Table of Contents
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Parent:: VirginBirth
Bear in mind, the first two chapters are not in the EarlyEbioniteMatthew, and if Luke is subsequently derived from Matthew, they would not be in an EbioniteCanon either.
How Do We know Virgin Birth Account was not Originally Present?
From jesuswordsonly.com/topicindex/225-virgin-birth-issues.html
The one most important fact staring us in the face is the line of the geneaology itself. Both Matthew and Luke are spending verse after verse tracing Joseph's lineage, only to have one line at the end stop short of Joseph begetting Jesus. This makes utterly no sense. Friedrich Delitzsch in 1908, a theologian, rhetorically asks 'why did Matthew or Luke bother to trace as they did if it originally ended with Mary as the sole human procreator of Jesus?' He wrote:
Common sense teaches us that these genealogies, whose sole aim is
to prove that Jesus is the son and descendent of David through
Joseph, the son and descendent of David, would be absolutely
meaningless and useless if Joseph had not been the father of Jesus
according to the flesh, if his fatherhood were only in appearance
and Jesus were [only] a son of Mary. (F. Delitzsch, Whose Son is
Christ?: Two Lectures on Progress in Religion (1908) at 35.)
In Luke's account it is even more obvious that the virgin birth is not original. First, just as in Matthew, the 'begat' verse is out of place with the line of descent which Luke presents for Joseph, not Mary. Also, the virgin birth account appears elsewhere mentioned in just one verse in Luke's gospel. So if you removed the genealogy ending and that single verse, you would have no idea that Luke believed in a virgin birth of Jesus. Finally, what makes it more obvious an editor added the virgin birth account to Luke's Gospel is the presence of the story in Luke 8:19-21.
This later passage in Luke which surely is authentic makes it extraordinarily hard to believe Mary experienced a miraculous virgin birth as recorded in Luke 1:35. For in Luke 8:19-21, it is clear that Jesus' family regards that Jesus has gone over the deep-end and do not believe in Him.
(In the Mark version, Mark says Jesus' family thought he had gone "crazy" -- including his mother.)
In fact, Mary is among those outside who are understood to fit in this category. The same is self-evident in Mark 3:31 where the same scene is depicted -- Jesus' mother and siblings come to get him, and Jesus' spurns them because He prefers the persons who fit the criteria of his true family in Mark 3:34-35 which in their hearing was:
And he looked round about on them which sat about him, and said,
Behold my mother and my brethren! For whosoever shall do the will of
God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother. Cf. Luke 8:21.
If Mary had really experienced a divine birth of Jesus, why would Mary be apart from Jesus' ministry? Be thinking He was a bit touched? Why would Jesus spurn his own mother, and call members of a crowd more a mother to him than his own birth mother?
Thus, we know the single line added to Luke to mention a virgin birth was a later editor's hand. It was not skillful enough to think to erase Luke 8:19-21 which was at direct odds with the single-line addition.
In fact, here is Tertullian in the 200s unwittingly proving this point in his discussion of Luke 8:19-21. Tertullian is not comparing this passage to the virgin birth story to show how paradoxically it tells us that Mary was a nonbeliever. However, we can borrow Tertullian's point to see Luke would not have recorded a virgin birth account and tell this story in Luke 8:19-21 as it exists now, but certainly not in how Luke read in the early 200s when Tertullian summarizes it. They 100% do not fit together.
Tertullian from the early 200s AD begins his comment on this passage by reasoning that the Gospel portrays a very realistic situation that can happen in any family where no one respects you. Tertullian explained:
"The Lord's brethren had not yet believed in Him." [Quoting Luke.]
So is it contained in the Gospel which was published before
Marcion's time; whilst there is at the same time a want of
evidence of His mother's adherence to Him, although the Marthas
and the other Marys were in constant attendance on Him. In this
very passage indeed, their unbelief is evident. Jesus was teaching
the way of life, preaching the kingdom of God and actively engaged
in healing infirmities of body and soul; but all the while, whilst
strangers were intent on Him, His very nearest relatives were
absent. (Tertullian, The Flesh of Christ, ch. 5.)
Hence, we can take Tertullian's analysis and use it to question the presence of the virgin birth story in Luke's original Gospel. How can Mary, if she truly experienced a virgin birth and the angel-explanation have been a non-believer, as Luke records? Also, wouldn't Mary have told Jesus' brothers and sisters of this miraculous birth so as to have them acknowledge Jesus as Messiah? But they too are described as non-believers—as if no miraculous birth ever touched this family. Thus, is it so hard to realize that if you remove just one verse from Luke (besides the last ‘begat' from Mary alone), the virgin birth account entirely disappears.
