodiac, at least three thousand years old, and in the ancient Egyptian one. Virgo commences rising at midnight, on the 25 December, with this star in the east in her arms—the star which piloted the wise men. According to Albertus Magnus, in his Book on the Universe:

The sign of the celestial virgin rises above the horizon, at the moment we find fixed for the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Sir William Drummond adds in Œdipus Judaicus:

The anointed of El, the male infant, who rises in the arms of Virgo, was called Jesus by the Hebrews… and was hailed as the anointed king or Messiah.

Now though the sun is annually reborn on the date chosen for Christ’s birth, 25 December, the midwinter solstice, for a period the sun was also born at the autumnal equinox as the infant son of God, the “bread of life”. This is the time of the original Jewish New Year, Rosh ha Shanah, 1 Tishri, the religious new year as opposed to the civil new year which began on 1 Nisan. Rosh ha Shanah was designated in Jewish religious law as a festival and a time of great rejoicing. Paradoxically it was also the Day of Judgement because it was an anniversary of the creation. This is the real date of the birth of Christ, if Christians want to celebrate it.

The reason is that in the centuries ending the first millenium BC the precession of the equinoxes led to a curious celestial event. The child of the cosmic virgin, Spica, rose on the Eastern horizon at the autumnal equinox at the same time as the sun. So after the constellation of the virgin had risen just before dawn in the east, the sun rose just when the bright star Spica was expected to rise. It seemed as if the son of the virgin, the ear of corn symbolising the bread of life (Rosh ha Shanah celebrated the beginning of the agricultural year), had risen as the glorious sun. The virgin had given birth to a god.

What was even more spectacular on some of these occasions was that the morning star, Venus, the Queen of Heaven, rose in the constellation of Virgo before the sun! So the sun rises as the child of the virgin Queen of Heaven over the eastern horizon, appearing out of the sea in many countries. In Latin, sea is “mare” whence Maria or Mary. The infant god arises as the light of the East in the arms of his mother, Mary or Venus, the morning star, which rises minutes before the child.

Also interesting is the fact that the Virgin in ancient zodiacs is associated with a tree, in which case the son would be an offshoot, a shoot or a branch, all of which were messianic names, and the word Nazarene comes from the word “neser” meaning a branch. The messianic name, Shiloh, which puzzled scholars for a long time also means branch and therefore means the star, Spica. When the branch or son of the virgin appears as the light of the east in all his glory then the messiah has been born. Whence:

We have seen his star in the east, and have come to worship him.
Mt 2:8

This phenomenon occurred in 11 BC and 3 BC and either event might have been associated with Jesus, though the earlier one is the favourite. The Essenes who were astrologers trained in Babylonian exile would have seen all this. It later escaped into the empire as literal truth instead of the astrological signs it originally was.

The story of the slaughter of the innocents is also widespread because originally it was again part of the allegory of the sun’s journey through the heavens. When the sun passed through the constellation of Gemini in May, he was imagined to have destroyed them. The Greek word to destroy is “anaireo” which literally means “to pass through” or “withdraw from” as well as “to take away”. The sun takes on the characteristics of each constellation it proceeds through so here Hercules is an infant twin. In myth that is, of course, what he was, his brother being Iphicles. So Hercules was a sun god who in his journey through the heavens threatens to kill himself as an infant of the constellation, Gemini. His earthly, adopted father had to flee with him and his mother to Galem for protection from threatening danger. Herod’s name suggested a link with Hercules so he fitted appropriately into the legend. Jesus was, of course, supposed to have had a twin brother, Thomas.

Pharaoh’s slaughter of the children, Christians believe, is referred to in the bible when Rachel weeps for her children, a passage introduced by:

In Rama, there was a voice heard.

Note that “Rama” is the Indian and Phoenican name for the zodiac, and that Rachel had two children only—Joseph and Benjamin—equivalent to Castor and Pollux. Rachel then was the queen of heaven, Venus, because for the Assyrians and the Phoenicians she wept when the sun passed through the astronomical twins, the constellation of Gemini, doubtless fearing their destruction.

The stories of gods cohabiting with virgins, and begetting other gods, are of astronomical origin. Astronomy and religion were interwoven at an early period of time.

The whole story of Jesus cannot be reduced to solar mythology. Once the crucifixion legend of the historic Jesus had been carried into the Pagan empire he came to be understood as a sun god. He collected bits of sun god mythology, but some people today, strain to explain every element of the biography of Jesus in the gospels in terms of sun mythology. There is plainly a genuine story of a living human at the core of the gospels, most clearly seen unadorned in Mark’s gospel. This was its novelty—here was a sun god that had lived on earth recently! But the Christians, largely ignorant people at first, fell for the cosmic Christ completely. They believed the cosmic Christ, the sun god, had actually appeared on earth recently and sacrificed himself, like the gods of the mysteries. The Gnostics said to the Christians:

You poor ignoramuses (idiotai), you have mistaken the mysteries of old for modern history, and accepted literally all that was only meant mystically.

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Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.