Below is an excerpt from a chapter I wrote on the creeds. I’m putting it in here as a meditation on what the Founding Fathers really thought about Christianity, Jesus, and the history of the church. What you read will not sit well with the Jerry Falwell’s of the world, and may make some progressive Christians uneasy. But it was Thomas Jefferson who said:
That statement from the man who wrote that ‘we are endowed by our creator’ cannot be forgotten.
[in midstream]
The creeds next assert the Jesus, “was conceived of the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary”.
This short line of dogma is ripe with confusion and controversy. The exact nature of Jesus, the meaning of the Holy Spirit, and the tradition of the virgin birth were debated so vociferously in the early church that the Apostle’s Creed and later the Nicene Creed were formulated to end fissures in the dispersed Christian community and to introduce uniformity of belief.
The Holy Spirit has many attributes in the New Testament. In Acts 13:2 the Holy Spirit is given the faculty of speech, saying “Set apart for Me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them”. The Apostle Paul explains that there is “no condemnation to them who are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death.” “For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God.” In Romans 8:26, the Spirit helps us by interceding and guiding our prayer.
In John 15:26 Jesus promises to send the “Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father”, who will testify to the power of Christ. Later in John 16:13-15, Jesus explains that the Spirit of truth will come to the believers and guide them and show them the “things to come.” In Acts 16:6-7, the Holy Spirit forbids Paul and Timotheus from preaching in Asia and Bithynia. Acts 20:23-28 explains that the Holy Ghost “testifies…in every city” and appoints some to be “overseers, to shepherd the church of God.”
There is probably no element of historical Christianity which is vaguer than this concept of the Holy Spirit. Our earliest formulations in Paul show a kind of proto-Cartesian opposition of spirit and flesh, with the Law of the Spirit opposed to the Law of the Torah. Because no one could live up to the stringent demands of the mitzvot (the 613 commandments in the Pentateuch), all people had fallen into sin and been condemned to death. But those people that are led by the Spirit in Christ Jesus are able to obtain forgiveness and conquer sin and death. It seems that the Holy Spirit is a comforter, a consoler, a guide, and an intermediary.
The Holy Spirit also came to be used as a metaphor for the Church as a whole and to, at once, represent the totality of the flock, while guiding and edifying them through the leadership. This tradition of mediator, or emissary, explains the dogmatic formulation that Jesus was conceived through the Holy Spirit. As Luke tells us, the angel Gabriel came to Mary and explained that she would give birth to the Christ, “And Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” And the angel answered and said to her, “The Holy Spirit, will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; and for that reason the holy offspring shall be called the Son of God … For nothing will be impossible with God.” The Almighty Father was too distant to come down to earth and impregnate Mary, so he sent the Spirit to accomplish this. Once Jesus had ascended back up into heaven to sit at the right hand of God, he also became too distant to directly communicate with the world. As Jesus explained to his disciples, “it is to your advantage that I go away; for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come unto you; but if I go, I will send Him to you. And He, when He comes, will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment.” Of all the different attributes of the Holy Spirit the one most consistently alluded to was the inspiration to the prophets. The Spirit was interpreted as the literal voice of God.
At the Council of Nicaea (325 CE) the Alexandrian bishop Athanasius prevailed over his presbyter Arius. Arius held that there had been a time before Jesus existed. He believed that only God is eternal and unoriginated. Athanasius denied this. The Nicene Creed was made to assert that Jesus and God were of one substance (homoousios). Furthermore, it insisted, “We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son. With the Father and the Son he is worshiped and glorified. He has spoken through the Prophets.”
This was the dogma of the trinity. From the co-equal status of Jesus, God, and the Holy Spirit an attempt was made to settle the disputes about the nature of Christ and the mechanism by which an ordinary woman could be made pregnant by God: “by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man.”. But by formulating the doctrine of the Trinity they did not succeed in ending the controversy. The Catholic Church would have to be ever watchful for heretics that didn’t accept their solutions at Nicaea. Martin Luther admitted, “We Christians seem fools to the world for believing that Mary was the true mother of this child, and nevertheless a pure virgin. For this is not only against all reason, but also against the creation of God, who said to Adam and Eve, `Be fruitful and multiply'”
And Thomas Jefferson said “The Athanasian paradox that one is three and three but one, is so incomprehensible to the human mind, that no candid man can say he has any idea of it, and how can he believe what presents no idea? He who thinks he does, only deceives himself.”
