Wednesday, April 19, 2023

Hans von Campenhausen on John 1:13

  

Even in the second century people had begun to correct the verse and change the original plural into a singular—that is, to relate it directly to Christ himself and to his creation ad birth taken in a physical sense. This correction certainly involves a misunderstanding, and perhaps not the original text; but it seems to me that the misunderstanding might very well not rest on pure chance, but that the association with the idea of Jesus’ virgin birth was intended all along. That would, in fact, mean that we should here have to do with a polemic allusion; for a virgin birth in the literal sense, as others had asserted it as regards Jesus, is rather, through the extension of the idea to Christians as a whole, robbed of its meaning and repudiated. Just as natural descent from Abraham does not prevent the children of Abraham from being described, not as such, but as children of the devil, so the believers, without prejudice to their natural creation and birth through an earthly father and mother, are to be regarded as pure ‘children of God’, ‘of virgin birth’ like God’s only Son—who yet had Joseph as his father. (Hans von Campenhausen, The Virgin Birth in the Theology of the Ancient Church [trans. Frank Clarke; Eugene, Oreg.: Wipf and Stock, 2011; repr., London: SCM Press, 1954], 16-17)