Supplementary Article No. 15
“BORN OF WOMAN”?
Reexamining
Galatians 4:4
-- i --
God Sent His Son
In
conjunction
with the upcoming Second Edition of The Jesus Puzzle, the
present
study offers a comprehensive examination of the passage in Paul’s
letters
which, it could be said, most suggests that he has a human Jesus in
mind. This
is Galatians 4:4-7, containing the double phrase “born of woman, born
under the
Law.” (I capitalize the word because Paul is referring to the Jewish
Law of the
Hebrew Bible, the Torah, not to law in general.) There are two
different ways
to approach this passage: one, accepting the double phrase as authentic
to
Paul; the other, questioning its authenticity and judging it as a
likely
interpolation. We will look at the passage as a whole, for regardless
in which
direction we lean, there are some surprising things to discover about
it.
4
Then in the fullness of time, God sent [exapesteilen] his Son, born of woman,
born under the Law,
5 in order that he might purchase freedom
for the
subjects of the Law, so that we might attain the status of sons.
6 And because you are sons, God (has) sent
[exapesteilen] into our hearts the Spirit
of his Son, crying ‘Father!’
7 You are therefore no longer a slave but
a son,
and if a son, then also by God’s act an heir.” [NEB/my
trans.]
The
Sending of the Son
“God
sent [the
verb exapostellō] his Son.” This verb
of sending is used in the Old Testament in connection with the sending
of
spiritual beings, such as angels, or personified Wisdom as in the Wisdom of Solomon 9:10. The basic form
of the verb, apostellō, is regularly
used to denote the sending of the Holy Spirit. (The verb and its
variants can
also be used to speak of ‘sending’ a person.) The identical form of the
verb in
verse 4, “God sent his Son,” is used in verse 6 to say that “God sent
into our
hearts the Spirit of his Son.” This is an aorist tense, placing both
these
actions in the past.
Some
translations
of the verb in verse 6 render it in the perfect tense: “God has sent
into our
hearts…” but this is misleading. The question is, are the two thoughts,
the two
“sent” actions, more or less contemporary? Might they essentially be
complementary parts of the same process? By using a perfect tense in
verse 6,
translators set up a “God sent…God has sent,” sequence, as though the
second is
completely separate and later than the first, the former representing
the advent
of Jesus and his life on earth, the latter the installation of his
Spirit into
Paul’s converts a generation after his passing. And no doubt such a
translation
has been influenced by that assumption. But if the two ‘sendings’ are
essentially
contemporary, Paul would be relating both to the time of his own
activities:
the sending in both cases would then relate only to the Spirit of the
Son, so
that we could take both in the context of the revelation of Christ by
God to Paul
and his congregations—as including the wider circles of contemporary
Christ
belief.
This
would then
represent the arrival of the spiritual Christ within the current
phenomenon of
divine revelation about him and Paul’s concept of “Christ in you.” This
spiritual
knowledge and presence of Christ would be part of the situation in
Paul’s time,
a knowledge and presence which have brought with them a new freedom
from the
Law, and by which those who are “in Christ” have achieved the “status
of sons.”
There need be nothing here that refers to an historical life or act of
Christ
on earth (or even a sacrificial act in the heavens). Let’s see how well
such a
reading can be supported.
We
should not
ignore the fact that Paul has failed to refer here to any event of
death and
resurrection, historical or mythical. It is not, “God sent his son to
die on Calvary
and rise from his tomb,” or even “God sent his son to die on the cross
and to
rise from death,” which could in the latter case allow placement in a
mythical
context. Rather he says:
“…God
sent his
Son…in order that he might purchase freedom for the subjects of the
law…”
I
have dropped the
contentious “born” phrases temporarily, so that we can see the main
train of
thought in the sentence. Note that the antecedent of “he” (the one who
purchases freedom) could grammatically be either God or the Son.
Usually, it is
the Son who is assumed to purchase freedom, but this may well be a
significant
misreading.
What
Paul is
focusing on in this passage is the specific transition of the believer
from
being under the Law to being free of it; from being a “slave” to being
a “son.”
(Paul has a very negative view of the biblical Torah—though he seems
not to
want to abolish it completely, but to transform it in Christ—and feels
that its
traditional application is repressive and soul-destroying.) This in
fact has
been his entire focus in the preceding chapter 3 of Galatians. And at
what
point has this transition from Law to freedom, from slave to son, taken
place?
The fact is, it has not been at the point of Jesus’ sacrificial act,
regardless
of whether that was historical or mythical. Paul locates it at quite a
different point. Here is his thought a few verses earlier:
3:23 Before faith came we were
held prisoner by the
Law until faith should be revealed....
25 Now that faith has come, we are no
longer under the supervision of the Law.
(The
intervening
verse 24 has been rendered in translations in either of two ways: “…the
Law was
our tutor until Christ came,” but this contradicts the thought in the
two
flanking verses which say that it is “faith” that has come. The other
is
preferable: “…the Law was a tutor leading us to Christ,” which is
literally
what the Greek says (gegonen eis Xriston).
The latter could be taken in any number of ways: leading us to learning
about
Christ, leading us to the time when Christ arrived—either in body,
spirit, or
the revelation of him. The King James Version, for example, translates:
“The
law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be
justified by
faith.”)
Thus,
even when
Christ had performed his act of sacrifice, whether historical or
mythical, we
were still under the Law, still slaves, not yet sons of God. All this
was to
change only at the time when faith was brought to the new believer,
through the
preaching of Paul and other apostles of the Christ.1
1 Paul often talks as if he were the
first to receive the revelation about Jesus the Son from God (as in
Gal. 1:16),
but while he might have liked to think of it that way, it is clear that
he was
not the first. The Christ cult existed before him, and in 2 Corinthians
11:4,
he speaks of other “spirits” (referring to revelations from the Holy
Spirit)
which other “ministers of Christ” (11:23) have received. Of course, he
thinks
his own received revelation is superior, the proper one, and it could
well be
that the sophistication of his own christology was a quantum leap
beyond that
of any predecessor.
Once
more, we see
this exclusive focus on the apostolic movement as being the key moment
of the
present time—seemingly its only
moment—with Jesus suspended somewhere in an indeterminate dimension,
communicating with humans and having the consequences of his shadowy
acts
brought into the light and into effect only with the preaching of the
gospel by
the likes of Paul. To call it curious—this relegation of the vivid
events of
Calvary and the empty tomb to some opaque no man’s land from which they
never
seem to emerge into focus—would be an understatement, though it is, of
course,
consistent with the regular practice of the epistles.
If
we allow the
thought of 3:23-25 to
govern 4:4
(which it should, else Paul is contradicting himself), we arrive at
this
scenario. If God sending his Son in verse 4 is focused on the act—God’s
act—of
producing that transition from Law to freedom, and Paul locates this
transition
at the time of faith (which is to say of the response to his own and
other
apostles’ preaching), then the “sent” of verse 4 does not refer to any
arrival
of the Son on the earthly scene some decades earlier. Rather, the
sending of
verse 4 is the sending of the Son during
the time of Paul, which can only mean through revelation into minds
like his
(“God revealed his son in me,” as he has said in 1:16), enabling him to
bring
knowledge of the Son to others (“in order that I might preach him among
the
nations”) and produce the “faith” within them which brings about that
freedom
from the Law and confers the status of “sons” upon them.2
2 Paul seems to have some concept of
the Law applying to gentiles. At least, he is taking into account the
view of
his fellow Jewish Christians that gentiles who join the faith must
submit to
the Law, which is something he is fighting tooth and nail, quite apart
from his
desire to set aside the Law for all, Jew and Greek.
