Lecture 14 -- The Backward Movement of Christology
Summary Outline
In the previous two lectures, we saw that the earliest Christians believed
that by raising Jesus from the dead, God made him into a divine being.
In this lecture and the ones that follow, we will see that over time,
Christians came to consider this earliest Christological view inadequate, and
they began pushing the Christological “moment”-the point at which Jesus
was thought to have become divine-further back in history. Ultimately, they
came to believe that Jesus had never ever been “made” the Son of God but
had always been the Son of God-equal with God from the very beginning.
In this lecture, we will begin to trace that development.
I. Authors of the Gospels
A. As we’ve said, scholars are virtually united in thinking that Markwas the first Gospel, written around 70 C.E.; Matthew and Lukewere written 10 or 15 years later, around 80 to 85 C.E.; and Johnwas last, written around 90 to 95 C.E.
B. We continue to call these Gospels Matthew, Mark, Luke, andJohn, but the reality is that we don’t know who wrote them.The books are anonymous; the titles that ascribe them to two ofJesus’s disciples (Matthew and John) and to two of the intimatecompanions of the apostles (Mark and Luke) were added later byscribes copying these books.
C. The first author on record to say that these were the personswho wrote the books was a church father named Irenaeusaround 180 C.E. For many decades, then, the books hadcirculated anonymously.
D. Scholars are in wide agreement that the books were not written byany of Jesus’s own followers, who were illiterate, Aramaic-speakingJews from rural Palestine; these books were written by highlyeducated, Greek-speaking Christians from outside of Palestine.
E. Where these authors got their information about Jesus is a complicatedquestion. But it is almost certainly the case that they inherited theirstories from earlier traditions-possibly written and certainly oral.People told stories about Jesus for years until Mark wrote themdown, then Matthew and Luke, and then John. It does not take muchimagination to realize what happens to stories that are passed along inthe oral tradition: They are changed and even invented.
F. These are the stories that the Gospel writers inherited. We canexpect, then, that these stories will have different points of viewdepending on who told them, under what circumstances, for whatpurposes, and when.
G. As the stories of Jesus changed over the decades, so, too, did theviews of who he was. Christians from the very begirming had aremarkably exalted view of Christ as the one adopted by God to behis Son at his baptism. But as time went on, they began to say evenmore exalted things about Jesus.
II. Christological Progression
A. One of the great New Testament scholars of the second half of the20th century was Raymond Brown, who sometimes talked about the“backward movement” of Christology.
1. The Iirst Christians said that Jesus was made the Son of God atthe Resurrection.
2. Later Christians maintained that he had been the Son ofGod for his entire ministry; thus, he was adopted by God athis baptism.
3. Still later Christians came to thir1k that he had been the Sonof God for his entire life; thus, he was actually born the Sonof God.
4. And still later Christians insisted that Christ had been the Sonof God before he came into the world, that he had alwaysbeen the Son of God and had existed with God from thevery beginning.B. We can find all four of these views in the New Testament.
1. The idea that Jesus became the Son of God at the Resurrectionis in our oldest pre-literary traditions.
2. The idea that he became the Son of God at his baptism is in theoldest Gospel, Mark.
3. The idea that he was born the Son of God is in the next twoGospels to be written, Matthew and Luke.
4. And the idea that he had always been the Son of God frometernity past is in the last of the Gospels to be written, John.
5. As we have seen, the first three Gospels-Matthew, Mark, andLuke-are called the Synoptic Gospels because they are alike inmany ways. But they also have differences among themselves,including with respect to their understanding that Christ is the Sonof God.
III. Chrlstology in Mark
A. Mark, the earliest Gospel, appears to understand that Jesus wasadopted to be the Son of God not at his Resurrection but atthe baptism.
B. In this Gospel, there is no narration of Jesus’s miraculous birth from avirgin and no hint that the author knows anything about a virgin birth.
