It's right to challenge Christian ideas of purity but wrong to deny the virgin birth

Some years ago, the BBC chose Christmas time to create a documentary arguing that Jesus was the result of Mary being raped. They did not bother to clarify the sources and only did so when responding to my indignant letter of complaint that, at the one time of year our faith takes centre stage, they felt it appropriate to question some of the most fundamental areas of belief for us – that Jesus, born in human flesh in the brutal and humiliating setting of a lowly stable, was the son of God, born to Mary as a miraculous intervention by almighty God above, beyond and outside of the norms of nature.
The BBC argued to me that, if Jesus were the son of a Roman soldier, or indeed the son of St Joseph, it didn’t necessarily alter his fully divine nature. Except, of course, that it would have, for as St John’s Gospel reminds us during the Christmas lectionary, he came about through the will of God, not the will of the flesh.

Fast forward over a decade, and it’s not the BBC airing such insensitive nonsense, but a man of the cloth: Rev. DR. Giles Fraser, who wrote a robust attack on the virgin birth narrative in his Guardian column this Christmas.
Fraser is, to some extent, a man that I admire: he chaired Inclusive Church for many years, he has written powerfully about the plight of refugees, he resigned his post on a point of principle over the protest camp at St Paul’s Cathedral and he has eruditely spoken in favour of a much more tolerant, accepting Christianity. None of this, however, justified what he said about the virgin birth, denying fundamental tenets of Christian theology which, as I will explain, he did so with no real intellectual case at all, for purely ideological reasons.
Fraser’s complaint is this: Mary probably wasn’t a virgin, and saying that she is has led to Christianity being infected with a damaging notion of purity that, actually, runs counter to the fact that Christianity actually abolishes notions of purity. Jesus did, after all, chastise the puritanical sects of his day for outward displays of cleanliness, and he was rather more fond of spending time with prostitutes and beggars than the great and the good of respectable society – the same great and good that ultimately would put him to death for his outspoken criticism of them and his association with outcasts.
What’s more, Fraser sees God’s rejection of a purity concept in the very act of becoming human: “In Christianity, purity is abolished. Indeed, the core idea that the all-perfect God almighty might actually steep so low as to be born as a bleeding, defecating human being would have been regarded by all previously orthodox believers – both Greek and Jew – as disgusting. But this is the central insight of Christianity: that in the person of Jesus, there is no contradiction between being fully human and fully divine. Or, in other words, God is perfectly at home in a human life, with all its ritualistic mess, from blood to semen. There is no shame in the constituent elements of our humanity, including the manner in which we are made. Which is why the ‘pure virgin’ tradition runs totally against the grain.”

What is evidently clear is that Fraser does not see it as important that Jesus is born to a virgin, because of God’s contentedness to assume human form and all that this involves. That, however, is a profoundly short-sighted view of the importance of the virgin birth. Make no mistake: liberal Christian commentators are as sex-obsessed as they assume their conservative counterparts to be, and this proves it (I knew semen would make it in there somewhere as I read through the piece). Fraser sees the virgin birth narrative as an attack on sex and sexuality, and the idea that God could possibly use the will of the flesh to do any good in the world. It isn’t. Instead, the virgin birth was, to repeat the earlier point, God acting outside the norms of human nature to save human kind. There is something beautiful in the idea that the child born on Christmas Day, resulted from an act of the will of God, who entrusted this most special child to one of the most vulnerable in contemporary Palestine: a young, unremarkable, poor, unmarried teenager. It is simply not the case, as Fraser suggests, that the virgin birth creates an impossible benchmark for women, expected to model an impossible combination of virginity and motherhood. It says nothing at all about what makes any other woman more or less pure, but it says plenty about the all-powerful, unbounded character of God. It sets Mary as the highest example of a faithful existence, not because of her sexuality, but because she believed that God would bring this thing about that the angel revealed to her, however ridiculous it must have sounded. Yet by insisting it could never have been, Guardian columnist Fraser reduces her role and significance to little more than an early socialist: “None of which is to disparage Mary one bit. A spirited young woman from Galilee, pregnant and unmarried, she sung about how God would pull down the mighty from their thrones and lift up the lowly.” Mary did a lot more than sing a song, however wonderful and powerful the Magnificat’s words are. She carried the son of the living God, keeping her faith and confidence in God, despite having to give birth in a town far from home with nothing other than swaddling clothes and a manger to shelter him and keep him warm, then being forced to flee as a refugee to Egypt as all around her, King Herod senselessly slaughtered the male infants of Bethlehem. I do rather think that this is disparaging her a great deal. As a Christian, does Fraser seriously think this unflattering, modest praise is acceptable or sufficient?