Once
again, as he
does so consistently throughout his letters, Paul has focused entirely
on his
own work and left the work of Jesus in outer darkness, known and
brought into
visibility only by God and revelation, with Paul himself acting as the
medium for
both. If the sending is of Christ as Spirit (which is what Paul then
says
outright in verse 6), there is no ‘action’ by Christ at that time which
purchases freedom, and thus God remains the subject of “to purchase
freedom for
the subjects of the Law.” It is by sending the revelation of his Son,
the
long-hidden secret (“mystery”) of which the epistles regularly speak,
that God
has set in motion the freeing of people from the Law and their adoption
as sons
through the work of Paul. Here Christ is essentially a passive figure.
The Work of
God
If
verse 4 is not
a reference to the Son’s acts themselves, but to God’s
act in sending the revelation of his Son and making the
benefits of his sacrifice available, all the elements of this passage
fall into
place. First, it must be pointed out that Paul, of course, also
envisions, and
elsewhere states, that it is Jesus’ act of sacrifice which has brought
freedom
from the Law. A short time earlier, in Galatians 3:13, he has said
“Christ
brought us freedom from the curse of the Law by becoming for our sake
an
accursed thing.” This is the primary act which is drawn on by God when
he
brings about the application of that freedom. But what is the specific
point of
this application? It is not stated to be the actual time of the
sacrifice. As
just outlined, the passage from 3:23
to 4:6 makes it clear that the application of the effects
of Christ’s act takes place only at the time of faith,
which is the time of Paul, not
Jesus. This coming of faith has been the act and responsibility of God,
through
his revelation to Paul (and others) and Paul’s subsequent missionary
work.
This,
in fact, is
the manner in which all the epistles describe the salvation workings of
the
present time. It is all God’s work, revealing Christ and making
available the
benefits of his sacrifice. This is why no role is ever given to Jesus
in the
present except to have himself “manifested” (all those revelation
verbs) and
enter into Paul and his converts. It is why his acts are never
introduced as
part of the present scene. Instead, those acts, performed at some
unspecified
time, have created a deposit placed in heaven’s bank, an account kept
hidden by
God “for long generations” but now revealed. This account has now been
opened
for withdrawals, with the PIN number given out to those who have
adopted faith
in Christ Jesus. We find this fully in keeping with the thought in
verse 7: “So
you are no longer a slave, but a son; and thus by God’s act,
an heir.” Here it is stated to be God who has
performed the act which
makes the believer a son, not Jesus, and this parallels and confirms
the
meaning in verse 4, in which it is God
who has “purchase[d] freedom for the subjects of the Law,” not Jesus.
Thus it
has not been the death and resurrection which are the immediate cause
of that
freedom, and so the “God sent his Son” in verse 4 does not imply a
reference to
the life which contained such events, but rather refers to God drawing
on those
acts to put the available freedom into effect by revealing
the Son and what he had done (a revelation achieved through
a new reading of scripture). God relies on Paul and others like him to
elicit
the necessary faith.
To
put it another
way, since it is God who has done the purchasing of freedom, and in the
time of
Paul, this pulls God’s act of ‘sending’ the Son in verse 4 into Paul’s time. This, then, could only
refer to a sending in a spiritual sense—the new knowledge and presence
of
Christ—which is what Paul goes on to say in verse 6: “God sent the
Spirit of
his Son.” Thus none of it is a reference to an arrival of Jesus on
earth in the
past. This does not, in itself, rule out some previous arrival on
earth, but
such a thought is not present in these verses. And it must be admitted
that to
take this spiritual sending as referring to the actual point of
revelation of
the Son, with no life preceding it, would be the natural assumption,
given its
perfect fit with all the epistles’ talk about Christ being “manifested”
in
their own time, with him having been part of God’s secret/mystery
hidden for
long generations, with the looked-for “arrival” of Christ from heaven
containing no suggestion that he had been here previously, and so on.
This
puts verse 6
in its proper relationship to verse 4. While the two thoughts are more
or less
contemporaneous, the second is something of a corollary and extension
of the
first. By revealing Christ and making the benefits of his
spiritual-world
sacrifice available to believers who now become free of the Law, God
has
created adopted sons. With Christ, God’s heavenly Son, now “in you”
(within
“our hearts”) in spiritual form, that “Spirit of his Son” is expressing
its
hosts’ new relationship with God by “crying: ‘Abba, Father!’ ”
Paul,
in this
entire passage, presents God as sending his Son, not in terms of any
arrival on
earth, but in the sense of his revelation to humanity. This fits with
every
other reference in the epistles to the ‘coming’ of Christ in the
present time,
offering a “now” figure who speaks from scripture rather than a “then”
figure
of the past. That an entire movement from its beginning and for over
half a
century could have adopted such language and created such a picture if
an
historical Jesus had recently existed and whose memory lived on in
their minds
is quite impossible.
In the
Fullness of Time
All
this is
further supported by another overlooked phrase, the very first words of
verse
4: “Then in the fullness of time…” (literally, “when came the fullness
of time
[to plēroma tou chronou]”). What is
that time? Certainly Paul does not here say, nor ever says, that it was
a
certain number of years ago, that it was at the time of an identifiable
person
or period in history which could locate Jesus on earth for us. Still,
there is
some validity to the idea that Paul is simply voicing the general
thought that
God did whatever he did when he had decided it was time to do so, and
this is
what the phrase serves to say. But this still leaves the anomaly of
what
specifically that “fullness of time” has been applied to. Again, in
light of
what we have determined about the ‘sending,’ that it was the time of
revelation, the time of the preaching by apostles like Paul, this makes
the
“fullness of time” refer to that preaching movement, conducted under
the
influence of the Holy Spirit.
Nor
can we shift
the “sending” back into Christ’s time while leaving God’s “purchasing
of
freedom” until later, in the time of Paul and faith, and thereby rescue
verse 4
for a more traditional interpretation. This would create an awkward and
unlikely sequence of ideas: “In the fullness of time a few decades ago
God sent
Jesus to earth to undergo death and resurrection, in order that God in
my
(Paul’s) time could purchase freedom for believers and make them sons.”
If that
were the case, the death and resurrection in the recent past would have
been
the focus of God’s “freeing from the Law,” not Paul’s later missionary
work
(see further below). The “now that faith has come” (3:25) is Paul
focusing on
himself and his own time. (Referring to a past “faith” that was in
response to
Jesus’ historical death and resurrection would have been too oblique;
any reference
to the past would have been to the saving events themselves.) Moreover,
it is
ruled out by another passage in the Pauline corpus. Even though the
epistle of
Titus, one of the Pastorals, was written probably half a century later,
it
still preserves much of Paul’s thought. In its opening verses, the
writer,
presenting himself as Paul, has this to say:
2
…the hope of eternal life which God, who
does
not lie, promised
before the beginning of time [pro chronōn aiōniōn],
3 and now at the proper time [kairois
idiois] he has revealed his word
[NEB: openly declared
himself] through the preaching entrusted to me
[i.e.,
Paul] by the command of God our Savior.