C. The Gospel begins with Jesus as an adult, in the account of hisbaptism by John. It is at this baptism that God declares Jesus to behis Son (Mark 1211), with the Spirit coming upon him to anoint him.
D. It is only at that point that Jesus begins to perform miracles anddeliver remarkable teachings. Why did he not do so earlier?
E. Because now, since the baptism, he has been made the Son of God.
F. As the Son of God, Jesus is obviously related to God and is, in somesense, himself divine, that is, a superhuman being whose ultimatehome is with God in heaven. But Jesus is clearly not the one trueGod himself
G. It is interesting that virtually no one recognizes Jesus as the Son of God in the Gospel of Mark.
1. That is true of the people. he grew up with before God made him his son (Mark 6), and it is true even of his mother and siblings (Mark 3).
2. With no virgin birth narrative, there is no reasonthat Mary should realize Jesus is different fromeveryone else.
H. In the Gospel of Mark, there is nothing to suggest that Jesus’s birth and upbringing were in any way unusual. That view was to change in the later Gospels.
IV. Christology in Matthew and Luke
A. Matthew and Luke both used Mark as a source for their accountsof Jesus’s life, but they also had other traditions at their disposal,including accounts of J esus’s unique and highly significant birth toa virgin. In these accounts, Jesus does not become the Son of Godat his baptism but at his conception.
B. This can be seen most clearly in the Gospel of Luke, wl1ich alonehas the story of the Annunciation to Mary. Here, the angel Gabrieltells Mary that she will conceive by the Holy Spirit; thus, the onebom of her will be called the Son of God (Luke 1235).
1. The earlier exaltation views of the pre-literary traditions and ofMark were comparable to the stories III pagan and Jewish circlesof humans being made divine, for example, at their deaths.
2. This view in Luke is comparable to the second way that aperson in antiquity could be divine-by being born to the unionof a god with a mortal. The key difference here is that in Luke,Mary does not actually have sex with God but is somehowmade pregnant by his Spirit.C. The Gospel of Matthew also has an account of Jesus’s beir1g bomof a virgin.
1. Here, we are told that the reason Jesus was to be bom of avirgin is that this is what is predicted in Scripture (Matthew1:22-23).
2. In reality, the passage of Scripture that Matthew is quoting here(Isaiah 7: 14) does not say that the woman who bears a son willbe a virgin and is probably not making a prediction of a futuremessiah figure. Matthew had a different interpretation of thepassage because he was reading it not in the original Hebrewbut in Greek.
3. This is part of Matthew’s attempt to show that everything aboutJesus fulfilled Scripture, including his birth III Bethlehem, theslaughter of the innocents in Bethlehem, his Hight to Egypt,and so on.
Lecture 14-Transcript
The Backward Movement of Christology
In the previous two lectures, we saw that the very earliest Christians believed
that by raising Jesus from the dead, God made him into a divine being. This
is the beginning of an exaltation Christology--the understanding or doctrine
of Christ as a person who has been exalted to the level of divinity.
In this lecture and the ones that follow, we’ll see that, over time, Christians
came to consider this earliest Christological view inadequate. And they began
pushing the important Christological moment-the time at which Jesus was
thought to have become divine-further and further back in history, until
they arrived at a point of saying that Jesus had never, ever been made the
Son of God, but that he had always been the Son of God-in fact, had been
equal with God from the very beginning of all things.
In this lecture, we begin to trace that development by looking at the Gospels
of the New Testament. It’s important to begin with some background
information about the Gospels. Remember, these accounts were produced
35 to 65 years after the life of Jesus. What could we say about their authors?
We continue to call these books Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Hohn, but the
reality is that we don’t know who wrote them. The books themselves are
anonymous. Their authors never indicate who they are, and they write in
the third person not about what they were doing, but about what Jesus and
the others were doing. Of course, the titles of these books that ascribe them
to two of Jesus’ disciples-Matthew and Hohn-and to two of the intimate
companions of the apostles-Mark and Luke-are found throughout our
English Bibles.
