The Virgin Birth and Angry Reviewers

Analyzing Rodney Stark’s treatment of the virgin birth of Jesus in his review of Stark’s latest book, The Victory of Reason (TNR January 6, 2006), Alan Wolfe writes, “Mary’s virgin birth has what [Charles] Freeman calls a ‘shaky’ scriptural basis, given that the Gospels mention her siblings and that one of them, John, does not mention her at all.”

This is mystifying. What, for starters, would Mary’s siblings have anything to do with her virginity? I suspect Wolfe meant Jesus’ siblings, but this too is irrelevant, for, if the possibility of a virgin birth be granted, Mary could have borne Jesus while a virgin and later had other children normally. This is, in fact, what those Protestants who still confess a virgin birth believe. It is also unclear how Mary’s absence from John’s gospel could provide evidence for the virgin birth one way or the other.

Wolfe also got it wrong when he said scholar before saying that the New Testament references to the virgin birth use “the word parthenos, which could also mean young girl, rather than the Hebrew almah.” The linguistic reality is the opposite: The Hebrew term is the broader of the two.

Not having read Stark’s book, Wolfe may have scored some points with his review. As he presents Stark’s arguments, some of them do sound rather silly. But I was left wondering about Wolfe’s competence to review the book: A reviewer as brashly dismissive of a book as Wolfe is of Stark’s should be more careful to get things right himself.

But what really chaffs Wolfe – and he is chaffed, make no mistake, using words like “ugly,” “anachronistic,” and “absurd” to characterize Stark, and concluding that the book is “the worst book by a social scientist I have ever read” – appears to be the “scandal of particularity.” He’s happy with Mark Noll, Grant Wacker, or George Marsden, becuase they behave (in Wolfe’s view) like good secularists within the academy – “as scholars they must act differently within the academy than they do in the pews.” Stark, who by his own testimony is not even a Christian, is not so politely reticent: Instead of writing about the virtues and cultural contributions of “religion,” he writes about “Christianity.” Shame on him. And how dare he!