Did Pagan Myths Influence the Virgin Birth? Michael Horton Responds to Bart Ehrman

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1. 00:00

   Bart Ehrman

   If someone like an apologist like Michael Licona wants to say we've got proof of Christianity, here it is, it's bam, bam, bam, bam, and the exact parallel things can be claimed for other gods and other humans, then why is it proof for Christianity and not for these other things?

2. 00:16

   Michael Horton

   There aren't the similarities he's talking about. The similarities are superficial.

3. 00:22

   Bart Ehrman

   Well, you come to a miraculous birth. Okay, I'm going to claim that, that God was my literal father. And I'm going to claim that, and my followers are going to believe me, and they're going to convince other people.

4. 00:34

   Michael Horton

   That is such a strange—once again, this is what Muslims think Christians believe, and we don't. We never have. This is a kind of fundamentalist, extreme literalism that he's applying that Christians have never intended at all.

5. 00:51

   Bart Ehrman

   How are you going to convince somebody that your father actually was God? Is it that your mother's going to say, oh yeah, I actually never had sex, you know, or, yeah, I didn't want to, but you know, this God came He came down and, you know, had his way with me. So the—what it's based on, what the woman says. Well, okay, is that evidence?

6. 01:07

   Michael Horton

   Yeah, that's why they call it a miracle. God can do whatever he wants. If he created the world, he can certainly become incarnate in the womb of a Jewish virgin.

7. 01:23

   Michael Horton

   Hi, my name is Mike Horton, and I teach theology and apologetics. And today we're going to examine some comments on the virgin birth by New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman. In this video, Ehrman is appearing on a podcast with Derek Lambert, former Christian who now critiques Orthodox Christianity, and let's see what they have to say.

8. 01:42

   Bart Ehrman

   We're in the Christmas season now, and one of the things that's obviously celebrated is Jesus' birth to a virgin. There are lots of elements of the Christmas story that are very much worth talking about, but this one is particularly intriguing for several reasons. You find the virgin birth in the New Testament only in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.

9. 02:01

   Michael Horton

   That's not true, actually. This is a kind of biblicistic approach where, you know, you find an explicit reference to a virgin. You do have, for example, in Luke's Gospel, Mary saying, how can this happen since I'm a virgin? You have these explicit statements, but you also have in the Gospel of John an obvious reference on almost every page to the fact that Jesus says, “my Father and I, before the world was created, were talking.” You know, he's referring to his preexistence with the Father. And then “I came into this world, born of a woman.” It's obvious in the Gospel of John, even more emphasized in the Gospel of John than any other gospel, that the “Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” And the rationale for this has to be born without sin, coming into the world assuming our humanity without losing his divinity. These are all doctrines that are integrally related to the virgin birth. So you have to take all of this evidence. under consideration. The whole New Testament and all of the epistles teach and everywhere presuppose that Jesus was born of a virgin. And by the way, it's not virgin birth, it's virginal conception. He was conceived by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary.

10. 03:47

    Bart Ehrman

    The other two gospels don't mention it, Mark and John, and it's nowhere else in the New Testament. Of the 27 books of the New Testament, only two mention Jesus being born of a virgin, but it becomes a very central feature of Christianity and Christian doctrine.

11. 04:03

    Michael Horton

    How does it become a central doctrine in early Christianity if he doesn't think that it has but scant biblical support?

12. 04:14

    Bart Ehrman

    Since the Enlightenment, some scholars have pointed out that there are other stories like that floating around in the ancient world, where somebody is born through the union of a divine being and a mortal being. In almost all these cases, you have a male divinity, a god, who comes down and gets a mortal being, a woman, pregnant. And so the child that's born then is the union of an immortal and a mortal, both human and divine. So these kinds of stories are circulating throughout the Roman world, and you have a number of cases of political figures, philosophers, religious figures who are said to have a divine parent. And if you go on the internet, you'll see that these things are called virgin births, that the virgin birth of Jesus was, you know, was a common trope throughout the Greek and Roman world.

