One way to hate is to degrade. One way to hate Christianity is to try to demonstrate that the Bible is flawed. How? By claiming that parts of it had been borrowed from other religions rather than originating with God, like the virgin birth of the Messiah. J. Warner Wallace has written against this allegation:
· First and foremost, the pre-existing mythologies described by critics are not as similar to the “virgin conception” of Jesus as they would like people to believe. As an example, neither Mithras nor Horus was the product of a “virgin conception”. Mithras emerged from rock and Horus was conceived through a sex act between Isis and Osiris. While it is true that many pagan mythologies describe the gods having sex with mortal women, the blatant sexual activity of these mythologies is missing from the Biblical narrative. https://coldcasechristianity.com/writings/was-the-virgin-conception-borrowed-from-prior-mythologies/
· The Gospel writers were clearly trying to convince their Jewish readers that Jesus fulfilled the Old Testament prophecies related to the Messiah; it is irrational to believe that these Jewish readers would embrace any part of paganism in the story of Jesus’ conception as being continuous with the Jewish narrative from the Old Testament.
· The insertion of false pagan mythology into the birth narratives assumes the late writing of the Gospels. If the Gospels were written early (as the evidence confirms), the earliest eyewitnesses would have been available to challenge the false insertion of the supposed “virgin conception” narrative. Jesus’ own relatives would have been among the first century “fact checkers” who would have exposed this narrative as mythology.
· Even the weak resemblances between the Biblical account and pagan mythologies may be the result of Judeo-Christian influence rather than contamination from a pagan source.
In addition to the above, Genesis, not paganism, already
contains the antecedents (seeds) for virgin birth theology. We find this in the
first Biblical prophecy:
· So the LORD God said to the serpent: "Because you have done this, you are cursed more than all cattle, and more than every beast of the field; on your belly you shall go, and you shall eat dust all the days of your life. And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her Seed [offspring]; He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise His heel (Genesis 3:14-15)
No mention of Adam’s seed! Did Eve understand this prophecy as involving a virgin birth? It seems like she did:
Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, and said, "I have acquired a man from the Lord." (Genesis 4:1; Hebrew: “I have gotten a man, the Lord!”) At least one Hebraic source concurs - “I have obtained the man, the Angel of the Lord,” Targum of Palestine)
Again, it seems that Eve did not believe that Adam had been involved in the birth. Also, she regarded this child as a messianic fulfillment of the prophecy of Genesis 3:15:
Genesis 4:25 And Adam knew his wife again, and she bore a son and named him Seth, "For God has appointed another seed for me instead of Abel, whom Cain killed."
Once again, Eve did not credit Adam’s involvement for the birth. Instead, she regarded the birth of Seth as the work of God.
According to another Hebraic writing, Madrash Rabbah: “She hinted at that seed which would arise from another source…King Messiah,” pointing again to a virgin birth but not her own. In light of the above, Eve had been correct about a virgin birth but mistaken in thinking that this birth would come from her.
In conclusion, even if the writers of the Bible found the idea of a virgin birth appealing, there had been no need for them to look for this concept within pagan mysticism when it already existed within Genesis.
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