Born of a Woman

John Shelby Spong

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061739606
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

John Shelby Spong, bestselling author and Episcopal bishop of Newark, NJ, challenges the doctrine of the virgin birth, tracing its development in the early Christian church and revealing its legacy in our contemporary attitudes toward women and female sexuality.

1

Escaping Biblical Literalism

For most of the two thousand years of history since the birth of our Lord, the Christian church has participated in and supported the oppression of women. This oppression has been both overt and covert, conscious and unconscious. It has come primarily through the church's ability in the name of God to define a woman and to make that definition stick. It was grounded in a literalistic understanding of Holy Scripture thought of as the infallible word of God and produced in a patriarchal era.

Patriarchy and God have been so deeply and uncritically linked to gender by the all-male church hierarchy that men have little understood how this alliance has been used to the detriment of all women. In a unique and intriguing sense, the parts of the Bible that have contributed most to this negativity have been the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke. These stories, far more than is generally realized, assisted in the development of the ecclesiastical stereotype of the ideal women against which all women came to be judged. The power of these birth narratives over women lies in their subtle illusions and romantic imagery. Those biblical passages that contain obvious prejudice against women can be quickly confronted and easily laid aside. But subtle, unconscious definitions and traditional unchallenged patterns resist so simple an excising. So it is that through these passages of Holy Scripture the picture of a woman known as “the virgin” has found entry into the heart of the Christian story, and from that position she has exercised her considerable influence.

Each year at the Christmas season she is brought out of the church and placed in a position of public honor for about two weeks. She is dressed in pale blue, portrayed with demure, downcast eyes, and defined in terms of virgin purity. No female figure in Western history rivals her in setting standards. Since she is known as “the virgin,” she has contributed to that peculiarly Christian pattern of viewing women primarily in terms of sexual function. Women may deny their sexuality by becoming virgin nuns, or women may indulge their sexuality by becoming prolific mothers. But in both cases, women are defined not first as persons and second as sexual beings but first and foremost as females whose sexuality determines their identity. This means, in my opinion, that the literalized Bible in general, and the birth narratives that turn on the person of the virgin in particular, are guilty of aiding and abetting the sexist prejudice that continues to live and to distort women even as late in history as these last years of the twentieth century.

I want to challenge publicly and vigorously this view of both the Bible and the virgin tradition and sexual images that gather around the stories of Jesus' birth. But I want to do this quite specifically as a Christian and as one who treasures the Scriptures. That task represents for me a willingness to walk the razor's edge of faith. I intend to claim the Bible as my ally in the struggle to end the oppression of women. I also intend to celebrate Christmas each year using the traditional readings and symbols of that season, but I will seek to free that birth tradition from its destructive literalism. I do not believe that Mary was in any biological sense literally a virgin. I do not believe that someone known as a virgin mother can be presented with credibility to contemporary men or women as an ideal woman. I do not believe that the story of Mary's virginity enhanced the portrait of the mother of Jesus. To the contrary, I believe that story has detracted from Mary's humanity and has become a weapon in the hands of those whose patriarchal prejudices distort everyone's humanity in general but women's humanity in particular. But before examining the birth narratives specifically, it is necessary to look briefly at the Bible as a whole.

I am amazed that given the knowledge revolution of the last six hundred years anyone can still regard the Bible as the dictated words of God, inerrant and eternal. This claim, however, is still made with effective power and still finds a fertile field in the hearts of many who refer to themselves as simple believers. It is this audience to whom the television evangelists direct their appeal. These electronic “preachers of the Word” offer to their legions biblical security, certainty in faith, and even superiority in their sense of salvation. In return, their supporters provide the evangelists with a following that can be translated into political power and enormous financial resources. Neither the political power nor the financial resources are always used, history has revealed, in a responsible way.

In recent years I have been given the opportunity to engage two of America's better-known evangelists in televised debates about the Bible.¹ I am for them an interesting study, for I grew up as a biblical fundamentalist and had the content of the Bible made a part of my very being. I have read this wondrous book on a daily basis since I was twelve. The remarkable biographical detail of my spiritual journey is that when I ceased being a fundamentalist I did not cease to love the Bible. The Bible remains today the primary focus of my study. I am therefore a strange phenomenon, at least in Christian America. I am known as a theological liberal. Yet I dare to call myself a Bible-believing, Bible-based Christian. Such a combination is, for many, a contradiction in terms.

