Many reject the doctrine of the virginal conception of Jesus because, like other miracles in the gospels, it challenges scientific understanding. Others, like Giles Fraser, fear that it devalues sexual intimacy and stereotypes women (The virgin birth runs against the grain of Christianity, 24 December). Nobody can deny that belief in Mary’s virginity has sometimes been used to reinforce Christian neuroses about sex and women. But the real point is that in the singularity of this event God was launching a new departure in the history of humanity. This is a child like no other, born to a special woman in a special way, marking the beginning of something remarkably new and – in a world of injustice and oppression, as well as in the mess of individual lives– we all need new beginnings.
Duncan Macpherson
Hampton, Middlesex
• Giles Fraser’s columns are always good and frequently brilliant. But the linking of “virginity” to purity – and the impurity of sex – is a Greek idea, not a Jewish one, and linked to the low status of (Greek) married women. The Jewish idea is related, but fundamentally different. It was unfaithfulness that was impure, emphatically not the sex, which was the expression of the Creation covenant: “the twain shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). This is abundantly clear in the Prophets, where the “virgin daughter of Zion” (see Jeremiah 31:4,13,21 for a characteristic example) is the standard figure for the faithful remnant of the people that has resisted idolatry. Fraser’s error reflects the Platonist syncretism that has misled the church since the (mythical) donation of Constantine.
Chris Jeynes
Guildford, Surrey
• Giles Fraser, as a 1970s liberal Anglican, gets confused in seeking to repudiate the scriptural account of the origin of Jesus Christ. Jesus was not subject to a virgin birth (ie he did not emerge from the birth canal leaving the hymen intact); he was born, as a response to original sin, by pneumatologically generated virginal conception – thereby repudiating the debased and disordered male sexuality Fraser is so proud of. The gnostic accounts Fraser cites are antisemitic and merely reiterate the fall into sin.
Paul Brazier
London
• Far from being part of a hostile polemic against Jesus, “we have not been born of fornication” is a plaintive defence by “Jews who believed him” put on the back foot by Jesus’s aggressive accusation that neither Abraham nor God is their father (John 8). He ends up telling them that their father is in fact the Devil, a murderer and a liar and the father of lies (8.44). The unpleasant point of this unpleasant harangue is that John’s Jesus casts “the Jews” as bastard children of the Devil: it has nothing to do with the legitimacy or otherwise of Jesus’s own conception.
Peter McKenna
Liverpool
• According to a dim and distant memory of a leering lecturer leaving us sniggering first-year law students to ponder the possibilities (Clarke v Clarke, I recall), fecundation ab extra is far from a biological impossibility.
Paul Roper
High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire
• David Cameron has repeated his claim that Britain is a Christian country (Cameron’s seasonal message: feel secure, 24 December). But a report from the Commission on Religion and Belief released in December found that almost half of the UK population now describes itself as non-religious. In 1983, two thirds of the population would have identified as Christian, today it is two in five. The British Social Attitudes survey published in 2014 gives an even higher figure for the non-religious: 50.6%, with just 41.7% regarding themselves as Christian, the lowest ever figure.
It is high time Cameron, and others who make the same claim, paid attention to these statistics.
George Broadhead
Kenilworth, Warwickshire
• Jesus proclaimed good news to the poor; David Cameron is bad news.
Jesus was bad news to the rich; Cameron is good news.
Mary said that her son would topple the mighty from their thrones; Cameron keeps them there.
Mary said that her son would lift up the oppressed; Cameron keeps them down.
Jesus, Mary and Joseph were refugees; Cameron leaves refugees in squalor and danger.
Rev Dr John Simmonds
New Tupton, Chesterfield
• Chibundu Onuzo’s church is to be warmly commended for distributing 2,000 Christmas parcels (Small acts of love will change the world, 23 December). However she is only half right about changing the world. Her comment that “The poor will always get poorer and the rich … richer” echoes the common misunderstanding of Jesus’s “The poor you will always have with you.” If, as seems most likely given other things Jesus said and did, the emphasis in that phrase should be firmly on the last word, it is actually a judgment on his society that they are not listening to his teachings. If they did the poor would not be getting poorer, likewise the rich.
Small acts of love are important but so is tacking inequality. Christian faith teaches that small acts of love and fighting injustice are both needed to change the world.
Rev David Haslam
Evesham, Worcestershire
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