My virgin-birth rebuttal at Patheos

A Catholic blogger wrote a piece on the questionable historicity of the nativity stories.  See here.

I posted the following reply:

barry • a few seconds from nowHold on, this is waiting to be approved by messyinspirations.First, Since the apostles would have been babies at best when the events of Jesus' virgin birth and childhood took place, and because nobody ever dared allege that Mary or Joseph wrote any of the 4 canonical gospels, an assumption of apostolic authorship of the gospels necessarily reduces the nativity stories to hearsay. It doesn't matter if we grant the assumption that Matthew and Luke conducted interviews with Mary and Joseph. The person giving us the facts is not somebody with personal first-hand knowledge, therefore, the nativity stories cannot be anything other than "hearsay".
 Second, skeptics cannot be considered unreasonable for adopting a position also adopted by most Christian scholars; that Mark is the earliest gospel. If the other three gospels came later, then it is reasonable to infer that the reason only two of the later gospels mention the virgin birth is because they are embellishing the earlier story. We naturally expect that between the earliest and later forms of the same story, the latter is more likely the one to contain the embellishments. That simple common sense is not going to disappear merely because the necessary ambiguity and non-absolute nature of the historical evidence enables a fundamentalist apologist to conjure up trifling excuses all day long about why Mark and everybody believed in the virgin birth and simply "didn't wish to repeat it".
 Third, nobody seriously claims that Jesus was referring to actual historical events when giving his parables. So it is also reasonable to deduce that the gospel authors found Jesus' use of fiction-to-support-theology useful and good when applied elsewhere, so that getting people to believe in high Christology was more important than whether the stories intended to facilitate such belief were actually true. It is not true that a stranger will necessarily kidnap your kids...but then again, you create far more good and family safety/cohesion if you just teach your small child 'stranger-danger'. The higher good of family safety trumps the idiot who trifles that "stranger-danger" isn't necessarily true. For that reason, it is reasonable to assume that the gospel authors would have found getting a person to believe the way the authors did, far more important than whether the "facts" that such faith was predicted upon were actually true. That's rather stupid under modern western notions of truth, but we are talking 1st century Palestine, where people 14 years after the fact will swear they saw heaven despite continuing to be unable to tell whether their flying into the sky was physical or spiritual (2nd Cor. 12:1-4). Fundamentalists probably think the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy was written by Moses in 1400 b.c.
 Fourth, fundamentalists have a nasty habit of automatically concluding that if they can think of any non-contradictory "how-it-could-have-been" bare possibility scenario in favor the historicity of the nativity stories, then presto, that bare possibility necessarily and conclusively trumps any possibility set forth by a skeptic. That is inaccurate and irrational: In 20 years of attacking the gospels, I've seen plenty of fundamentalist defenses of the nativity stories. I think TWO of them attempted to show that historicity was more likely than embellishment. once again, nobody wins a historiography debate by merely showing the way they believe does not involve logical contradiction or is founded upon mere possibilities. The person who wins the historical debate is the person who shows that their theory is more likely to be true than the theory they disagree with. Sure, its possible Mark knew of and approved of the virgin birth stories but chose for his own reasons to avoid mentioning them, but that's only a possibility. You will have to show that this is more likely than the skeptical theory that says Mark, with his goal to prove Jesus was the divine son of God, would never "choose to excude" nativity stories that support his intended theme often more powerfully than the pericopes he DID choose to record.
 Fifth, I have formed particularized rebuttals to the particular arguments of Licona, Habermas and W.C.Craig in favor of the resurrection, and if it be reasonable to conclude Jesus did not rise from the dead, then under apostle Paul's logic, we are also reasonable to conclude Christians are false witnesses who are still in their sins (1st Cor. 15:15-17), which, makes it reasonable to deduce that Christians are then under YHWH's death penalty even if we granted that they did genuinely supernatural miracles (Deuteronomy 13:1-5). Since YHWH doesn't think the doing of a miracle automatically infuses the theology taught therein with divine approval, then it doesn't matter if we grant the miracle of Jesus' virgin birth for the sake of argument, we'd still have to ask whether Jesus taught in harmony with the Law. 2,000 years of Jewish opposition to Christianity might have a tendency to render skeptics "reasonable" even if not "infallible" in attacking Christianity.
 Sixth, fundamentalists don't merely claim skeptics are "wrong", they also say we are "fools" or "unreasonable" to deny the historicity of the virgin birth narratives. That being the case, if we wish to disprove their contention, we don't have to prove that the skeptical position is "correct", we only have to prove that the skeptical position is "reasonable". If the fundies can become 'reasonable' by merely positing possibilities, they must extend that luxury to skeptics and concede that skeptical possibilities render the skeptic reasonable.
 Seventh, the biggest problem here is the stupid fundamentalist who is always casting bible inerrancy in terms of accuracy. That is, since Jesus was either virgin born or he wasn't, we should expect the historical evidence to show that he was, or show that he wasn't. This is stupid: Jesus was born 2,000 years ago, and the records of such birth are similarly 1,950 years old. Any historian will tell you that you don't answer questions of ancient history in terms of accuracy, you only answer them in terms of probability. How LIKELY is it that the nativity stories are true? How LIKELY is it that the nativity stories are embellishment?
 Eighth, if any fundamentalist thinks Matthew was written to both Christian and non-Christian Jews, that gives you a pretty good idea of how anti-intellectual Matthew was: he expected non-Christian Jews to be persuaded Jesus was virgin born...because of a story...a story that, given Matthew's likely 60 a.d. date of publication, is thus a story that comes to those non-Christian Jews 30 years after the fact. Think legends take at least a full generation to materialize? Think again, read Acts 21:18-24. And most Christian scholars including Licona and Craig Evans admit that Matthew and John engaged in "artistry" and either invented history or placed historical events in a time that they didn't actually occur, so that there is plenty of scholarly justification to say that the gospel authors' concerns for accuracy were not quite as fanatical as those of modern fundamentalists.