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The Virginal Conception and Its Meanings

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Gerald O'Collins S.J.
Gerald O'Collins S.J.*
Affiliation:
9 Edge Hill, Wimbledon, London SW19 4LR
*
Email: ocollins@unigre.it
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Abstract

In Jeffrey Archer's The Gospel According to Judas, Judas dismisses the virginal conception of Jesus as no more than another example of ‘Greek myths that tell of gods in heaven who produce offspring following a union with women of this earth’. To attribute such a view to a first-century Jew like Judas seems strange, since the earliest evidence shows Jewish critics of the Christian movement rejecting the virginal conception as a case of illegitimacy. In any case such Greek myths do not provide plausible sources for the two Gospel accounts of the virginal conception. Yet such merely historical debate is insufficient. One should press on to illustrate the religious significance and theological importance of the virginal conception within the whole story of Jesus: for instance, the role of this conception in revealing the Trinity at work for human salvation.

Keywords

Virginal conceptionGreco-Roman mythsJesus and the TrinityJesus' ‘double’ generationSalvation history
Type
Original Articles
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 89 , Issue 1022 , July 2008 , pp. 431 - 440
Copyright
Copyright © The author 2008. Journal compilation © The Dominican Council/Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2008

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References

1 London: Macmillan, 2007.

2 See my review of their book in The Pastoral Review, July/August 2007, pp. 83–85.

3 See Brown, R. E., The Birth of the Messiah (New York: Doubleday, new ed. 1993), pp. 522–23Google Scholar.

4 See Chadwick, H., Origen Contra Celsum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953, paperback ed. 1980), pp. 28, 31–32Google Scholar.

5 See Brown, , The Birth of the Messiah, pp. 534–37Google Scholar.

6 For a valuable account of the composition of the four Gospels, see Bauckham, R., Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2006)Google Scholar.

7 For details see O'Collins, G., Easter Faith (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2003), pp. 48–49Google Scholar, 67–69, 112.

8 See Chadwick, Origen Contra Celsum, p. 321, n. 12.

9 The Birth of the Messiah, p. 517.

10 Denzinger, H. and Huenermann, P., eds., Enchiridion Symbolorum, Definitionum et Declarationum etc., 37th ed. (Freiburg: Herder, 1991), no. 301Google Scholar.

11 For details see O'Collins, G., Christology. A Biblical, Historical and Systematic Study of Jesus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, rev. edn. 2004), pp. 166–67Google Scholar.