But just as obviously, these titles are not original. Nobody would have called
a gospel that he wrote “The Gospel according to Matthew.” When I write
a book, I don’t entitle the book “According to Me.” Whoever gave it the
title “According to Matthew” was somebody telling you who, in his opinion,
actually wrote this gospel. These titles that we have in our Gospels naming
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were titles that were only added later by
scribes who were copying the books.
It turns out these books were circulated originally anonymously. And this
anonymous circulation went on for a very long time. The first author on
record to say that these persons-Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John-were
the persons who wrote these four books was a church father named Irenaeus
writing around the year 180 CE. In other words, virtually a century after
these books had been in circulation.
These books are quoted earlier than Irenaeus. For example, there are
quotations in the writings of the church father Ignatius around the year 110,
who appears to quote from these Gospels-at least from Matthew, Mark, and
Luke-but never calls them Matthew, Mark, and Luke. He simply quotes
them as giving the words of Jesus.
About 40 years later, we find the writings of the Roman author Justin
Martyr, who quotes all four Gospels-at least Matthew, Mark and Luke, and
possibly John as well-and cites these quotations as coming from gospels,
but calls these gospels “Memoirs of the Apostles.” In other words, he doesn’t
call them Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John-doesn’t name Matthew, Mark,
Luke, and John.
As I’ve said, Irenaeus is the first to give them these names. The discussion
of Irenaeus is very interesting. Irenaeus is attacking heretics in the church-
those who were providing false teachings-and he says that one problem
that some heretical groups have is that they focus on just one gospel over
the other. So some heretics have only the Gospel of Matthew, and since they
have only Matthew, they don’t have a well-rounded understanding of who
Christ is, or what salvation is. Others have just the Gospel of Mark; others
use just the Gospel of Luke; and yet others use just the Gospel of John. But
according to Irenaeus, you have to have all four gospels in order to have the
full understanding of theology. And how does Irenaeus know that there have
to be these four gospels? Irenaeus says that the gospel of Christ was spread
by the four winds of heaven, through the four comers of the earth. And so, of
course, there have to be four gospels, and no others.
But why does he have these four instead of some other four? These were the
four gospels that were being used widely in the churches that Irenaeus was
associated with. Why, then, assign them to apostles? Because there were so
many other gospels in circulation, and people like Irenaeus had to establish
which gospels could be accepted as authoritative texts.
To be an authoritative text, the text had to be written by somebody who
was associated with Jesus, or who was a companion of somebody who was
associated with Jesus. And so we have Matthew, allegedly the tax collector
who was Jesus’ disciple, John, the beloved disciple of the Gospel of John.
And then we have Mark, who was said to be the companion of Peter, and
Luke, who was said to be the companion of Paul. These four then are
ascribed the Gospels.
Prior to that, for many decades, the books circulated anonymously. Authors
today are in wide agreement that the books of the gospels were not actually
written by Jesus’ own followers. There are good reasons for thinking this.
Jesus’ followers were illiterate Aramaic-speaking peasants from rural
Palestine. The reality is that most people in the Roman Empire could not read
or write. And according to studies of literacy in Palestine, even fewer people
could read or write. The best studies indicate that, at this time in the early
Roman Empire in Palestine, only 3 percent of the population was literate.
It took years of training to learn how to read, and years more to learn how to
compose writings. The only people who could afford those years of education
were the rich upper classes. And usually people in the rich upper classes
learned how to compose writing in their own language. These books-
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John-were written by highly-educated Greek-
speaking Christians from outside of Palestine. It is pretty clear, therefore,
that they were not written by the apostles of Jesus, who were lower-class
people who could not afford an education, almost certainly did not have an
education, and certainly did not have an education learning how to compose
writings in Greek. And the striking point, to restate it, is these books don’t
claim to be written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
Where, then, did these authors get their information about Jesus? Well, this
is a rather complicated story. But it’s almost certainly the case that these
authors inherited their stories about Jesus from the earlier traditions, some of
them possibly written, and certainly oral traditions.