Because the presence of the virgin birth story is so incongruous with Luke 8:19-21, it appears the virgin birth account was a one-line addition to Luke's Gospel. It was an inauthentic editorial change. Both it and the genealogy in Luke are not original.
Similarly, in Luke 2:41-42, Mary says to Jesus that she and "your father" were worried when they lost track of him. Would Mary think to call Joseph Jesus' father unless he truly were? Also, when Jesus responds and says he was about his "Father's" business, neither Joseph nor Mary understood what Jesus meant. Does that make sense if a virgin birth happened, and angelic messengers spoke as they supposedly did to advise of its importance, as recorded supposedly earlier? Obviously not. Hence, the virgin birth account in Luke mismatches other portions of Luke, indicating a successful early -- pre-325 AD -- corruption.
And if we regard the Ebionæans as the custodians of the earliest Matthew in Hebrew, prior to the Greek translation, then the recording in 180, 236 and when the Syriac Sinaiticus of Agnes Lewis (200s) of having the view Joseph begat Jesus is just one more proof of how the Gospel of Matthew originally read.
=== Scholar Affirms That Later Editor Deliberately Corrupted Text to Add Virgin Birth
This is agreed upon by J.R. Wilkinson - a renown Christian scholar of his day -- in his article "Mr. Conybeare's Textual Theories, Hibbert Journal, October 1902, p. 96," Hibbert' Journal (1904) at 354 et seq. We read at page 358 (link) the following text:
The reading of Syrus Sinaiticus [of Agnes Lewis] Joseph to whom
was betrothed Mary the Virgin begat Jesus who was called the
Christ is clearly due to a mixture of the Western text with the
reading of the original genealogy. [Note: the Western text has the
virgin birth.] It carries us back to the early days when the
canonical gospel was competing with the source or sources from
which it was derived. We have here perhaps a conscious
corruption of the canonical text for we find that in Syriac
Sinaiticus agrees with the famous Old Latin manuscript in omitting
the words mix é y vwo xev a1i ri1v Ewg [MY NOTE: verse 25,
'before they came together, found with child" omitted in Old Latin
and Syriac Sinaiticus thus proving the Older manuscripts did not
have virgin birth.] The reading of Syriac Sinaiticus [of 1:25]
here is he took his wife and she bore to him a son and he called
his name Jesus. The reading of Timothy and Aquila is as Schmiedel
says a confluence from the Textus Receptus [i.e., Virgin
Birth] and the original genealogy [i.e., "Joseph begat Jesus."]
The article continues and weighs the possibility that the "canonical evangelist" (not Matthew) may have not been sure which way to go, and left traces of the original version -- Joseph begat Mary, while trying to conform to the newer virgin birth account. He calls the "Davidic Messiahship" idea was the "old Davidic idea" which was gradually being displaced by the newer "supernatural birth idea" in the mind of the "canonical evangelist" himself. The article ends suggesting that the "canonical evangelist" was not the original compiler of the sayings in Matthew, and that he used a version of Matthew "much in favor in the church" which had the older text, and then would "corrupt by mixture the old text," i.e., mixing mention of the "virgin Mary" in 1:16 with "Joseph begat Jesus." So now it reads in Syr Sinaiticus 1:16 partly in favor of a virgin birth and partly negating it.
The scholar Wilkinson earlier had agreed on why we are compelled to believe both Matthew and Luke had to have something like "Joseph begat Jesus." Otherwise, the point of the geneologies is lost:
The text of Syrus Sinaiticus [of Agnes Lewis] alone seems to
postulate such a clause [i.e., Joseph begat Jesus -- it is not
merely postulated but in the text]; and is it possible to believe
anyone would have taken the trouble to construct the long line of
natural descent if at the last step natural descent were to play
no part? This inconsistency is best seen in the geneaology of
St. Luke, where as Holtzmann [Ham-Kommentatur Zum N.T.] justly
remarks, it is absurd to assume an evangelist would take the
trouble to construct the long geneaology of our Lord through
Joseph, and then as it were, spoil all that he had done by adding
that Jesus was only "accounted" or supposed to the son of
Joseph. The construction of such genealogies presupposes natural
descent throughout. It is evident that in both St. Matthew and
Luke correction has taken place [356] (in the case of St. Luke a
very clumsy correction), so as to render these genealogies
consistent with a virgin birth.