“Greetings, O favored one, the Lord is with you” said the angel Gabriel to Mary (Lk. 1:29).[1] Just a young virgin living in Nazareth betrothed to a carpenter named Joseph, she was both startled and curious as to the meaning of the message.
Gabriel then explained, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God, and behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end” (Lk. 1:31-33).
Now, Mary points out the obvious problem, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?” (Lk. 1:34). The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God…for nothing will be impossible with God” (Lk. 1:35, 37). Mary replies, “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word” (Lk. 1:38). She positively responds and humbly receives her calling from the Lord. Thus, the Virgin conceived and gave birth to the Child.
I find it always tempting to ponder some ordinary or natural explanation for how the virgin conceived the Child rather than embracing the exceptional and extraordinary explanation. Life in the secular society makes it easy to do so. One can easily follow the world in interpreting things observed through the spectacles of philosophical naturalism, which basically “denies that a transcendent God or supernatural realm exists at all and, thus, denies that miracles could ever happen.”[2] Nevertheless, people across time were skeptical about the miraculous explanations for happenings like the virgin birth.
Celsus, an ancient Greek philosopher, rejected the virgin birth, and imagined an ordinary explanation for the conception of the Child. Origen of Alexandria writes, “But [Celsus] disbelieves the accounts of His conception by the Holy Ghost, and believes that [Jesus] was begotten by one Panthera, who corrupted the Virgin” (Against Celsus, 1.69).[3] Origen elsewhere identifies Panthera as a solider who committed an act of adultery with the Virgin (Against Celsus, 1.32-33). (Though not to be mistaken with the heavy metal band Pantera associated with the late guitarist “Dimebag” Darrel =p).
James Tabor, Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, likewise, purports, “the Joseph who married the pregnant Mary was not the father of Jesus. Jesus’ father remains unknown but possibly was named Pantera, and if so, was quite possibly a Roman solider.”[4] But the evidence for Tabor’s assertion is tissue paper thin — natural explanations about the virgin’s conception proposed by ancient skeptics like Celus, a tomb in Germany dating to the first century of one Tiberius Julius Abdes Pantera of Sidon, and Mark’s mention of Jesus visiting Sidon and Tyre (Mk. 7:24, 31).[5] This hardly makes the case for adultery.
What Celsus offers is a mere insult. New Testament scholar Craig Evans points out “The allegation that Jesus’ real father was a man named Pantera (or Panthera) exploits Christians’ claim that Jesus was born of a ‘virgin’ (Greek, parthenos). It was nothing more than a play on words. Pantera was the closest sound-alike name, and was a name of soldiers, so Jesus’ conception was suggested to be not that of a virgin, a parthenos, but that of a soldier, a man named Panthera. We have here nothing more than slander and rebuttal. We have no actual archeological evidence that can with any probability be linked to Jesus.”[6]
Circulation of naturalistic stories about Christ being the son of an illicit relationship between Pantera and Mary are fueled by minds closed to the supernatural. But we need to keep an open mind to extraordinary possibilities.
“For nothing will be impossible with God” (Lk. 1:37). God exists; therefore, miracles are possible. Not that the natural processes that happen within the universe can be turned off and on according to some external mind or force, but that personal being outside the universe can intervene with the happenings inside the universe.
When we talk about miracles, we consider the happening to be “an intervention by an outside agent into the affairs of this world causing events that otherwise would not have happened. This, however, involved no violation of the laws of nature.”[7]
A ceramic cup can fall of the counter and smash to bits upon the hard floor. On the other hand, I can catch the cup before it hits the floor, suspending it in midair with the palm of my hand. It is never that the gravitational constant ceases to operate. Rather, the palm of my hand intervenes in the process of the falling cup, which would never suspend in midair without my intervention. If there is a God, then then miracles are possible, and God can suspend the cup in midair without strings, special effects, or sleight-of-hand magic. An axe head can float upon the water because God intervenes within the operations of nature (cf. 2 Kgs. 6:1-7). The gravitational constant has never ceased. No need to even alter the surface tension and viscosity of liquid H2O in this instance. But God is the one to lift the axe head to the surface of the water. Without supernatural intervention the axe head will be subject to natural processes of things and sink to the bottom of the river.
