(2024)
Introduction
Logistics and Mary the Mother of God
Some Important Epistemology
On Testing the Virgin Birth Claim Itself
Significant Problems with Mother Mary Giving Birth to God’s Son
1. The Genealogies are Inaccurate and Irrelevant
2. Jesus Was Not Born in Bethlehem
3. There was No Census
4. There was No Slaughter of the Innocents
5. There was No Star of Bethlehem
6. The Nativity Prophecies are Fake News
7. The Virgin Birth of Jesus has Pagan Parallels
But Wait, is There Something Else?
Let Us Imagine What Could Have Been…
Introduction
Catholic Christians pray the rosary, which is a string of beads representing creeds and prayers to be recited. Devout Catholics are considered to recite it every single day. In it the Apostles’ Creed made the cut, which is recited one time. The Glory Be (Doxology) is recited five times, while the Lord’s Prayer is said six times. However, the Hail Mary prayer is recited a whopping 150 times!
As someone who was raised Catholic, I was required to recite these things a number of times upon visiting the confessional booth, depending on the gravity of my pre-teen sins. While the Hail Mary can be dated back to the 13th century, the current prayer dates to the 16th century:
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
Logistics and Mary the Mother of God
Let’s briefly consider some logistics. First, consider the logistics of how a real mother named Mary could conceive of God (or God’s son). The ancients commonly believed that a woman contributes nothing to the physical constitution of the baby to be born. That is, they believed that the child was only biologically related to the father. The uterus was thought of as but a receptacle for male sperm, which grew to become children.
But with the advent of genetics, most Christians today try to defend a virgin birth of Jesus where Jesus’ humanity was derived from Mary, and his divine nature was derived from God. They do this because they know something about genetics and know that Mary must have contributed the human egg that gave birth to Jesus. But this doesn’t adequately explain how Jesus is a human being, for this requires that a human sperm penetrate a human egg. Until that happens, we don’t even have the complete chromosomal structure required to have a human being.
Of course, God could conceivably create both the human egg and the sperm from which to create life inside of Mary’s womb. But if it’s a created human life, then it’s not God, who is said to be eternal, the creator of everything, and sinless, and who came to suffer and die to atone for human sins. Other problems for belief in a virgin birth emerge when it comes to the supposed genealogies and fulfilled prophecies.
Nevertheless, what if God somehow had (or took on) a body? The biblical God did, didn’t he? Sure he did, even though later Christian theology describes God as a Spirit. God is described as walking and talking with Adam and Eve, who subsequently tried to hide from him in the trees of the Garden (Genesis 3:8-10). Later on, Jacob prevailed over God in an all-night wrestling match, after which Jacob said, “I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared” (Genesis 32:22-32). God also let Moses see his body, even his backside (Exodus 33). After monotheism arrived God was still seen as having a body. He sat on a throne (Ezekiel 1; Daniel 7; Matthew 25:31; Revelation 5:1) and he rewarded the faithful by allowing them to see his face (Matthew 5:8; 18:11; Revelation 22:3-4). The first martyr Stephen saw Jesus “standing at the right hand of God” (Acts 7:56). Even at the end of times every eye will see him—and presumably recognize him—riding on a white horse to do battle with his enemies (Revelation 1:7; 19:11-21).[1]
So perhaps it isn’t too surprising that Mormons still believe that God has a body. But if so, they have to struggle with the virgin conception of Jesus. Was mother Mary a virgin or not? According to Brigham Young, the second president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “The Father came down and begat Jesus, the same as we do now.” Mormon apostle Bruce McConkie agreed, saying, “Christ was begotten by an immortal Father in the same way that mortal men are begotten by mortal fathers.” Two Mormon researchers ask us if it “is so disgusting to suggest God sired a son by sexual intercourse?”[2] Inquiring minds want to know.[3] But if God’s son was produced the old-fashioned way, his son Jesus was not conceived of a virgin after all!
Second, consider the logistics of how a real child could exist who was God (or God’s son). A God incarnate would have a dual nature, 100% divine and 100% human, with everything essential included and everything nonessential excluded. Nobody has sufficiently been able to do this math!
There are several fatal problems with the notion of an incarnate son of God. God is supposedly a necessary and uncreated being. Humans are essentially contingent and created beings. These characteristics cannot be reconciled. How can God be God if he has a body? How can humans be humans if we don’t have bodies? How can an infinite timeless God exist within time? How can Jesus be omniscient and also human? God is supposedly omnipresent, everywhere, but Jesus as a human being was not. Can a human be perfectly good and thus incapable of being tempted to sin, and yet be tempted to sin? Christians themselves have shown the incoherence of a divine/human being by their 2000-year-long disagreements over it.[4]
Some Important Epistemology
The short answer to the question of this paper—whether Virgin Mary birthed God in the flesh— is no, an emphatic unequivocal no! No virgin ever gave birth to a son of God. What follows is a longer answer, one which could be backed up by a much longer answer in turn.[5]
Let’s start with the obvious. Most people are indoctrinated into their religious faith, whether it’s Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Mormonism, or any of their respective sects. This is beyond dispute. The problem is that very few of them believe that they were indoctrinated, or that their indoctrination led inexorably to their religious faith.
Comedian Bill Burr best states the problem this way:
“Everybody else’s religion sounds stupid. The first time I heard the story of Scientology I thought that is the dumbest stuff I have ever heard in my life, while simultaneously believing that a woman who never had sex had a baby that walked on the water, died and came back three days later.
Yeah, that made total sense to me!
So it just hit me one day. Why doesn’t Scientology make sense and my stuff does?
It’s because I heard their story when I was an adult. I heard my story when I was four years old.”
On this we need to hear from more than a comedian.
After surveying several bizarre paranormal and religious beliefs, philosopher Peter Boghossian concluded:
We are forced to conclude that a tremendous number of people are delusional. There is no other conclusion one can draw. The most charitable thing we can say about faith is that it’s likely to be false.[6]
Psychiatrist Valerie Tarico describes how people defend their paranormal and religious beliefs. She claims that “it doesn’t take very many false assumptions to send us on a long goose chase.” To illustrate this point, she tells us about the mental world of a paranoid schizophrenic. To such a person the perceived persecution by others sounds real:
You can sit, as a psychiatrist, with a diagnostic manual next to you, and think: as bizarre as it sounds, the CIA really is bugging this guy. The arguments are tight, the logic persuasive, the evidence organized into neat files. All that is needed to build such an impressive house of illusion is a clear, well-organized mind and a few false assumptions. Paranoid individuals can be very credible.[7]
Anthropologist James T. Houk concludes: “Virtually anything and everything, no matter how absurd, inane, or ridiculous, has been believed or claimed to be true at one time or another by somebody, somewhere in the name of faith.”[8]
So what can convince indoctrinated religious people that they might be wrong?
The short answer is: probably nothing. And yet, since many former believers have rejected their indoctrination, there is hope. I’ve written a short primer on how to undo indoctrination.[9] The longer answer provided here could be backed up by an even longer answer found in a dozen (or so) books that I’ve published on it (including several papers here on the Secular Web).
There is a gateway that leads to doubting the Gospel narratives as a whole, just as Genesis 1-11 is the gateway to doubting the Old Testament narratives as a whole.[10] The New Testament gateway is the virgin birth myth in the Gospels. It was the first tale that led me to doubting it all.