Thus
the “proper
time,” an idea equivalent to Galatians’ “fullness of time,” is indeed
the time
of revelation and preaching by Paul. It is not the time of Jesus’
arrival and
acts on earth. Now, the Galatians verse might theoretically allow for
an
earlier arrival even if the “time” it refers to is the time of faith
when
believers actually become sons, based on Christ’s work; yet common
sense surely
rules that out. Would any writer present the “fullness of time” as
coming only
with the period of Paul and his preaching, rather than with the past
incarnation of the Son and his earthly career? Of course, such a way of
thinking is betrayed all through the epistles, such as in 1 Corinthians
10:11,
“Upon us the fulfillment of the ages has come!” Here Paul himself
declares that
all the expectations of the previous age have been focused on and come
to
fruition in his time, rather than in
any life of Christ in the recent past. Again, it is inconceivable that
an
entire movement would consistently express itself this way.
Furthermore, Titus
1:2-3 does not allow us to
deliberately go against common sense. There is no room made in those
verses for
an earlier arrival. Between God’s promises made “before the beginning
of time”
and the revealing of his word “at the proper time” in the preaching of
Paul, no
scope is available for any arrival of Christ on the earthly scene to do
work of
any kind, either bestowing eternal life or revealing its availability.
No
writer would ever have laid out such a pattern and completely ignored
Jesus in
the middle of it.3
3 This is
only the most blatant
indicator that the writer of the Pastorals knows of no historical
Jesus, which
strengthens the case I have suggested in Appendix 1 for regarding 1
Timothy
6:13, with its reference to Pilate, as an interpolation. But even
failing that,
Robert Price, in his The Pre-Nicene New
Testament, has presented the Pastorals in a pattern of composition
which
would allow my observation to stand and yet retain 6:13 as
authentic to 1 Timothy. Price
demonstrates that Titus and 2 Timothy were written first by one author,
and
that 1 Timothy was not only written later by a different author, it
contains a
lot of material taken over from the two earlier epistles. This would
allow, if
6:13 were authentic, for much of the ‘no historical Jesus’ spirit of
the
earlier documents to be carried over into 1 Timothy, even if the later
author
has absorbed some Gospel data. In fact, we find that the ‘silences’ in
1
Timothy relate to specifics about Gospel details and teachings, not to
the
existence of Jesus per se. It is 2
Timothy and Titus which contain the blatantly exclusionary passages. In
any
case, I still regard the idea of interpolation of the Pilate reference
in 6:13 to be, on balance, the more feasible
and supportable option. (See the Appendix of Supplementary Article No.
3, Who
Crucified Jesus?, for a discussion of the authenticity question.)
The
End of the Law
But let’s go back to Galatians 3:23 and
consider more fully the curious way Paul presents things. “Before faith
came,
we were held prisoner of the Law until faith should be revealed.” In
the
context of an historical crucifixion some decades earlier than Paul was
writing,
this would be a perverse thought. If Jesus dying on the cross was the
necessary
act (and it was) which brought about the setting aside of the old Law,
surely
any idea that the Law still held sway even after
that historical event had happened would be unnatural. Rather, the Law
would
have ceased to have any force, any life in it, from that point on, even
if the
message about this cessation was yet to be brought to people, even if
people
only assumed that they were still
under the Law until informed otherwise by Paul. Yet Paul, in 3:23, states clearly that the Law was
in effect, it continued to make people
prisoners, until his time, the time
of revelation to apostles like himself and the bringing of faith to
their
converts. He never attaches any ‘end’ of the Law to the actual death of
Jesus.
This would make perfect sense in the context of a death which had not
taken
place at an identifiable point in history, but in the spiritual world,
something hidden for long ages, knowledge of which has only now come
through
God’s revelation about it. In such a context, the only point that would
be
available to which the end of the Law’s dominion could be affixed would
be the
point at which the Son’s sacrifice was revealed and faith in it was
inaugurated.
Indeed, Paul says in 1 Thessalonians 4:14: “We believe Jesus died and
rose
again,” clearly implying that not only the rising, but even the death
was a
matter of faith, not historical knowledge. As well, in 1 Corinthians
15:12-16,
he seems to say that Christians know of Jesus’ resurrection through
revelation
by God, through faith rather than historical witness.4
4 Paul’s
silence on the Law’s demise at
the time of the crucifixion itself seems to change somewhat in later
epistles
written in his name, although the texts are not perfectly clear on the
point.
Ephesians 2:15 has Christ “abolishing in his flesh the
Law with its
commandments and regulations.” Since “flesh” here refers to his
form/substance
when undergoing crucifixion, and since this is followed by the
statement that
in his new “body” he has reconciled Jew and gentile and destroyed the
barrier
between them, this could, in the mind of the writer, place the end of
the Law
at the time of that spiritual world event. Both these sentiments are
highly
mystical and could not refer to the literal flesh and body of Christ on
earth.
The same situation exists in Colossians 2:14 where Christ on his cross
nails
the Law to it, canceling its inimical regulations. This, too, is a
mystical
scenario, followed by a clearly spirit-realm scene in which the demon
powers
are disarmed and triumphantly led in some spectacle of defeat.
Actually, who it
is that does the canceling and nailing of the Law to the cross is
grammatically
uncertain. It could be God, although the switch to Jesus for the
disarming of
the powers, which seems required, is in that case virtually
unrecognizable. If
it is indeed God doing the canceling, this would be closer to Paul’s
conception
and could be assigned to the time of his preaching.
The
observations
thus far are valid quite apart from the absence or presence of “born of
woman,
born under the Law.” But they do have a bearing on the question of
whether
those phrases should be in the text, or whether they are
interpolations. If the
sending of the Son in verse 4 does not refer to the arrival of the
person Jesus
on earth, but only to a spiritual manifestation in the time of Paul,
then the
idea of Christ being “born of woman” would be immaterial—even if an
historical
Jesus had existed. The “born” idea would have no relevance to what was
being
said around it. By the same token, “born under the Law” would be
equally
irrelevant to what was being discussed. Within the context of the
Galatians
passage itself, neither of these features would play any direct role.
Christ is
not being presented as the one who abolishes or purchases freedom from
the Law.
That is God himself. (It is “God’s own act,” as the NEB emphasizes it.)
But
could it be claimed that this act by God was made possible by Jesus
being sent
to earth in the past and being “born of woman, born under the Law”?
First of
all, these would be quite secondary to the death and rising which is
the primary
act which bestows salvation. (Why did Paul not put these events forward
instead
of the woman/Law features?) In what way would being born of woman and
born
under the Law be items worthy of highlighting as important in this
context? It
would go without saying that if Jesus had lived on earth and been
crucified as
a human being on Calvary, then he was “born of
woman.”
That would hardly contribute anything to the primary act or strengthen
it; it
would be merely gratuitous and redundant. In fact, since orthodox
interpretation of the passage assumes that the sending of verse 4
already means
the life of Christ and his saving act of death and resurrection, Paul
would
have no reason to say that he was “born of woman.” Thus the presence of
the
phrase provides a justification for suggesting interpolation.
If
“born of woman”
is thus to be set aside, “born under the Law” would almost certainly
have to go
with it. But even without that, what could “born under the Law” itself
have
contributed to the primary act of death and resurrection? Nothing
evident. And
if one tried to see any relevance for it in relation to the discussion
of the
abolition of the Law, that too is hard to come by. In what way is Jesus
having
been “born under the Law” a useful or working part of the mechanism by
which
God has freed believers from it, which is what this passage is all
about? It is
the death and rising which is the salvific act drawn on by God. It did
not
require Jesus to have been subject to the Torah himself. If it did,
Paul should
have been led to spell out that relevance, especially since it would
have been far
from obvious to his readers (just as it is far from obvious to us).
