It’s turning out my initial 5-part book analysis is going to end up being 8 posts. Oh well. Here in this post of my book analysis of Dan McClellan’s book, The Bible Says So, I’m going cover chapters 16-17.
16: The Bible Says the Messiah Would Be Born of a Virgin
Chapter 16 deals with Isaiah 7:14, Matthew 1:23 (where he quotes Isaiah 7:14) and Luke 1 (although it doesn’t quote Isaiah 7:14, it echoes Matthew in that Mary was a virgin). I know this topic pretty well because my PhD thesis was on it. Growing up, I was always told Isaiah 7:14 was a prediction of Jesus’ virginal conception and birth and that both Matthew and Luke were basically testimony that prediction finally came true. Also, Jesus had to have been born of a virgin because he was sinless, and if he was conceived with the input of a man, he would have been sinful.
All of that is extremely over-generalized and exegetically problematic. Isaiah 7:14 had an original context, meaning Isaiah’s Immanuel prophecy meant something to the people there at that time in 8th century Judah. I believe that in that original context, Isaiah 7:14 (as well as the larger prophetic section in Isaiah 7-12) is addressing King Ahab’s refusal to put his trust in YHWH in light of the military threat coming from the northern kingdom of Isarel and the kingdom of Aram. Basically, Isaiah says, “Trust YHWH! He’ll give you any sign you ask for!” Ahab says, “I don’t think so! I’m calling up the superpower Assyria to help instead!” To which Isaiah says, “You moron! Because you’re not trusting YHWH, He’ll give you a sign alright! Look! The almah (young woman/virgin) is pregnant. That child’s name is going to be Immanuel (“God with us”)—and that means that by the time he’s old enough to refuse the evil and choose the good, Israel and Aram are going to go bye-bye…but then you’re going to have a bigger problem, because Assyria is going to oppress you!”
The rest of Isaiah 7-12 make it clear that this Immanuel child will (unlike Ahab) put his trust in YHWH, and YHWH will spank eventually spank and punish Assyria. But that is how Judah will know “God is with us”—both in YHWH allowing Assyria to come and punish Ahab for failing to trust YHWH, and in YHWH’s spanking of Assyria because of Immanuel putting his trust in YHWH. That sets up the entire literary structure of Proto-Isaiah (Isaiah 1-39) which is clearly set from Ahab’s failure during the Syro-Ephraimite Crisis in the 740s BC and Hezekiah’s (actually YHWH’s) victory over Assyria during Sennacherib’s invasion in 701 BC. Hence, Isaiah 7-12 is the prophecy and Isaiah 36-39 is its fulfillment. And that means Hezekiah was that Immanuel child.
Matthew’s (and Luke’s) later take Isaiah 7:14 to reference Hezekiah and basically say, “Jesus is like that, but bigger.” Hezekiah was the Davidic king who saved God’s people from Assyrian oppression, but Jesus is the Davidic Messiah who saves all people from the oppression of sin and death. Matthew crafts his nativity account to further says, “Jesus, not Herod, is the true King of the Jews,” while Luke’s nativity account is saying, “Jesus, not Caesar, is the true Savior of the world.” Incidentally, in imperial propaganda, Caesar Augustus was hailed as one who was “born of a virgin.”
What about the question of the virgin birth? Basically, in the original context, almah means “young woman” and was a reference to a woman who was already pregnant (the old-fashioned way!) at the time (Ahab’s wife/Hezekiah’s mother). Matthew and Luke use parthenos (the Greek translation of almah) and further claim Mary was a virgin. Three things: (1) both parthenos and almah can mean “virgin” but also can just mean “young woman.” It all depends on the context; (2) Matthew is using Isaiah 7:14 to compare Jesus with Hezekiah; while Luke is playing upon the “born of a virgin” to contrast Jesus with Caesar; but (3) both Matthew and Luke are still saying Mary was a literal virgin—I can’t explain “how that worked,” but that is the clear message. Still, if we focus solely on the “Was she a literal virgin?” question, we will miss the clear literary and Christological claims both Matthew and Luke are making regarding who Jesus is (like Hezekiah, but bigger; the true King of the Jews—not Herod; the true Savior of the World/one born of a virgin—not Caesar).