When I hear a public person suggest that the Bible means literally exactly what it says, I am so amazed that I have to remind myself that some seven decades have passed since the famous Scopes trial in Tennessee. That trial not only captured the nation's attention but it also actually found a young high school science teacher guilty of espousing evolution in his classroom in direct defiance of the truth of Holy Scripture. Such activity constituted a crime in Tennessee in the 1920s. In that trial Clarence Darrow was brilliant in his cross-examination of William Jennings Bryan, reducing his opponent to blathering ineptitude by asking such biblical questions as “Where did Cain get his wife?” and “Was it really possible for a human being named Jonah to live three days and three nights in the belly of a whale?” But the jury nonetheless voted to convict the high school teacher, for the commitment to biblical literalism was more deeply a part of the security system of the times than was the commitment to truth. So bizarre was their conclusion that it propelled Mr. Scopes, Mr. Darrow, and Mr. Bryan into the very folklore of America.

Yet, incredible though it is, the presentation of this kind of biblical literalism continues to live today, being regularly fed by the mass communication system called television. That electronic power assures that religious ignorance will continue to live for yet a while longer. Furthermore, it guarantees that this level of ignorance will continue to define many of the religious questions and the religious issues of our time, to the ultimate loss of credibility for all religious systems, I fear.

As a direct consequence of this activity, increasing numbers of the educated of our world will be convinced that organized religion is little more than a hysterical, superstitious system with no ability to compel either their response or allegiance. Those who seek to be citizens of this century as well as believing Christians will be a shriveling and sometimes almost invisible minority.

It is quite easy to dismiss biblical fundamentalism on intellectual grounds.² The Bible is full of contradictions. The same God who says in one place, “You shall not kill” (Exod. 20:13), in another place orders Israel to “slay the Amalekites, every man, woman and child” (1 Sam. 15:3ff). The God who seems to entertain a universal consciousness when heard to say, “My name shall be great among the gentiles” (Mal. 1:10) or “every valley shall be exalted” (Isa. 40:4), is also pictured as rejoicing over the drowning of the Egyptians in the Red Sea (Exodus 15) and allowing the heads of the Edomite children to be “dashed against the rocks” (Ps. 137:7-9). An entire manuscript filled with similar contradictions could be gathered quickly.

Beyond these anomalies, geological and astrophysical evidence has also challenged biblical “truth” successfully. That evidence reveals that this planet earth has been in existence for between four and five billion years and that human or near-human life itself is between five hundred thousand and two million years old. This documentable data should be able to take care of the literalization of the seven-day creation story and Irish Bishop James Ussher's biblical calculation that the earth was created in the year 4004 B.C.E. Since the sun does not revolve around the earth, as Joshua thought, it would be quite difficult to order it to stop in its journey across the sky. Yet Joshua did precisely that, according to the Bible, to enable Israel to win its battle before night-fall (Josh. 10:12-13).

We could also raise interesting questions as to what occurred in the digestive system of the great fish when Jonah entered that system whole and remained there for seventy-two hours (Jon. 1:17). At the very least, there would have been an acute fishy constipation. Did the graves really open at the time of the crucifixion and people long dead get up and walk into Jerusalem to be seen by many, as Matthew asserts (Matt. 27:51-53)? Did the waters of the Red Sea really part for Moses (Exod. 14:21ff)? Did manna really rain down from heaven only on six days so as not to violate the Sabbath by falling on the seventh day (Exod. 16:5)? Did Noah really gather all the animals of the world into that tiny boat, two by two (Gen. 7:6-10)? Did that include kangaroos, which no one knew existed until Australia was discovered centuries later? Did Jesus walk on the water (Mark 6:48, 49), still the storm (Mark 4:37-41), or feed the multitude with five loaves and two fish (John 6:1-14)? If grave clothes were left intact in Jesus' tomb when Jesus rose, as John asserts (John 20:7), are we to assume that his resurrected body was unclothed?

Belief in the historic accuracy of these texts no longer exists in academic circles, but it still enjoys a vigorous life in the pews of many of our churches. In a less blatant form this fundamentalistic attitude permeates not just the ranks of the unthinking masses but finds expression even in sophisticated, well-educated, high ecclesiastical circles.

