Abstract
As the subtitle of this thoughtful and important book hints, Lincoln’s aim is to prod fellow Christians to think more carefully and insightfully about Jesus’s birth. Repeatedly identifying himself as holding a traditional Christian faith, including a ‘high’ view of Scripture, he insists that his call to reconsider the place of a literal ‘virgin birth’ account of Jesus’s origin does not stem from a simplistic liberalism. Instead, Lincoln posits that there are solid reasons from within Christian faith that justify (perhaps even require) believers to consider questions about the virgin birth of Jesus with an openness to the sort of thinking demonstrated in this impressive study.
One of Lincoln’s emphases is that there appears to be a certain diversity in the New Testament about Jesus’ birth. The virgin-birth tradition rests entirely on the nativity narratives in the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke. But other New Testament writings/writers seem to have no knowledge of this tradition. Paul, for example, refers to Jesus’s Davidic lineage (Rom. 1:3-4), just as Hebrews emphasizes Jesus’ descent from Judah (Heb. 7:14), and the Gospel of John simply asserts that the divine Logos ‘became flesh’ (John 1:14). Lincoln plausibly proposes that these writings and writers appear to assume that Jesus was conceived through two human parents. Yet, unquestionably, these same writings reflect ‘high’ views of Jesus’s person and significance.
Lincoln also traces the historical process by which the virgin-birth tradition became dominant in the early centuries, and how the idea functioned across these times. In Ignatius of Antioch, Jesus’s birth of Mary featured against docetic and ‘gnostic’ denials of Jesus’s true humanity. But in later centuries (e.g., Augustine), emphasis on the virginal conception idea served to protect Jesus from the taint of ‘original sin’ thought of as a taint transmitted through semen (a notion now widely rejected).
In the two concluding chapters, Lincoln addresses contemporary Christian concerns ironically and thoughtfully, contending that believers can be free to regard the virgin-birth narratives as reflecting a Roman-era biographical trope (not as literal historical events), and that taking virgin-birth literally relies on (and requires) a pre-scientific view of human procreation. Indeed, he contends that for contemporary Christians a literal virgin-birth may even involve a danger of failing to do justice to Jesus’s authentic humanity, which is essential to affirm for a proper understanding of salvation.
This book should be engaged with the same thoughtfulness, patience, and dedication to authentic Christian faith with which Lincoln has written it. He has produced a case for traditional Christians to reconsider the virgin-birth, and for those of more liberal persuasion also to think with greater care about Christian faith.