This epistemological issue needs to be addressed at some length from the outset.
Probably the best tool to help culturally indoctrinated believers acknowledge the value of sufficient objective evidence is found in my book The Outsider Test for Faith (2013). It challenges believers to question their own childhood faith for perhaps the first time, as if they had never heard of it before. It calls on them to require of their own faith what they reasonably require of the religious faiths that they reject. It forces them to demand logical consistency within and between their doctrines, along with sufficient objective relevant evidence for them, just as they reasonably require of the religious traditions that they reject. (Hereafter “sufficient evidence” will refer to sufficient objective relevant evidence.)[11]
This test is a very useful fact-checking tool against false religious beliefs. It helps believers acknowledge the need for sufficient objective evidence (a hard task in itself!). Then it forces them to consider how they reasonably examine the other religious faiths that they reject, teaching them to apply the same single standard across the board, including to their own religious faith. No double standards. Instead, we have a universally applicable standard:
Reasonable people need sufficient objective evidence to transform the alleged negligible amount of human testimony found in the Bible into verified or corroborated eyewitness testimony.
But such evidence does not exist. As I’ll show later, it could exist—it just doesn’t.
When it comes to a philosophical case against miracles in general, I’ve defended David Hume’s arguments here at Secular Web[12] and edited a book on it.[13] David Hume argued that “No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous [i.e., more improbable] than the fact which it endeavours to establish.” All claims about the objective world require sufficient evidence appropriate to the nature of the claim. The amount and quality of the evidence required is dependent on the type of claim being made. This applies to ordinary claims, extraordinary claims, and miraculous claims.
A miraculous claim is one made about events that are impossible via natural causes alone. Consequently a miracle is not merely an extremely rare event within the natural world, or something that just happened “at the right time.” We know from statistics that extremely rare events take place regularly in our lives. Believers will quote their believing doctors, who say that the odds of being healed were “one in a million,” as evidence of a miraculous healing. But a one in a million healing is not equivalent to a miracle in a world of eight billion people!
Statistician David Hand convincingly shows that “extraordinarily rare events are anything but. In fact, they’re commonplace. Not only that, we should all expect to experience a miracle roughly once every month.” He does not believe in truly supernatural miracles, though: “No mystical or supernatural explanation is necessary to understand why someone is lucky enough to win the lottery twice, or is destined to be hit by lightning three times and still survive.”[14] We should expect extremely rare events in our lives many times over. No gods made these events happen.
A legitimate miracle claim, by its very nature, requires the highest level of the strongest objective evidence. The fact that a miracle requires this over and above the fallibility of ordinary human testimony is not an unreasonable demand. It’s the nature of the beast, especially in the distant past from sources that we cannot cross-examine or fact-check for consistency and truth.
To justifiably believe a biblical tale of a miracle would require more than mere human testimony. Just think of what it would take to believe someone who told you that he consecutively sank eighteen hole-in-ones on a golf course. It would take some strong objective evidence (in terms of quality and/or quantity) to justifiably believe him. Believing that an event that is naturally impossible occurred, especially in the distant past, would be equivalent to believing a golfer who claimed that he flew in the air from tee to tee while making eighteen consecutive hole-in-ones!
When it comes to a scientific case against miracles I produced an anthology showing the method and results of science falsify Christianity.[15] Concerning the bogeyman of “scientism” I merely say that when it comes to the nature of nature, its regularities, and its origins, science (and the math built on it) is the only objective method to gain the truth.
In his 100th column for Scientific American, Michael Shermer wrote:
I conclude that I’m a skeptic not because I do not want to believe but because I want to know. I believe that the truth is out there. But how can we tell the difference between what we would like to be true and what is actually true? The answer is science…. [T]he scientific method is the best tool ever devised to discriminate between true and false patterns, to distinguish between reality and fantasy, and to detect baloney.[16]
The Christian apologist will almost always object at this juncture, saying that this argument betrays an anti-supernatural bias. But the only justified bias here is that science discovers what is objectively true and false about the world. Any conclusion that has sufficient evidence for it is probably true. Any conclusion that has sufficient evidence against it is probably false. We should always proportion our conclusions based on the probabilities. In cases where the results are inconclusive, we should just admit that we don’t know yet, like on the origins of biological life from inanimate matter.
When it comes to miracles a supernatural bias has a very high reasonable burden of proof to meet. By contrast, the so-called bias of science has been very well established.
If a scientist cannot establish biblical miracles using the scientific method, based on sufficient objective evidence, then faith cannot do so times a hundred thousand.
Philosophy and science converge on the historical critical method for understanding the Bible with its claims of miracles. This method, when properly understanding the Bible, is a forced one given the improbabilities within the biblical texts and the many borrowed texts and forgeries. The successors of early forerunners like David Friedrich Strauss and Thomas Paine include contemporary scholars like Bart Ehrman, Hector Avalos, and many others. Ancient historian Richard Carrier posted a relevant online essay that looks at uncorroborated supernatural and miracles claims in the book of Mark.[17]
It’s reasonable to use the standards of the historian to judge biblical claims of miracles. Bart Ehrman, an agnostic historian of Christianity, tells us: “From a purely historical point of view, a highly unlikely event is far more probable than a virtually impossible one like a miracle.”[18] Why is this wrong? By what else can we judge that which did or did not take place?
James McGrath, a liberal historian of Christianity, has said:
All sorts of fairly improbable scenarios are inevitably going to be more likely than an extremely improbable one. That doesn’t necessarily mean miracles never happened then or don’t happen now—it just means that historical tools are not the way to answer that question.”[19]
However, if a historian cannot establish biblical miracles using the historical method, based on sufficient objective evidence, then faith cannot do so times a hundred thousand.
So Christian theists don’t have an objective method to justify claims that biblical miracles occurred as reported in the Bible. They cannot do so by objecting to the philosophical arguments given by David Hume. They cannot do so based on the scientist’s requirement for sufficient evidence. Nor can they do so based on the historian’s requirement for sufficient evidence.
One thing is for sure: we know what does not count as extraordinary evidence of the objective kind. Second-, third-, and fourth-hand hearsay testimonial evidence doesn’t count, nor does anecdotal evidence as reported in completed documents that postdate the supposed events by three centuries, documents that were additionally copied by scribes and theologians who had no qualms about including forgeries.
We also know that subjective feelings, experiences, or inner voices don’t count as objective evidence when it comes to biblical miracle claims, and neither does testimony from someone who tells others that his writings are divinely inspired, whether through dreams, visions, or anything else. Nor can the special-pleading appeal to psychic communication from the supposed Holy Spirit constitute such evidence, as William Lane Craig has asserted.[20]
Believers cannot reasonably justify their belief in miracles ex post facto (i.e., after the fact), either, by depending on their assumed priors or background information. All of us have accumulated information learned over the course of our lives since childhood. We use this information to judge what is true or false as we encounter new experiences in life. Usually we don’t judge new information any other way.
But background information is not equivalent to background knowledge! Knowledge is basically justified true belief based on sufficient evidence and logical inferences made from it. Information alone is not automatically factual knowledge. One’s upbringing doesn’t automatically produce factual background knowledge, especially when it comes to culturally different religions.[21] Using Bayes’ theorem from that sort of starting point won’t help convince anyone of anything.[22]
The intractable difficulty is that there is no miracle claim in the Bible that has anything going for it other than uncorroborated testimony, and most all of it is hearsay written by others. The earliest authors in the first century, even if we date them using conservative scholarship, are the conjectured Q Gospel (40 CE), the Gospel of Thomas (50 CE), Paul’s authentic letters (50 CE), and the Gospel of Mark (65 CE). But Q, like the Gospel of Thomas, makes no mention of the resurrection of Jesus.
