Special Letter Section

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The response we received to J. Edward Barrett’s “Can Scholars Take the Virgin Birth Seriously?” BR 04:05, was unprecedented. In our February 1989 Readers Reply department we printed 26 readers’ letters out of the avalanche we received in response to this article. Almost all were critical.

We wrote Dr. F. F. Bruce, the very distinguished British evangelical scholar who sits on BR’s Editorial Advisory Board, to ask if he thought these letters were an adequate response. Yes, he replied, they were a “sufficient—and probably more than sufficient—counterbalance.” He went on to say that “some of the letters suggest that Christian orthodoxy might well pray to be defended from its defenders.”

Then we received an avalanche of letters in reply to the 26 letters we published in our February issue. We print below a selection from this second-wave response.

Many of the letters we printed—on both sides—are extremely sensitive and insightful. All together the initial article and the exchange that followed cannot help but enrich our understanding and appreciation—regardless of our conclusions or the certainty or hesitancy with which we hold these conclusions. We hope our readers will agree with us that it can be a joy to learn.—Ed.

Enjoyed the Article; Enjoyed the Letters

I found J. Edward Barrett’s article “Can Scholars Take the Virgin Birth Seriously?” BR 04:05, thought-provoking and most helpful; the article was impregnated with invitations toward mature faith. I have not been able to decide, however, which I enjoyed more, the article or the letters (Readers Reply, BR 05:01) that followed. Keep up the good work!

The Polarization of Christians

I was both amused and alarmed when I read the many letters in your February issue protesting J. Edward Barrett’s article on the virgin birth. I must confess that I had to re-read the article after seeing so much “name calling” printed in Readers Reply, BR 05:01. Quite frankly, I still do not know what these folks are so upset about. Barrett didn’t say anything that hasn’t already been discussed among scholars and laypeople.

What really alarms me is what seems to be a greater polarization among Christians. Several years ago I committed myself to being more open to conservative points of view about biblical scholarship. I did so, in part, because I felt it would help me to grow in my theological understanding. But more important, if I wanted the (so-called) conservatives to listen to me, then I in turn should listen to them. It appears that no dialogue is possible in the near future.

Some of the readers were angry with Barrett for shaking their innocence to the core. I remember sitting in a theology class in 1979 when one of my fellow Baptist students accused our Franciscan professor of stomping a muddy boot in the middle of his theology. The professor took another puff on his cigarette and responded, “Good!” Dr. Barrett has planted another muddy boot in the middle of biblical scholarship and to that I say, “Good!” In my opinion, Dr. Barrett has given us a fresh look at how we can synthesize our knowledge of the modern world with the knowledge and understanding of the ancient world. For that, I am grateful.

I intend to renew my subscription to Bible Review. Keep up the good work.

Our Medieval Readers

I read with great interest your wonderful article about the virgin birth of Jesus. It was my impression that such scholarly and open-minded consideration of the most obviously burning issues of religion was the basic reason that you publish your magazine and that people would want to read it. But when I read the many bitter letters (Readers Reply, BR 05:01) that you printed from the mountain you must have received I was horrified to see that your readers are 037not looking for thought, scholarship, open discussion, but mere corroboration of their presently held articles of faith. I found many of the letters medieval and frightening. It is out of just this kind of narrow-mindedness that murderous movements like the Inquisition and the pure-race theories of the Nazis can arise.

Blessings on you for the fine work you are doing in providing an interfaith forum for the intelligent exploration of matters concerning the Bible.

An Evangelical Who Eats the Meat and Leaves the Bones

I do believe Scripture is inerrant. I am an evangelical, orthodox Christian minister. But one principle of hermeneutics I believe should be universally applied to any social or theological movement is “cultural contextualization”—that is, researching the cultural, historical backgrounds of the day as well as our own cultural biases when analyzing them. Too many people forget this—especially when they approach God’s Word.

