I have had someone ask me a number of questions related to the Jesus Myth Theory. They are fair questions and I want to address them. I want to begin with questions about the virgin birth.
Before we tackle specific questions, we need to ask: What do you mean by that?
For some mythicists, a virgin birth can mean that a male god had sex with a female mortal. Others see it as a birth that included any supernatural or miraculous element. We shouldn’t be surprised that such descriptions are common among myths.
What do the Gospels mean by the virgin birth? I’m not talking about later Christian beliefs. I actually believe that some later Christians did borrow some pagan beliefs as they developed their ideas about Mary.
What Matthew and Luke describe is a miracle by which Mary, who had never had sex with anyone previously, was caused to become pregnant by the power of God. This does not mean that God had sex with Mary. Unlike gods like Zeus, the God of the Bible has no physical body. So in summary, the Bible describes a virgin becoming pregnant without any sexual intercourse.
The person who contacted me provided a number of examples, which I found very helpful. They were the Egyptian goddesses Neith and Hathor, and the Greco-Roman Hera/Juno. Looking at specific figures makes this a much better conversation.
Neith does cause the god Keeper/Atum/Re to come into being without the help of any male. The problem with this is at this time, no one was having sex. Neith is a creator goddess who can cause all things to come into being. Neith also creates Egypt, as well as the thirty gods. This is closer to God’s creation of Adam and Eve than to Mary’s birth of Jesus.
Hathor is a strange goddess. Some myths describe her as a mass murder who is only stopped by getting drunk. She gave birth to a number of gods but she also did that in the context of being a consort of male gods. In fact one of her roles was as a goddess of sexuality.
Hera, or as she was known to the Romans, Juno, was the wife of Zeus/Jupiter. Not only was Hera married, she was the goddess of marriage. Whereas Aphrodite was the goddess of promiscuous sex, Hera was the goddess of sex within the marriage union. Hera gave birth to numerous children by Zeus. However, she did give birth the Hephaestus/Vulcan without the aid of Zeus. This was revenge for Zeus fathering children without her. Hera was not a virgin at the time and this did not give special status to Hephaestus, in fact he was hated by Hera.
When we look at the actual details of these goddesses, we see no real similarity to the biblical description of Mary. It is very possible that later Christians adopted aspects of goddesses such as Isis to their understanding of Mary. But there is no hint of that in the Gospels.
What about descriptions of goddesses as virgins that are found in the myths? This goes back to our original question of what we mean by that. When a myth describes a goddess as a virgin, except for rare cases like Athena, they are not describing her sexual history. They knew very well that Hera had sex with Zeus. What they are describing is her holiness. The goddess was pure in a spiritual sense that drew worshippers to adore them.
When the Gospels describe Mary, they are speaking of her sexual history. Both Matthew and Gospel make it clear that there is a problem with Mary being pregnant as she had never had intercourse.
When we look at these goddesses and the descriptions of Mary in the Gospels, there is no hint of borrowing from the myths in the Gospels.