In four paragraphs, I’ve just crystallized the context of Isaiah 1-39 and how both Matthew and Luke are using Isaiah 7:14 to make their claims about Jesus. (If you want to read more about this, I wrote a five-part series on it back in 2016. The first post is here. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5.) McClellan, though, hardly covers any of that.
The one thing he gets right is that Isaiah 7:14 has an original context and meant something back then, and that it had to do with what Isaiah told Ahaz (back in the 8th century BC). What that message was, though, McClellan gets wrong. He claims Isaiah 7:14ff was talking about “a sign that Yahweh is providing to King Ahaz to put him at ease regarding the threat represented by the alliance” (205). It’s like McClellan stopped reading Isaiah 7 after verse 16. He doesn’t even bother reading to the end of the prophecy. It’s baffling. How can you properly interpret Isaiah 7:14 in its original context if you don’t bother reading to the end of the actual prophecy?
In any case, since McClellan doesn’t address anything that I’ve pointed out above, you might be asking, “Then what does he spend the chapter arguing?” Well…
- Paul never mentions the virgin birth, therefore there must have been no belief in it early on.
- Mark starts his Gospel with Jesus’ baptism, therefore “seems to treat Jesus as a human who was adopted as God’s son and Messiah at his baptism” (208). [For the record, this claim that Jesus was just a regular human guy who didn’t become God’s son until his baptism was a later Gnostic teaching that the Church rejected as heresy].
- The reason why Matthew and Luke talk about a virgin birth is because they wanted to deny “the role of sex in his conception and thereby ratchet up his holiness and divinity” (208). [This attitude that “sex was dirty and unholy” more of a Stoic philosophical influence that influence later Church Fathers in the 4th-5th centuries but wasn’t there in the first century. Therefore, McClellan’s rationale here is deeply flawed].
- “Some scholars” (like Bart Ehrman) think Luke’s nativity account in 1-2 was a second-century addition to Luke’s Gospel. [Zero “data” to support this; from a literary perspective, Luke 1-2 is intricately tied to the rest of Luke’s Gospel].
- The Virgin birth “tradition” developed in the late first century “in response to growing concern for the nature of Jesus’ origins” (209). [Again, zero “data” to support the claim that there was a “growing concern” for the nature of Jesus’ origins. What we have are documents dating back to within 40-50 years of Jesus’ life that claim his virgin birth. Responsible scholars need to accept that].
There you have it. McClellan is right that Isaiah 7:14 has an original context, but everything else in the chapter is pretty much unsubstantiated speculation about issues that have nothing to do with trying to understand how Isaiah 7:14 was understood in its original historical/literary contexts, or how Matthew and Luke were using Isaiah 7:14 with their respective historical/literary contexts.
17: The Bible Says Jesus is God
This is a topic that is very tricky. Most people get it wrong, and even most Christians don’t fully understand the doctrine of the Trinity. I cannot perfectly explain it all in this portion of one post. The easiest-to-understand explanation of the doctrine of the Trinity I’ve ever come across was by C.S. Lewis. We are like two-dimensional flat drawings—our understanding of reality is limited to that. The doctrine of the Trinity is like drawing a cube on a flat piece of paper. Now, since we are actually three-dimensional creatures, we can see a cube drawn on a flat piece of paper and understand what is being conveyed. But imagine trying to understand that drawing of a cube if you were a two-dimensional creature.
The Christian doctrine of the Trinity says that God is three persons yet still one substance. Basically, there is a different kind of divine life within God that we can’t fully understand. And part of the Gospel message is that when we put our faith in Christ, who is both God and man, and who is God’s image, we become one with Him and become part of Christ’s body and are given the Holy Spirit so that we are taken up into that divine life in some way. Orthodoxy calls this theosis: God has become man, so that man can become like God. The starting point for understanding that is found in Christ being revealed as both God and man.
