Saturday, August 3, 2024

Rhyne R. Putman on Luke 2:22-24 and Jesus’s Birth being Normal, Not Miraculous

  

. . . Mary’s “unclean” status indicates that she delivered a truly human Savior through ordinary childbirth. Though we sometimes call the miraculous way Jesus was conceived the “virgin birth,” the Bible gives us no indication that anything miraculous happened in the birth process itself. Many early and medieval Christians were convinced that Jesus could not have been delivered through natural childbirth because a natural delivery would have broken Mary’s hymen, the physical evidence of her virginity (see Deut 22:15-17). The second-century pseudo-gospel known as The First Gospel of James (c. 150) concocted an elaborate story of how Mary could continue to be a virgin after Jesus was born, including a pain-free birth (see Prot. Jas 19:19-20). But the biblical account of Mary’s purification ritual means we can dispense with this later, extrabiblical tradition that says she had a painless childbirth or that she somehow delivered Jesus without incurring any changes to her body. (Rhyne R. Putman, Conceived by the Holy Spirit: The Virgin Birth in Scripture and Theology [Brentwood, Tenn.: B&H Academic, 2024], 155-56)

 

Luke, the only biblical author to provide an account of Jesus’s actual birth, says nothing about a miraculous delivery whatsoever. Had he believed that this occurred, it seems likely that he would have included it in his account of this specific event. Furthermore, his inclusion of Mary’s purification sacrifice contradicts the idea that Mary had anything other than a natural birth. The Levitical law specifically states that a new mother “will continue in purification from her bleeding” at least forty days (Lev 12:2-4). If Mary did not bleed or deliver Jesus naturally, she would have no need for the purification ritual that followed Jesus’s birth (Luke 2:22-24). The extrabiblical tradition of Jesus’s supernatural birth simply does not coincide with the facts of the biblical narrative. This miraculous birth story also reads more like the gnostic idea that Christ simply “passed through Mary” than a perspective that preserves Jesus’s true humanity. (Ibid., 357)

 

  

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