My own personal experience in Christ was quite existential. That is to say, when I was at the end of my rope and I called on the name of Jesus Christ, inerrancy and historicity were not of any concern to me. But they are of concern to me now.

Although I, too, thought Barrett’s article was basically ridiculous, we must realize that there are all kinds of heresies in the world. This is nothing new. The first five centuries of the church’s existence were plagued with Arianism and all kinds of gnosticism. For a thousand years, justification of faith was nearly unheard of. While I wouldn’t commend Bible Review for publishing Barrett’s article, we need to realize that truth can stand examination. Anyone who really examines the issues and seeks God with diligence and honest study of Scripture and church history will arrive it the conclusion the first-century church did—Jesus Christ is God Manifest in the Flesh. What is really scary is that people with Mr. Barrett’s opinion are in a position to teach. Lambasting him in a letters column, calling him names, etc., is hardly consistent with a Christian approach, especially from people who cling to inerrancy. As one who teaches, I do empathize with the outrage felt when someone mishandles and mangles the New Testament text. Contending, “Vengeance is mine, says the Lord, I will repay.” Even though I disagree frequently with some of the positions your contributors take, I still enjoy Bible Review. I’ll eat meat and leave the bones!

Spiritual Reality Conveyed by a Metaphor of Physical Reality

I was stunned by the readers’ response to Professor Barrett’s article.

I believe I have tasted enough of God’s redeeming love at work in my own life to understand the joy of the apostles, whose assurance of Christ’s sonship by perfect obedience and completely faithful trust in God led them to express this spiritual reality in the physical reality of a birth by the Holy Spirit. Indeed, their lives were full of the assurance that they were born again by the Holy Spirit. It is neither subterfuge nor deception to use the language of a physical miracle to give expression to what is so obviously a spiritual miracle within your own life.

Matthew and Luke may have known little or nothing of the details of Jesus’ birth, but they lived in a tradition that often expressed the power of faithfulness—of trust in God—to bring new life to a hopeless situation in terms of miraculous births: Abraham and Sarah, of course, and for Matthew, especially, the extra-biblical stories of Moses’ birth, and for Luke the story of Hannah and Elijah’s birth.

What frightens me is not Professor Barrett’s questioning of the physical reality of the virgin birth, but that so many people’s lives have so little experience of the redemptive power of God’s love in Jesus Christ that their faith is based entirely on a book full of words, rather than the enormous spiritual power those words let loose in the world. This absence of redemptive love is doubly underscored by the virulent and vindictive hatred they pour out on anyone who threatens this frail faith in apparently lifeless words.

Squeezing the Life from God’s Word

The barrage of letters castigating J. Edward Barrett seems to miss entirely his point: YES, scholars can take it seriously, if not necessarily literally.

Jesus is the Son of God, the Savior, the Christ, is the confession of Christians. “Fresh and blood has not revealed this to you,” Jesus told Peter, when first acknowledged by a disciple that He was the Christ, “but my Father who is in heaven” (Mathew 16:17). If the literalists, the inerrantists, are correct that the truth of the Gospel stands or falls with “flesh and blood” proofs (e.g., Mr. Kleiver’s letter, Readers Reply, BR 05:01), they are contradicting Jesus himself. Indeed, the most serious schism in the Church today (cf. Mr. Carpenter’s letter, Readers Reply, BR 05:01) is between those inerrantists who would squeeze the life from God’s Word trying to save it, by denying the power of the Holy Spirit to speak the living Word through means touched by human hands and therefore in some minor human sense fallible, and those who believe God’s Word is “living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword … discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12), speaking, therefore, to men and women in any age the full truth of salvation and God’s will for human life and action.

God wants us to use the wisdom God gives us—“Be wise as serpents and innocent as doves,” Jesus says (Matthew 10:16). Angry inerrantists (and angry immaculatists) offend on both counts. And they also offend the great majority of Christian believers who do believe, together with believers in every era, that “our Lord … was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary” (Apostles’ Creed) and that open-minded scholarly investigation of the biblical texts standing behind that assertion will strengthen Christian faith and its evangelical proclamation.