You might wonder if these aren’t just counterarguments and different interpretations by people interested in theology, and think that I should just get on with believing what I want and let Fraser do likewise. Where I see a real significance to the virgin birth, Fraser doesn’t and he doesn’t even believe it happened. The trouble is, however, that the theological underpinnings of his case do not stand up to scrutiny. He is changing theology to suit his own agenda, and that’s not acceptable to me. He argues that the whole concept of the virgin birth arises from mistranslations of the Bible. It doesn’t. By citing scholarly criticism of the rendering of Hebrew, he is implicitly referring to the controversy of Isaiah chapter 7, verse 14, in which there is a prophecy of a child being born to a virgin...or so we have always believed. In fact, the Hebrew word ‘almah’ that is used, is a looser term, that may simply refer to a young woman, but not necessarily a virgin. It is when Isaiah was translated in to Greek that the error occurred, because the term used was ‘parthenos,’ which does mean a virgin. It is whether a contemporary translation uses the term ‘virgin’ or ‘young woman’ in this verse that, for many conservative Christians, determines whether a given translation of the Bible is acceptable or not. Indeed, the great Christian narrator Eric Martin has refused to re-record his narration of the New American Bible since it was revised in 2011, out of protest at adoption of ‘young woman.’ Translations of translations lead to errors: that’s pretty obvious. This particular controversy, however, has nothing to do with the virgin birth. Yes, it upsets conservative Christians because if the woman whose delivery of a child is foretold by Isaiah wasn’t described as a virgin, it takes away a healthy slice of theological evidence, but Matthew and Luke do not rely solely on the prophets. Luke in particular is very clear that his gospel is an eye witness account, and it wasn’t written in Hebrew, but Greek. He says Mary was a virgin. That’s what he heard and was told.
It is clear to me that Fraser’s case relies on ignoring that, and trying to drag a debate about the Old Testament in to the new. With such an intellectually unsound basis for questioning the gospel accounts, I feel that he has misled readers of his column in order to propagate a version of Christianity that does not demonise sex, make it dirty or associated with any shame. I applaud him for holding that view of sex, and bitterly regret that we still make our faith such an unwelcome prospect by imposing a strictness and rigidity on the matter that Jesus himself never did. I believe that, as liberal Christians, we have to work hard within our communities to weed out puritanical discourse, unwelcoming language and unhealthy attitudes that treat human sexuality as sinful and something to be aggressively controlled. While we’re at it, we could do with easing up on the homosexuals and those who may have remarried too, and we could (as Catholics) speak out against the ridiculous prohibition of contraception. English churches (Catholic and Anglican) have a tendency simply not to talk about these matters all that much. That makes those who can’t live up to doctrines that aren’t changing any time soon feel welcomed nonetheless and wanted by the church.
So we can take a lot away from what Giles Fraser has said about the profoundly unchristian nature of doctrines of purity, and we can marginalise them by our own example as individuals, families, friendship groups and churches. I just don’t think you have to rewrite theology on faulty arguments to do it. The manner of Jesus’s conception is magnificent and awesome, beyond our human capacity to comprehend. I don’t agree that, if people stopped believing it to have been true, they would simply lose a nice story that has had the unfortunate side-effect of bringing in to our churches a pernicious demonization of sex and unacceptable suppression of sexuality – and female sexuality in particular. Rather, they would no longer hear a story of God’s love for human kind and how that love is so great that he entrusted the salvation of the world with a young, frightened and unmarried girl. He did not choose the women of prominence: the women who could have carried the child with ease and brought him up in a manner fitting for a king. He chose the young Virgin Mary. So great was his love for her that, to enable her to fulfil her part in humanity’s salvation, he transcended the rules of nature. And what an example we have in her husband, who stuck by her and risked the shame of his contemporaries to do so. Mary’s virgin birth serves as the most powerful vindication of her own testimony that God looks with favour on our lowliness and that he has “lifted up the lowly.” That’s a rather wonderful thing to deny.