Following in the footsteps of the recent discussion of infant baptism, I figured that I would spent a little time on what the book Credo calls the Anabaptist error on the doctrine of the virgin birth:
The Anabaptists taught that the Lord Jesus took His body from heaven, and so did not receive His flesh and blood from the blessed virgin Mary. Since Mary was conceived and born in sin, they argued that Christ would have been sinful if He had taken her flesh and blood. For them, Mary acted like a funnel, a route through which Christ passed without in any way being affected by it in His person. Note how the passages above show this to be wrong. Ultimately, the Anabaptists made flesh and blood to be sinful in itself.
The "passages above" referred to here are Isaiah 7:14, Matthew 1:23, and Hebrews 4:15 and are found in the World English Bible as follows (assuming that I don't make a copying error this time, as I did in the original post on baptism):
Isaiah 7:14 - Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin will conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.
Matthew 1:23 - “Behold, the virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son. They shall call his name Immanuel;†which is, being interpreted, “God with us.â€
Hebrews 4:15 - For we don’t have a high priest who can’t be touched with the feeling of our infirmities, but one who has been in all points tempted like we are, yet without sin.
It's a little bit interesting to see how, although the first bit of Matthew 1:23 is stated as a quote of Isaiah 7:14, that they are a little bit different in their wording (I guessing that this is due to one coming from a Hebrew manuscript, and the other from a Greek one). In the NIV, Isaiah 7:14 and Matthew 1:23 come out the same.
Anyways, three things come to mind when I think of these passages:
- Views at the time on pregnancy: I think that the views at the time of the birth of Christ were still those of Aristotle. His views were something along the lines of the male providing sperm which contained the complete essence of a child, with the mother basically being nothing more than a source of matter.
- Modern views on pregnancy: Modern biology would suggest that beyond the point of conception, the mother and developing child are genetically distinct. The mother provides oxygen and other nutrients for to the child via the placenta, but this is merely a meeting point at which transfer takes place with the circulatory systems and blood remaining distinct.
- Language: Given the views at the time on how children came to exist, and also the one-time nature of the event, I'm just wondering if we might be hitting some sort of barrier in terms of usable language (ie. an inability to differentiate the start of pregnancy from modern views of conception is - something which they didn't really know of at the time).
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Given the above, I'm finding it a little difficult to say that scripture disproves this so-called "Anabaptist error". Beyond providing nutrition - which would contain none of her genetic material - did Mary provide anything more than the funnel view of Anabaptism allows? Feel free to disagree (and to try to persuade me).