I grew up with the understanding that birth narratives of Jesus reflected historical truth; that Mary was impregnated by the Divine, that the three wise men visited from the East, and that angels announced to humble shepherds the cosmic event of God’s incarnation in the infant Jesus. This understanding held that the “virgin birth” was something unique, something special to Christianity. This uniqueness was somehow presumed to be a validation of our faith.

This view replicates mistakes of the earliest followers of Jesus, the Jewish Christians.  As we saw last week, they had a habit of taking brief passages of Scripture out of context and creating another, totally different meaning for these passages. Following their not-so-good example, we have done the same. We have overlooked the context of the world of Jesus’s time. Let me show you how…

The notion of a virgin birth and the notion of a divine impregnation are actually rather common in the ancient world. In the Greco-Roman tradition, gods often impregnate women directly. Zeus, for example, impregnates Danae as a shower of gold. This is very close structurally to a nonsexual divine conception like that alleged for Jesus.  In a slightly different way, Zeus impregnates Alcmene while disguised as her husband. There are many similar examples. In the Greco-Roman culture, divine impregnation was a status claim, not a moral or a metaphysical anomaly.

In ancient Egypt, divine conception was a matter of state theology. Pharaohs were often said to be conceived when the God Amun visited the Queen in the form of her husband. As a result, the future of Pharaoh was literally a divine being.

In Indian traditions, Krishna was conceived by the descent of the god Vishnu into a human woman.  Gautama Buddha was conceived as his mother dreamt of a white elephant entering her side – a symbolic, nonsexual conception. In the Zoroastrian tradition, the future savior, Saoshyant, was conceived when a virgin bathed in a lake concealing the preserved seed of Zarathustra. In the Chinese tradition, Hou Ji, a cultural hero, was conceived after his mother stepped in a divine footprint.

What these ancient traditions have in common is the notion of a divine Transcendence entering into a material form. The emphasis here is not on biology. These narratives are symbolic technologies used across cultures to express a specific claim: the entry of the Transcendent into the human domain is beyond ordinary causation.  In effect, the Transcendent is so special, so different from our ordinary, that we need to denote its significance with these kinds of stories.

What most people miss is that these stories emerge after the figure’s importance is established. These stories function as a retrospective theological framing. They are a not neutral descriptions of facts. That idea misses the point completely. The real question is not, “Did it happen biologically?” The real question is, “What claim about reality is being encoded here?”

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So where does that leave us? If we place Jesus’s birth narratives in their historical context, our Jewish Christian forbearers were using a common symbolic structure – the structure of a divine birth – to indicate Jesus’s transcendent and divine nature. 

That these narratives were created long after the fact seems obvious. If nothing else, there is no support for them in the historical record. There is no account of Herod slaughtering the innocents in Bethlehem – surely a notable sign of madness by a ruler that deserves comment in the historical record. There is no account of the visitation of the three wise men. And there is no account of any ‘miraculous’ increase in Joseph’s family’s standard of living because of the gift of gold from the wise men. Apparently, Joseph did not ask for an immediate upgrade in his family’s meager accommodations in Bethlehem.

Let me state this in another way. There is something peculiar about us human beings and our need to attribute some form of “specialness” to our fellow human beings who appear to have knowledge of the Divine.  This view has two distinctly separate and paradoxical functions.

• First, these unique birth narratives identify and mark out these individuals as bringing us special knowledge and power, knowledge that is critical to our happiness and well-being.

• Paradoxically, these narratives also put a fence around these special beings. These narratives show us that they are so different from us that we cannot possibly achieve their special status. Of note in this regard, Jesus said the opposite. He stated in the gospel of John (14.20) that he lives in us (i.e. the Divine lives in you! Right now, even!) and we live in him.

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So what can we reasonably conclude from these data? Here are the conclusions that I draw. You may draw different conclusions.

1. The birth narratives of Jesus are not historical facts. Instead, they are a symbolic theological statement that was meant to signal divine status.

2. The attribution of divinity to our great spiritual leaders has nothing to do with biology.

3. In the ancient world, the birth narratives of spiritual figures were a way of describing how transcendence entered ordinary human beings like us. After all, we needed some way of explaining how these great spiritual avatars came to be and why they were so different from the rest of us. 

4. Because of the transcultural nature of these birth narratives, the common source appears to be some deep layer in the collective unconscious of humanity.

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When you understand the birth narratives of Jesus in this manner, several things become clear. Suddenly it becomes reasonable that Matthew and Luke would include these narratives. Matthew was writing for the Jewish Christian community centered in Jerusalem. He needed to make Jesus special to attract his fellow Jews. Luke, on the other hand, was attempting to position Christianity as a legitimate, orderly movement within the Roman world. A divine birth narrative makes Jesus comparable to the more familiar birth narratives of the Roman divinities.

Another conclusion that we can draw is that these birth narratives were not typical in the Jewish world. In fact, these narratives were very disruptive to their notion of having a special covenant with God. These narratives identified Jesus as someone more than an ordinary prophet like Isaiah or Jeremiah. Instead, Jesus is seen through these special birth stories as someone equivalent to Moses, who also had a special birth story.

Third, the birth story of Jesus was not a sexualized union between God and a woman. Instead, there was a strong emphasis on moral purity and divine initiative. This was not like the divine lust of Zeus nor was it a form of royal propaganda like that of the Egyptians. Of note, this moral purity not only informed early Christianity, but it was picked up again during the Reformation and reemphasized in their teachings.

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I think this finishes up my take on the “divine insemination.” When you see these stories in context, their meaning is quite different from the conventional Christian interpretation. I hope this essay fills out your understanding of these narratives. They have very little to do with biology or historical fact. They are in fact a symbolic means for describing the entry of the transcendent into the human domain.

While all of this is interesting and important, what is even more important is your experience of the Divine.  The Divine which lives inside your heart.  The Divine which has always whispered encouragement and direction to you.  

I hope you take time every day to go within and meditate.  To just sit with yourself, doing nothing, and observing.  It is here that you will find that marvelous Presence.  He is there, waiting for each of us…

May God make his face to smile upon you, this day, and always!

P.S.  These newsletters were written in a particular order, but due to the limitations of our email delivery system, we cannot send them in the order in which they were written.  We can send out the first five in order, but then the system sends out the next one, whatever that happens to be.

So, if you are suddenly moving from issue #5 to issue #whatever, it might be a little jarring.  If this sounds like you, I would encourage you to go back into our archives and do your best to read them in order. 

Humility as a Tool  → Letting go → Fear → Openness →  Acceptance & Growth

If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible:  The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇

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