The paradox of the trinity and the paradox of the virgin mother were resisted precisely because they were paradoxes and thereby counterintuitive. Jefferson predicted that “The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter”.
Although that view was already gathering steam among the elites in Jefferson’s time it fell to the disciplines of Biblical Higher Criticism, cultural anthropology, and comparative religion in the 19th and 20th centuries, to make it a widespread secular truism.
As other cultures were more closely examined it became clear that the motif of the virgin birth by divine parentage was much more widespread and universal than even the Deists suspected. In Toltec legend, Quetzacoatl was conceived in the womb of a virgin named Chimalman when God breathed upon her. The Greek demigod, Perseus, was the child of a virgin named Danae, impregnated by Zeus’s shower of gold. Attis was born when his mother ate a pomegranate. The hero, or demigod, born of partially divine heritage turned up repeatedly as archeologists, anthropologists and scholars unearthed the ancient evidence. Joseph Campbell, remarking on the similarity between the Virgin Mary and the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis, said:
The modern criticism of the virgin birth, that it was derived and unoriginal, was merely a revival of the same charge in the early days of the church. Perhaps, the best way to elucidate this is to revisit the ancient debate between Origen (c.184-251 CE) and Celsus. Origen was a brilliant young student of the philosopher Ammonius Saccas in Alexandria. By the age of 17 he was put in charge of the Catechetical School there, and charged with teaching the catechumens. These were people that had converted to Christianity and needed to learn the rudiments of the religion before they could be baptized. Later he passed off this duty and devoted himself to intense study. Yet, he almost didn’t survive his youth.
Legend has it that during the persecutions of 202 CE Origen became obsessed with the idea of his own martyrdom. When his father was arrested, he was ready to rush “headlong into the conflict.” Fearful for his life, his mother hid all his clothes. Unable to leave the house he sent his father a letter admonishing him not to renounce his faith “on our account”. After the death of his father their property was confiscated by the imperial treasury and Origen, his mother, and other siblings were left destitute. Fortunately for posterity, he found a wealthy patron in a distinguished lady of Alexandria who took him in and provided for his necessities. Later, perhaps influenced by some of the tenets of neo-Platonism, Origen castrated himself. He also turned his attention to the humanities and familiarized himself with all the currents of intellectual life propagating throughout the Mediterranean. In his writings he easily passes from Hebrew scripture, to Homeric folklore, to Pythagorean and Platonic exegesis. Origen proved himself to be one of the ablest apologists for the Christian faith, and one of the most influential thinkers and shapers of the religion. However, his end was tragic.
Having set up a school in Caesarea, he was arrested during the persecutions of Decius. Tortured and held in miserable conditions, he died shortly after his release from imprisonment. Further injury was inflicted when he was posthumously condemned as a heretic at the Fifth Ecumenical Council in 553 CE.
Origen created the first great Christian theological system and was prodigious in his output. And when a certain heretical work gained currency and was undermining the faith of the believers, it was to Origen that Ambrosius turned for help. Ambrosius was a wealthy noble and a cultured man who had been converted to the faith by Origen years earlier. He had helped Origen open his school in Caesarea and encouraged him in his studies.
The book in question was called Alethès lógos (A True Discourse) and was written by a man named Celsus. Very little is known about this Celsus. It is believed that he lived during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, and that his book was written between 175 and 180 CE. The going assumption is that Celsus was Roman but this is not assured. He had an intimate knowledge of the Jewish religion and Egyptian ideas, leading many to speculate that he lived or traveled extensively in Eastern region of the empire. There are no extant copies of A True Discourse but we can reconstruct as much as ninety percent of it from the extensive citations Origen made in his rebuttal Katà Kélsou (Contra Celsus).
Celsus didn’t just dispute the virgin birth, he disbelieved that Jesus was the Son of God as well. For Celsus these two issues were interlinked and implausible. Jesus had been born in Judea in a “certain Jewish village, of a poor woman of the country, who gained her subsistence by spinning…” For Celsus this was not what we should expect for a man purported to be the only begotten Son of God. Why would God bring forth his child in some obscure village on the outskirts of the Roman Empire? Why not in Rome, or Antioch, or some other great city of the empire? More than this, why would he be of peasant stock and uneducated? Why not bring forth a child of rank and privilege whose noble characteristics would testify to his favor with God?