The original Gospel of Mark—the one without the forged ending (16:9-20)—ends without any evidence of the resurrection of Jesus since no post-Resurrection appearances to Jesus’ disciples are reported. It just had an unevidenced announcement: “He has risen! He is not here.” It also included a prediction made in Mark’s gospel that was not fulfilled: “He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.'” Jesus didn’t appear to them in Mark. When compared to Paul, if Jesus wasn’t raised, then their “faith is in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:15-18). So why are there no post-resurrection appearances in Mark? Why no proof, if according to Paul it was so important to stress?
The only alleged eyewitness New Testament writer is the apostle Paul, and even he says his Damascus Road experience was a “vision.” In his defense before the tribunal of King Agrippa the Great, Paul says, “I was not disobedient to the vision from heaven.” (Acts 26:19) But this isn’t really news. Paul was himself a visionary (see II Corinthians 12:1-4)[23] This is hardly the stuff reasonable thinkers require.[24]
Maybe there really was a miracle-working Jesus. But if so, we have no objective evidence for those miracles today. From today’s perspective, using reasonable standards of gathering evidence, there’s no reason to think that Jesus worked any miracles.
On Testing the Virgin Birth Claim Itself
Let’s turn now to the virgin birth. William Lane Craig is on record as saying:
The virgin birth was a stumbling block to my coming to faith—I simply could not believe such a thing. But when I reflected on the fact that God had created the entire universe, it occurred to me that it would not be too difficult for Him to make a woman pregnant.[25]
Wait just a minute! Whether there’s a god who may have impregnated Mary isn’t something that Craig can just assume. He cannot assume that the god believed to have done this miracle did do it! Whether one can justifiably believe that a god performed a particular miracle depends on the probability of the objective evidence all by itself, apart from any presupposition that God exists. That’s because any god can turn a mysterious set of circumstances into a miracle.[26] It doesn’t follow that if God did one miracle, he did other miracles attributed to him, too.
Maybe a non-Trinitarian God exists who doesn’t need a miraculous virgin birth, like the God of Judaism or Islam? This is the main problem that all theistic apologists must face. They cannot punt to a specific god as the god who did a given miracle. They must first show sufficient evidence that such a god did in fact do it, and this evidence must not be depend entirely on the belief that a particular god thought to have performed a miracle did in fact perform one.
Surely liberal clergy are closer to the truth on this. According to a poll of 7,441 clergy, the following percentage of ministers said that they didn’t believe in the virgin birth as “a biological miracle”:
- Methodists 60%
- Episcopalians 44%
- Presbyterians 49%
- American Baptists 34%
- American Lutherans 19%
- UK Catholic Priests in the UK 25%
- Church of Scotland 37%[27]
So the question of the virgin birth of Jesus is not just a debate between Christians and atheists! The debate is between Christians who believe Mary was the mother of God (or God’s son) and everyone else who does not believe it.
Let’s lay out the facts for believers who haven’t yet seen them fact-checked. There is no objective relevant evidence to corroborate the Virgin Mary story. Before there can be a virgin birth, one must first show that Mary wasn’t pregnant. We hear nothing about her wearing a misogynistic chastity belt to prove her virginity. No one checked for an intact hymen before she gave birth, either. After Jesus was born, Maury Povich wasn’t there with a DNA test to verify that Joseph was not the baby daddy. One must show that neither Joseph nor any other man was the father.
We don’t even have first-hand testimonial evidence for the event since the story is related to us by others, not by Mary or Joseph. At best, all we have is second-hand testimony by one person, Mary, as reported in two later anonymous gospels, or two people if we include Joseph, who was incredulously convinced Mary was a virgin because of a dream—yes, a dream (see Matthew 1:19-24).[28] We never get to independently cross-examine Mary and Joseph, or question the people who knew them, which we would need to do since they may have a very good reason for lying (pregnancy out of wedlock, anyone?). For all we know the entire narrative is just a mythical tale, as explained later, and so there never was anyone to fact-check.
Now readers might simply trust the anonymous Gospel writers who wrote down this miraculous tale simply because it is recounted in this particular Holy Book—but why? How is it possible that they could find out that a virgin named Mary gave birth to a deity? Think about how they would go about researching it. No reasonable investigation could take Mary’s word for it, or, for that matter, Joseph’s word. With regard to Joseph’s dream—it makes no difference that in his dream, an angel told him that Mary was telling the truth. It was still a dream. Angels in dreams don’t actually exist outside of dreams. Thomas Hobbes tells us: “For a man to say God hath spoken to him in a Dream, is no more than to say he dreamed that God spake to him; which is not of force to win belief from any man.”[29] So the testimonial evidence comes down to one person, Mary, which is still second-hand testimony at best, as reported in two later canonical gospels. Why should we believe that testimony, if indeed a historical Mary even provided any?
As fellow blogger Daniel Mocsny notes in a Disqus comment:
I wonder about the special pleading at play here. Would, for example, a theologian who treats ‘The’ virgin birth as a credible claim be equally as generous to his own pregnant and unmarried teenaged daughter if she made the same claim as Mary, and on the same strength of evidence (i.e. her ipse dixit i.e. bare assertion)? To the theologian I would say, if you wouldn’t buy that explanation from your own daughter, why would you be more inclined to trust Mary’s claim when we only have it on multiple levels of hearsay, if ‘Mary’ even existed at all?
It seems to me that our starting level of skepticism of Immaculate Conception ought to be the same for every woman of childbearing age who presents as pregnant. Our immediate working assumption is that every pregnant woman got to be pregnant either as a result of having sex with a man, or by having a man’s genetic contribution introduced by some medical procedure. The notion of miraculous conception would simply never cross our minds as a serious possibility.
On this fact Christian believers are faced with a serious dilemma. If this is the kind of research that went into writing the Gospel of Matthew—by taking Mary’s word and Joseph’s dream as evidence—then we shouldn’t believe anything else we find in that gospel without corroborating objective evidence. But this lack of evidence for Mary’s story speaks directly to the credibility of the gospel as a whole. For if there’s no good reason to believe the virgin birth, then there’s no good reason to believe the resurrection myth, either, since the Gospel story of Jesus appearing bodily to his disciples is first told in Matthew’s gospel.[30]
In an online discussion fundamentalist apologist Lydia McGrew suggested that I’ve got this all wrong. Her response was that the author of Matthew’s gospel merely reported that Joseph’s dream convinced him that Mary told the truth about her pregnancy and nothing more. But if so, why is Joseph’s dream included in Matthew’s gospel at all? If McGrew is right it wouldn’t do anything to lead reasonable people to accept Mary’s story. Her testimony would still stand alone without any support. It would be tantamount to admitting that Joseph was incredulously convinced by less than what a reasonable person should accept. It would also encourage readers to consider their own dreams to constitute convincing evidence on other issues.
