Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Did Luke's gospel originally contain a virgin birth? By Bart D. Ehrman, read by John Paul Middlesworth a couple of weeks ago I gave a two lecture online course called Jesus the actual Son of Joseph, the New Testament evidence not connected with the blog. You can learn more about it on my website, ww barteh.com forward slash courses. It was an interesting experience for me, in part because it made me think of things and look into things I hadn't thought of or looked into before, and in part because it made me look back at some of the work I had done before but not thought about in a long time. That included a paper I gave 20 years ago now at the british New Testament conference, organized by Mark Goodacre, back when he was still teaching at the University of Birmingham in England. For this more recent course, I've reread the paper, not remembering it and having read it again, thought that it would be interesting to excerpt here on the blog. It was delivered for scholars of the New Testament, but I wrote it so that it would not be overly technical or jargony, and its basic ideas, whether I reached the right conclusions or not, seemed pretty important for anyone interested in the NT. The paper was Christ as divine man in text, disputed and apocryphal. I never published it, but, well, here it is. This will take four posts. I begin the paper after some standard throat clearing by making a preliminary remark about the topic.
[00:01:27] Some scholars have offered what they have termed historical studies of this kind of question, in what sense and when Jesus came to be seen as divine by focusing exclusively on exegesis of NT texts. I want to make the methodological point, however, that even for scholars interested simply in the early periods of Christianity, any decision to restrict the investigation to canonical texts in their final form is made not on historical but on theological grounds.
[00:01:56] If a historical investigation were in view, then other christian texts written at roughly the same time as those of the New Testament must be brought into view. Parts of the didachi, for example, are probably earlier than, say, the johannine epistles. The letters of Ignatius are earlier than second Peter, etc. This especially means non canonical apocryphal texts, especially gospels, in the narratives they relate should be examined with greater rigor if nothing else, in order to see what kinds of oral traditions lie at their roots, traditions that could feasibly move back into the NT period.
[00:02:31] Moreover, if a historical investigation were in view, then the manuscript tradition of the various texts should be taken into account more thoroughly, both to see what the so called original texts said, but also to see where the originals came to be changed in the early history of their transmission. In short, for an historical investigation, data other than just the NT documents in their final form need to be considered. In this paper. I would like to explore how such an investigation might be carried out by focusing principally on one of our early christian texts, the gospel according to Luke. As an opening thesis, I would like to contend that the quote unquote earliest version of Luke was particularly open to an adoptionistic reading, where Jesus was not seen as divine by nature, so to say, but as a human who was adopted by God to be his son.
[00:03:25] First, I should say a word about adoptionism as a christological option, not to provide any new information on the subject, but to stake out my position on the matter and so set up the rest of my paper. My view is the common one that we appear to have had, quote, adoptionistic christologies, unquote, for about as long as we've had christologies, that in fact these are the oldest christologies we know.
[00:03:49] I think the evidence is compelling, for example, that romans one, three through four is a pre pauline creedal fragment that celebrated the resurrection of Jesus as the moment in which he came to be appointed to be the Son of God. In its basic affirmation, this fragment concurs with the pre lukene statement taken over in Peter's speech of acts 1332, that the words of psalm two relate to God's glorification of Jesus at the resurrection. Quote, you are my son today I have begotten you, unquote, a view that is possibly echoed in Paul's Ariopagus speech, chapter 17, verse 31, that Jesus was appointed to be the future judge of the earth at his resurrection.
[00:04:32] Eventually this most primitive notion that the resurrection was the moment of Jesus's adoption to sonship, came to be modified as christians of the early decades began to think that Jesus was God's son during his entire ministry, in which case the voice from heaven spoke the words of psalm two at his baptism or for his entire life, in which case he was born the Son of God or for his eternal existence, in which case he was with God from eternity past.
[00:04:59] It's true that, as it turns out, one can trace these stages chronologically through our gospels, so that mark, our earliest gospel, appears to have Jesus as son of God at his baptism. Our later gospels, Matthew and Luke, have him as the son of God at his miraculous birth, and our final gospel, John, has him as the word of God in eternity past. But it would obviously be a mistake to think in terms of a neat linear development of christological views since our earliest author Paul already muddies the waters. My own view is that different christologies emerged at different times in different places, that different christologies emerged simultaneously in different places, that different christologies emerge simultaneously in the same places, and even more, that the same christologies emerged at different times or even at the same time in different places. And that's about as confusing as this paper gets.
[00:05:56] We know this final option to be true from later times, for example, where such disparate second century groups as the Jewish Christian Ebionites, or at least one sect of the group that for the sake of convenience we can label Ebionites and the Gentile Roman Christian Theodosians held in common the view that Jesus was a silos anthropos, a mere man, meaning that he was not by nature divine. It is striking that, according to the so called little labyrinth quoted by Eusebius in book five of his ecclesiastical history, the latter group, the Theodosians, who were followers of the roman cobbler Theodotus, who obviously had a lot of time on his hands while making shoes for a living, insisted vociferously that their view was the original understanding of the apostles and of the entire early christian tradition. Many scholars readily concede some such claim, at least with respect to the Ebionites, that this really was the oldest form of christological confession.
[00:06:54] Maybe some form of adoptionism was the original christology. In any event, back to my opening thesis, that the earliest version of Luke was particularly open to an adoptionistic reading, where Jesus was not seen as divine by nature but as a human who was adopted by God to be his son? It has widely been recognized that the infancy narrative of Luke, chapters one through two, were a secondary and later, possibly final addition to the gospel composed, that is, after the rest of the book, and probably acts, was written and then added on in the final stage of composition. But is it possible that the gospel actually circulated for a time without the first two chapters, and that, as probably happened with the Gospel of John and possibly in a different way with the Book of Acts, the Gospel was published in multiple editions, only one of which came to serve as the archetype for the surviving textual tradition?
[00:07:51] First, consider the standard arguments for seeing Luke, chapters one and two, as a secondary addition to the gospel with the breviso. If the gospel lacked most of chapters one and two, it probably began with what is now one, chapters one through four, the preface to the work, and then went directly to what is now chapter three, verse one one. It is widely conceded that the solemn dating of the appearance of John the Baptist in chapter three, verses one and two reads like the beginning, not the continuation, of the narrative quote. In the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, the word of God came to John the son of Zechariah in the wilderness, unquote.
[00:08:39] Two most of the central themes of chapters one and two, including the familial ties of John the Baptist and Jesus. Jesus's virginal conception and his birth in Bethlehem, are completely absent from the rest of the narrative, even though there were plenty of opportunities to mention them had they already been narrated.
[00:08:58] Three the genealogy of Jesus makes little sense in chapter three after his baptism, given the fact that he and his birth are already mentioned in chapter two and that would be the appropriate place to indicate his lineage. But if the gospel began in chapter three and the first thing that happened to Jesus was the declaration that he was the son of God in chapter three, verse 23, then his lineage back to God through Adam makes sense where it is. Number four. The Book of Acts summarizes the preceding narrative as involving what Jesus quote began to do and teach, unquote, acts one, one saying nothing of his birth. So too, in Peter's later summary of the Gospel quote beginning from Galilee after the baptism that John preached, unquote, chapter ten, verse 37.
[00:09:52] These data are well known, but some of the historical implications have not always been considered, since exegetes have tended to treat Luke's gospel as a whole, including the first two chapters. I don't want to make any definitive historical claim here, but I do wonder if it's possible that there was an earlier limited edition of Luke, a publication that did not get copied much but that was nonetheless in circulation, that lacked the first two chapters.
[00:10:20] I'll continue from here in the next post.