13. 05:03

    Michael Horton

    It simply wasn't a common trope. I have to disagree with Bart Ehrman on that. There was a trope of gods like Zeus having intercourse with human women, but nothing about them being necessarily virgins. But in any case, it doesn't matter because what we're saying about the birth of Jesus from Mary has nothing to do with a god coming down and having sex with her. This is the obstacle, one of the great obstacles to Muslims. They think that that's what we're saying. The church has never said that. The church has always argued against any kind of notion of God having intercourse with Mary and the result being Jesus. Rather, the Holy Spirit, the same Holy Spirit who hovered over the waters in Genesis 1:2 to make the barren waters fruitful, who hovered over Israel to give them manna in the wilderness and water from the rock, the same Holy Spirit who hovered over the womb of the Virgin Mary so that what was brought forth from Mary was no less than the Son of God. There was no intercourse involved. The whole—all of the stories of ancient mythology, an element here, a feature there that have some resemblance are radically different from what the New Testament actually claims, not only about the virginal conception, but many, many other things.

14. 06:54

    Bart Ehrman

    That you have these divine fathers and mortal mothers. My question in this seminar is, were any of these women in these stories virgins? If so, then are Christians just, you know, taking over this theme from others? If not, if they actually weren't virgins, then why did Christians come up with the idea of a virgin birth?

15. 07:15

    Derek Lambert

    There's contemporaneous work to the Gospels. I'll say, give or take a few decades. Suetonius writes actually in Lives of the Caesars, and I'm really impressed with his Augustus angle. You literally hear not only of portents of his birth, there's like a prophecy where lightning strikes a certain wall and these people fight against the Romans almost to their own self-destruction. But the Senate—and this is what's really interesting—catches word that this prophecy is going to be fulfilled in a certain year. So the mothers didn't want to rear up their children and put them in the census saying, hey, our kids are going to be born and they're going to kill these children if they find out that this might be one of them. That sounds a lot like Matthew. Do you think there's something going on here?

16. 07:58

    Bart Ehrman

    Well, it sounds a lot like Matthew. It sounds a lot like Exodus. Same thing with the birth of Moses.

17. 08:03

    Michael Horton

    Well, Exodus was written a long time before the birth of Jesus, so it's hard to imagine that the author of the book of Exodus was influenced by Greco-Roman ideas.

18. 08:21

    Bart Ehrman

    It's a trope in ancient literature that the great man had a lot of troubles to begin with and almost didn't make it out of infancy. And so you have these kind of divine interventions to make it happen. And so you get the divine intervention in the birth often, but then also in the early protection of the child. And so I don't think Suetonius is getting this from Matthew. I think this is this trope that you get in, in other, in other contexts, including, I mean, even in the ancient Near East, the birth of Sargon the Great has also a similar kind of story. I don't think that it's necessarily an Achilles heel for Christianity that you have these other stories floating around, because there are ways that you can explain that if you're a theologian and have. I mean, C.S. Lewis claimed somewhat famously that you have—and he's actually borrowing this from Justin Martyr from the second Christian century, who's our first apologist—that you have kind of foreshadowings of what's going to happen when God comes into the world in other religions, because religions aren't all completely false. There are also claims of truth in other religions that are actually true. And so they have reflections of what's going to happen with Jesus. And so, you know, you can get around these things on a theological level.

19. 09:41

    Michael Horton

    Yeah, this is an important point. He's right in that a lot of the arguments of the early church were based on this notion that just as God had given prophecies to Israel, he had kind of planted these intimations all along the way, breadcrumb trail, if you will, not to bring them to Christ. It wasn't saving revelation, but preparation for the salvation that came in Jesus Christ. C.S. Lewis brilliantly in the essay to which Professor Ehrman refers says, “the myth became fact.” We passed from a boulder or an Osiris dying nobody knows when or where to a historical person crucified under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact, it does not cease to be myth. That is the miracle. We have to stop seeing myth as opposed to fact. Myth is broader. There are many myths that are not factual. Most myths are not factual. They just evolve over time. But this has a lot of characteristics, the incarnation of God, lots of characteristics, yes, that are anticipated here and there, but it's like Cinderella's slipper. None of the other myths really fit what happens when the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. It's something that just explodes and transcends all hopes and dreams. It's still a myth in the sense that this is the meaning of history happening here. This gives meaning for every area of life, but it became fact. While Quirinius was governor of Syria, while Caesar Augustus sent out a command that all the world should be taxed. And so there were—there was a census. There are particular days when things happen. There are particular months. We can discern important historical facts throughout the Gospels. And this is a difference from mythological stories where it just isn't tied to history. It didn't become historical. It wasn't historical. This is the myth that became fact. This is the real myth, the true myth.

