The Virgin Birth and the Earliest Christian Tradition

— K. D. Sethna

cover

Price: Rs 85

Pages: 92
Dimensions (in cms): 14x22
Soft Cover
   
Publisher: The Integral Life Foundation, U.S.A.

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About The Virgin Birth and the Earliest Christian Tradition

In this study on the Virgin Birth of Jesus Christ, the author stresses that the focus must be not on the "manner in which orthodox Christians understand Mary's child to have emerged from her womb" but on "the nature of the conception by which that child is said to have been born virginally". He states, "the more correct term, therefore, would be the Virginal Conception of Jesus." The study is not from a rationalist angle but "to find if the basic Christian tradition itself affords ground for belief in such a beginning of life". The subject is considered through the eyes of the scholar and ordained minister of the Roman Catholic Church, Father Raymond E. Brown, because he has given "an admirably many-sided treatment to the problem".

REVIEW



  The Virgin-Birth doctrine is a much discussed topic among theologians and comparatists of religions. The Gospel of the Hebrews, the early Christian Apocryphal book informs us: "The saviour himself saith, `Even now my mother the Holy Spirit took me!'" In the fourth century Aphraates of Edessa spoke of a man having god for his father and "The Holy Spirit his mother". The Odes of Solomon, a Jewish Christian work of the second(?) century associates Mary's virginity with the thesis of a painless birth and a feminine Holy Spirit. The combination of Mary with the Holy Spirit has triggered off new interpretations of the developing doctrine of the Divine Trinity.

  Out of the twenty-seven books in the New Testament, the gospels of Mathew and Luke were the sole documents to narrate the Virgin Birth. And all the rest, as Father Raymond E.Brown in his scholarly work The Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus repeatedly grants, are silent.

  The Virginity ascribed to Mary, `Mother of God', as the representative of a creative goddess-force would essentially be symbolic. Sri Aurobindo in his Essays on the Gita observes: "In the Buddhist legend the name of the mother of Buddha (Mayadevi, also Mahamaya) makes the symbolism clear; in the Christian the symbol seems to have been attached by a familiar mythopoeic process to the actual human mother of Jesus of Nazareth."

     K.D.Sethna, an eminent scholar-poet, has taken up the Virgin Birth of Jesus for the subject matter of his study in this scholarly work under review. "By Virgin Birth", writes the author K.D.Sethna, "we must take care not to involve the manner in which Orthodox Christians understand Mary's child to have emerged from her womb: that is to say, with the physiological sign of virginity still present — an unruptured hymen — and with no pain of labour. We must focus simply on the nature of the conception by which that child is said to have been born virginally: in other words, the birth took place from a conception for which no male agent was responsible. The more correct term, therefore, would be the virginal conception of Jesus. We are retaining the other for our title because of its historical and current use, but it is meant to convey that Jesus came out of Mary's body in whatever manner as the result of her previously conceiving him in a state of virginity without the sex act."

  The purpose of Sethna's study is to find if the basic Christian tradition itself affords ground for belief in such a beginning of life as these documents describe for their Messiah. The book is an adventure of exploration for genuine evidence from the New Testament and from the background to it of the earliest Christianity. It is not a `willing to wound and yet afraid to strike' thesis. Jesus's status as an Incarnation is not called into question at all. What is critically examined from a certain viewpoint is merely the kind of nativity Christendom associates with him.

  No doubt, the subject is too sacred to be touched. And so, Sethna chose to look at it in some detail through the eyes of a modern scholar, Father Raymond E.Brown, S.S, for the reason that he has given with an exemplary open mind an admirably many-sided treatment to the problem. This is not to say that Sethna, an equally eminent scholar, has completely relied on Brown's wide knowledge. Wherever Brown is perceived to have gone astray Sethna has essayed some corrective comments of his own. At the end of the study a few observations are made on the original religious motif at work, its ultimate significance in a spiritual view of reality, its true nature in the eyes of India's great modern Seer Sri Aurobindo and the form under which it may finally function.

— P. Raja

November 2002