Just Another Virgin Birth? Parallels in World Religions

One of the enduring myths among modern critics of Christianity is that there isn’t anything truly new in it. The Christian religion is a mere miscellany of moral teachings dressed up in tall tales borrowed from the common stock of the world’s religions.

As we draw near to Advent, we’ll likely hear that the idea of a virgin giving birth to a special son is at once not essential to the Christian message and not original to it, either.

On the first count, we’ll be told that only (!) two of the gospels (Matthew and Luke) even imply the idea, while no epistles teach it as an article of faith. Let’s dispense with this argument immediately.

The virgin birth shows up in God’s inspired Word as true. GLuke, for instance, shows Mary wondering aloud how she can possibly conceive when she has not had sex—and GMatthew has repeated references to the divine origin of Mary’s conception (1:18, 20).

Luke drops another clue later as he refers to Jesus as “the son, so it was thought, of Joseph” (3:23). Matthew says something similar as he concludes Jesus’ genealogy with Mary, not Joseph: “and Jacob the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, and Mary was the mother of Jesus who is called the Messiah” (1:16).

How many times does God need to tell us something for us to accept it as revelation?

Moreover, the virgin birth makes sense of what Christians have concluded about the nature of the incarnation as the Son of God becoming also the Son of Man. Divine fathering and human mothering cohere with the dual natures of Jesus Christ better than any alternative.

(And don’t let anyone hang you up on pseudo-scholarship about the Hebrew and Greek behind the word “virgin.” Yes, Isaiah 7:14 can be, and sometimes is, translated “young woman.” But in that culture, young women were presumed to be virgins, and in the Old Testament, the word bethulah invariably denotes such a person. Furthermore, parthenos, the Greek word used for Mary in the New Testament, also usually means virgin—male or female—as any good lexicon will attest.)

Denying the virgin birth, in fact, is never an isolated enterprise. It is never a matter of mere scholarly curiosity. Probe just a little bit, and you’ll find such any such challenge is ingredient in a general assault on orthodoxy on behalf of a different understanding of Jesus and in the service of, indeed, a different gospel.

Parallels around the World?

On the second count, the focus of this post, we’ll be told that virgin births have happened all over the world—including such luminaries as the Hindu gods Krishna and Ganesh, the twin founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus, the Egyptian god Horus, and even (in some epics) the Buddha himself.

Similar claims of “borrowing,” with the implication that each version is as good as another, show up all over religious scholarship. The flood narrative of Noah? The resurrection of Jesus? The subduing of Satan? There are lots of flood stories, lots of gods coming back to life, and lots of dragons and serpents being overcome by heroes—from Heracles to St. George to Beowulf. Nothing to see here, folks, just move along.

Bestselling books have brought such a “comparative religions” approach to the general public, from James Frazer’s Golden Bough (1890) to Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949)—to dozens of books since then. The scholarly pursuit of such parallels is known as Religionsgeschichte—the “History of Religions”—as pioneered in the nineteenth century by Max Müller, advanced by Ernest Troeltsch in the early twentieth, and then spread by the likes of Mircea Eliade, editor of the famous Encyclopedia of Religion (1987) and author of the multivolume History of Religious Ideas (original of volume one in French, 1976).

Most educated Christians, however, will have encountered such work in Bible commentaries, especially on the Old Testament. (Indeed, the “History of Religions School” points specifically to Biblical and theological scholars at the University of Göttingen in the 1890s.)

Such commentaries point out parallels to Biblical narratives and themes in Ancient Near Eastern literature, from Egypt to Sumeria. Some of that work commendably helps us understand the Bible better, and we should welcome its illumination as it helps us more fully enter the thought-world of the early writers and readers. “Ah! So that’s what’s going on there!” is a frequent experience in such reading.

Some of this work, alas, has demonstrably been aimed at undercutting any sense that the Bible deserves special treatment as inspired scripture. The Holy Bible—the Unique Book—is reduced to merely the Hebrew or Christian version of generic tales and topics.

3 Ways to Think Better about These Similarities

What are faithful and thoughtful Christians to make of this enterprise? Three good rules of thumb come to mind.

1. Beware “similarity equals identity.”  The downward drag of reductionism lurks nearby in these conversations. Since Osiris in the Egyptian pantheon and Tammuz/Adonis in the Greek died and were raised back to life, then the story of Jesus is just one more element in this general set of “dying-and-rising gods.”

The too-easy equation—“This looks something like that ergo this and that are the same thing”—is everywhere in the History of Religions. Liberty trees (normally elms) in New England mark central gathering places and symbolize their communities as do banyan trees in India. Are they therefore, religiously speaking, the same thing?

No, they aren’t. The American concept of liberty implies the equality of all people, democratic government, and freedom of religion, among other basic linkages. Such ideas would be unthinkable in an ancient Hindu town governed by the varna/caste social system, the karma/dharma ethical system, and religious exclusivism.

Jesus’ resurrection is fundamentally different from that of the supposed parallels in several respects. Chief among the differences is the Christian belief that the One True God died on behalf of God’s errant creatures, us human beings. Christianity's main hope, furthermore, is that in the wake of Christ’s resurrection, all who follow Jesus can expect to enjoy resurrection as well. There are no parallels to such basic Christian doctrines in any other of the world's religions.