-- ii --
Burton on
Galatians 4
One
of the most thorough analyses of this
passage was made by Edward D. Burton in 1924, in the International
Critical Commentary series. He, of course, was not a
mythicist, but some of the observations he made on various elements of
these
verses help to cast the mythicist viewpoint, and what I have said
above, in a
favorable light.
First
of all, the
two qualifying phrases, “born of woman, born under the Law” (genomenon
ek gunaikos, genomenon hupo nomon)
are descriptive of the Son, but not specifically tied to the ‘sending.’
Burton
says [Galatians, p.218-19]:
“The
employment of
the aorist [past tense] presents the birth and the subjection to law as
in each
case a simple fact, and leaves the temporal relation to exapesteilen
[“sent”] to be inferred solely from the nature of the
facts referred to….But the phrases are best accounted for as intended
not so
much to express the accompaniments of the sending as directly to
characterize
the Son, describing the relation to humanity and the law in which he
performed
his mission.”
For
those phrases, Burton is
not ruling out
the
understanding of a temporal relationship to the verb, but he is saying
that it
is not grammatically necessary. Yet if they can be seen as not
qualifying the sending, this further frees the ‘sent’ thought
in verse 4 from having to be a reference to the arrival in the world of
the
incarnated Christ in a human body.
Burton
also calls into question the meaning of “born under the Law”:
“The
words genomenon hupo nomon should probably be
taken in the sense ‘made subject to law’ rather than ‘born under law,’
for,
though genomenon ek gunaikos
evidently refers to birth, that reference is neither conveyed by, nor
imparted
to, the participle, but lies wholly in the limiting phrase. This idea
is,
therefore, not of necessity carried over into the second phrase.”
Note
his qualifier
of “evidently” as the meaning of birth for “genomenon
ek gunaikos.” Burton
is
admitting that the chosen word in the Greek is not the plainest one for
being
born in the literal sense, a point we will consider shortly. He accepts
that
the phrase does indeed mean birth, but not because of the nature of the
participle; rather, it is because the “of woman” gives it that meaning
(presumably). Further, because genomenon
in itself does not necessarily spell birth, one cannot simply by
extension take
the second appearance of it as meaning “born.” So the second phrase
should,
says Burton, be reduced to
the
safer interpretation that Jesus was “subject to the Law.” This
eliminates any
need to understand that he was born a Jew and automatically under the
Law. Taken
with the fact of Burton’s other observation, that the two participles
do not
have a necessary temporal relation to the verb “sent,” this means that
one
could possibly understand that Christ came in “subjection to Law” at
some later
point than birth. Burton does not offer any suggestion as to when or
how this
could take place, whereas I might suggest that it is possible that
Paul, if he
in fact included these phrases, might have envisioned Christ as taking
on such
features when he entered “the realm of flesh.”
The
myths of some
savior gods, such as Dionysos, had them ‘born of woman’ (Semele, in his
case),
and while such mythology was originally cast in an earthly setting
implying an
earthly woman, its attraction into the Platonic cast of turn-of-the-era
philosophy might have transformed her into a mythical counterpart to
the
earthly Semele. It’s a tricky question, but it does enable us to
suggest the
possibility that Paul’s “woman” was similarly mythical. And to suggest
that the
idea was prompted by scripture.
Isaiah 7:14
“A
young woman is
with child, and she will bear a son…”
This
is a passage
which, despite its context clearly linking the woman and her child with
the
time of the prophet, was widely regarded as prophetic of the Messiah.
If Paul
felt compelled to interpret this as a reference to his spiritual
Christ, he
would not have refrained from stating it (even if he didn’t understand
how it
could be that the spiritual Christ could be “born of woman”). Perhaps
he simply
assigned it to the world of myth and God’s “mysteries”—which were
unfathomable
anyway, and had to be accepted on the basis of scriptural revelation;
just as
he accepted that the spiritual Christ was of David’s stock because
scripture
said so. Why he would choose to introduce that mythical element here,
especially without explanation, can only be a matter of speculation. In
the
context of Galatians 4, there seems no practical necessity for either
phrase,
which becomes one of the arguments for interpolation.5
5 By the time of Irenaeus, Christian
thinkers had come up with a reason for Christ being “born of woman.” In
Against Heresies, Bk.V, 21, Irenaeus
explains that, since man was conquered by the serpent (Satan) in the
Garden of
Eden through a woman, Eve, it was fitting and necessary that a man born
of a
woman who was a descendant of Eve would overturn that conquest and
conquer
Satan. Could this idea have been in Paul’s mind, leading him to offer
this type
of parallel? After all, he uses paradigmatic parallelism in Romans
6:1-5, in
having the convert’s ‘death’ in baptism parallel Christ’s, and his
future
resurrection guaranteed by Christ’s own. But this is quite different
from that
of Irenaeus. Paul’s parallel is between the believer and Christ (as it
is in
the fundamental mystery cult relationship between savior and devotee).
And if
Christ “born of woman” is meant to be in parallel to the believers
being “born
of woman,” this would add another dimension to the parallel
relationship, one
which Paul never lays out, unless it be understood as part of the
general
pattern of “likeness” so often stressed by the early writers (as in the
Philippians hymn and Hebrews 2:15; compare the Ascension of Isaiah
9:14-15).
Yet taking on the “form” and being only in the “likeness” of a man is
not the
same as saying that he became an actual earthly man (something the
epistles
never explicitly state: there are other forms of “man” in the
philosophical
thinking of the time), much less that he was born in the human way
(something
Paul never explicitly tells us by using the common verb for being born,
gennaō). If Paul were being consistent
with early Christian expression here, we would have to see him as
regarding the
‘birth’ from woman as equally a “likeness,” which would render such a
birth and
such a woman mythical, something relating to the metaphysical
dimension,
revealed by scripture. This would be in keeping with the fact that he
does not
tell us who this woman was. Still, it remains odd that he would have
brought up
this parallel solely within the context of Galatians 4 where, as we
have seen,
it would not have been pertinent to the discussion. Another reason to
lean
toward interpolation.
But
back to Edward
Burton. He suggests that “the motive for the insertion of the [second]
phrase
is doubtless to emphasize the cost at which the Son effected his
redemptive
work” [p.218]. The problem is, the desire for such an emphasis is not
to be
detected anywhere else in Paul’s writings. If the “cost” (inferring a
negative
connotation) of the Son’s redemptive work included the fact that he had
to be
born in human flesh and be subject to the Law, and Paul wanted to
emphasize
this, he would surely have chosen (or been forced) to talk about that
life,
with its disadvantages and demands, more than he does—which is to say,
not at
all. The suffering and death of Christ cannot simply be included in
such a
category, for they are never identified as taking place on earth, in
actual
human flesh. Moreover, this would be to unjustifiably rule out the idea
that
gods could suffer and die, something which is patently not the case
given the
mystery cult myths. (And it would be begging the question.)