The undesigned coincidence of McGrew’s suggestion would sow the seeds for doubting Matthew’s gospel, the second of four Gospels, and the later two gospels which borrowed from it. If the author of the gospel of Matthew was merely reporting Joseph’s dream without first fact-checking it, then nothing prohibits us from concluding that the author was merely reporting other tales in his gospel without fact-checking them.
Apologists and theologians now use the minimal facts approach of Gary Habermas, Mike Licona, and William Lane Craig, who want to focus on a set of minimal facts that nonbelieving scholars (almost) all agree on when it comes to the resurrection of Jesus.[31] They sweep off the table everything else, including our unanimous agreement that a virgin named Mary did not give birth to an incarnate God. Apologists unreasonably separate these issues because the virgin birth narratives in the Gospels speak directly to the illogical and unevidenced nature of the gospel narratives as a whole.
Significant Problems with Mother Mary Giving Birth to God’s Son
What we know is that neither of the two earliest New Testament writers refer to the virgin birth of Jesus. Neither the apostle Paul nor the author of the gospel of Mark specifically and unequivocally referred to it. That’s very telling. It’s inconceivable that neither of them mentioned it. The virgin birth story was only makes sense as an invention made up on hindsight to explain how Jesus came down to Earth from the sky above the clouds.
Additionally, in the gospel of Mark the family of Jesus themselves thought that Jesus was crazy, not God’s son. “He is out of his mind,” they said, and tried “to take charge of him” (Mark 3:19-21, 31-35). This makes no sense if the virgin birth stories are true in the later gospels of Matthew and Luke. How could his mother Mary forget how her son Jesus was conceived, or what was said about him at the time of his birth? Mary would’ve heard the angel Gabriel say that her newborn boy would be called “the Son of God” (Luke 1:35). Her cousin Elizabeth told Mary that she was the “mother of my Lord” (Luke 1:43), and she herself said, “from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed” (Luke 1:48). No mother would ever forget the circumstances of his birth—if it happened as it was reported.
In Luke’s gospel, when Mary first hears from the angel Gabriel that she’s to give birth, she objects by saying, “How shall this be, since I know not a man?” (Luke 1:34). Surely Mary wouldn’t feel it necessary to inform Gabriel that she hadn’t had sex with any man. If this conversation took place at all, she would’ve said, “How shall this be, since I know not my husband.” So Mary’s stated objection to the angel is also a literary invention.
It gets worse. There are seven facts to consider.
1. The Genealogies are Inaccurate and Irrelevant
The royal genealogies of Jesus in the later gospels of Luke (3:23-37) and Matthew (1:1-17) have historical problems. For instance, Matthew’s gospel makes Jesus a descendant of king Jeconiah (1:11), even though the prophet Jeremiah had proclaimed none of Jeconiah’s descendants would ever sit on the throne of David (Jeremiah 22:30).
Moreover, the genealogies of Jesus are irrelevant if he was born of a virgin. Jewish royal lineages are traced through men, not women, so Luke’s genealogy is irrelevant since it traces the lineage of Jesus through Mary. Matthew’s genealogy is equally irrelevant, since it traces the lineage of Jesus through Joseph, who was not his father, according to gospel accounts. To desperately claim that Mary’s baby was a new divine creation unrelated to the lineages of either Mary or Joseph also makes the genealogies irrelevant. For then it wouldn’t matter which mother’s womb God decided to use to create his son.
In no other case is a supposed or adopted son a legitimate heir to a throne. So John Beversluis writes:
Either Joseph was the biological father of Jesus or he was not. If he was, then Jesus was a gene-carrying descendant of David, and God’s promise to David was fulfilled. If he was not, then Jesus was not a gene-carrying descendant of David, and God’s promise to David was not fulfilled.[32]
Modern genetics decisively renders the genealogies irrelevant since one cannot even have a human being without the genetic contributions of both a male seed and an egg from a woman. Cloning human beings is still off in the future. Nonetheless, if one were to clone a female human being, the result would be a female baby, not a boy.
2. Jesus Was Not Born in Bethlehem
In Matthew 2:5-6 we’re told that the Messiah was to be born in Bethlehem near Jerusalem, in the southern part of Israel. But the precise phrase “Bethlehem Ephratah” in the original prophecy of Micah 5:2 refers not to a town, but to a family clan: the clan of Bethlehem, who was the son of Caleb’s second wife, Ephratah (1 Chronicles 2:19, 2:50-51, 4:4). Furthermore, Micah’s prophecy predicts a military commander who would rule over the land of Assyria (which never happened), and was certainly not about a future Messiah.
The earliest gospel, Mark, begins by saying that Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee, in the northern part of Israel, not from Bethlehem (Mark 1:9). In the later Gospel of John, Jesus was rejected as the Messiah precisely because the people of Nazareth knew that he was born and raised in their town! They rhetorically asked: “How can the Messiah come from Galilee?” They answered: “A prophet does not come out of Galilee” (John 7:42,52).
Since Jesus was from Nazareth of Galilee, he couldn’t be the promised Messiah. So Matthew and Luke invented conflicting stories to fix this problem. In Matthew’s gospel—the one most concerned with making Jesus fit alleged prophecies—Joseph’s family is originally living in Bethlehem, where Jesus was born (Matthew 2). To show that Jesus was the Messiah, the author invented the Bethlehem star as astrological “proof” that he was born exactly where the Messiah was supposed to be born. To get Jesus to Nazareth after the birth of Jesus he tells us that Joseph was warned in a dream to flee to Egypt because Herod was slaughtering two-year old children (Matthew 2:15). Then, after Herod died, he tells us that Joseph took his family to reside in Nazareth (Matthew 2:21-23), the town that Jesus was known to have come from. Luke’s gospel, by contrast, claims Joseph and Mary already lived in Nazareth but traveled to Bethlehem because of an invented Roman census, where he was born (Luke 1:26; 2:4). Afterward they went back to their home in Nazareth (Luke 2:39).
But there was no census, no massacre of children, and no Bethlehem star.
3. There Was No Census
Luke’s gospel tells us something bizarre: that Joseph had to go to Bethlehem to register for the census because “he was from the house and lineage of David” (Luke 2:4). According to Luke’s genealogy King David had lived forty-two generations earlier. Why should everyone have had to register for a census in the town of one of his ancestors forty-two generations earlier? There would be millions of ancestors by that time, and the whole empire would have been uprooted. Why forty-two generations and not thirty-five, or sixteen? If this requirement was only for the lineage of King David, what was Caesar Augustus thinking when he ordered it? He had a king, Herod.
Both Matthew and Luke tell us that Jesus was born during the time of Herod the Great (Matthew 2:1; Luke 1:5). Herod died in 4 BCE, so Jesus would have been born at the latest in 4 BCE. The only known census of that period was a local one in Galilee that took place in 6 CE by Syrian governor Quirinius. There’s a gap of ten years between Herod’s death and the alleged census, which means that there was no census at the birth of Jesus. But Luke’s gospel said that it was a worldwide census, not a local one. And that census didn’t take place at all, for as Raymond Brown tells: “A census of the known world under Caesar Augustus never happened,” though he reigned from 27 BCE to 14 CE.[33]
After fact-checking Luke’s nativity narrative, German theologian Ute Ranke-Heinemann concludes:
If we wish to continue seeing Luke’s accounts … as [accounts of] historical events, we’d have to take a large leap of faith: We’d have to assume that while on verifiable matters of historical fact Luke tells all sorts of fairy tales but on supernatural matters—which by definition can never be checked—he simply reports the facts. By his arbitrary treatment of history, Luke has shown himself to be an unhistorical reporter—a teller of fairy tales.[34]
4. There Was No Slaughter of the Innocents
In Matthew’s gospel King Herod was said to have ordered that all of the male children “in Bethlehem and all the surrounding countryside” be slaughtered (2:16) because he was worried one of them could usurp his throne. But there is no other account of such a massacre in any other source. It’s clear that the first-century Jewish historian Josephus hated Herod. He chronicled in detail his crimes, many of which were lesser in kind than this alleged wholesale massacre of children. Yet nowhere does Josephus’ mention this slaughter, even though he would have been in a position to know of one had one happened, and even though he would have every reason to mention it.