2. Beware “uniqueness is better.” The great Christian scholar of Islamic law, the University of London’s J. N. D. Anderson, wrote a careful book in defense of Christianity’s uniqueness among the world’s religions, Christianity and Comparative Religions (1970), released in revised form as Christianity and World Religions (1984).

Sir Norman’s book makes the case that Christianity does indeed offer the world a unique proclamation of a unique saviour bringing a unique salvation. This book remains the best I know of in setting out the uniqueness of the Christian religion against all supposed parallels.

Nonetheless, a crucial qualifying idea must come alongside this declaration of uniqueness. For what ultimately matters in religion, as in any other domain in which big ideas contend with each other, is not uniqueness.

The kookiest idea will be unique, but it remains of no consequence because it is transparently wrong. And there is a trivial sense in which every religion is not exactly like any other, so all of them are unique. So what?

What matters above all is twofold: that Christianity's main idea—God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself (2 Cor. 5:19)—is indeed unique and also true.

Moreover, we want truth in two respects: (1) the binary sense of “true or false,” yes or no, real or fake; and (2) the sense of adequacy to the occasion. We need truth to correspond so well to the issue at hand as to provide a description sufficient to understand and navigate the situation successfully.

What we look for in a map is not a map unlike every other one. We might prudently be inclined to distrust a map of Vancouver that claimed to be completely different from every other map of that city ever produced.

What we want is a map that is not false, but true. Furthermore, what we need is one that is accurate enough to tell us what we need to know in order to guide us where we want to go.

The Christian claim is that the gospel is both unique and true. It is not false, and it is adequate to its purpose: not to describe the entire universe in complete detail, but to depict and to facilitate our salvation.

3. Beware post hoc, ergo propter hoc and “correlation versus causation.” With this double-barrelled caution we encounter two plausible, but mistaken, ideas: (a) since Y occurred after X, X must have caused Y plus (b) the idea that since X seems to occur always before and then with Y, then X must be somehow causing Y.

Take the genre of "flood stories." Does an earlier version of a flood story mean that a later version is reliant upon it, even derivative of it? Not necessarily.

Consider a conflict in which the Green Army defeats the Purple Army. Likely the victorious Green Army will send out its account of the battle more quickly and powerfully than the weakened and demoralized Purple Army. But when, eventually, the Purple Army proclaims its own account of what happened, we would expect that the Purple Version is not merely caused by the Green Version, nor even reliant upon it.

Similarity of narratives can be explained in a variety of ways. Perhaps the same experience is reported by different participants. Perhaps similar, but not identical, experiences are reported by various people. Maybe there are a lot of flood stories because, not to put to fine a point on the matter, there was a flood. Or maybe there have been (keep up with me, now) lots of floods—and big floods make quite an impact on the landscape and on the memory.

Christians have wondered about this question of similar tropes and themes in other worldviews from the very beginning. Over the centuries, perhaps the most common theological explanation is the idea of the praeparatio evangelica.

This is the title, in fact, of one of the earliest church histories, penned by Eusebius in the fourth century. Eusebius followed in the train of still earlier Christian writers, such as Justin Martyr, to claim that the best qualities—the best virtues, the best teachings, and the best stories—of all the religions he knew of were gifts of God to the various peoples of the world. And God had given those gifts to prepare each people to recognize and accept the superior goodness of the gospel when it arrived among them.

In our day, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien are most often cited for their sense that the elements in other folk traditions that seem similar to the gospel were given by God as “good dreams,” as anticipations of the “true myth” that would arrive in the Story of Jesus.

(I can't resist: perhaps we could say they were "inklings" of the gospel.)

Missionaries, after all, are teachers of the new, and good teachers strive to find ways to connect the new thing they are teaching with something their audiences already know—to the unknown from the known, to the novel from the familiar. Without any common ground, how could anyone even understand, let alone be interested in considering seriously, the Christian message?

To be sure, great differences remain. The great scholar of religion Rudolph Otto wrote a profound apologetic on behalf of Christianity indicating some common ground among at least some of the world’s religions in The Idea of the Holy (1917).

He also recognized, however, that the major religions of the world remain stark alternatives to Christianity. They turn on different axes; they move to different dynamics. They aren't just anticipations of Christianity, as the religion of the Old Testament clearly was. They are different ways that lead to different outcomes. Conversion to Christ remains necessary: a change of outlook, of heart, and of life in devotion to Jesus of Nazareth as Lord and Saviour.

Still, the Christian religion could be seen, and should be seen, as taking up the best of this or that religion into the final revelation of God in Christ as expressed in the Bible. In the once-for-all mighty deeds of God in the incarnation, life, ministry, suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, followed by the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, God opened The Way Back to himself and The Way Forward to the world to come.

That is the fundamental uniqueness and fundamental truth of Christianity: what God did, does, and will do as articulated in the Scripture and experienced in the Spirit and the Church. The other religions in the world can be fascinating and even inspiring. As one who has studied and taught them for more than four decades, I can attest to their attractive qualities. Rising above them all, however, like Kilimanjaro over the hillocks of the Serengeti, is the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

There is a lot to celebrate at Christmas. Don’t let anyone diminish it for you!