Now, McClellan completely rejects the idea of the Trinity and claims it was a doctrine that what forced on believers in the Church Councils that used the power of the Roman Empire to consolidate power for themselves. Basically, McClellan believes the scenario in The DaVinci Code to be historical! Along the lines of the book/movie, McClellan believes that before the Church Councils, “Christians and their literature (including the New Testament) promoted a variety of different ways of thinking about Jesus’ relationship to God” (212). “What Christians?” you might ask. Well, the heretics and Gnostics that early Church Fathers like Polycarp, Ignatius (among others) condemned and wrote about. To be clear, those whom the Church has rejected from the very beginning are considered by McClellan to be valid Christians who just had a different view and who were oppressed by those evil Church Councils. Needless to say, his view of Church history is wanting. If you want to get a better understanding of where McClellan’s view came from and why it is provably wrong, let me suggest The Heresy of Orthodoxy by Andreas J. Kostenberger and Michael J. Kruger.
In any case, because McClellan rejects the doctrine of the Trinity as something that was enforced by a “a central institutional hierarchy” [i.e. the Church councils] backed by “the full force of the Roman Empire” (231), he has to go through the New Testament to all the verses that talk about Jesus as God and come up with a reason to say, “Well, they’re not really saying what you think they’re saying.” Here are just a few examples:
- John 1:1 doesn’t really say, “the Word was God.” The Greek word theos really can just be a reference to “deity,” so John 1:1 really says, “the Word was deity,” meaning Jesus wasn’t God, but was just divine in some sense.
- Philippians 2:5-11 doesn’t really say Jesus was “in the form of God,” as if He were God. It is saying that he was more like “a high-ranking angel that exercised God’s own power and authority because they bore or possessed God’s name” (214).
- In Mark 2:10, when Jesus heals the paralytic, we are first told that he tells the paralytic his sins were forgiven. The scribes say that is blasphemy, because only God can forgive sins. Jesus tells them that the Son of Man has the authority to forgive sins and then heals the paralytic. McClellan, though says Jesus isn’t proving He is God in some sense, though. Actually, Jesus is correcting the scribes’ misunderstanding! Basically, He’s not showing He’s God by healing the paralytic, but showing them that God isn’t the only one who can forgive sins—He can too!
- McClellan covers many other verses in John (8:58; 14:9; 10:30, etc.) and argues that none of them are actually saying Jesus is God, but rather that Jesus has a unique relationship with God (like an angel) and that since He “possesses the divine name” (like a divine image), He can transmit the Father’s power, authority, and presence. He goes so far to say that the New Testament authors themselves understood Jesus in terms of being an angel of YHWH, and that His “sonship” was a case of adoptionism (i.e. adopted as God’s son at His baptism).
You can find this view with scholars like Bart Ehrman and taken to extremes by Jesus mythicists like Richard Carrier. The fact remains that such a view of Jesus has been understood to be heretical even long before the Council of Nicaea. It was never accepted among Christians. Heretics who refused to have anything to do with the Church? Yes. But Christians? No.
That being said, McClellan’s comments about how Christ “bears the divine image” is actually correct, when understood within traditional Church teaching. In a sense, McClellan is so close. But his rejection of Trinitarianism and the mistaken view that the doctrine of the Trinity was essentially forced upon Christians by oppressive Church Councils just leads him into mental and linguistical gymnastics to try to convince himself and others that the clear message of the New Testament isn’t saying what it clearly is saying.
Look at that. I’m at 2,200 words. That means I need to cover the final two chapters in The Bible Says So and offer a summarizing conclusion to this series in my eighth and final post. Should be easy to do. After all, Chapter 18 is just about the Mark of the Beast and Chapter 19 is just about Hell! Easy things to clarify!
