What is important about this matter of dating is that neither Paul nor Mark mentions a word about any virgin birth. Paul, who was the closest of all to the presumed origins, says in one passage that Jesus Christ was “born of a woman,” but that is all. This is no evidence for historicity. The same, of course, was said by the Egyptians in their ritual myths about the god Horus. It was said of other mythic deities as well. Mark’s Gospel significantly begins abruptly not with a newborn but with an adult Jesus being baptized in Jordan by John the Baptizer. Significantly, none of the other epistle writers in the rest of the New Testament cites a miraculous birth.
Perhaps most important of all, the Fourth Gospel, that of John, which even from the earliest times, as we have seen, has been regarded as the “spiritual” or “mystical” Gospel, also fails to mention the virgin birth. Instead, this author chooses to place Jesus’ origins back before time was, that is to say, in the bosom of the Cosmic Source, or God. Hence the famous passage with which the Gospel opens—echoing the first verse of Genesis—“In the beginning was the Word [Logos], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” More about that later.
Genealogies
The fact that a fictional tradition was gradually being established is attested to by the genealogies given to Jesus by the two sources that do speak of a virgin birth, namely, Matthew and Luke. Likely because the Gospel of Matthew was addressing the concerns of a mainly Jewish community, he traces Jesus’ ancestry back to a beginning with Abraham.2 He does so, significantly, in three groups of fourteen. Both numbers were of traditional, symbolical import. Together, they spoke of perfection. Luke reverses the order, beginning with Jesus himself and working backwards until he comes at last to Adam, whom he describes as the “son of God.”3 He was writing for a chiefly Gentile (Greek) community, and so, instead of emphasizing the Jewishness of Jesus, he stresses his universality. Jesus in this version comes directly from the first father of the race. Since Adam (most certainly) and Abraham (most likely) were also mythical figures, it’s fairly obvious what’s afoot.
But two other points must be made. There is absolutely no way the two genealogies can be made compatible, despite the contortions of some fundamentalist expositors. You just have to ask who Jesus’ grandfather was alleged to be and check the texts for yourself. Secondly, and this seems to me to be the clincher against which logic can offer no acceptable solution, both of these lengthy and involved attempts end in a genuine debacle. Both are attempting to show that Jesus was of the Davidic lineage and thus a fulfiller of Messianic prophecy. The ancient traditions demanded that. But, since both are also at pains to show that Mary bore Jesus without intercourse with Joseph, the whole structure collapses with the admission that the Davidic bloodline came through Joseph, not her. Thus Matthew lamely concludes his list with: “. . . and Jacob the father of Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called the Messiah.” Both genealogies thus become totally irrelevant as history. There is good reason why the unknown author of the first letter to Timothy, in chapter 1, verse 4, tells the young preacher to avoid giving heed to “myths and endless genealogies.”
Son of a Carpenter?
Speaking of Joseph, the “father” of Jesus, it is highly revealing to consider how he has been depicted down the ages as a carpenter—making Jesus, on the surface at any rate, “the carpenter’s son.”4 Mark, however, actually says that Jesus himself was a carpenter or stonemason: “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary?”5 This is the reading of the bulk of the earliest Greek manuscripts. But there are also some manuscripts that say the son of a carpenter. This was the preferred text used by Origen in the second century and argued for in his famous dialogue with Celsus, the Pagan philosopher. Matthew’s account quite plainly follows this textual tradition as well—he says “the carpenter’s son.” What is truly interesting, however, to those who see this all as eternal myth, is a truth elucidated by Carl Jung in his book Symbols of Transformation. Jung notes that not just Joseph but many, if not all, of the fathers of ancient heroes and/or god-men were artisans, carpenters or creative builders of one kind or another.6
According to an Arabian legend, Terah, Abraham’s father, was a master craftsman who worked with wood. Tyashtri, father of the Vedic god Agni, was a cosmic architect, a smith and a carpenter. Cinyras, the father of Adonis, was also a carpenter. Hephaestus, the father of the many-faced Hermes, was the Greek fire god who made, among other things, Achilles’ shield. Homer’s hero Odysseus was a wily craftsman who planned and created the famous Trojan horse. This mythic theme, Jung points out, is also followed in folk tales everywhere, with the more modest woodcutter as hero or father of the same. In other words, the entire tradition of Jesus as a carpenter or the son of one is a clear sign, not of historical detail, but of mythical enhancement disguised as earthly fact.
Pagan Parallels
The third compelling argument against any possibility of history being behind the virgin birth is the obvious fact that, as already indicated, virgin births were a common feature of mythological solar and other deities or semi-deities in the ancient world. The reader is referred back to The Pagan Christ and the many other books cited there for further evidence that even the early Fathers of the Church felt some genuine embarrassment over the issue. Those deeply interested in the entire process whereby mythical characters become over the years the focus of seemingly historical trappings and an assumed historicity that is wholly unfounded upon actual facts of any kind should read Lord Raglan’s classic 1956 study The Hero: A Study in Tradition, Myth and Drama.
The virgin birth part of the Jesus Story fails to ring true as history not least, then, because it is really part of a formulaic element in the tales of most major heroes from great antiquity. (So too is the element of the threat to the newborn’s life. Herod’s slaughter of the innocents—for which there isn’t a shred of historical evidence—had many parallels. For example, at the birth of India’s Lord Krishna, King Kansa, a brutal tyrant, ordered the killing of all boy babies under two years of age.) But, in the case of Jesus, it has a remarkable, even central, esoteric message that for too long has been obscured by the furore over whether the virgin birth belongs to an authentically Christian faith or not. We need to move far beyond that theological debate now and explore what the inner meaning of the myth is saying to us about who and what we are.
The Meaning
By openly declaring that Joseph was not the actual begetter of Jesus, the Evangelists are saying that what mattered was not so much the natural side of Jesus’ humanity, but the divine side or spark of the Divine within him. If we probe further, however, and see this notion as part of the myth of the human Self, or of every man and woman born into this world, what it says at the most profound level is that each human being’s birth is a miraculous happening. We have a physical-psychical nature from our mother’s womb, but we are also begotten of God. This is why John in his opening chapter underlines that those who receive the awareness of the Christ principle or light within themselves are “born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.” We have a divine origin or a latent divinity within ourselves as a result of direct divine descent. As it says in the Book of Acts, “We are all God’s offspring.” This higher or more spiritual meaning is directly expressed in the prologue of John’s Gospel, where he says: “That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world” (King James Version).
Thus, for example, Joseph Campbell sees the mythic meaning of the virgin birth as the coming to full awareness by each individual person that he or she is more than a human animal concerned merely with reproduction and material things. It is “the birth of the spiritual as opposed to the merely natural life,” he says; the recognition that there are higher aims and values in living than self-preservation, reproduction, pleasure, the acquisition of money and things, and the struggle for power or status.7 It’s a birth in the heart, or the idea of being spiritually “born again” that Jesus spoke of and which has been so misunderstood by fundamentalists today.
So, the question posed to us by the virgin birth is not, Do you believe this literally? but, Have you truly experienced your own divinity within? Are you claiming