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This season, with scores and scores of other Christ-followers, I will be singing the Christmas classic: Silent Night. "Silent Night; Holy Night. All is calm; all is bright. Round yon virgin, mother and child..." Wait a sec . . . did I just sing virgin; do I really believe that a virgin can be a mother? Such a question is hardly novel; if one added up all of the pages typed trying either to substantiate Jesus' virgin birth or dismiss it, the total is enough to give one carpal tunnel just by fathoming it. So, do you really believe in the virgin birth? In other words, do you hold that these events that the Bible narrates actually occurred as real, historical events?

The dilemma is found in the question. Outside of the Text itself, we have no epistemological access to the events surrounding Jesus' birth; we have no historically verifiable or trustworthy witness independent of the Gospel stories. Therefore, if we are asking for truth in the sense of empirical data that actually happened in space and time, we will have a sad Christmas, for that gift will remain absent from under our yule tree.

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A brief history lesson: at the pinnacle of the enlightenment the biblical narrative was separated from it's meaning. For 1700 years, Christ-followers were content to aver that the Bible means what it says. So when Luke's Gospel maintains, "The virgin's name was Mary," people actually believed that the Text meant what it said. However, like the deep-red ring of plastic encircling the circumference of a piece of bologna, the narrative was eventually discarded as an inedible casing that needed to be gotten around, at best, or thrown away, at worst.

Beginning with the German biblical scholar Reimarus, scholars started searching for external evidence (e.g. eye-witness accounts) that might validate the stories found in the Gospels. This launched a new discipline within biblical studies that would later be called "The Quest for the Historical Jesus." Finding none, the liberal scholars in 18th and 19th Century Europe came to view the narratives - including the virgin birth account - as myths that did not refer to any reality in the real world. They were deemed fictional accounts that were crafted to connect with some existential need present within the communities in which these myths were proclaimed. The bottom line, however, was simple: the stories we find in the Bible refer to something outside of themselves and that referent is fictional.

The conservatives did not sit idle while the liberals systematically dissected their Jesus; they fought back with vigor. Employing the methodologies of the liberals, the conservatives went to great lengths to validate the historicity of biblical events, substantiate the reality of miracles, and bolster the claims of Jesus' messiahness and divinity. They were not content to take the Bible at its word, they sought proof.

The technical term for this move made by both liberals and conservatives is called "ostensive reference." What it means is this: these scholars maintained that the Bible pointed to some external referent being delineated by the Text. Theologian Hans Frei is helpful here. He writes, “The truth to which we refer we cannot state apart from the biblical language which we employ to do so. And belief in the divine authority of Scripture is for me simply that we do not need more.” What Frei is doing here is monumental. He is taking the lot of 18th-20th Century theologians and biblical scholars to task for separating the biblical narratives from their meaning.

Frei effectively dismantles the modernist penchant for severing narrative reference from its referents and thereby obviates the necessity to situate the Bible’s meaning with its ostensive reference or with mythical reorientation. Subsequently, his realistic narrative enables the restoration—via figural interpretation—of the unity of the cannon. These two subtle shifts allow him to make the argument that the Bible is no mere record of historical facts (or propositional truths), yet its history-like narratives render a unified “real world” that the reader is called by faith to accept. Frei writes, “The emphasis in figural interpretation of the bible is on the whole putatively temporal sequence narrated, and on the fact that inclusion in it shapes into one story the whole set of independent biblical stories covering its chronological sequences” (28). His work opens the channels of history whereby the “old realistic sensibility… in which the narrative itself rendered a world at once real and meaningful, which was [inseparable from] the narrative, while serving also to orient men’s dispositions” (156).

Elsewhere Frei notes:

[I]f one speaks in terms of “reference” to a subject matter described—a complex, perhaps confused, perhaps indispensable way of speaking—then there is not a split reference to the described subject matter. The text means what it says, and so the reader’s redescription is just that, a redescription and not the discovery of the text as symbolic representation of something else more profound. (44)

So our initial question, 'Did the virgin birth really happen?' is the wrong question to ask, if by this we are seeking some extra-biblical, empirically verifiable referent that might bolster the Text's witness. This inappropriately severs the narratives we find in the first chapters of Matthew and Luke from their meaning. The Text says that Jesus was born of a virgin and given what I know about Jesus' life and ministry I'm willing to affirm that this is exactly what the Text means. How 'bout you?

I leave you with a final word, again from Frei. Merry Christmas!

But now if you go on from there and say, ‘What about the historical facts here?’ – what facts? Do we know what the facts are outside of the description? Remember what facts were for the empiricists: facts for the empiricist were always those separate occurrences, quite apart from the description, quite apart from the story itself – those separate historical, empirical occurrences which could be confirmed or disconfirmed by independent evidence. What are the facts that are being referred to here? They are facts that we cannot have apart from the story. That is precisely one of the most important things about a realistic interpretation of the Gospels. I’ll put it in the words of a modern English philosopher who said, ‘We have reality only under a description.’ We have this reality only as it is rendered under the description, only as it is rendered by this narrative. It is as though the Bible, especially the Gospel story… were a genuine narrative, the reality of which is not rendered by anything other than the description itself – the reality of which is indeed rightly called I think, for Christians, true fact, but rightly called true fact in a way which, although it may bear a family resemblance to that set of empirical facts we call history, is not identical with it. (from an unpublished speech entitled, "On Interpreting the Christian Story," 50-1)

Did the Virgin Birth Really Happen?

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