People were telling stories about Jesus year after year after year after his
death, until Mark wrote them down around the year 70, then Matthew
and Luke, and then John. It doesn’t take much imagination to realize
what happens to stories that are passed along in oral tradition. Stories that
are passed on by word of mouth get changed, and sometimes stories get
made up.
The apostles could not have guaranteed that no one would make up stories
about Jesus. They couldn’t do that anymore than a famous person today can
control what is said about them, not only in the daily newspapers, but by any
Joe Schmoe or Jill Schmill on the street. These are the stories that the gospel
writers inherited, ones that had been in oral traditions. We can expect, then,
that these stories will have different points of view, depending on who told
them, under what circumstances, and for what purposes, and when.
As the stories of Jesus changed over the decades, so too did the views of who
he was. Christians, from the very beginning, had a remarkably exalted view
of Christ as the one adopted by God to be his Son at his Resurrection. But as
time went on, they began to say even more exalted things.
One of the great New Testament scholars of the second half of the 20“‘ century
was Raymond Brown, who sometimes talked about the backward movement
of Christology. According to Brown’s view, the first Christians said, as we’ve
pointed out, that Jesus was made the Son of God at the Resurrection. Later
Christians, though, thought about it and begin to think that, in fact, Jesus
must not have been the Son of God only from the Resurrection, he must have
been the Son of God for his entire ministry.
And so, in this later view, it came to be thought that Jesus had been adopted
as Son of God at his baptism, at the beginning of his ministry. Still later
Christians came to think that Christ had been the Son of God not only for his
ministry, that he’d been the Son of God for his entire life. And so they began
telling stories about how Jesus was actually born as the Son of God. And still
later Christians insisted that Christ had been the Son of God, not just for his
entire life, but for all eternity. That in fact he had been the Son of God before
he came lI1t0 the world. He had always been with God-had existed with
God from the very beginning.
You can find all four of these views in the New Testament. The idea that
Jesus became the Son of God at his Resurrection is in our oldest pre-literary
traditions, as we saw in the previous lecture. The idea that he became the
Son of God at his baptism is in our oldest Gospel, Mark, as we’re going to
see. The idea that he was born the Son of God is in the next two gospels to
be written-Matthew and Luke. And the idea that he had always been the
Son of God from eternity past is in the last of our gospels to be written, the
Gospel of John.
In this lecture, we’ll look at the first three gospels and their views of Jesus. As
we’ve seen, these three--Matthew, Mark, and Luke--are called the Synoptic
Gospels, because they are so much alike they can be seen together-the
literal meaning of synoptic. These three Gospels also have differences among
themselves, including with respect to how they understand that Christ is the
Son of God.
Mark, our earliest Gospel, appears to understand that Jesus was adopted to
be the Son of God not at his Resurrection, but at his baptism. In this gospel,
the Gospel of Mark, there is no narration of Jesus’ miraculous birth from a
virgin. That’s in the later gospels of Matthew and Luke, as we’ll see. But
it’s not here in Mark. Moreover, there is no hint in the Gospel of Mark that
the author knows anything about a virgin birth, or about his being born at
Bethlehem, or a miraculous beginning to Jesus’ life at all. The Gospel of
Mark begins with Jesus as an adult, in an account of his being baptized by
John the Baptist.
Mark begins with the appearance of John the Baptist in fulfillment of
a prediction of Isaiah, where John comes forth baptizing people for the
remission of sins. We’re told that Jesus himself went out to be baptized by
John. And as he was baptized, he comes up out of the water, and Jesus sees
that the heavens rip open. The spirit of God descends upon him. And then
there comes a voice from heaven-a voice in which God declares Jesus to
be his Son.