EXCURSUS:
Distinguishing Between the
Spirit of Father and Son
In
regard to the question of distinguishing between the two ‘sendings’ in
verses 4
and 6, Burton has some
very
interesting observations to make. He is of the same mind as myself that
there
is a sequence entailed in verse 6 between the occurrence of becoming
sons of
God and the taking in of the Spirit of Christ, which is a consequence
of and
authenticates the sonship. But Burton sees the first ‘sending of the
Son’ in
verse 4 as the mechanism of the process of becoming sons, referring to
the acts
of Jesus of Nazareth, whereas I have analyzed it as referring to God’s
revelation about the Son and the benefits accruing from his mythical
acts. Through
those acts, God himself is able to free the believer from the Law and
adopt him
as a son. (One assumes that female believers are also adopted as sons.)
Thus,
the sent Son of verse 4 is the “Spirit” of the Son being sent into the
world by
means of revelation and taking up a presence within it. Whereas the
sending of
verse 6, which actually uses the words “the Spirit of the Son,” is
specifically
the installation of the spiritual Son into the hearts of those who are
now “in
Christ,” through faith and the ritual of baptism.
In
the orthodox interpretation, which Burton follows, verse 4 is speaking
of the
actual entry of the incarnated Christ into the earthly world and what
he did there,
which itself brings about—or enables—the sonship of those who come to
believe
in him; whereas verse 6 speaks of his “Spirit” in a post-incarnation
supernatural
sense. That this is mistaken is inadvertently supported by an
intriguing
observation by Burton. He
starts by
saying [p.222] that “Historically speaking, the sending of the Son and
the
sending of the Spirit [i.e., the Holy Spirit; he is not referring to
the Son of
verse 6] are distinguished in early Christian thought,” though here he
appeals
to a Gospel as an example, where the Son would clearly be thought of as
a human
figure. But then he notes:
“But
in the
experience of the early Christians the Christ who by his resurrection
had
become a spirit active in their lives, and the Spirit of God similarly
active,
could not be distinguished.”
Burton
fails to perceive the reason for this, a reason which makes the
phenomenon he
describes completely natural and not at all perplexing or unusual.
First of
all, we must remove from his statement the assumption that Christ
became “a
spirit active in their lives” through the route of having been a human
on
earth. This is being read into the writings of those “early
Christians”—by
which Burton means in the
epistles,
which represent the life of the early Church. This assumption is not in
evidence
in those epistles, which never speak in any identifiable way of an
earthly life
of Christ or an earthly body. Thus, what we really have in the lives of
the “early
Christians” of the epistles is solely “the spirit of Christ,” a force
coming to
them—and “into” them—through a revelation by God and their adoption of
faith in
that force. Without a human figure and traditions about him present in
the
background, there was little to clearly differentiate the Spirit of
Christ from
the Spirit of God. Both would be sensed in the same way.
Thus
it is no wonder that Burton
observes
(which he does by acknowledging the actual impression the epistles
convey) that
the early Christians made little distinction between the Spirit of
Christ and
the Spirit of God. They were both ‘spirits’ in the same way: known to
them
through beliefs and revelations which had nothing to do with either one
of them
having been recently on earth. And since the spiritual Christ was
essentially a
part of God, his ‘first-born’ emanation in Philo’s terminology, there
was
precious little to actually distinguish the two, except in some of the
roles
they played—though the latter did not proceed from historical memory
but from
the interpretation of scripture. Christ was the part of God which had
descended
to be crucified in the lower heavens as a sacrifice for sin. But with
no human
life involved, such a descent and sacrifice were hidden, unattached to
any
historical time and place. Thus there was little or no basis on which
to treat
the Spirit of Christ present in their faith world differently from the
Spirit
of God that was also present in that world. The two Spirits were
essentially
two parts of the same divine organism. This is not to say that they confused the two; Paul knows when he is
speaking about Christ in his life and about God’s Spirit active in the
movement. As Burton also
says:
“Apparently the
apostle Paul, while clearly distinguishing Christ from God the
Father…and less
sharply distinguishing the Spirit from God…is not careful to
distinguish the
Spirit [i.e., the Holy Spirit] and Christ, yet never explicitly
identifies
them.”
It
is understandable that Christ (as Spirit, which is the only way Paul
has
contact with him) would suffer from lack of distinction from the Spirit
of God,
since they are both essentially the same thing: God’s emanation, with
Christ
having a certain theoretical individuality as a divine entity in
himself. What
he does not have is any
identification with a recent historical man, which would have provided
a
powerful additional dimension to ensure Paul’s distinctive treatment of
the Spirit
in his life who had once been Jesus of Nazareth. Burton
is trying to find something in Paul’s thought that cannot
be there, and thus the absence of it is perplexing to him.
All the indicators of the true situation are facing Burton
squarely on, but he cannot put the pieces together because the
established
paradigm of an historical Christ is too ingrained and too essential.
(The
epistle 1 John is another document in which we encounter the same
vagueness of
distinction between the Father and the Son, sometimes to the point
where
scholars find it difficult to identify which figure is being referred
to in a
given passage. They are often led to assume it is the Son simply on the
basis
of Gospel understandings, even though this is not always borne out by a
careful
reading of the text.)
Incidentally,
we should note the similar situation remarked on by scholars (see The Jesus Puzzle, n.16) that the early
church supposedly made no distinction between “words of the Lord” as
spoken by
Christian preachers like Paul out of inspiration from Christ in heaven,
and
words spoken by Christ on earth. There is no distinction because there
are none
identified as the latter in the epistles; scholars simply assume them
to be if
they resemble those in the Gospels. Without such identification, they
all
become “words of the Lord” from heaven, or else, when unattributed to
Jesus,
they are simply moral pronouncements coming from a general pool of such
things.
“Born” or
“Arise”: Ginomai vs. Gennaō
Burton
also recognizes another anomaly. In discussing whether “born under the
Law”
means “by birth” (and deciding that it need not), he says:
“Had the apostle
desired to express the idea of ‘born’ in both phrases, he could have
done so
unambiguously by the use of gennēthenta.”
Here
we come to a
significant point of contention between historicists and mythicists. As
Burton
acknowledges, the verb (in participle form) used in both phrases, “born
of
woman, born under the Law”—genomenon ek
gunaikos, genomenon hupo nomon—is
not the most natural word to refer to birth. The verb used is “ginomai” which has a broader meaning of
“to become, to arise, to occur, to come into existence, to be created.”
It can
also be used in the sense of human birth, but that meaning will be
determined
by the context. On the other hand, there is a verb which in
straightforward
fashion means “to be born”: the passive of “gennaō,”
to give birth.
The
question
becomes, why did Paul not use gennaō if
all he meant was that Jesus was born in the normal human way? What
would lead
him to use ginomai instead? First, we
need to consider a few statistics.
Burton
has already deduced that Paul does not have to mean literally “born” in
“born
under the Law,” although he does not apply the same reasoning to “born
of
woman” because he thinks the context imposes the birth meaning. But if
Paul envisioned
an entirely mythical Christ, did ginomai
better serve his purpose? If he decided that the two thoughts needed to
be
expressed—perhaps under the pressure of a scriptural verse, most likely
Isaiah
7:14—was ginomai the best word
available? Was he again putting forward an idea regardless of whether
or not it
could be rationally understood, simply putting his trust in scripture?
Considering what he was able to do with terms like “flesh” and “body”
in purely
mystical and metaphysical settings, placing a ‘birth’ by a ‘woman’ in
such a
setting would not likely be beyond him.
