Why Saint Mark doesn’t have to ruin your Christmas

Then Jesus entered a house, and again a crowd gathered, so that he and his disciples were not even able to eat. When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him, for they said, “He is out of his mind.”

[💃🏽Intermission💃🏽]

Then Jesus’ mother and brothers arrived. Standing outside, they sent someone in to call him. A crowd was sitting around him, and they told him, “Your mother and brothers are outside looking for you.” “Who are my mother and my brothers?” he asked. Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.” [Mark 3:20-21, 31-35 – NIV]

I remember vividly when this section of Mark’s gospel was first called to my attention.

For the first time in my life I had really been wrestling carefully with my Christian faith, and although I desperately hoped I wouldn’t land too far from where I started, I was too deep into the exhilaration/terror of it all to cut that exploration abruptly short.

I was trying to work through (what felt at the time like) very knotty issues of faith, belief, evidence, miracles, historical methodology, and how they all intersect with one another. And then this episode in Mark fell right into my lap. The clouds parted, the skies opened, dazzling rays of sun shone upon me, and I could see with pristine clarity:

Mary had never heard of the virgin birth.

I could see it plainly on the page in front of me. Clear even in English translations. No pained introspections necessary about whether I was inadvertently smuggling an undue (even wicked) “anti-supernaturalistic bias” into my engagement with the text. Or difficult explorations of complex and widely disputed nuances, say, of ancient Greek grammar, or of conditions in first century Palestine.

Some textual background is indeed helpful here, but it’s not very complicated. The only two books in the Christian New Testament that contain any mention of the virgin birth are the gospels of Matthew and Luke. You won’t find it anywhere in the letters of Paul (and he even gave himself a rather low hanging opportunity to mention it), or in the gospels of Mark or John, or anywhere else.

Furthermore, the thoroughgoing consensus of New Testament scholars–even quite conservative ones–is that Matthew and Luke are among the latest New Testament documents to have been written. Later than the authentic letters of Paul, and most notably for my purposes here, later than the gospel of Mark, which they use as a source.

The standard apologetic response is that this is a weak argument of omission. The non-gospel writers weren’t trying to provide biographies of Jesus’ life, so why expect a mention of the virgin birth from them? And although it’s surprising that Mark and John don’t mention it, neither do they deny it.

But as it turns out, actually Mark does deny it.

Or at least, he comes as close to denying it as could be expected of someone who had never heard of such a tradition. He does so in chapter 3 of his gospel, quoted at the outset of this essay.

In the first three chapters of Mark, we see Jesus embarking on a radical and controversial ministry. Driving out demons, healing lepers, preaching “with authority,” eating with “tax collectors and sinners,” flaunting fasting traditions and Sabbath regulations, and “blaspheming” against God by forgiving sins. Already drawing large crowds of fawning devotees, and enraging the religious establishment.

So along come his “mother and brothers” to take him away, to save him from himself. Mary herself thinks that Jesus had gone crazy.

The same Mary who, supposedly, had been visited by an angelic messenger, telling her that Jesus would be the “Son of God” who would reign forever on the “throne of his father David.” Who had virginally conceived Jesus. Who had witnessed foreign kings and angelic choirs worshipping her son. Who had heard weeping songs about him from prophets and prophetesses. Who had fled to Egypt and back again, because Jesus was so exceptional and threatening even as an infant that King Herod wanted him dead. Who had found Jesus schooling the religious elites in the Jerusalem temple, as a boy of just 12 years old. The same Mary who had “treasured all these things in her heart.” (None of this is found in Mark, by the way. Only in Matthew and Luke.)

But perhaps by the time Jesus’ 30th birthday bash rolled around, some of this had lost its luster for Mary? All that early promise seemed to have evaporated in a cloud of marijuana smoke, buried with stale cheetos beneath the cushions of her living room couch, on which he still resided?

And that makes even less sense if we’re to regard as a historical fact the water-into-wine episode (found in John’s gospel, the latest of the four). In which Mary herself provides the initial push for Jesus’ ministry, by prompting him to perform his first miracle.

Assuming a virgin birth, it *might* still be understandable if Mary was nevertheless surprised and taken aback by the opening moves of Jesus’ ministry. And so she sought him out to discuss the matter with him privately, to clear up any misunderstanding. But as Mark has it, she’s simply made up her mind that he’s crazy, and she comes with his brothers to forcibly take him away, in a public setting. And Jesus’ response confirms this as well: Rather than taking them aside for a patient conversation, he avoids them altogether and even appears to disown them (vs 33-35).

(Incidentally, apologetic responses to this text appear to be few and far between, and they tend to consist of admissions that, yes, this episode is certainly surprising. But hey, Mary was human too, whatcha gonna do.)