5. There Was No Star of Bethlehem
Matthew’s gospel says: “The star, which they the Magi had seen in the east, went on before them until it came and stopped over the place where the child was” (2:9-10). There is no independent corroboration of this tale by any other source, Christian or otherwise. No astrologer/astronomer anywhere in the world recorded this event, even though they systematically searched the stars for guidance and predictions of the future. More significantly, the author of Luke chose not to include the story of a star, Magi, or the attempt on Jesus’ life, which is telling, since his gospel was written after “a careful study of everything” so that readers could know what actually took place from what didn’t. (1:1-4).
Theories for this star include a comet, a supernova, the conjunction of planets, and a Type Ic hypernova located in the Andromeda galaxy, among other things. H. R. Reimarus (1768 CE) observed long ago that even if it were some sort of comet with a tail, “it is too high to point to a specific house.” If it were a miraculous star, then why didn’t everyone in the vicinity see it? Pope Leo I (461 CE) proposed that the star was invisible to the Jews because of their blindness. But then why did it allegedly appear to pagan astrologers?
The fatal problem is that none of these theories conform to what the text actually says in Matthew’s gospel. The Magi follow the star to Jerusalem, where they inquire of King Herod about the birth of the Messiah, the king of the Jews. Then they follow the star to Bethlehem. We read, “they went their way; and lo, the star which they had seen in the East went before them, till it came to rest over the place where the child was” (Matthew 2:9, RSV). But there’s no way to determine which specific house a star stopped over, if it did! This is only consistent with pre-scientific notions of the earth being the center of the universe with the stars being moved by a god who sits on a throne in the sky.[35]
Stars don’t move in the sky, and they certainly don’t appear to move in a southern direction from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. They all appear to move from the east to west, like the Sun, because of the spin of the Earth.
The star is no problem for the biblical worldview, though. In the Bible stars move: “The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises” (Ecclesiastes 1:5). They can also stop: “The sun stopped in the middle of the sky for about a full day. There has never been a day like it before or since” (Joshua 10).[36]
When we compare Matthew’s and Luke’s accounts, Raymond Brown concludes:
Despite efforts stemming from preconceptions of biblical inerrancy or of Marian piety, it is exceedingly doubtful that both accounts can be considered historical. A review of the implications explains why the historicity of the infancy narratives has been questioned by so many scholars, even by those who do not in advance (i.e., a priori) rule out the miraculous.[37]
6. The Nativity Prophecies are Fake News
A prophecy in Isaiah 9:6-7 says: “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” In Luke 1:31-33 the language is similar to Isaiah’s description of Jesus.
But any Jew writing at that time might express the same hope for a Messiah/savior who would rescue their nation from their oppressors. An expressed hope for a future Messiah is not to be considered a prediction unless that expressed hope comes with specific details that we can check to see if they are fulfilled in a specific person. Isaiah provides none. With no such details, there isn’t any real prediction.
Matthew 1:20-23 claims Isaiah 7:14 predicts Jesus’ virgin birth.
First of all the Hebrew word for virgin used in Isaiah 7:14 is betulah. It’s used five times in the book of Isaiah. Isaiah 7:14 isn’t one of them. The word used in Isaiah 7:14 is almah, which means young woman, or simply girl. It does not specify a virgin. Full stop. The gospel of Matthew’s error was to use a 200-year-old Greek translation of the Hebrew, which used the word parthenos. Parthenos originally meant “young girl,” but by the time that Matthew had written his gospel, that word had been changed by usage to signify a “virgin” rather than “a young girl.” This is not unlike how the words “nice” and “gay” have changed in meaning over the years. So Matthew grossly misunderstood the original Hebrew text in Isaiah by incorrectly claiming that Jesus was to be born of a virgin.
Let’s consider exactly what Isaiah 7:1-16 actually says in context:
In the days of king Ahaz the Lord said to Isaiah, “Go forth to meet Ahaz, and say to him, ‘Take heed, be quiet, do not fear, and do not let your heart be faint because Syria, with Ephraim, has devised evil against you saying, ‘Let us go up against Judah and let us conquer it.'” Thus says the Lord God: “Within sixty-five years Ephraim will be broken to pieces so that it will no longer be a people.”
….
The Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, a maiden (almah not betulah) shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. 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.
The context for the prophecy in Isaiah tells us that before a son born of a “young woman” (not a virgin) is old enough to know how to choose between right and wrong the countries of two kings (i.e., Syria and Samaria) will be destroyed (7:15-16). The prophecy was actually fulfilled in Isaiah 8:3 with the birth of his son Maher-shalal-hash-baz.
Robert Miller comments:
The imminent birth of the baby is the point. The birth is coming soon enough to be a sign for King Ahaz that God will protect the throne of David during the current military crisis. The birth of which Isaiah speaks can be a sign for Ahaz only if it is imminent. Isaiah could not possibly have intended to predict the birth of Jesus, for the obvious reason that a birth over seven hundred years in Isaiah’s future could not be a sign to Ahaz.[38]
Miller adds:
Even if we take the Greek translation parthenos to refer to ‘virgin,’ it means only that a woman who is now a virgin will become pregnant. No miracle is intended. Every woman who gets pregnant was once a virgin. In both the Hebrew and Greek, the divine sign is the timing of the conception, not its manner.[39]
Apologist Garrett Kell clearly places blind faith above reason on this alleged virgin birth prophecy. He says that Matthew’s virgin birth interpretation is correct because it is inspired by the same God who inspired Isaiah 7, despite the fact they are irreconcilable:
Matthew is telling us that Isaiah, whether he knew it or not, was speaking of the Messiah—and that his prophecy is fulfilled and realized in the miraculous conception of Jesus. We can trust Matthew’s interpretation of Isaiah 7 because his writings are inspired by the same Spirit who inspired Isaiah’s prophecy.[40]
In the book The Case for the Real Jesus (2007), apologist Lee Strobel interviewed Michael Brown, an evangelical expert on messianic prophecy. Here Brown states his crucial conclusion on this prophecy from Isaiah to Matthew:
Lee Strobel: Did Matthew misinterpret this?
Brown: It’s a tough passage.
Strobel: What’s your conclusion?