The voice says, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”
Here, then, Jesus is being announced to be the Son of God. This appears to
be an allusion to the coronation ceremony of the ancient king of Israel. As
we’ve seen, kings of Israel were thought to be the Son of God. And when
they were coronated to be king is when they became the Son of God. Here,
Jesus is said to have become the Son of God.
But Mark has a more exalted view of what this means to be the Son of God.
It’s not simply that Jesus is the future king, Jesus really is a divine being. In
this Gospel, Jesus is the one who has been adopted to receive all of God’s
power, authority, and prestige-and it happens not at the Resurrection, as in
our pre-literary traditions, but at his baptism.
It is only at this point in his life that Jesus begins to do amazing miracles,
and to deliver remarkable teachings. Why didn’t he do so earlier? Because
it is now, for Mark’s Gospel, it is at this point-at his baptism-that he is
made the Son of God, so that he’s able to do his miracles and to deliver his
spectacular teachings.
As the Son of God, in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus is obviously related to God. And
in some sense, he is himself divine. That is, he is a superhuman being whose
ultimate home is with God in heaven. He’s clearly not the one true God
himself He is God’s adopted son, his chosen one. In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus
is chosen specifically to do God’s will, which is to die for the sins of others.
It is interesting that nobody in this gospel understands that Jesus is the Son
of God. You can see this in a number of stories in the gospel. For example, in
Mark 6, Jesus goes to his hometown, Nazareth, preaches a sermon, and the
townspeople say, where did he get such words of wisdom? And how does he
do such miracles? Isn’t he the carpenter? In other words, there was nothing
about Jesus’ life up to this point that would suggest that he was anything
special. He certainly wasn’t the adopted son of God.
That’s true, also, even of Jesus’ mother and siblings, who don’t seem to
understand who Jesus is. In Mark 3, Jesus is in public and attracting a crowd
to him, and his family comes to him to take him out of the public view,
because they say he’s gone out of his mind. In other words, Jesus’ mother
and siblings don’t understand who he is, because he’s only become adopted
at the baptism.
Since there is no virgin birth narrative here, there is no reason in this gospel
that Mary should realize that Jesus was different from everyone else. In this
gospel, there is nothing to suggest that Jesus’ birth and upbringing were in
any way unusual. That view was to change in the later gospels.
No one else in this gospel understands who Jesus is, either. The Jewish
leaders think that he’s possessed by the devil. Even the disciples don’t
understand who he is in Mark’s gospel. But for the author, Jesus is divine-
adopted by God at his baptism. It is interesting that no one else knows who
he is, but that’s one of the things of this particular Gospel. In the other
Gospels-where there is a virgin birth, for example-we have evidence that
people do, in fact, understand who Jesus is.
We turn now to Matthew and Luke, both of whom had the Gospel of Mark
as a source for their own accounts of Jesus’ life. But they had other traditions
at their disposal as well, including accounts of Jesus’ unique and highly
significant birth to a woman who was a virgin. In Matthew and Luke, Jesus
does not become the Son of God at his baptism, but at his conception.
This can be seen most clearly of all in the Gospel of Luke. Luke 1:1-4 are
very interesting because the author tells us that other people have attempted
to write an orderly account of what Jesus said and did but that in fact, he,
now having done the research, is going to do it really well. In other words,
he doesn’t think that his predecessors have done a good enough job.
One of the things that is different from Luke from one of his predecessors,
Mark, is that he has an account of Jesus’ birth. In the account that Luke
gives of Jesus’ birth, he begins with the Annunciation to Mary by the Angel
Gabriel that she will conceive a son, not by a man, but by the Holy Spirit.
The Angel Gabriel comes to Mary, who is said to be a virgin engaged to a
man whose name was Joseph, and he tells her that she has “found favor with
God.” And then he tells her, “You will conceive in your womb and bear a
son, and you will name him Jesus.”
