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3 THE VIRGIN BIRTH AND JESUS’ CHILDHOOD

Deep at the heart of all that is, there shines the beauty of a transcendent glory.

– ANONYMOUS

VIRGINS do not give birth to babies. Few people outside the Church need convincing of that today. Nevertheless, lest it be said that the mythical understanding being put forth here has already closed its mind against the possibility that God—however one expresses this ultimate mystery—can do anything, even to the breaking of the very natural laws which he/she created in the first place, some preliminary observations need to be made.

We know that stories of virgin births and/or other forms of supernatural births, of god-men and of illustrious heroes, were very much a part of the total milieu in the Mediterranean world of the centuries preceding and surrounding the emergence of the Christian movement. It was really a coded or esoteric way of saying that somebody was very special indeed. It was a metaphor in the ancient Greco-Roman world used to announce an entity of striking numinosity and power.

Early Christian apologists, in their disputations with Pagan critics, freely admitted there had been other virgin births. Horus, the ancient Egyptian saviour, was miraculously conceived, and Origen, in his famous debate with the Pagan philosopher Celsus, cites the story that when Plato was born of Amphictione, her husband, Ariston, was prevented from having intercourse with her until she had brought forth the child, which she had by the god Apollo.¹

Similar stories circulated about Alexander, Apollonius of Tyana and dozens of others. There was an early tradition in the second and third centuries that the manger at Bethlehem was actually in a cave, and the symbol of supernatural births in this womb-of-the-earth-like setting also belongs to other ancient traditions. For example, the Greek god-man Adonis, whose death and resurrection after three days also came after the spring equinox on March 25, was born in a cave. So too was Mithras, whose cult is closely paralleled in early Christianity as well. Some second- and third-century Christian sarcophagi have carvings on them of the Nativity scene with the ox, the ass and the three Magi. The latter wear the hat of the god Mithras. The ass was traditionally associated with Seth, the brother and murderer of Osiris. It was also associated with the planet Saturn, a symbol for Israel. The ox or bull was for long ages the symbol for Osiris himself.

One of the clearest pieces of evidence that in the story of Jesus we are dealing with a mythical tradition lies in the two divergent accounts of the virgin birth found in Matthew and Luke. Incidentally, there are scores of scholarly treatments of the non-historicity of the “born of the Virgin Mary” phrase in the Creed, and only the most ultra-conservative of New Testament authorities would risk arguing today for taking it literally. Whether or not they believe in a historical Jesus of Nazareth, there is general consensus among Biblical scholars that the birth narratives are Midrashic (interpretive) expansions of universal mythical themes. Nevertheless, it is important for our study to set out the major reasons for this overall agreement.

In the first place, the birth stories in Matthew and Luke are very obviously later additions to the original traditions about Jesus. The average uninstructed person who picks up a New Testament could well be forgiven for thinking that Matthew—who tells one version of the miraculous birth—is not only the first Gospel to have been written but also holds the earliest testimony in the book. Matthew’s centuries-old position as the first of the four Gospels in any printed bible has lent immense authority to such a view. Of course, as anyone who has read even a little about the Christian scriptures knows, the Gospels together form a second, later stratum to the whole New Testament. The authentic letters of St. Paul are earlier than the Gospels by at least twenty to thirty years. What’s more, the earliest of the four Gospels is that of Mark, written in Rome and usually dated sometime after 70 CE. I personally agree with those scholars who argue for a later date of about 90 CE, but conservatives, of course, try to push for not later than 70 CE, the date of the destruction of the temple by the Romans under Titus.

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 your inheritance as more than a human animal—as a fully human being? To put this another way: Has the Christ principle been born in the manger of your consciousness? You don’t have to be a Christian or a member of any church for this to take place. As the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart once said in a sermon: “It is more worth to God his being brought forth ghostly [spiritually] in the individual virgin or good soul than that he was born of Mary bodily.”⁸ As Campbell points out, this kind of virgin birth within is well expressed in St. Paul’s statement in Galatians, “I live, now not I, but Christ liveth in me.”⁹