By contrast, what actually does make sense–and this is what Mark assumes–is that there was nothing particularly unique about Jesus’ birth and childhood. As Mark tells it, Jesus’ baptism is the first noteworthy glimpse of big things to come: the Spirit of God descends upon him like a dove and the voice of God calls out from heaven, “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.” And then he starts kicking ass and taking names. So it’s no surprise at all that Mary and his brothers are shocked and deeply concerned by the opening moves of Jesus’ ministry. And Mark’s not embarrassed by this fact–why should he be? In fact, it only serves to better underscore how awesome Jesus is, because he overcomes the skepticism even of his own family. (And it might have further served as a convenient dig at the James-led faction of early Christians.)

Another detail that’s very telling: In their parallel accounts of this Mark 3 episode, Matthew and Luke censor and sanitize the uncomfortable bits. Not uncomfortable for Mark, but uncomfortable for them, because they’re now spinning stories of virgin births and angelic messengers, etc, and they know it’s therefore not going to fly to say that Mary initially thought Jesus was crazy. In fact, they abridge and censor the episode so much that it no longer makes any sense: Mary and Jesus’ brothers show up for no apparent reason, and Jesus gives them the cold shoulder, again for no apparent reason.

So, if Jesus wasn’t virgin born, why might Matthew and Luke have invented stories to that effect?

One possibility is that Jesus’ birth may have been associated with scandal; his paternity may have been unknown. Joseph is almost completely absent from the Christian New Testament. He isn’t mentioned in Mark (who refers to Jesus–rather curiously given the norms at the time–as “Mary’s son”) or in any earlier document. He’s only mentioned in the gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John. John names him merely in passing, and Matthew and Luke offer only the barest of details about this mysterious figure. They can’t even agree who Joseph’s father was: Matthew has his father as “Jacob” whereas Luke has his father as “Heli.” Furthermore, John chapter 8 tells of a heated exchange between Jesus and the Pharisees, in which they say, “We are not illegitimate children” [in contrast to you, Jesus]. Might that indicate scandalous rumors regarding Jesus’ birth? Also of note is that within his chapter 1 genealogy, Matthew appears to repeatedly imply that God can make lemonade from the lemons of sexual impropriety.

Another possibility, not mutually exclusive with the first, is that Matthew and Luke wanted to exalt Jesus’ birth in order to supplement his status as God’s son. Perhaps as a direct subversion of Rome: Caesar Augustus called himself “Divi filius” (Son of God) and was said to have been fathered by Apollo. This possibility in particular suggests the virgin birth may have been intended more as a symbolic motif than as a literal account.

In any event, whatever their exact motivations might have been, Matthew’s and Luke’s virgin birth narratives would have served as apologetic tools in one form or another. And the fact that their accounts are vastly different and difficult to reconcile with one another–while introducing historical oddities such as incorrect names and dates, a bizarre census, a dubious slaughter of innocents, and a miraculous star–further suggests that they were inventing their narratives whole cloth. Based on the bullet points (ie, Mary, Joseph, Bethlehem, miracle) of a virgin birth tradition that had started circulating among the early Christians after Mark’s gospel had been written.

(John, by the way, has no need of that hypothesis. He’s moved on to regarding Jesus as the incarnation of the eternal pre-existent Logos of God. No need, then, to get potentially sidetracked by awkward and irrelevant details about Holy Spirit sperm bringing Jesus into existence.)

So does all of this have to ruin your Christmas?

I borrowed my title here from a video series by Greg Boyd, responding to a nativity article written by secular New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman. (Speaking of Ehrman, here’s his quick and accessible summary of grammatical issues in the Mark 3 episode.) I like Greg Boyd, I’ve met him and attended his church in St Paul, I admire him as one of the rare voices against militarism and nationalism among American evangelicals, and by all appearances he seems like a thoroughly decent guy. I can’t say however that his apologetic work fares much better than the standard offerings. And it’s suffused with the same existential angst as the rest: if Christ had not been raised, then we might as well “all go live in a fucking log cabin.”

In reply, I can do no better than to very slightly adapt the gospel of Grinch:

“Poo poo to the Whos,” he was Grinchily humming. “They’re finding out now that no Christmas is coming! They’re just waking up, I know just what they’ll do. Their mouths will hang open a minute or two, then the Whos down in Whoville will all cry ‘boo hoo!’ That’s a noise,” grinned the Grinch, “that I simply must hear.” He paused, and the Grinch put a hand to his ear. And he did hear a sound rising over the snow. It started in low, then it started to grow…

But this, this sound wasn’t sad. Why, this sound sounded glad! Every Who down in Whoville, the tall and the small, was singing, without any virgin at all. He hadn’t stopped Christmas from coming. It came! Somehow or other, it came just the same. And the Grinch with his Grinch feet ice cold in the snow, stood puzzling and puzzling, “How could it be so? It came without donkeys, it came without sheep. It came without virgins a-drifting to sleep.”

He puzzled and puzzed till his puzzler was sore. Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before. “Maybe Christmas,” he thought, “doesn’t come through that door? Maybe Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more”…

Welcome Christmas, bring your cheer. Cheer to all Whos far and near. Christmas day is in our grasp, so long as we have hands to clasp. Christmas day will always be, just as long as we have we. Welcome Christmas while we stand, heart to heart and hand in hand.