Faith Must Stand the Test of Modern Scholarship

Perhaps the readers’ replies to “Can Scholars Take the Virgin Birth Seriously?” BR 04:05, tell us something about how we deal with our understanding of God and the Infinite. Some devout people seem to have little tolerance for expressions of faith based on contemporary ideas.

Fortunately, Edward Barrett and the staff of Bible Review will not suffer the fate of John Huss, Ulrich Zwingli or Michael Servetus. We live in more enlightened times. But then again, they believed they did also.

I hope you are not dissuaded by the negative response to Professor Barrett’s article and will continue to run more exegetical studies and commentaries on Scripture and doctrine. Faith must stand the test of modern scholarship, and your magazine is an opportunity for intelligent religious study.

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Church Father Recognized Christ May Not Have Been Born of a Virgin

It is interesting to read “Justin Martyr—The Dialgue with Trypho” and realize that Justin admitted that Christ may not have been born of a virgin: “However at the present point, Trypho, I said, the fact that He is the Christ of God is not destroyed if I cannot prove that He existed beforehand as the Son of the Maker of the universe, being God, and that He has been born man by the Virgin … [I]t is right that I should be said to have erred in this respect alone, but it is not right to deny that this is the Christ, if He should appear to have been born man of merely human origin, and is proved to have come to be Messiah by God’s selection. For … there are some of your race who acknowledged him to be Messiah, yet declare that he was man of merely human origin …” (p. 96, 1930 edition).

It is obviously a fact that the primitive church composed of Jews, did believe that he was merely man and chosen to be Messiah as was every previous king before him. The Fall 1986 Bible Review article by H. Neil Richardson (“The Old Testament Background of Jesus as Begotten of God,” BR 02:03) covered that issue accurately.

Let those detractors of that excellent gentleman Barrett do a little study and research with a more open mind to truth and they will end up praising his scholarship and great honesty and courage.

Belief at the Detail Level Generates Superstition

Fun with the fundies!

Don’t tell me you didn’t run Dr. Barrett’s article on purpose just to see how much dust you would kick up.

On the other hand, the article was quite good and certainly stood on its own merits.

Reviewing the responses in Readers Reply, BR 05:01, I was struck by the rampant confusion apparent in the matter of belief versus faith.

Insistence on specific and unquestioned beliefs at the detail level is the instrument for generating superstition, idolatry and venomous hatred for all who do not subscribe to the beliefs in precisely the same detail.

It simply does not matter what you believe or what I believe. What matters is, to whom do you belong?

I enjoyed the article and the sideshow. Keep the good articles coming and, by all means, send me a renewal notice.

Beliefs Stored in a Safe Place

It is so distressing to read the letters from poor souls whose orthodox (from the Greek, “straight opinion”) beliefs are threatened like so much lead crystal glassware by an article in your delightful journal. “Belief,” from this perspective, is a treasured object stored in a safe place that one can show to others and persuade them of its value.

My response to the virgin birth article is that I want to do some research and work up a criticism, not run and hide in the closet like the subscription cancellers. I see some good critical letters in your readers’ replies. There are lots of us that read things closely and will apply the skills we have studied to keep scholars honest—which any good scholar wants. So keep the provocations coming.

Subtle Anti-Christian and Anti-Semitic Attitudes?

Please cancel my subscription.

The occasional good articles are not worth the attacks on biblical faith.

I am not a fundamentalist. I am a Roman Catholic with a doctorate in medieval literature and I have read widely in patristic, medieval and modern exegesis. I have found your magazine to be a ploy for insinuating anti-Christian and anti-Semitic attitudes to the Scripture.

Too many scholars have rejected the faith of the Bible but wish to continue to make their living by talking about it. They may be “respected” by other scholars who share the same views, but they would not be recognized as Christians or even Jews by Augustine, Aquinas, Ratzinger or evangelical scholars. From the letters to the editor I see that your readership has detected this approach and that the sensus fidelium is not deceived.