Furthermore,
what
do we find when we examine the Pauline usages of the two verbs
throughout his
letters, and compare them with usages in the wider record? (I will in
most
cases refer to the main verb itself, rather than the specific form in
which it
appears.) The results are illuminating:
One: Paul (as we have him in the
canonical texts) uses ginomai in any
alleged sense of “born” only in
regard to Christ: Romans 1:3 and Galatians 4:4. The Philippians hymn
uses the
same verb in 2:7, “made in the
likeness of men.” All three relate to the issue under discussion: does
this use
of ginomai signify something other
than ordinary human birth? If the two verbs are supposedly synonymous
to convey
the meaning of “born,” why does Paul choose this verb only
here?
Two: Consider other epistolary usages
of ginomai: 1 Corinthians 15:45:
“Adam became [ginomai] a living
soul.” Here it cannot be the meaning “born,” since Adam was created by
God, not
born of anyone. In 1 Corinthians 1:30, Paul speaks of Christ Jesus “who
is made
[ginomai] for us wisdom.” Hebrews 1:4
speaks of Christ “becoming [ginomai]
so much superior to the angels.” Of himself, ‘Paul’ says in Eph. 3:7 “I
became
[ginomai] a minister of the gospel.”
There is a certain consistency here. The usage of ginomai
in this area is directed at “becoming,” not being “born.”
So what should we make of the fact that in relation to Christ, Paul
gravitates
to ginomai?
Three: When Paul does want to directly
and unmistakably express “born” what does he
use? Outside of his two references to Christ, always gennaō:
Romans 9:11
(children not yet born), Galatians 4:23
and 4:29 (the
son/one…born…). The
latter are part of his allegory of the two sons of Abraham, coming only
a few
verses after he has spoken of Christ as “born of woman.” Why did he
switch
verbs here, if they both meant the same thing and he wanted to state
the same
thing?
Four: In none of the other epistles is
the verb ginomai used for “born.” Not
in Hebrews 11:23, not in 1 John 2:29,
3:9, 4:7, 5:1 or 5:18.
Five: In all cases (about two dozen)
where the Gospels express the idea of
being “born” they use either gennaō,
the adjective gevvētos, or the verb tiktō
(to bear). In no case do they use ginomai. When they
refer specifically to
the birth of Jesus (four times in Matthew, twice in Luke), they use gennaō, or tiktō once in Luke. John uses
ginomai
twice in the Prologue: “all things were made [egeneto]
through him” (where it hardly means “born”), and “the Word
was made [egeneto] flesh” (where it
has the same meaning of “made” rather than “born”).
If,
as some claim,
the two verbs can be equally understood as “born” in this type of
context, if
the implication is that a writer could have used one or the other since
he
would have been sensible of no distinction, why does the law of
averages not
apply in the New Testament? Why is there a universal use of gennaō
to apply to all births other than
that of Jesus, as well as to Jesus’ birth in the Gospels? Why does a
distinction only exist between the Gospels’ consistent use of gennaō to refer to Jesus’ birth, and the
epistles’ consistent use of ginomai
to refer to Jesus’ (alleged) birth? Was it not the same sort of birth?
The
strong
implication is that, if the key phrases in Paul are his own voice and
not an
interpolation, Paul must have had in mind something different in regard
to
Christ than simply being “born” in the normal sense. If all he meant
was the
latter, then he should have had no reason to choose ginomai
in those isolated cases.
Further,
when we
consider the usage of the entire phrase “born of woman,” we see the
same
imbalance. In the Septuagint the phrase occurs three times in Job and
once in
Sirach; in the Gospels twice. Some usages in the later apologists have
to do
with quoting Matthew and Luke. Every one of these phrases uses gennaō (or the Latin equivalent). The
only exceptions are those which quote Paul’s use of ginomai.
It is often claimed that Paul used the phrase because it
was so common. If it was so common, why did he not use it in the common
form?
The very fact that something is common should lead one to use it if one
means
the common thing. If it was found in scripture and Paul was taking his
cue from
there, why did he change the verb as used in scripture? The fact that
Paul changed
the key element of the phrase should lead us to conclude that he was
avoiding
using it in its normal form because he meant something different from
the
normal understanding.
Or
else, he didn’t
write it all.
-- iii - -
“Born of Woman, Born under
the Law” as an Interpolation
So
far we have
been analyzing this passage while adopting the assumption that “born of
woman,
born under the Law” could have been authentic to Paul. If we abandon
that assumption, would
the problem be solved? Is there evidence and argument available to make
the
solution of interpolation acceptable and even persuasive?
First,
let’s see
how the passage would read if those phrases were dropped. And in fact,
a
context does exist in which those phrases do not appear. Not in the
form of any
extant manuscript of Galatians which does not contain them, yet
something
pointing to that very thing. The following is a reconstruction of the
passage
from the version of Galatians used by the ‘gnostic’ Marcion in the mid
second
century. Although a copy of Marcion’s document is not extant, scholars
have
reconstructed most of it from passages in Tertullian’s Against
Marcion in which Tertullian, in great detail, takes Marcion
to task for adulterating the “true original” of Paul’s letter. From
that work,
Marcion’s version of Galatians 4:3-6 has been put together as follows.6
6 Taken
from The Center for Marcionite
Research Library at http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Ithaca/3827/Library.html.
The translation is by Daniel Jon Mahar, from “English Reconstruction
and Translation
of Marcion’s Version of To the Galatians” at http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Ithaca/3827/EGalatians.PDF.
As
a man I say,
When we were
barely-born,
We were enslaved
Under the elements
of the cosmos.
But when the
fullness of time came,
God sent forth his
Son,
That he might
purchase those under law,
And that we may
receive adoption.
God sent forth the
Spirit of his Son
Into your hearts,
crying, “Abba, Father”.
In
Book V, chapter
4, Tertullian is going step by step through the opening verses of
Galatians 4.
He quotes, “ ‘But when the fullness of time was come, God sent forth
His Son—’
” then stops and makes a few comments on God’s control of ‘time,’ its
ages and
days. He resumes:
“But for what end
did He send His Son? ‘To redeem them that were under the Law…and that
we might
receive the adoption of sons,’ that is, the gentiles, who once were not
sons.”
[Translations of Tertullian taken from Ante-Nicene
Fathers, vol.III]
The phrases
“born of woman, born
under the Law” are passed over without comment—if indeed they were in
Marcion’s
epistle. (If they were not, it would never have crossed Tertullian’s
mind to
think that the phrases in his own copy, half a century later, might
have been
added and that Marcion’s version represented the original.)
We
know that
Tertullian’s own copy (in Latin) contained them because he appeals to
the
phrase “born of woman” in another place (On
the Flesh of Christ, 20), where he says:
“Paul,
too,
silences these critics when he says, ‘God sent forth His Son, made of a
woman.’
Does he mean through a woman, or in a
woman? [This relates to the
conflict between heretical and orthodox interpretations.] Nay more, for
the
sake of greater emphasis, he uses the word ‘made’ [factum]
rather than ‘born’ [natum],
although the use of the latter expression would have been simpler.”
The
Latin “factum” corresponds to the Greek genomenon
(the verb ginomai), while “natum”
would correspond to gennōmenon (the
verb gennaō). This tells us that
Tertullian, even though he understood factum
to mean “born,” acknowledged that natum
(and gennaō) would have been the more
natural language. He explains Paul’s use of ginomai
by saying he wanted to emphasize “the reality of the flesh which was
made of a
virgin,” but this would have been imparting to Paul an awareness of
critical
disputes in Tertullian’s time and an intention to discredit them. We
do,
however, know from this (and from Irenaeus a little earlier) that both
Greek
and Latin versions of Galatians by the late second century contained ginomai/facio in that phrase. We also
know (from Irenaeus, Against Heresies III,10,3) that
they
also contained “born under the law” and that this verb, too, was ginomai/facio.
