Retconning Virginity
Reflections on the Lectionary for the Fourth Sunday of Advent
A couple of months ago I wrote a post about Retcons and Fan Fiction, talking about how these categories can help us make sense of certain parts of the bible. The word “retcon” is short for “retroactive continuity,” and it’s a way to describe the way authors will sometimes add details to a story that make previous iterations of the story take on new or different meanings. We might learn that a superhero had once encountered the villain in elementary school, for example, or that an important character had once gone by a different name, and therefore was connected to someone else in the story in an unexpected way. Retcons are a fun way to reboot stories that seem to have run their course, and to be playful with the canon of a story or a universe while also being faithful to it.
The bible does this all the time. The New Testament, in particular, can be read as one long retcon of the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament), because it moves through the Torah and the prophets and reinterprets them to give them new meanings in light of new ways of thinking. Early Christian biblical interpreters like Origen and Augustine made quite an industry of this; they would mine the texts of ancient Israel for hidden or obscure meanings, and find ways to connect them to the story of Jesus. Even when a story might not have seemed to have much to do with Jesus or with the Christian story, these interpreters could often find connections. The Song of Songs, for example, seems to be a fairly straightforward declaration of love and longing of two people for each other. But early Christians interpreted it as an allegory for the love of Christ for the church, making all the erotic language read as symbolic. Or Genesis 1, with its creation through the voice of God, gets retrofitted through John 1 so that the “word” of God, which Christians understand as Jesus, was there at creation with God the creator, speaking the world into being. (John 1 even echoes the opening words of Genesis 1, “In the beginning,” to drive home the point). The New Testament does this all the time, nowhere as frequently as the gospel of Matthew from which the text for the fourth Sunday of Advent comes. Matthew’s gospel is especially fond of “fulfillment citations” in which a passage of scripture is cited to show how and why Jesus performs certain actions. In claiming Jesus’ fulfillment of these texts, Matthew is retrofitting them to carry the Christian story.
Christians tend to view this kind of thing as fulfillment or the realization of a truth that had long been hidden, but others—including Jewish people—view this as supersession. Supersession is the scholarly term for the claim that Christianity has superseded or surpassed Judaism—that Jesus and Christianity are the true and only endpoint for the story of Israel. Of course, Jewish people mostly reject that, as do many (many) others, including many biblical scholars. Although Christians like to claim that Jesus is inevitable if you read the Hebrew Bible the right way, this is not true. Nothing about the texts of ancient Israel make Jesus inevitable, and in fact, even knowing about Jesus, it takes some work to retcon the Old Testament so that it seems to talk about Jesus at all. Supersession is an interpretive act, a hermeneutical move, and nothing about it is obvious or predictable. Furthermore, many people (including many Christians) view supersessionism as unethical and dangerous, and they (we) downplay Christians’ triumphant claiming of Israel’s scripture for its own purposes. Whether it’s possible to be a Christian without being a supersessionist is an interesting question; I tend to think it is possible, but I’m also convinced by the arguments of those who say that it is not.
The lectionary this week pairs a couple of texts—Isaiah 7:10-16 and Matthew 1:18-25—that together form a great example of how the New Testament retcons the Hebrew Bible, and how supersessionism gets performed in early Christianity. These two passages also happen to have a lot to do with one of the key theological claims of the Christian tradition: the virgin birth. The way Matthew uses Isaiah, and the way both texts have been used in the Christian tradition, have given rise to the claim (the doctrine, in some traditions) that Mary was a virgin when Jesus was conceived. Some traditions even claim that Mary remained a virgin afterward, and that she was perpetually virginal. Why? It has to do with Matthew’s use of Isaiah.
In Hebrew, the word used to describe Mary in Isaiah 7:14 is almah. Like most words in most languages, almah has a few different meanings. Scholars call this “semantic range,” which just signals that words can often cover a lot of territory. (Think, for example, of the word “plate” in English—it can mean a dish you eat off, or the food you eat from it, or the act of putting food on a plate, or the home base in baseball, or a surgical implant, or a veneer on an object, or the act of putting a veneer on something—and those are just the ones I thought of in about 30 seconds). In Hebrew, almah can mean a virgin or a young woman. (It can also mean a newly married woman, or someone with a very high voice, like a soprano). Of course, young women sometimes are virgins, and virgins sometimes are young women, but they are not always the same thing. So when the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible that was circulating around the time the New Testament was being written) needed to translate Isaiah 7:14, the translators faced a choice. Which aspect of the word almah should they try to capture, and what word should they use to capture it? This is the problem of semantic range; there is almost never a 1:1 correlation between words and their possible meanings in different languages, so you have to do the best you can to approximate the range of meaning.