Barrett’s “Trash” Is “Modern” but Not “responsible”

I question your judgment in publishing Barrett’s article under the thin excuse that you “are committed to providing a forum for the full range of responsible modern scholarship” (Readers Reply, BR 05:01). Does this kind of trash need your pages as a forum, a Publication intended to be helpful in understanding the Bible? Barrett’s article is “modern,” yes indeed, but is it “responsible scholarship”? Shame on you for such a destructive endeavor. God will forgive you, however, and God, in time, will repair the damage you and Barrett have done.

Virgin Conception Is Faith, Not History

As a student of Mariology for the past fifteen years (A New Creation on Earth: The Evolution of Christianity’s Sacred Mother Mary, Sarah Lawrence College, 1986), I eagerly read Professor Barrett’s article on the virgin birth, hoping for a new perspective which might impact on my work-in-progress. Instead I found it to be a good review of ideas which are historically acceptable to many Marian scholars. Mary’s virginal conception of Jesus is a matter of faith, not history.

The faith of the respondents in your Reader Reply section is admirable, especially their loving defense of Mary, but a few homework assignments would serve to clarify the historicity of the virgin birth argument. It is not a new concept conceived by Professor Barrett. He has, in fact, explored a difficult subject with the required brevity, yet scholarly balance and is really not deserving of the unbridled criticism he received.

Scholarship Does Not Validate or Discredit Faith

It seems pointless for you to publish letters from people who need to vindicate their faith, or lack thereof. There seems to be a broadly clear understanding that the articles published by BR are meant to be observations or conclusions drawn from honest, scholarly inquiry, and not from investigations into the need for faith or into the justification of Judaism or Christianity.

If work is in fact scholarly, it is meant to expand possibility, to increase perspective; if the work presented in BR is scholarly inquiry, it is work dealing with history and culture, society and language; it is not work attempting to support belief or to discredit belief.

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It therefore seems at best inappropriate for you to publish letters that deplore the articles in BR or that favor them because they either validate or discredit faith as such. Worse, the inclusion of such letters tends to draw consideration away from the areas of inquiry dealt with by the articles themselves into the emotional arena of threatened belief.

BR’s Cowardly Response to Criticism

Before me sits my last issue of your magazine. I wanted a chance to see your reply to what I expected would be a flood of response to the Barrett article in the October issue. I’m afraid you’ve followed a bad mistake with a worse one. To have printed the Barrett article was bad enough—as others have pointed out very well—but the cowardly way in which you responded to the criticism was even more deplorable. To hide behind the idea of responsible scholarship (Readers Reply, BR 05:01), modern or otherwise, to excuse a rejection of simple faith in a simple gospel that saves men from the destruction of sin is not only dangerous spiritually, it is poltroonish. In view of simply the quantity of negative response, an open admission of having committed a wrong by calling such writing “biblical scholarship” would have been much more appropriate.

Your magazine is so beautiful—yet you fill it with so much that takes away from the gospel.

Open to the Range of Scriptural Tradition

As I breezed through the Readers Reply, BR 05:01, upon receiving my latest issue of Bible Review I was shocked at the comments I saw. Accusations of “blasphemy,” “biblical bulldroppings,” “garbage,” “Christ-killer,” “fool” (cf. Matthew 5:22), “anti-Christ,” “false prophets” and finally “Godless Communism(?)” greeted my eyes. The tone was so shrill as to shatter glass. In confusion I returned to the article (J. Edward Barrett, “Can Scholars Take the Virgin Birth Seriously?” BR 04:05) to see where I had overlooked such blasphemous idolatry. Surprisingly, all I found was generally solid and accepted scholarship. Perhaps it needed a little polishing, the 2 Timothy argument seemed to need more support to me, but, on the whole, nothing was surprising.