Were
the phrases
“born of woman, born under the Law” in Marcion’s earlier copy or not?
It might
seem curious either way, that Tertullian did not comment on them if
they were
present, or did not castigate Marcion for removing them if they were
not. Yet
the conundrum is fairly easily solved by Tertullian himself. After
addressing
verse 3, and before he goes on to verse 4, he says: “But indeed it is
superfluous to dwell on what he has erased, when he may be more
effectually
confuted from that which he has retained.” Thus, if “born of woman,
born under
the Law” was missing in Marcion, Tertullian’s silence on that ‘erasure’
would
fit his stated intention not to dwell on such things. Whereas, if the
words
were present, his silence would go against his stated intention to
address the things
Marcion retained. Thus, if we can judge Tertullian by his own words,
“born of
woman, born under the Law” was not present in Marcion’s version of
Galatians.
But
there remains
the question: did Marcion in fact excise the phrases? They could be
said to go
against Marcion’s doctrine that Jesus was not “born” of anyone, but
descended
from heaven as a fully grown (docetic) man; and since Marcion had even
less use
for the Jewish Law than Paul did (he rejected all things Jewish as
originally
belonging to his conception of Christianity), these two phrases would
have been
prime candidates for the cutting-room floor. The issue cannot be
settled one
way or the other. All we can say with some degree of confidence is that
the
Galatians used by Marcion which Tertullian was addressing did not
contain “born
of woman, born under the Law.”7
7 The
radical view that none of the
Pauline epistles are authentic, but were in fact written in their
original
forms by Marcion himself—co-opting a supposedly dim and legendary
figure of
almost a century earlier as a preacher of his own theology—would mean
that such
originals did not contain the phrases. This radical view is a complex
question.
Its leading exponent today is Herman Detering of Germany, who has an extensive website on the
subject (http://www.radikalkritik.de)
and has published a book, The
Fabricated
Paul. I am unable to embrace this
theory, though many of its observations
about the epistles themselves are insightful and illuminating, and at
the very
least give us a picture of the Pauline corpus which has likely been
through a
significant amount of later editing. (See the closing sections of the
previous
Supplementary Article on Hebrews for a short discussion of the reasons
why I
retain some degree of an authentic first-century Paul.)
Textual
Corruptions
But
in addition to
the observations made earlier, that the analysis of the surrounding
text would
make “born of woman, born under the Law” irrelevant to it and not
likely to have
been included by Paul, there is another consideration which works in
favor of
interpolation. For this, we must go to a groundbreaking and influential
book
published in 1993 by Bart D. Ehrman, The
Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. Ehrman’s exhaustive study of the
extant
texts of the New Testament led him to realize that over the course of
the early
centuries from which we have a surviving record—beginning after the
year 200—numerous
amendments and insertions were made by Christian scribes to many
passages. As
Ehrman says in his Introduction:
“My
thesis can be
stated simply: scribes occasionally altered the words of their sacred
texts to
make them more patently orthodox and to prevent their misuse by
Christians who
espoused aberrant views.” [p.xi]
Ehrman
“explores
the ways proto-orthodox Christians used literature in their early
struggles for
dominance, as they produced polemical treatises, forged supporting
documents
under the names of earlier authorities, collected apostolic works into
an
authoritative canon, and insisted on certain hermeneutical principles
for the
interpretation of these works….It was within this milieu of controversy
that
scribes sometimes changed their scriptural texts to make them say what they were already known to mean.
In the technical parlance of textual
criticism…these scribes ‘corrupted’ their texts for theological
reasons”
[p.xii].8
8 In view of the extent of forgery even
within the New Testament (the polite term is “pseudonymity”), in view
of the
vast catalogue of apocryphal writings purporting to recount the “Acts”
of this
or that apostle, forged letters from Pilate to Rome, correspondence
between
Paul and Seneca, a letter even from Jesus himself to an Edessan king,
and the
scribal amendments Ehrman has revealed (not that others were not aware
of some
of them earlier), not to mention the notorious Christian character of
the
extant “Testimonium” in Josephus, we should regard forgery and
amendment as the
name of the game in early Christianity and adopt it as the default
position. To
a great extent, suspicion needs to be brought to everything textual,
including
and especially as late as Eusebius, the Church historian under
Constantine to
whom we owe so much of our knowledge of the early ‘history’ of
Christianity. That
Matthew and Luke, as we shall see, made wholesale changes to their
sources (Mark
and Q) is there for all to see, and to think that this wasn’t done to
the
epistles and other writings through the century and a half when we
entirely
lack manuscript evidence is plainly naivete and special pleading.
Ehrman
creates a
picture of orthodox Christians tampering with all sorts of passages,
scribal
emendations done for the purpose of making it clear that Jesus was
such-and-such in opposition to heretical doctrines like adoptionism,
separationism, and especially docetism. Although these observations are
based
on variant manuscript readings coming from the third century and later
(since
we have no manuscripts earlier than about the year 200), Ehrman was
able, by
comparison with citations from second and third century commentators
like
Irenaeus and Origen, to make certain deductions about emendations that
could have
been made as early as the first half of the second century.
It
is certainly
the case that if contentions within Christianity could induce scribes
to alter
and insert words in the later period, there is nothing to prevent them
from having
been doing the same in the second century. “Born of woman” would be a
natural
insertion in Galatians (perhaps around the middle of the century, to
counter the
claims of docetists like Marcion and others and their appropriation of
Paul) in
order to make the point that Jesus was in fact a fully human man from a
human
mother. Why Paul, on the other hand, would have needed to make this
obvious
point is not so clear, especially if he wrote long before docetism came
along
whose views would need counteracting.
In
a section
entitled “Christ: Born Human” in his chapter “Anti-Docetic Corruptions
of
Scripture,” Ehrman has pointed out [p.239] that Galatians 4:4 was
indeed a
passage that was a favorite for amendment. The Greek “genomenon
ek gunaikos” was occasionally changed to “gennōmenon
ek gunaikos”—from the verb ginomai
to gennaō, the latter being the verb
that everyone (including Tertullian) has acknowledged was the plainer
word for
being born in the human way. Similarly in Latin manuscripts, says
Ehrman, “factum” (made) was changed to “natum”
(born). Clearly, such later
scribes, faced with Gnostic doctrine that Jesus had not been born a
real human
but only in the semblance of one, that he had passed through Mary
without
taking on any of her human substance, felt that the verb ginomai
was not explicit enough and substituted gennaō. (Ginomai did ultimately survive and became part of the
received
text.)
If
later scribes
were amending these important texts, earlier ones could well have
introduced
the entire phrase in the first place during a period when Jesus was
struggling
to emerge from mythical to historical, or from docetism to flesh and
blood
humanity. Later, scribes in some communities felt that the initial
insertion
was not graphic enough, not ‘human’ enough, and so changed ginomai
to gennaō, facio to nascor.
This, by the way, would indicate that the two verbs were not
regarded as interchangeable and that ginomai was not
the strongest verb to
convey the idea of being born in the human way.
But,
one might ask,
if “genomenon ek gunaikos, genomenon hupo
nomon” was from the start
a scribal interpolation to make the case for human birth and human
nature in
Christ, why did the initial interpolator choose ginomai
instead of gennaō?