No less a person than Pope John Paul II has supported a document and an attitude that proclaims, “Women will never be priests in the Roman Catholic Church because Jesus did not choose any women to be his disciples.” I submit that this is a literal misuse of the Holy Scriptures. In the social order and mores of the first century, a woman as a member of a disciple band of an itinerant rabbi or teacher was inconceivable. The female role was too clearly circumscribed for that even to be imagined. Here, however, biblical literalism is eclectic rather than thoroughgoing. Perhaps it has not yet occurred to the bishop of Rome that Jesus did not choose any Polish males to be disciples either, but this did not exclude from the priesthood the Polish boy Karol Jozef Wojtyla, who became John Paul II. Of course, this attitude toward women is changing everywhere, including all branches of the Christian church. Even those churches that still refuse to ordain women now allow them to serve the church as lay leaders and acolytes and on the governing boards. None of that was possible before World War II. All churches will surely have women pastors, priests, and bishops before long.

When I listen to Easter and Christmas sermons, I hear time after time a still-vibrant neoliteralism even in those mainline churches that would be embarrassed if someone suggested they were fundamentalistic. Likewise, the official documents, studies, and pastoral letters issued by ecclesiastical bodies or groups of bishops are often buttressed by straightforward appeals to the literalism of Scripture. One bishop was quoted in the press as asserting that in seven specific passages of the Bible homosexuality was condemned, as if that somehow guaranteed it to be so forever.³ Every movement to end oppression in any form in Western history has had to overcome the authority of a literal Bible. Christianity, with its Scriptures intact, persecuted pagans and spawned a vicious anti-Semitism that fueled everything from the Crusades to the Holocaust to the defacement of synagogues. That demonic gift from biblical literalism plagues us even today. A literal Bible still sees the Jews as those evil people who killed Jesus. “His blood be on us and on our children” (Matt. 27:25) is a text frequently used to justify our prejudice. The Jews are called in the Bible “children of the devil” (John 8:44), and they are defined as possessing a God-given stupor: “eyes that cannot see and ears that cannot hear” (Rom. 11:8). There are times that I literally shudder when I hear the Good Friday story read and realize once again that the biblical use of the words the Jews in that narrative will once more feed that dark stain on the historic soul of Christianity.

Other life-denying prejudices have been perpetuated throughout history as official “Christian” positions, buttressed by an appeal to the literal Bible. Included on that list would be the rejection of left-handed people as abnormal, the enslavement and segregation of non-white people as sub-human, the violation and murder of gay or lesbian people who are labelled sick or depraved, the repulsion from the sanctuaries of the church including the burial office of those who have committed suicide, and the rejection and excommunication through canon law of divorced persons regardless of the circumstances leading to the divorce. It always seemed strange to me that something called the Word of God became in fact again and again in the life of the church a weapon of oppression. But that is the judgment of history.

It is almost amusing to examine “biblical morality” as it is called by the literalists. They do not seem to understand how immoral, by our standards, many biblical attitudes are. For example, according to the older of the Hebrew creation myths, the woman was not created in the image of God but rather came into being as an afterthought to provide the male with a companion and a helpmate (Gen. 2:4-23). The woman was the property of the man. Lot, called righteous by the Bible, offered his virgin daughters to the angry mob in the city of Sodom (Gen. 19:8). Who will step forward to support that part of “biblical morality”? In the Ten Commandments, the quintessential part of the Jewish law still naively saluted as the essence of biblical morality, the wife was listed after a man's house and before a man's ox, as a possession not to be coveted by another man (Exod. 20:17). Moralists who quote the seventh commandment prohibiting adultery (Exod. 20:14) fail to realize that polygamy was the style of marriage abroad when that commandment was given. Indeed, three hundred years after the giving of the law at Mount Sinai, Solomon had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines, says the Bible (1 Kings 11:3). What does adultery mean when one man possesses one thousand women? In its literal context the seventh commandment really enjoined one man from violating the woman who was the property of another man. A woman who was not so owned was, of course, fair game. That does not seem to be nearly so moral as the moralists would have us believe.