But Celsus went further in his criticisms. He claimed that Mary, being discovered pregnant, had been convicted of adultery and turned out of the house by “the carpenter to whom she had been betrothed”. After wandering about homeless she had given birth to a bastard child. Celsus identified the true father of Jesus as a soldier named Panthera. It is interesting to compare Celsus’s version of the birth of Jesus to the account given in the Gospel of Matthew, which is the oldest account we have:
It appears that Celsus was familiar with the Gospel of Matthew and took the basic outlines of the virgin birth as face value. He accepted that Joseph and Mary had been engaged, that Mary had become pregnant without ever having slept with her fiancée, and that Joseph had sought to break off the marriage. But, for Celsus, the story of a messenger of God coming to Joseph and taking responsibility for the pregnancy was a pure invention intended to explain the sordid origins of Jesus and cover up for his illegitimate birth. The true story was that Joseph had kicked Mary out of the house and she had raised Jesus without a father. Desperately impoverished Jesus had hired himself out as a servant in Egypt where he had learned the secrets of magic and sorcery, and then, “returned to his own country, highly elated on account of them (the secrets), and by means of these proclaimed himself a God.”
Celsus was not making an outrageous claim out of whole cloth but a very familiar one. In the Roman Empire the Egyptians had a reputation for performing miracles and Israel had witnessed several movements led by men claiming divine powers or inspiration. One example that occurred during the reign of Nero was of a man known simply as “The Egyptian”. Josephus reports that, “Arriving in the country this man, a fraud who posed as a seer, collected 30,000 dupes, led them round from the desert to the Mount of Olives, and from there was ready to force an entry into Jerusalem, overwhelm the Roman Garrison, and seize supreme power with his fellow-raiders as bodyguard.” Felix, the Roman procurator at the time (52-59 CE), sniffed out the conspiracy and led out the Roman infantry who routed the Egyptian’s troops and set him to flight. The Apostle Paul was later confused with the Egyptian when he was arrested in Jerusalem. Another example of false messiahship is recorded by Josephus:
Given the environment in Judea in the first century, the claims being made for Jesus were not all that surprising. There had been other miracle workers from Egypt that had inspired large followings. There were Jewish nationalists wo rking wonders and claiming messiahship, that had suffered death at the hands of a Roman procurator. There was the case of Simon Magus, a Samaritan that had become famous for his use of magic arts and had won many adherents. The New Testament acknowledges Simon and other miracle workers, and even prophesies more in the future. But it universally joins Josephus in branding them pretenders and false prophets.
The ancient world did not dispute miracles in the same way we do. They had not discovered inalterable laws of nature and were wont to explain the unexplainable with recourse to spirits, both good and evil. Celsus didn’t dispute the claim that Jesus had performed miracles but, strangely to our modern ears, this wasn’t much of a concession. Miracle workers were so ubiquitous that the performance of miracles conferred no proof of divine inheritance. Miracles could sometimes be illusions, the work of magicians. Other times they could be genuine, but accomplished with the assistance of the spirit world.
The Gospel of Matthew acknowledges this critique of Jesus’ special powers when it has the Pharisees accuse Jesus of casting out demons by the power of Beelzebul, the ruler of the demons. The New Testament writers, like the pagans and the Jews, believed that there were both charlatans and real miracle workers. But they denied that Jesus was a fraud and insisted that the spirit by which he performed miracles was the Holy Spirit–God’s mediator–and not a demonic one. Furthermore, they claimed that the apostles had access to the Holy Spirit and could cast out demons, speak in tongues, survive snakebite and heal the sick with a laying on of hands.
On the other hand, they condemned all other miracle workers as agents of Satan. Christians did not deny that the pagan deities existed, or that they enabled wondrous acts. They simply attributed these acts to evil, and associated the many Gods with the minions of Satan. As Tertullian said, “…if both angels and demons do just what your gods do, where in that case is the preeminence of deity, which we must surely think to be above all in might? Will it not then be more reasonable to hold that these spirits make themselves gods…”