Why not put in the more ‘natural’ verb from the start? The answer to
that is
partly speculative. Perhaps one scribe had a little different feeling
than
another scribe about the relative meaning of each verb. Nuances can
also change
over time. When a later scribe was looking for a way to make the case
for human
birth stronger, it may have struck him that this would be a change for
the
better. It has been suggested that using ginomai
would have been ‘more literary’ than using gennaō.
On
the other hand,
Tertullian himself offers a feasible explanation, as we have seen.
Recall the
passage in On the Flesh of Christ,
20, quoted earlier:
“…Nay
more, for
the sake of greater emphasis, he uses the word ‘made’ [factum]
rather than ‘born’ [natum],
although the use of the latter expression would have been simpler.”
Tertullian
found not only that factum/genomenon sounded fine to
his
ears, he believed that the reason for it was to create greater
emphasis.
Obviously, later scribes did not agree and decided to change it.
Christ
Under the Law
As
a final
consideration on whether Paul was likely to have written “born under
the Law,”
we ought to examine his attitude about what being under the Law meant
to him in
the first place. To his way of thinking, it was entirely a negative
condition,
useless for salvation, an enabler of sin. God needed to free believers
from it.
“No human being can be justified in the sight of God for having kept
the Law:
Law brings only the consciousness of sin,” Paul says in Romans 3:20. Would it not have occurred to
him, or to
his readers, to wonder how Jesus, if he was born under Law, was exempt
from
this terrible fate? Would not the two statements, Romans 3:20 and Galatians 4:4, constitute
something of a
contradiction—at the least requiring clarification? The very fact of
the inclusion
of “born under the Law” in Galatians 4:4 implies that Christ was in
fact a
subject of the Law and therefore a prey to all its impediments. It
could serve
no other purpose than to say that Christ was like us in regard to the
Law. If
Paul didn’t mean that, or meant it only in a limited fashion, excluding
all the
negative aspects he is constantly declaring, he would have had to spell
that
out. (And what would have been left to actually embody the condition of
Christ’s being “born under the Law”?) A later scribe inserting it might
not be
aware of the discrepancy he was setting up, but Paul surely would have
been.
He, not the scribe, was the writer of the context.
Romans
7:7 – “Is
the Law identical with sin? Surely not. Yet I would not have known sin
except
through the Law. I would not have known lust except for the Law saying:
thou
shalt not lust.” (We can be quite sure that Paul had in mind actual lust and not the milder “coveting” which
translations prefer to use. He alludes to something more graphic in 7:23, but we don’t need a roadmap to
decide
what “members” he is talking about.) But if being born under the Law
did that
to him, why didn’t it do so to Christ? Would not Paul feel constrained
to offer
qualifications where Christ’s ‘birth under the Law’ was concerned?
Romans
7:21 – “When I want to do
good, evil is right
there with me.” Would not evil have been there with Christ, if he was born under the Law? If no one
will be declared righteous in the sight of God by observing the Law,
how can
this not have included Jesus if he was born under the Law? Indeed, did
he obey
the Law or flout it? Did he, too, regard the Law as something that was
no
longer an asset to salvation, that needed to be set aside? (Not
according to
Matthew and Luke—and Q—he didn’t.) Would Paul not need to elucidate
this point?
Wouldn’t his position stand or fall on that very question? It is
difficult to
see how he could have put forward such a revolutionary gospel as the
abolition
of the ancient Mosaic Torah without addressing the question of whether
Jesus
himself had advocated such a thing. If he had, this is all Paul would
have
needed. If he had not, or if he had preached the retention of the Law
(as very
clearly in Matthew), Paul wouldn’t have had a leg to stand on in
anyone’s eyes.
If
all of this was
liable to raise confusion in his readers (and how could it not?), it is
perplexing
that Paul would be even tempted to state Jesus’ subjection to the Law
in
Galatians 4:4, especially since it would have served no practical
purpose. The
more Paul would call attention to Jesus’ status under the Law,
supposedly to
say that he was like us, the more the anomaly would work against him.
And if in
many important respects Jesus was not
like everyone else who was under the Law, this would go against the
alleged
purpose for saying it in the first place.
Here
we have an
identical situation to that which I have pointed out in regard to
Paul’s
concept of “living kata sarka.” If
living in the flesh, as Paul so consistently emphasizes, is full of
corruption,
temptation, sin, contrariness to God, even ‘death’ (figuratively
speaking), the
question had to arise as to how an historical Jesus who ‘lived in the
flesh’ was
not a party to all this. Why does Paul never give a hint of any
awareness of
such a conflict, either in regard to Jesus ‘living in flesh’ or being
‘born
under the Law’? The simplest answer is that he had no idea of his Jesus
living
in (earthly) flesh or being born under the Law. Again, the anomaly
seems to
have sailed over the head of the scribe who made the interpolation. For
Paul,
it was so endemic to his way of thinking and preaching, it could not
have
failed to impress itself upon him, and he would have had to deal with
it. It
would have been an itch he couldn’t help but scratch.
In
Romans 2:17-24,
Paul sets up the perfect opening to elucidate Jesus’ distinction from
everyone
else born under the Law. Consider the passage and try to imagine the
spirit of
Jesus standing at Paul’s side and hearing what he is saying to certain
Jews who
are ‘born under the Law’:
“But
as for
you—you may bear the name of Jew; you rely upon the law and are proud
[lit.,
you boast] of your God; you know his will; you are aware of moral
distinctions
because you receive instruction from the law; you are confident [lit.,
have
convinced yourself] that you are the one to guide the blind, to
enlighten the
benighted, to train the stupid, and to teach the immature, because in
the law
you see the very shape of knowledge and truth. You, then, who teach
your
fellow-man, do you fail to teach yourself? You proclaim, ‘Do not
steal’; but
are you yourself a thief? You say, ‘Do not commit adultery’; but are
you an
adulterer? You abominate false gods; but do you rob their shrines?
While you
take pride in the law, you dishonor God by breaking it. For, as
Scripture says,
‘Because of you the name of God is dishonored among the Gentiles’.”
The
tone of the
whole passage is critical. Paul is almost sneering at those he is
addressing,
those Jews under the Law. If the spirit of an historical Jesus were standing at Paul’s side, he would
be cringing, waiting for Paul to make the obvious exception for
himself.
(“Surely he’s not including Me in all
that sarcasm about Jews who, having knowledge in the Law and being
teachers, do
not practice what they preach? Have I
dishonored God by breaking the Law? Is he saying that because of Me ‘the name of God is dishonored among
the gentiles’? Surely not!”)
There
is not a word
anywhere from Paul about how Jesus the teacher behaved while being
“born under
(or subject to) the Law.” Moreover, with Jesus supposedly looming in
the
background, he could have been brought forward by Paul to illustrate
how this
particular Jew “instructed in the Law” had shown how to properly behave
even in
such circumstances and not dishonor
the profession and the name of God.
In
sum, the
question of interpolation of these phrases cannot be settled with
absolute certainty.
But there are enough compelling indicators that Paul either could not
or would
not have included them in the Galatians 4:4 passage to remove them from
contention as good evidence that Paul viewed his Christ as a recent
human man.
Taken together with the alternate possibility that these phrases, if by
Paul,
reflect a metaphysical view of Jesus determined by scripture (although
I would
lean most toward the interpolation option), I regard this as an
effective
neutering of perhaps the most significant argument on the historicist
side that
the epistles stand in the tradition of an historical Jesus.