Concerning the virgin conception, C.S. Lewis writes, “If God creates a miraculous spermatozoon in the body of a virgin, it does not proceed to break any laws. The laws at once take it over. Nature is ready. Pregnancy follows, according to all the normal laws, and nine months later a child is born…The divine art of miracle is not an art of suspending the pattern to which events conform but of feeding new events into that pattern.”[8] Not all questions can be easily answered about God becoming a man. God works in mysterious ways. But belief that the virgin birth came as the result of supernatural intervention is an exercise of well-reasoned faith.
Miracles are possible, if God exists and the existence of God is undeniable. All existence, the visible and invisible, the very cosmos we dwell, presupposes a Maker. Put it another way: “According to modern science, the universe not only had a beginning, but it is unfathomably fine-tuned to support life. Not only so, but the origin of life, information in the genetic code, irreducible complexity in biological systems, and the phenomenon of the human mind pose intractable difficulties for merely natural explanations. Reason, therefore, forces us to look beyond the natural world to a supernatural Designer who periodically intervenes in the affairs of His created handiwork.”[9]
“The central miracle asserted by Christians is the Incarnation” writes Lewis, who further states, “they say that God became Man. Every other miracle prepares for this, or exhibits this, or results from this.”[10] A virgin conceived and bore a Child. That Child is none than Yahweh coming to dwell with His people. The Son of the Most High. The first Christmas was a glorious occasion. The angels of heaven could hardly contain themselves. Their voices rang out throughout the whole of creation. Even God saw fit to unzip the veil of invisibility to allow lowly shepherds watching their flocks in the fields to witness the concert of all concerts. The angels sang, “Glory to God in the highest | and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!” (Lk. 2:14). If we just close our eyes and listen intently, we can still hear their song reverberating throughout the cosmos. We can even join with the angels in singing praises to one true Triune God of the universe who came to be with us upon the first Christmas.
Veiled in flesh the Godhead see,
Hail th’incarnate Deity!
Pleased as man with men to dwell,
Jesus our Immanuel.
— WGN
[1] All Scripture cited from The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016) unless noted.
[2] Paul Chamberlain, Why People Stop Believing (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2018), 183
[3] All quotations from Origen cited from The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 4, ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, trans. Frederick Crombie (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Company, 1885).
[4] James Tabor, The Jesus Dynasty: The Hidden History of Jesus, His Royal Family, and the Birth of Christianity (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2006), 72.
[5] Cf. Tabor, 64-72.
[6] Craig A. Evans, Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels (Downers Grove, Inter-Varsity Press, 2006), 219
[7] Chamberlain, 174. C.S. Lewis puts it this way: “Miracle is, from the point of view of the scientist, a form of doctoring, tampering, (if you like) cheating. It introduces a new factor into the situation, namely supernatural force, which the scientist had not reckoned on. He calculates what will happen, or what must have happened on a past occasion, in the belief that the situation, at that point of space and time, is or was A. But if supernatural force has been added, then the situation really is or was AB. And no one knows better than the scientist that AB cannot yield the same result as A” (C.S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study [New York: HarperOne, 1947, 2001], 92-93).
[8] Lewis, 94.
[9] Hank Hanegraaff, The Complete Bible Answer Book Collector’s Edition Revised and Updated (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2008, 2016), 260. Paul Chamberlain, likewise, states, “Once we allow the possibility of a supernatural agent such as God who created the entire natural order, there seems no good reason to think such an agent could not intervene into this natural order and cause events which otherwise would not happen. When they do, they will defy normal explanation; that is the essence of a miracle” (Chamberlain, 195). For further related reading, see James N. Anderson, “The Inescapability of God,” Christian Research Journal, 40, 5 [2017]: https://www.equip.org/articles/the-inescapability-of-god/; Melissa Cain Travis, “A Grand Cosmic Resonance: How the Structure and Comprehensibility of the Universe Reveal a Mindful Maker,” Christian Research Journal, 41, 1 [2018]: https://www.equip.org/articles/a-grand-cosmic-resonance/; Trent Horn, “Thomas Aquinas’s Five Proofs for God Revisited,” Christian Research Journal, 41, 2 [2018]: https://www.equip.org/articles/thomas-aquinass-five-proofs-for-god-revisited/
[10] Lewis,, 171.
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