She’s quite surprised. She hasn’t ever had sex. And so, how is she supposed
to have a son? And then the angel explains to her the following. “The Holy
Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow
you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called the Son
of God.”
Now, I tell my students that whenever they’re reading in the Bible and they
come across the word therefore, they should ask, “What is the ‘therefore’
there for?” In this case, the reason this child is going to be called the Son
of God is because it is the Holy Spirit who will come over Mary and make
her pregnant.
The earlier exaltation views of the pre-literary traditions that we have
in the New Testament and the earlier views found in the Gospel of Mark
were comparable in many ways to stories that you get in pagan and Jewish
circles of humans who are made divine, for example, when they die. In this
case, in the pre-literary traditions, at the Resurrection-in Mark’s Gospel, at
the baptism.
This view in Luke is different, however. This is not a human, technically
speaking, who becomes divine-this relates to the second way that we
talked about a person in antiquity being both human and divine, in which a
person is born to the union of a God with a mortal. That’s how Hercules was
divine-his father was Jupiter.
In Genesis 6, that’s how these giants-the Nephilim--were said to be sons
of God, because they, in fact, were the union of these angelic beings with
human beings. And here, too, in Luke-the reason Jesus is the Son of God
is because the spirit of God is the one who makes Mary pregnant. There’s a
key difference, though, in this case between the stories of Hercules and the
stories of the Nephilim in Genesis. In this particular case, the spirit of God
makes Mary pregnant, but there’s no sense that Mary physically actually has
sex with God. Instead, she is somehow made pregnant by his spirit.
The Gospel of Matthew also has an account of Jesus being born of a virgin.
It’s a different account from the one we get in Luke. And it is equally
interesting. Here we are told that the reason that Jesus was to be born of a
virgin is because that is what is predicted in the scriptures. The passage is in
Matthew 1. According to Matthew 1, Mary has been made pregnant by the
Holy Spirit. And Joseph, her husband, decides that he’s going to divorce her,
because he thinks, of course, that someone else has gotten her pregnant. But
he is told that, in fact, she’s been made pregnant by the Holy Spirit, and so he
should take her as his wife. And the angel who tells him this announces that
this has happened “to fulfill what [had been] spoken [by the Lord through]
the prophet: ‘Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall
call him Emmanuel.’ ” That’s Matthew 1:23. The reason his mother is a
virgin is to fulfill the prophecy.
The prophecy is referring to a passage in the book of Isaiah 7: 14-16. And it
is striking that, in fact, when you read what Isaiah has to say, it is not what
Matthew says Isaiah has to say. It turns out that the book of Isaiah 7: 14-16 is
not making a prediction of what’s going to happen with the future messiah.
In Isaiah 7-you can find out simply by reading the passage yourself-it’s
quite clear what the context is. There is a king of Israel who has joined up
with the king of Syria, and has attacked the kingdom of Judah, Jerusalem.
The king of Judea living in Jerusalem is a king named Ahaz. And the prophet
Isaiah comes to him to tell him that he doesn’t have to worry about these two
kings that have ganged up against him. And he says that God is going to give
him a sign that he doesn’t need to worry about it. And this is what he says.
“Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is
with child, and shall bear a son, and [shall name] him Immanuel.”
Notice what this says in the original Hebrew Bible. It does not say, a virgin
shall conceive and bear a son. It says that a young woman has already
conceived and will bear a son. And the reason this is a sign to Ahaz is what
he says next. “Before the child knows how to refuse the evil and choose the
good, the land before whose two kings you are in dread will be deserted.”
In other words, there’s a woman who’s pregnant now. When she gives birth,
there’s not long to wait before these two kings who are attacking you are
going to go away. This is not the prediction of what’s going to happen to a
future messiah, and it’s not the prediction of a future virgin birth. Isaiah in
the Hebrew-the original language-was talking about a young woman who
was already pregnant.