20. 12:20

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21. 13:33

    Bart Ehrman

    The problem is the historical level, which is the one you're talking about. If someone like an apologist like Mike Licona wants to say we've got proof of Christianity, here it is, it's bam, bam, bam, bam. And the exact—not the exact same things, but the parallel thing, the exact parallel things can be claimed for other gods and other humans. Then why is it proof for Christianity and not for these other things?

22. 13:58

    Michael Horton

    There is simply no—Bart Ehrman is simply overstating his case. There aren't the similarities he's talking about. Remember Cinderella's slipper again. It doesn't quite fit. The similarities are superficial. Then you get the actual fact of the incarnation and Jesus explodes all myths, all expectations, and it's grounded in fact, things that actually happened, historical events that took place. There's simply no comparison. You can still say it's a myth that didn't become fact, but what you can't say is that it's like all of the other myths in valuing history. It is absolutely tethered to historical events and historical facts.

23. 14:59

    Bart Ehrman

    When you come to a miraculous birth, okay, I'm going to claim that God was my literal father, and I'm going to claim that, and my followers are going to believe me, and they're going to convince other people.

24. 15:10

    Michael Horton

    That is such a strange—once again, this is what Muslims think Christians believe, and we don't. We never have. This is a kind of fundamentalist, extreme literalism that he's applying that Christians have never intended at all. There's nothing in these passages that gives us the idea that God the Father had intercourse with Mary. That's exactly what the myths he's talking about contend. Zeus comes down and has intercourse with any number of human women. But that's not what happens here. The Holy Spirit hovers over the Virgin Mary, just as he did in the waters of creation in Genesis 1:2, and that's all we're told. The Holy Spirit makes barren waters fruitful. There was no intercourse involved.

25. 16:14

    Bart Ehrman

    How are you going to convince somebody that your father actually was God? I mean, you know, is it that your mother is going to say, “oh, yeah, actually never had sex, you know,” or, “yeah, I didn't want to, but, you know, this God came down and, you know, had his way with me, you know.” And so it's based on what the woman says. Well, okay, is that evidence? Some people say, look, the only way the gospel writers could have gotten it is if Mary told them. And so it had to be right. Well, okay. So today, if there's a woman who gives birth and she says, “look, I never had sex before, really, trust me, it's like I'm not married, I never had sex” and she gives birth. Do you think, oh, well, that's evidence then? Okay. Yeah, she never had sex. Of course not. You say, yeah, okay, I think you had sex. And so—

26. 16:59

    Michael Horton

    Yeah, that's why they call it a miracle. I would have no disagreement with Bart Ehrman that if I encountered that today, someone saying that they were a virgin, hadn't had sex, and then, then out comes this child, that they were lying. But this was prophesied hundreds of years before it happened, and it came true. The only explanation for it, as Mary herself attested, was that it was a miracle. How can this happen since I am a virgin? she asks the angel, and the angel says, the Holy Spirit will come upon you. He will overshadow you, and what is born of you will be the Son of God. It's a miracle. God can do whatever he wants. If he created the world, he can certainly become incarnate in the womb of a Jewish virgin.

27. 17:51

    Bart Ehrman

    You know, so what kind of evidence would be that, you know, if somebody could cite for the virgin birth, what would be the evidence that you—that would be different from the evidence that Romulus was born of a virgin?

28. 18:03

    Michael Horton

    Well, the evidence would be, first of all, a description contrasting the two. Romulus has nothing to do with the gospel narrative. So first of all, you'd contrast them. Secondly, you'd go directly to the resurrection and demonstrate that Jesus rose from the dead on the third day and worked back from there to what he said about himself, what he said he came to do, and therefore certifying by his resurrection that he'd done it. Did any of these other figures accomplish that? We can argue for years about the similarities and differences with ancient mythology, but none of these presumed deities rose from the dead.