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Let me say clearly what this essay is not saying. It is not saying Christianity is false, or that believers in the virgin birth are foolish. Raymond Brown believed it; so does the Catholic Church alone, which teaches the virgin birth and counts 1.406 billion members according to the Vatican’s Annuario Pontificio 2025, to say nothing of the Orthodox and Protestant faithful. Faith can hold what history cannot prove, and Brown modeled exactly that kind of honest double vision. It is not saying Jesus was “just a man” in the dismissive sense. It is saying something closer to the opposite: that Jesus showed what a human being in full union with God looks like, and that this is far more astonishing, and far more demanding, than a story about a being who was never quite one of us to begin with. And it is not diminishing Mary. Look at what the scholarship actually gives back to her. Mary Foskett, writing for Bible Odyssey, notes that the annunciation “speak[s] as much to God’s concern for the downtrodden and the depth of Mary’s faith as [it does] to the miraculous nature of her pregnancy,” and that “it is through the ordinary and faithful Mary that God works to achieve the divine vision for humankind.” In Luke, the Spirit that comes upon Mary also “empowers her to prophesy”: bibleodyssey the Magnificat, in which she sings that God “has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly” (Luke 1:52). A young Galilean woman, probably in her early teens, in a village under Roman occupation, facing real social danger, says: “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word” (Luke 1:38). That yes is the hinge of the whole story. It does not need a sealed womb to be holy. It needs a human heart, which is exactly what makes it something you can do too. Andrew Lincoln’s quiet line deserves repeating: to focus on the means of the incarnation is to miss its glory. nootherfoundationbookshop The glory is that God was fully present in a fully human life. If we insist that life must have been biologically exempt from the human condition, we have, without meaning to, made the incarnation less incarnate.

The Christian tradition never fully lost this. It went underground, into its mystics. Theosis: God became human so that humans might become divine In the fourth century, Athanasius of Alexandria, the great defender of Nicene orthodoxy, the very opposite of a heretic, wrote in On the Incarnation (54.3): “For He was made man that we might be made God.” The Eastern Orthodox churches call this theosis, which means “divinization”: the human being’s real participation in the life of God. Irenaeus said it a century earlier: the Word “became what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself.” christianhistoryinstitute +2 Orthodox theologians are careful to say we become divine by grace, not by nature or essence. faithandtrustSubstack Fine. But notice the direction of travel. For the orthodox Fathers, the whole point of the incarnation was not to establish an unbridgeable gap. It was to close one. Meister Eckhart: “That it should happen in me is what matters” Meister Eckhart, the Dominican preacher and mystic who, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “most likely died on January 28, 1328,” preached a cycle of Christmas sermons on what he called the eternal birth. Sermon One in Maurice Walshe’s translation (The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart) opens: “Here, in time, we are celebrating the eternal birth which God the Father bore and bears unceasingly in eternity, because this same birth is now born in time, in human nature. Saint Augustine says, ‘What does it avail me that this birth is always happening, if it does not happen in me? That it should happen in me is what matters.’” cacmarkvernon

No villain required It would be easy to tell this story as a cover-up. It is more interesting, and more true, to see that nobody had to lie. A translator in Alexandria chose a word that was ambiguous in his own time. A Greek-speaking evangelist read it with the meaning that had become common in his. A Mediterranean culture already had a slot labeled “son of a god by miraculous birth,” and the story slid into it naturally. Devotion did what devotion does: it adorned. Later readers merged Matthew’s prophecy-proof, Luke’s divine paternity, and John’s preexistent Word into a single composite. ehrmanblog Then each generation’s piety became the next generation’s baseline. Translation drift. Honorific convention. Doctrinal momentum. That is all it took. The lens did the work automatically. And the lens is still on our faces. Pastor Hux was not a villain; he was a man who could feel, correctly, that something precious was tied to that word, and who assumed, incorrectly, that the precious thing would die if the word changed. What gets lost.. Here is the cost, as plainly as I can say it. When Jesus is placed in an ontological category of one, meaning a category of being that no one else can occupy, then every one of his most radical sayings about us gets quietly reassigned to him. “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30) becomes a credential, not an invitation. “The kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21, King James Version) becomes a pious metaphor. (Honesty note: the Greek entos hymōn can mean “within you” or “among you / in your midst,” and many modern translations prefer “among you.” Both readings locate the kingdom here and now rather than in some future elsewhere; the mystical tradition has always heard “within.”) “Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these” (John 14:12) becomes a verse no one preaches on.