The translators of the Septuagint chose the Greek word parthenos. You might recognize the word from the name of the grand temple on the acropolis in Athens, the Parthenon. (Improbably, there is also a replica of the Parthenon not far from where we used to live in Nashville, Tennessee). Scholars debate why the Parthenon is named that—whether for a group of virgin priestesses who worked there, or for the goddess Athena, or something else. But in Greek, parthenos has a narrower range of meaning than almah has in Hebrew. It refers less to age and more to sexual status—it means a chaste person or someone who has never had sex. So, in the translation process, the woman in Isaiah 7:14 moved from being a young woman to being a woman who was virginal. That might not have been such a big issue if that verse hadn’t been picked up by Matthew as a retcon/proof text for Jesus. But Matthew did choose to cite that verse, and so as a consequence Christianity has had to justify virgin birth, both biologically and theologically, for centuries, somewhat by accident.
Different Christians place different values on the claim of Mary’s virginity. For some, the virgin birth is a cherished article of faith, and for others, it’s not. As for me, I see it as an artifact of translation and not meant to describe anything either historical or theological. It is of no consequence to me whether Mary was a virgin or not, and of course in any case that is unknowable to us today. But there have been other consequences of this translation choice beyond theology, as many feminist scholars have pointed out. As Mary developed into an ideal type of womanhood and motherhood, the example of a virgin mother was obviously impossible to replicate. Even if Mary did somehow pull off virgin parentage, that’s not something that’s attainable to most people. There have been terrible consequences over the years to the church lifting up Mary as a paradigm to be emulated, because virginity and motherhood are a difficult combination to attain, and because the privileging of sexual purity and chastity has put a fence around women’s lives and experiences in harmful ways. (Men, in the Christian tradition, are often strangely exempt from the category of virgins, although there are some scattered traditions of male virgins).
So what do we do with a passage like this one from Matthew, and its dramatic retconning of Isaiah, and its claims to a virgin birth? I am not sure. Modern bible translations usually now put a footnote on the word “virgin,” signaling the translation problems I discussed above. Some even use “young woman,” though that’s a controversial choice for theological reasons. It’s hard to imagine someone giving a Christmas Eve homily about how Mary wasn’t a virgin after all—it just doesn’t fit the spirit of the season. And nobody wants to sing “round yon young woman, mother and child.” It doesn’t have that lyrical quality. I think this word “virgin” has joined a bunch of other words and concepts in Christianity that exist in a kind of liminal state, where we still say them but we say them with a wink and a nod, or with our fingers crossed. We play language games to avoid saying the word “virgin,” so that people who are in the know won’t be offended and people who want to maintain traditional language and categories won’t be either. It’s sort of like how we say “the author” instead of “Paul” when we are talking about 1 Timothy; nobody will notice probably, but it’s a way around claiming that Paul wrote 1 Timothy, when he almost certainly did not. “Virgin” likewise will have to wait for a time when we can perform a wholesale revision of Christian language, doing our own retcon of the tradition to shift the verbiage of theology to suit a new time and people. This kind of overhaul happens from time to time in Christianity, and it’s overdue now.
I once heard someone say—or read it somewhere, I can’t recall—that “theology is a language game.” It’s a system of words and thought that both mirror and construct worlds at the same time. We express theology in the language we use, but we also make theology in the language we use. “Virgin” might not be the right word anymore, for lots of reasons, but it’s not yet clear what might come next.
Edit to add: My friend Matt Nagel, who I went to Vanderbilt with, called me last night to remind me that the “theology is a language game” comment came from Peter Hodgson, our constructive theology professor there. He was discussing Ludwig Wittgenstein, who apparently talks a lot about this stuff. (I am not a theologian!). Thanks, Matt, for placing my vague memory in context, even 20 years later.