Beyond the naive literalism of the fundamentalists and the more subtle literalism of a broad segment of church leaders is still another level of biblical literalism. It is all but unchallenged even in religious and academic circles. This form of literalism is the assertion that the Bible's stories are absolutely unique, novel, and non-syncretistic, or the literalism that fails to see the universal aspects of all religious folklore. Joseph Campbell in his conversation with Bill Moyers, published under the title The Power of Myth, suggested that religious people should study the myths of religions other than their own because they tend to literalize the myths of their own religious systems.⁴

Many stories in the mythologies of the world, for example, parallel familiar parts of the Christian tradition. Divine figures are born of virgin mothers, mythic heroes die and are resurrected and return to heaven in cosmic ascensions. When we read of these traditions in the context of Egyptian sacred writings, it does not occur to us to literalize the stories of Osiris and Isis. We know we are dealing in that instance with ancient myths. However, we avoid making the same assumptions about our own faith story. In fact, among some Christians, anyone not affirming the total historicity of the Christian story is suspect and drummed out of the corps as a nonbeliever or even a heretic. Most believing Christians have not yet come to recognize in their religious tradition the subjectivity of language, of history, of a particular value system, or of every specific mind-set.

Can the meaning of Jesus' ascension (Acts 1), which in its biblical context assumed a three-tiered universe—a flat earth and a literal heaven above the domed sky—be delivered from the words and thought forms of the era that first froze that experience into such stringent and dated concrete images? Can space-age people escape the conclusion that if Jesus literally rose from this earth, and even if he traveled at the speed of light (186,000 miles per second), he has still not escaped the boundaries of this single galaxy. Literalism leads to strange absurdities!

In the first century's view of genetics, the whole life of the infant was assumed to be genetically present in the sperm of the male, a concept referred to as a humuncleos.⁵ The birth narratives written in that era, therefore, in order to assert Jesus' divine origin had only to displace the male, for the female was believed to offer nothing save the womb to serve as an incubator. That story, if literalized, can make no sense at all in a world that understands the genetic processes of both males and females quite differently. The framers of the birth narratives did not know about egg cells and the way zygotes are formed genetically. Literalize the birth legends of Matthew and Luke today and you will, according to such eminent theologians as Wolfhart Pannenberg and Emil Brunner, destroy the Christian concept of incarnation.⁶ A Jesus who receives his human nature from Mary and his divine nature from the Holy Spirit cannot meet the test of being fully human and fully divine. He would, in fact, be neither fully human nor fully divine, both Pannenberg and Brunner have argued. If they are correct, then even Christianity itself cannot stand the continued literalization of the virgin birth tradition. Yet at lunch in the refectory of one of America's foremost divinity schools several years ago, the students with whom I talked were still treating the virgin story literally, and, perhaps more fearfully, they were quoting one of their professors to buttress their arguments.

When one Episcopal bishop told me that he accepted the virgin birth story literally because “if God wanted to be born of a virgin, he could have arranged that,”⁷ or when another said, “If God created ex nihilo, the virgin birth would be a snap,”⁸ I thought to myself, How will the church survive in this world with that lack of scholarship among its leaders? In those statements the bishops were asserting their belief in a God who was in fact a manipulative male person, who would set aside the processes of the world to produce a miracle in order to bring his (sic) divine presence into a human enterprise called life, from which this God was clearly separated. They also revealed no knowledge whatsoever of the biblical studies that have, for at least a century, thrown new light on the interpretation of these birth narratives.

Literalism masquerades under many forms—from the blatant to the subtle to the unconscious—but it is literalism nonetheless, and in every instance it is finally destructive to truth. Because the power of institutional Christianity has been assumed to rest upon the literal assertions of a fourth-century creed, it is easy to understand why biblical literalism continues to possess its tenacious hold upon ecclesiastical leadership, including those academicians who teach the clergy of the future in some of the seminaries of this land, particularly the denominationally based seminaries.

A literalized myth is a doomed myth. Its truth cannot be rescued. Literalism is not even a benign alternative for contemporary Christians. It is, in the modern world, nothing less than an enemy to faith in Jesus Christ. It is a belief system built on ignorance, which acts as if God, the infinite mystery, can be defined in the words of any human being or in the thought forms of a particular era. Literalism is a claim that God's eternal truth has been, or can be, captured in the time-limited concepts of human history. It is to pretend that knowledge is finite and that know...