The whole allegory of the humble but royal birth in a cave or stable was based upon the archetypal idea of the kingly nature of the crowning of our evolutionary development by the advent of self-reflective consciousness. The concept of a Messianic or Christly “coming” therefore is the result of the ancient sages meditating upon this new and higher degree of intelligence and self-awareness. The former, purely animalistic mode of life gave way to the potential inherent in a seed of divine mind implanted in the order of nature from “above,” that is, by the mysterious omnipresence we call God. In reality, then, Christmas itself is, as the carol triumphantly announces, “the birthday of a king.” But this “king” is not a single individual who is believed to have lived in Palestine some two thousand years ago, but the glorious birth within each one of us of divine Incarnation. As St. Paul puts it: “Christ in you; the hope of glory.”

Thus, all the rites and practices of the churches at Christmastime are truly efficacious and meaningful only if the birth of the “Saviour Jesus” is understood as a symbol of the glorious “virgin” birth within ourselves. The joyful message is that Transcendence has broken into history and become part of every one of us. What we need is to have the eyes to see this glory within and all around. It is when we truly recognize who and what we really are that we are born again. As Hermes Trismegistus (“thrice great”) says to his son Tat in the passage of the Hermetica already referred to: “I am not now the man I was. I have been born again in spirit.”

At the Age of Twelve

One of the most obvious clues that in the Gospel narratives we are not dealing with anything resembling a biography of a historical person called Jesus or Yeshua of Nazareth is the fact that in all the Gospels except Luke there is a total silence about the entire period from Jesus’ infancy until the beginning of his public ministry at about age thirty. This is wholly unlike any other biography ever written, and is a bedrock fact that the historicizers and other literalizers of all schools must face at some point. We are asked by them to believe that the Gospel authors and editors knew in minute detail what Jesus is alleged to have said and to have done over a space of from one year to about three years, but that at the same time they could not remember one single incident, occasion or saying from all the years between! It defies reason.

In his two-volume work Ancient Egypt, The Light of the World, the scholar Gerald Massey makes the telling point that this same vacuum occurs in the various accounts of many other mythical Messiahs. For example, there is no recorded deed or history of the Egyptian “Christ,” Horus, between the ages of twelve and thirty years. Luke’s exception, the story of Jesus being taken to the temple in Jerusalem when he was twelve, the approximate age of incipient adulthood and personal responsibility to the Torah, deserves a closer look. It is a highly instructive stage in the unfolding drama:

Now every year his parents went to Jerusalem for the festival of the Passover. And when he was twelve years old, they went up as usual for the festival. When the festival was ended and they started to return, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but his parents did not know it. Assuming that he was in the group of travellers, they went a day’s journey. Then they started to look for him among their relatives and friends. When they did not find him, they returned to Jerusalem to search for him. After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers. When his parents saw him they were astonished; and his mother said to him, “Child, why have you treated us like this? Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety.” He said to them, “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” But they did not understand what he said to them. Then he went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them. His mother treasured all these things in her heart. And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favour. (Luke 2:41–52)

This passage reads clearly enough on the surface, but few stories in the overall drama are more frequently misunderstood and distorted in the retelling, whether in sermons, popular writing or Bible study, than this. It would be impossible to count the number of times I have heard it skewed by clergy and others. In mistaken zeal they cite the passage as evidence of Jesus’ presumed unique sonship and omniscience. We are told by them that he was found in the temple instructing the teachers and the authorities there. But such was not the case at all. Luke says simply that he was both listening to these experts and “asking them questions.” True, we are told they were very surprised at his intelligence and at his answers to questions in the discussion.¹⁰ But he wasn’t teaching the teachers, as is so often supposed.

Luke himself gives his readers a hint that the story is symbolical/allegorical by using the formulaic, symbolical number three. Jesus’ parents only notice he is missing and discover him in the temple after three days. In the Ritual of Egypt, Isis, the mother of the sun god Horus, searches for three days to find her son. As was noted in my earlier work, the number three gained its esoteric, symbolic meaning from the observed fact that for three days and two nights each month the moon is not visible from Earth. The moon was thought of symbolically as having congress with the sun at that time and as conceiving the new moon. Consequently, three became a symbol of any potent period of change or renewal. Hence the three days of Christ’s entombment prior to the Resurrection.

