Liezl, the kids and I went to Cape Town last year. This is The African Madonna by Leon Underwood in St. Georges Cathedral, Cape Town. I found it captivating. Click to enlarge.
“What if tomorrow someone digs up definitive proof that Jesus had a real, earthly, biological father named Larry, and archeologists find Larry’s tomb and do DNA samples and prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the virgin birth was really just a bit of mythologizing the Gospel writers threw in to appeal to the followers of the Mithra and Dionysian religious cults that were hugely popular at the time of Jesus, whose gods had virgin births? But what if, as you study the origin of the word ‘virgin’ you discover that the word ‘virgin’ in the gospel of Matthew actually comes from the book of Isaiah, and then you find out that in the Hebrew language at that time, the word ‘virgin’ could mean several things. And what if you discover that in the first century being ‘born of a virgin’ also referred to a child whose mother became pregnant the first time she had intercourse? What if that spring were seriously questioned? Could a person keep on jumping? Could a person still love God? Could you still be a Christian? Is the way of Jesus still the best possible way to live? Or does the whole thing fall apart?…If the whole faith falls apart when we reexamine and rethink one spring, then it wasn’t that strong in the first place, was it?”
A while back I read Velvet Elvis. Rob Bell wrote it. He’s popular, very popular. The paragraph above is from page 26. It represents a question. Maybe it’s hyperthetical but it certainly does embody a question our culture has been and still is asking: “What’s so important about the Virgin Birth anyway?”, and “Seriously! A virgin? Maybe you’re reading it wrong!”
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