Brown: That it’s impossible to determine exactly what the prophecy meant to the original hearers when it was delivered.[41]
But biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan tells us what really happened: “Clearly, somebody went seeking in the Old Testament for a text that could be interpreted as prophesying a virginal conception, even if such was never its original meaning.”[42]
7. The Virgin Birth of Jesus Has Pagan Parallels
As Robert Miller shows, many important people in the ancient world were believed to have been the product of virgin births:
People in the ancient world believed that heroes were the sons of gods because of the extraordinary qualities of their adult lives, not because there was public information about the intimate details of how their mothers became pregnant. In fact, in some biographies the god takes on the physical form of the woman’s husband in order to have sex with her.[43]
Miller proceeds to document some of these stories. There was Theagenes, the Olympic champion, who was regarded as divine for being one of the greatest athlete’s in the ancient world. Hercules was the most widely revered hero of the ancient world. He was promoted to divine status after his death, and it was said that he was fathered by the god Zeus. Alexander the Great was believed to be conceived of a virgin and fathered in turn by the god Heracles. Augustus Caesar was believed to be conceived of a virgin and fathered by the god Apollo, as was the philosopher Plato. Apollonius of Tyana was believed to be a holy man born of a virgin and fathered by Zeus. Pythagoras the philosopher was believed to be a son of Apollo. There were also savior-gods like Krishna, Osiris, Dionysus, and Tammuz, who were said to have been born of virgins and known centuries before the Gospel were written.
All that these virgin birth claims show is that these people were deemed important to the ancient world, nothing more. None of them are taken to be literal virgin births. So it should not come as a surprise that the early Christians came up with similar myths about Jesus. The virgin birth is myth all the way down with no historical reality.
Justin Martyr, a second-century Christian apologist who tried to convert the pagans to Christianity, tells us as much. In his First Apology he wrote:
When we say that the Word, who is the first-birth of God, was produced without sexual union, and that he, Jesus Christ, our teacher, was crucified and died, and rose again, and ascended into heaven, we propound nothing different from what you believe regarding those whom you esteem sons of Jupiter…Of what kind of deeds recorded of each of these reputed sons of Jupiter, it is needless to tell to those who already know…[I]f we even affirm that he [Jesus] was born of a virgin, accept this in common with what you accept of Perseus.[44]
Richard Miller (no relation to Robert Miller) focuses on the points made by Justin Martyr.[45] He comments:
Justin contends there is “nothing new” about the Christian tales of Jesus. They are the same in kind as the Greco-Roman demi-gods: sired by human and divine parents, a tragic death, immortalization / resurrection, ascension, etc., which are the adorning themes of a superhero, not of real events in time and space.
Justin essentially says: ‘Our new hero is just like your own, except ours is awesome, whereas yours are the deceptions of demons.’
Justin offers no historical evidence.
Justin’s ‘case’ is that Jesus had more ancient prophetic oracles, or was a more perfect symbol of morality, and that’s it.
Why doesn’t Justin offer any historical evidence? Because none was needed, just as there was none needed for the sons of Zeus. Hero deification was based solely on the perceived greatness of the deceased.
But Wait, Isn’t There Something Else?
There is an early Christian forgery called the Proto-Gospel of James (dated 140-170 CE) that was falsely claimed to be written by James the brother of Jesus before any of the canonical Gospels. The authenticity of this gospel was rejected by the early Church. It was supposed to provide the objective evidence that Jesus was born of a virgin named Mary.
The Proto-Gospel of James follows a lot of what we read in the canonical Gospel accounts, repeating their fraudulent claims like that of a worldwide census under Augustus Caesar, the sign of the star of Bethlehem, the slaughter of the innocents, and the claim that Joseph was convinced by a dream that Mary was impregnated by God.
In the Proto-Gospel of James we’re told that Joseph and Mary were accused by a priest of being fornicators, and so the priest ordered them to participate in a barbaric trial by ordeal based on passages like Numbers 5. They were both ordered to drink contaminated water from the floor of the temple, which would be polluted by animal feces and blood from sacrifices. If they were guilty of lying about their pregnancy, Mary would suffer a miscarriage, or her and Joseph could both die. According to the Proto-Gospel of James they drank it and survived, so they were exonerated.
One wonders, of course, if Joseph would really “go to the mat” for Mary based on a mere dream. Nonetheless, trials by ordeals don’t work. They’re barbaric, and it would be unbecoming for a god to require them. Anyone who thinks otherwise might use them to double-check whether accused murderers were correctly acquitted in court. Just have them eat contaminated meat, or drink measured amounts of arsenic, cyanide, or venom. Watch and see!
In the Proto-Gospel of James there was a midwife for Mary, along with another woman named Salome. Upon the birth of Jesus the midwife believed, but Salome said, “Unless I thrust in my finger, and search the parts, I will not believe that a virgin has brought forth.” Then “Salome put in her finger, and cried out, and said: Woe is me for mine iniquity and mine unbelief, because I have tempted the living God.” Her hand began to drop off “as if burned with fire.” Salome prays for forgiveness for questioning God, and her hand is healed.[46] Reminiscent of the tale of Doubting Thomas, who refused to believe that Jesus was resurrected until he inserted his fingers into Jesus’ wounds, Salome refused to believe that Mary was a virgin until she checked for an intact hymen, which had to be a miracle since a baby would have torn her hymen.
This late-dated forgery contains an additional miracle, Salome’s healed hand, which doesn’t provide any support for the original miracle claim of the virgin birth. It isn’t considered objective evidence nor good testimonial evidence. In fact, Salome’s unevidenced miracle is not to be considered evidence for an unevidenced virgin birth by the alleged Mother of God! And it contains known historical falsehoods insofar as it’s based on what we read in the Gospels. It is late, untrustworthy, and inauthentic. It doesn’t provide the needed objective evidence or testimonial evidence to support a miracle claim. It is therefore irrelevant.
Let Us Imagine What Could Have Been…
Imagine if an overwhelming number of Jews in first-century Palestine had become Christians. These Jews believed in their God, that their God performed miracles, and that he provided Old Testament prophecies. They hoped for a Messiah/King based on these prophecies.[47] We’re told they were beloved by their God! Yet the overwhelming majority of those first-century Jews did not believe that Jesus was raised from the dead.[48] They were there, and they didn’t believe. So why should we?
If I could go back in time to watch Jesus coming out of a tomb, I might have reason to believe. But I can’t travel back in time. If someone recently found some convincing objective evidence of such an event dating back to the days of Jesus, that would work. But I can’t imagine what kind of evidence that could be. As I’ve argued, uncorroborated testimonial evidence alone wouldn’t work, so a supposed handwritten letter from the mother of Jesus would be insufficient. If a cell phone was discovered that dated to the time of Jesus and contained videos of him doing miracles, that would work. But this is just as unlikely as his resurrection. If Jesus, God, or Mary were to appear to me, that would work. But that has never happened even in my believing days, and there’s nothing I can do to make it happen, either. Several atheists have suggested other scenarios that would work, but none of them have panned out.[49]
Believers will undoubtedly cry foul, complaining that the kind of objective evidence needed to believe cannot be found—as if doubters concocted this need precisely to deny miracles. But this is simply what reasonable people need. If that’s the case, then that’s the case. Bite the bullet. It’s not our fault as doubters that it doesn’t exist. As soon as honest inquirers admit that the objective evidence doesn’t exist, they should stop complaining and be honest about its absence. It’s that simple. Since reasonable people need this evidence, if God exists, then God is at fault for failing to provide it. Why would a God reasonable people and then not provide what reasonable people need? We should always think about these matters in accordance with the probabilities based on the strength of the objective evidence.