But there are some other features deserving comment. What kind of parents, one might ask, would allow their twelve-year-old son, in what purportedly was his very first grown-up visit to an unfamiliar city and territory, such freedom of movement and lack of supervision as to not even notice he was absent for a whole day? The situation is all the more puzzling in that the text says they were actually on the move, returning through the dangerous country around Jerusalem (mainly wilderness or “badlands”), well before they began to search for Jesus in earnest.

Then there is the larger issue of historical credibility raised by the fact that, while Luke tells us Mary mused on her son’s behaviour and treasured all these things in her heart, the subsequent narrative shows that she and his family in general had no idea of who he was really supposed to be. You would think that, having experienced a virgin birth herself and then observed her son’s conduct and learned about his answers in the temple, Mary at least would have been well aware that something very remarkable was going on. Yet—especially in Mark, where on one occasion we are told his family came to get Jesus and take him home, “for, they said, he is beside himself ” (is not well and may come to harm)—in the Gospels the immediate family are not shown as truly believing in him until after the Resurrection. This, of course, fits in completely with Mark’s overall intention of showing that certain prophecies are being fulfilled. It was foretold that the Messiah would be rejected by even his closest friends and kin. Notice that some conservatives like to reason that, if this account were not really historical, the author would have left these negative details out through embarrassment. Why would anyone making up a story put in such a “clanger”? they query. However, they miss the point. As noted, the family’s seemingly obtuse objections actually help make Mark’s case. Only the true Messiah would be treated like that.

Fundamentally, however, the story relates to a deeper truth. What it reveals is that, as the age of responsibility is reached, one’s deeper commitment, to the voice and stirrings of God both within and over all, comes to the fore of consciousness. The individual soul here radically begins its real “business,” that of seeking to know and do the will of “the Father.” “Jesus says to Joseph and Mary: ‘Don’t you realize I must be focused on my Father’s concerns?’” (My translation.) In the ancient wisdom, the “father” was often a symbol of spirit and mind, while the “mother” symbolized the womb out of which spirit was born. But there was no hint of valuing maleness over the feminine. Far from it. Indeed, wisdom, personified—or hypostatized, to use the technical term—as Sophia, was invariably viewed as female. Sophia, or “wisdom” in Greek, is a feminine name. Mother, Latin mater, is the bearer of spirit. This story, then, is about the first solid step on the journey for all of us that ultimately, through much joy and struggling, leads to “home.” There is a point where, however expressed, one decides to do the will of the “Father.” Ego needs to begin to be controlled and made to serve a higher purpose than oneself. The road to spiritual maturity has begun.

Lest anyone expect that this road will be smooth or easy, let me hasten to say that it will require great courage and what the New Testament calls hypomone—tough endurance. The King James Version usually translates this Greek term as “patience,” but this is only accurate in a very antique sense of that word. What it really means is the ability to stay with or under a heavy task or demanding situation. Life, as Scott Peck says in the very first lines of his giant bestseller The Road Less Traveled, “is difficult.” The Buddha said so, the Gospels say so too. But, as I point out in Living Waters, the evolution of the soul is furthered much more by problems, doubts, anxieties—all forms of resistance to the Spirit within—than by purely halcyon days.¹¹

There is a good reason why spiritually motivated people frequently experience “the dark night of the soul.” I have certainly known such episodes of “dryness” in my own life, and can say without hesitation that they have, in retrospect, been times of genuine advance in self-knowledge and eventual victory over some mistaken ambition, pride or other weakness. Looking back at my life, I can see that the roughest terrain encountered has often been the most fruitful land I ploughed. The medieval alchemists tried to find ways of turning lead into gold. Understood esoterically, this was a metaphor for the inner spiritual soul-work involved for every one of us as we struggle by the grace of the God within to transform the leaden dross of all our foibles, all our neuroses and all our empty vanities into the pure gold of Christliness. St. Paul describes this process thus: “And all of us . . . seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image [that of the inner Christ] from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.”¹² That is what I mean by the concept of spiritual evolution.

As the well-loved hymn by Edwin Hatch puts it so aptly:

Breathe on me breath of God,

Till I am wholly Thine,

Until this earthly part of me

Glows with Thy fire divine.