Still confused, I returned to the readers’ letters, where I found the refuting arguments stated there more troubling than even the name calling. Many of the readers equated the virgin birth with the salvific power of Jesus. The reason I found this troubling is because it seems to be such a minority view in the New Testament itself (if existent at all). The issue is Sonship. The virgin birth makes Jesus to be God’s biological Son from conception. Sonship is deemed necessary for salvation and therefore, some seem to reason, the virgin birth is necessary for salvation. But Paul certainly does not hold that the virgin birth is necessary for salvation. Rather, he downplays the humanity of Jesus in even going so far as to argue that Sonship was not bestowed until the resurrection (Romans 1:3–4). There is an intrinsic tension, if not contradiction, between the virgin birth and Mark, who has Jesus’ Sonship bestowed at baptism in a private vision (Mark 1:9–11). The early Church’s kerygma as presented in Acts in both Paul’s sermon in chapter 13 and Peter’s sermon in chapter 2 make no mention of the virgin birth and both imply, and Paul’s sermon states it explicitly in Acts 13:33, that his Sonship/Christhood occurred only at the resurrection. Even accounting for the fact that Luke wrote both Acts and Luke, these ideas represent very different lines of tradition than that which held the virgin birth in esteem. In John, the birth narrative is replaced by the Johannine prologue. Within the Book of John, Jesus’ paternity is clearly ascribed to Joseph (John 6:42). It seems that your readers refuse to give Dr. Barrett the same courtesy that the New Testament extends to its authors: the right to disagree and still be Christian.

Moreover, when one examines the birth stories, one comes across a myriad of problems. The genealogies are very different. The stories themselves have a whole different tone to them. Matthew is a story of drama and escape. Luke has attitude of peacefulness and joy. The escape to Egypt cannot be fit into Luke’s story. Joseph’s town of origination differs between accounts. The witnesses to the event are different. The stories differ in almost every major and minor detail. Such minor agreements as there are, in connection with the overwhelming differences, point to a vague tradition about a birth in Bethlehem upon which the gospel stories are grounded. Certainly the immaculate conception was part of that tradition. Yet the fact that it is absent from Mark, for which there seems to be no good theological reason because Mark does make Jesus’ Sonship the first issue in his gospel, leads one to suspect that the story was a later creation. In fact, the words which God speaks at the baptism in Mark—“Thou are my beloved son”—are a reference to Psalm 2:7 which continues, “Today I have begotten thee.” Such a scriptural reference, when it encountered the Hellenistic world (in which gods procreated in a physical way), could well lead to such a birth narrative as that which underlies Matthew and Luke. Bultmann supports this by tracing some of the wording of the birth narratives to the Hellenistic community.^a Thus we can well conclude the birth narratives to be a product of emerging tradition and not history.

But is the salvation of the world truly dependent on Mary’s virginity? Could not God choose to forgive the sins of the world through Christ, even if he were not immaculately conceived? Objections about original sin and atonement are our questions, not ones the Bible deals with. Certainly Paul understood the need of atonement and the price of original sin, yet he never relies on the virgin birth to answer these objections. The problem is one of focus. Christ is not important because of His birth. His birth is important because of Him. When the moment came that Jesus became the Holy One of God, whether at birth as in Matthew and Luke, at baptism as in Mark, or at the resurrection as in Paul, is inconsequential. Christians can disagree and still be Christian. The fact that He did become God’s Christ is what is important. To dogmatically hold to a rigid litmus test like the virgin birth violates the witness of the New Testament. Let us be open to the whole range of traditions preserved in Scripture instead of some narrow view we define as orthodoxy.

Keep up the good work, Bible Review, articles like this one make us think.

No Threat to Mature Christian Faith

I write in appreciation of J. Edward Barrett’s scholarly article on the virgin birth (“Can Scholars Take the Virgin Birth Seriously?” BR 04:05). It holds no threat to mature Christian faith nor compromise with true orthodoxy.