When Matthew read the book of Isaiah, however, Matthew was reading it in
Greek instead of in Hebrew. And in the Greek translation of Isaiah 7, it says
a virgin shall conceive. Matthew took that to mean that it’s a prediction of
what’s going to happen with the messiah-that the messiah will be conceived
of a virgin. And so he has the virgin birth story.
This is all part of Matthew’s attempt to show that everything about Jesus-in
his early life and in his later life-everything about Jesus was a fulfillment
of scripture. You can see this just by reading Matthew 1-2. Everything that
happens in the birth story fulfills scripture. Jesus is born in Bethlehem.
Why? Because the prophet Micah says he’s supposed to be born in
Bethlehem. Herod the king tries to kill Jesus by killing all the male children
in Bethlehem. Why? Because the book of Jeremiah says that there will be
weeping as Rachel bemoans the loss of her children.
Jesus and his family escaped the wrath of Herod by going to Egypt. Why?
Because the prophet Hosea says, “Out of Egypt I called my son.” Everything
is said to fulfill scripture, even the virgin birth. Behind this tradition that all
that happens within Jesus’ life is a fulfillment of scripture, however, there
appears to be a tradition that Jesus had to be born of a virgin, because it was
at that point that he became the Son of God.
Thus we get in both Matthew and Luke. In Matthew and Luke, you have a
virginal conception and birth of Jesus to a woman who has never had sex
with a man-a virgin birth-because at that point, God has made a woman
pregnant, so that the child is literally the Son of God. This stands in contrast
to Mark, where Jesus becomes the Son of God when he’s baptized, not when
he’s born. And both views stand in contrast to what we find in the pre-literary
traditions found in Paul and the book of Acts, in which Jesus becomes the
Son of God at his Resurrection.
It’s important to note that in none of these traditions of Jesus becoming the
Son of God-in Matthew, Mark, or Luke-is there any word at all to indicate
that Jesus preexisted his birth. This is a point that is frequently overlooked.
There’s not a word in Matthew, Mark, or Luke about Jesus preexisting
his birth.
In Mark, there’s not even a hint that his mother was a virgin. She doesn’t
know who Jesus is. She thinks she’s crazy at one pOlI1t, which is why she and
his brothers tried to take him out of the public eye. That story, by the way,
of the family of Jesus trying to get him out of the public eye because they
think he’s crazy is not found in Matthew and Luke. And it should be clear
why it’s not there: because in Matthew and Luke, Mary knows about Jesus’
supernatural origin, since she knows full well that she’s a virgin when she
gives birth.
But in Matthew and Luke, when Jesus is born of a virgin, even there, there
is nowhere that there’s any indication that Jesus was a preexistent divine
being who was born of a virgin. In those gospels, Jesus is not a divinity
who becomes humanity-he comes into existence when he’s conceived, and
he’s conceived as the Son of God. And so, for both of these gospels, Jesus’
conception by a virgin made pregnant by God is the point at which he came
into existence. He did not preexist.
Only in the Gospel of John, as we will see in Lecture 16, is Christ imagined
as having some kind of preexistence before he comes lI1t0 the world.
And we’ll see that, in that gospel, there’s no word about a virgin birth.
So the virgin birth is in two gospels, and the preexistence of Jesus is in a
different gospel.
Only later Christians came up with the idea that Christ was a preexistent
God who became flesh through the Virgin Mary. They came to that view by
accepting what Matthew and Luke said about Jesus’ virgin birth and what
John says about Christ as a preexistent divine being. In other words, the
later classic doctrine of the incarnation through the Virgin Mary was created
by smashing together the views of Matthew and Luke on the one hand,
and John on the other, creating a view that precisely none of the Gospels
themselves has.
We’ll soon get to John’s unique understanding of Christ. But first, it’ll be
important to look at the views of the Apostle Paul, who represents a kind
of bridge, or transition figure, between the earlier exaltation Christologies
and the later incarnation Christologies. That will be the subject of the
next lecture.