If nothing else, a God who desired our belief could have waited until our present technological age to perform miracles, knowing that people in this scientific age need to see the evidence. If a God can send the savior Jesus in the first century, whose death supposedly atoned for our sins and atoned for all of the sins of the people in the past (prior to his death), then that same God could have waited to send Jesus to die in the year 2024. Doing so would bring salvation to every person born before this year, too, which just adds twenty centuries of people to save.
In today’s world it would be easy to provide objective evidence of the Gospel miracles. Magicians and mentalists would watch Jesus to see if he could fool them, like what Penn & Teller do on their show. There would be thousands of cell phones (and television cameras) that could document his birth, life, death, and resurrection. The raising of Lazarus out of his tomb would go viral. We could set up a watch party as Jesus was being put into his grave to document everything all weekend, especially his resurrection. We could ask the resurrected Jesus to tell us things that only the real Jesus could have known or said before he died. Photos could be compared. DNA tests could be conducted on the resurrected body of Jesus, if we first snatched the foreskin of the baby Jesus long before his death. Everyone in the world could watch as his body ascended back into the heavenly sky above, from where it was believed he came down to Earth.
Christian believers say that their God wouldn’t make his existence obvious. But if their God wanted to save more people, as we read he does in 2 Peter 3:9, then it’s obvious that he should’ve waited until our modern era to do so. For the evidence could be massive. If nothing else, their God had all of this evidence available to him, but chose not to use any of it, even though with the addition of each unit of evidence, more people would be saved.
Notes
[1] See Francesca Stavrakopoulou, God: An Anatomy (New York, NY: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2022).
[2] All quotes here are from Bill McKeever and Aaron Shafovaloff, “Redefining the Virgin Birth: Mormonism on the Natural Conception of Jesus” (May 29, 2009). Mormonism Research Ministry. <https://www.mrm.org/virgin-birth>.
[3] If readers think God was merely accommodating his revelation to ancient pre-scientific people, they need to consider why God would not reveal his true nature to them, and then do some incredible miracles to prove it. See John W. Loftus, “The Accommodation Theory of the Bible” (August 8, 2007). Debunking Christianity blog. <https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2007/08/accommodation-theory-of-bible.html>.
[4] On this issue I highly recommend chapter 19 (“Was Jesus God Incarnate?”) of my Why I Became an Atheist (pp. 370-398).
[5] The much longer answer can be found in my collected works, especially Why I Became an Atheist (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2008) and my edited volume The Case against Miracles (United States: Hypatia Press, 2019).
[6] See Peter Boghossian, “Faith Based Belief Processes Are Unreliable” (April 11, 2012). Debunking Christianity blog. <https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2012/04/peter-boghossian-faith-based-belief.html>.
[7] Valerie Tarico, The Dark Side: How Evangelical Teachings Corrupt Love and Truth (Morrisville, NC: Lulu, 2006), pp. 221-222. See also: Loftus, “A Review of Valerie Tarico’s Book, ‘The Dark Side’” (June 1, 2007). Debunking Christianity blog. <https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2007/06/review-of-valerie-taricos-book-dark.html>.
[8] James T. Houk, The Illusion of Certainty (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2017), p. 16.
[9] See Loftus, “How to Change the Mind of Believers” (January 31, 2023). The Secular Web. <https://infidels.org/editors-choice/how-to-change-the-minds-of-believers/>.
[10] See Loftus, “Does God Exist? A Definitive Biblical Case” (May 1, 2023). The Secular Web. <https://infidels.org/kiosk/article/does-god-exist-a-definitive-biblical-case/>.
[11] Regarding the need to look at “relevant” evidence, believers will often focus on irrelevancies like ancient manuscripts and archeological findings. Yes, we have 4th-century manuscripts, but that’s only handed-down hearsay testimony written by authors who were not themselves eyewitnesses. So it’s irrelevant as objective evidence.
Such believers also point to archaeological findings of the Pool of Siloam in Jerusalem, where Jesus supposedly told a blind man to go and be healed, and then was healed (John 9:1-7). But findings like these are not considered relevant objective evidence. At best, what Christians have here are archaeological findings that are consistent with what they believe. They don’t confirm what they believe. The existence of Bethlehem is consistent with the claim that Jesus was born of a virgin, but it doesn’t confirm it—just like the existence of Roswell, New Mexico is consistent with claims of extraterrestrial visitation, but doesn’t confirm it. This kind of evidence is important, but it’s not relevant to whether a miracle took place. Artifacts merely provide information about the backdrop for the tales being told, nothing more. They’re no more evidential than what Homer wrote in The Iliad and The Odyssey about the miraculous deeds of the gods and goddesses using identified places as backdrops. See Loftus, “Disconfirming Evidence is Decisive” (July 18, 2011). Debunking Christianity blog. <https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2011/07/disconfirming-evidence-is-decisive.html>.
[12] See Loftus, “Questioning Miracles: In Defense of David Hume” (April 6, 2024). The Secular Web. <https://infidels.org/library/modern/questioning-miracles/>.
[13] Loftus, The Case against Miracles.
[14] David J. Hand, The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day (New York, NY: Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014).
[15] Loftus, Christianity in the Light of Science: Critically Examining the World’s Largest Religion (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2016).
[16] Michael Shermer, “I Want to Believe: Opus 100: What Skepticism Reveals about Science.” Scientific American Vol. 301, No. 1 (July 2009), pp. 33-35. <https://michaelshermer.com/sciam-columns/i-want-to-believe/>.
[17] Richard C. Carrier, “All the Fantastical Things in the Gospel according to Mark” (July 30, 2024). Richard Carrier Blogs. <https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/29744>.
[18] Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don’t Know About Them) (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2009), pp. 171-179.
[19] John W. Loftus, “Bart D. Ehrman on the Historian and the Resurrection of Jesus” (April 9, 2009). Debunking Christianity blog. <https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2009/04/bart-d-ehrman-quote-on-historian-and.html>.
[20] This attempt utterly fails. See Loftus, “Psychic Epistemology: The Special Pleading of William Lane Craig” (October 31, 2022). The Secular Web. <https://infidels.org/kiosk/article/psychic-epistemology-the-special-pleading-of-william-lane-craig/>.
[21] Loftus, “The brain treats questions about beliefs like physical threats. Can we learn to disarm it?” (January 14, 2018). Debunking Christianity blog. <https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2018/01/the-brain-treats-questions-about.html>.
[22] Christian apologist Kyle Alander attempted to clarify his view of background knowledge using a Bayesian analysis in The Educative Matrix: A Theodicy for the Universal Growth of All Beings (self-published, 2024). Very briefly, and strangely enough, he doesn’t understand background knowledge as something “being built incrementally over time.” It “is not formed through the accumulation of evidence over time but is instead understood as a unified network where evidence is evaluated based on its explanatory coherence with other established facts and propositions” (2024, pp. 67-49 [Kindle edition]).
Alander is right that a Bayesian analysis of knowledge acquisition is all about belief change. That’s what Bayes’ theorem is designed to do! Nevertheless, most people, most of the time, defend their cultural religious indoctrination because their brains prohibit questioning it, Bayes be damned! See Loftus, “What’s Wrong with Using Bayes’ Theorem on Miracles?” (January 25, 2022), esp. § “What’s Wrong With Bayes’ Theorem?” The Secular Web. <https://infidels.org/kiosk/article/whats-wrong-with-bayes-theorem/>.
People defend their religious beliefs due to the background information (not knowledge) that they learned since childhood, which is very unlikely to be dislodged later in life. Strange, isn’t it, that a God who wants us to believe requires us to apply Bayesian reasoning that was not first known until 1763! In any case, Alander needs to explain why other Bayesians disagree with his analysis.
[23] R. A. Torrey, Visions: To Paul in The New Topical Textbook ed. R. A. Torrey (Murfreesboro, TN: Sword of the Lord Publishers, 1897).
[24] See Loftus, “Richard Carrier’s Lecture on ‘Acts as Historical Fiction’” (December 17, 2015). Debunking Christianity blog. <https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2015/12/richard-carriers-lecture-on-acts-as.html>.
[25] William Lane Craig, Apologetics: An Introduction (Chicago, IL: Moody Press, 1984), p. 125.
[26] When it comes to the supposed resurrection of Jesus, at best historians would say that there just isn’t enough evidence to speculate on the role of a god when there are plenty of other natural explanations for a supposed resurrection. Even if these explanations are unlikely, they are eminently more likely than that Jesus walked out of his grave after being brain dead for about three days. That being said, I support one explanation over others—see Loftus, “‘The Rationalization Hypothesis: Is a Vision of Jesus Necessary for the Rise of the Resurrection Belief?’—by Kris Komarnitsky” (April 30, 2022). Debunking Christianity blog. <https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2022/04/the-rationalization-hypothesis-is.html>.
[27] These statistics are sourced in: B. A. Robinson, “The Virgin Birth of Jesus” (December 23, 2007). Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance website [defunct]. <https://www.religioustolerance.org/virgin_b7.htm>.
[28] Joseph’s dream is used in the Gospel of Matthew’s narrative to help explain why Mary was not put to death for dishonoring him by committing adultery. There are five other dreams in this gospel account that were all intended to save someone’s life. So, Joseph’s dream was probably meant to save Mary’s life, too (Matthew 1:19-23; 2:12; 2:19-23; & 27:19). In Joseph’s Dilemma: “Honor Killing” in the Birth Narrative of Matthew (Wipf & Stock Publisher, 2008), Matthew J. Marohl shows that “Joseph’s dilemma involves the possibility of an honor killing. If Joseph reveals that Mary is pregnant, she will be killed. If Joseph conceals Mary’s pregnancy, he will be opposing the law of the Lord. What is a ‘righteous’ man to do?” (2008, p. xii). Marohl: “Early Christ-followers understood Joseph’s dilemma to involve an assumption of adultery and the subsequent possibility of the killing of Mary.”
Honor killings were part of their culture and justified in both the Old and New Testaments. Jesus even agreed with the Mosaic Law (Exodus 21:17; Leviticus 20:9) against his opponents on behalf of the honor killings of children who dishonored their parents (Mark 7:9-13). The tale of the woman caught in adultery, where Jesus exposes the hypocrisy of her accusers, doesn’t change what Jesus thinks of the law, either (John 8; Matthew 5:18). See Loftus, “‘God of Genocide? A Debate on Biblical Violence’ The Text of My 12 Minute Debate Opener Against Randal Rauser” (May 4, 2021). Debunking Christianity blog. <https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2021/05/god-of-genocide-debate-on-biblical.html>.
[29] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: With Selected Variants from the Latin Edition of 1668 ed. E. M. Curley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1994), p. 247 [chapter 32, section 6]. (Original work published 1651).
[30] On the resurrection, see Loftus, The Case against Miracles, chapter 18 (“The Resurrection of Jesus Never Took Place”).
[31] What are these so-called agreed-upon facts? That: (1) Jesus died by crucifixion; (2) his disciples believed that he arose and appeared to them; (3) the Church-persecutor Paul was suddenly converted; (4) James, the brother of Jesus, who was formerly a skeptic, converted; and (5) the tomb of Jesus was empty. (See various Debunking Christianity posts on the minimal facts approach.)
[32] See Loftus, “John Beversluis, “The Gospel According to Whom? A Nonbeliever Looks at The New Testament and its Contemporary Defenders” [Chapter] 3” (August 3, 2021). Debunking Christianity blog. <https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2021/08/john-beversluis-gospel-according-to.html>.
[33] See Paul Tobin, “The Bible and Modern Scholarship” in The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails (pp. 148-180) ed. John W. Loftus (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2010).
[34] Uta Ranke-Heinemann, Putting Away Childish Things (New York, NY: Harper San Francisco, 1995), p. 14.
[35] See Aaron Adair, The Star of Bethlehem: A Skeptical View (Fareham, UK: Onus Books, 2013).
[36] For a monumental work on the cosmology of the Bible, see Edward T. Babinski, “The Cosmology of the Bible” in The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails (pp. 109-147) ed. John W. Loftus (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2010).
[37] Loftus, “Christian Scholarship Led me to Reject Christianity” (November 18, 2006). Debunking Christianity blog. <https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2024/11/christian-scholarship-led-me-to-reject.html>.
[38] Robert J. Miller, Born Divine: The Births of Jesus & Other Sons of God (Salem, OR: Polebridge Press/Westar Institute, 1993), pp. 95-96.
[39] Miller, Born Divine, pp. 95-96.
[40] Gareth Kell, “Is Jesus Really the Virgin-Born Child in Isaiah 7?” (May 9, 2020). The Gospel Coalition website. <https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/jesus-virgin-child-isaiah/>.
[41] Lee Strobel, The Case for the Real Jesus (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2007), p. 217.
[42] John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (New York, NY: Harper-Collins, 1989), pp. 16-23.
[43] Miller, Born Divine, p. 134.
[44] Justin Martyr, First Apology (155 CE), chapter 21 (“Analogies to the History of Christ”).
[45] For the best analysis of this, see Richard C. Miller, Resurrection and Reception in Early Christianity (New York, NY: Routledge, 2017).
[46] The Proto-Gospel of James (1:19-20) in Philippe L. De Coster, Exposition of the Epistle of James including The Proto-Gospel of James & The Secret Book of James (Ghent, Belgium: Berea School of Theology and Internet Ministries, October 2014). <https://ia600407.us.archive.org/15/items/exposition-james-epistle/Exposition_James_Epistle.pdf>
[47] To see how early Christians misused Old Testament prophecy, see Robert J. Miller, Helping Jesus Fulfill Prophecy (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2015).
[48] The most plausible estimate of the first-century Jewish population comes from a census of the Roman Empire during the reign of Claudius (48 CE) that counted nearly 7 million Jews. See the entry “Population” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed. vol. 13 (Detroit, MI: Macmillan Reference). In Palestine there may have been as many as 2.5 million Jews. See Magen Broshi, “Estimating the Population of Ancient Jerusalem.” Biblical Archaeological Review Vol. 4, No. 2 (June 1978): 10-15. Despite these numbers, Catholic New Testament scholar David C. Sim shows that “Throughout the first century the total number of Jews in the Christian movement probably never exceeded 1,000.” See “How Many Jews Became Christians in the First Century: The Failure of the Christian Mission to the Jews.” Hervormde Teologiese Studies Vol. 61, No. 1/2 (2005): 417-440.
[49] Loftus, “What Would Convince Atheists to Become Christians? Five Definitive Links!” (April 4, 2017). Debunking Christianity blog. <https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2017/04/what-would-convince-atheists-to-become.html>.
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