HERE WE GO AGAIN
The head of the global Anglican church, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, sounded off December 19 with London radio talk-show host Simon Mayo, Radio 5, about the “virgin birth” of Jesus Christ. Did it happen the way we are told?
Oh God, here we go again. He supported the Gospel of Saint Matthew but muddied the waters.
Archbishop Williams was quite wobbly, and his remarks have caused consternation throughout not only the Anglican communion but the Catholic, Mormon, and other Christian communions as well.
Here’s what Archbishop Rowan Williams said in answer to this question from Simon Mayo:
SIMON MAYO: So start with the baby Jesus in a manger: Historically and factually true?
ARCHBISHOP ROWAN WILLIAMS: I should think so. The Gospel tells us he was born outside the main house, probably because it was overcrowded because it was pilgrimage time or census time; whatever; yes; he’s born in poor circumstances, slightly out of the ordinary.
SIMON MAYO: The Virgin Mary next door to him?
ARCHBISHOP ROWAN WILLIAMS:: We know his mother’s name was Mary. That’s one of the things all the gospels agree about. And the two gospels that tell the story have the story of the virgin birth and that’s something I'm committed to as part of what I’ve inherited.
SIMON MAYO: You were a prominent part of a Spectator survey in the current issue which headlined, ‘Do you believe in the virgin birth?’ There are some people in this survey who would say they were Christian who don’t have a problem if you don’t believe in the Virgin birth. How important it is it to believe in that bit?
ARCHBISHOP ROWAN WILLIAMS:: I don’t want to set it as a kind of hurdle that people have to get over before they, you know, be signed up, but I think quite a few people that, as time goes on, they get a sense, a deeper sense of what the Virgin birth is about. I would say that of myself. About thirty years ago, I might have said I wasn’t too fussed about it. Now I see it much more as dovetailing with the rest of what I believe about the story, and yes.
SIMON MAYO: Christopher Hitchens and many others make the point that isn’t the translation for young woman rather than virgin? Does it have to be seen as virgin; might it be a mistranslation?
ARCHBISHOP ROWAN WILLIAMS: It is. Well, what’s happening there, one of the Gospels quotes a prophecy that a virgin will conceive a child. Now the original Hebrew doesn’t have the word virgin, it’s just a young woman. But that’s the prophecy that’s quoted from the Old Testament in support of the story which is, in any case, about a birth without a human father, so it’s not that it rests on mistranslation.
Saint Matthew’s gone to his Greek version of the bible and said “Oh, ‘virgin,’ sounds like the story I know,” and put it in.
SIMON MAYO: So you’ve got the Virgin Mary, Jesus, Joseph?
ARCHBISHOP ROWAN WILLIAMS:: Joseph, yes, again, the Gospels are pretty consistent that that’s his father’s name;
SIMON MAYO: So we’re panning out now’; shepherds? They’re with their sheep and the oxes and asses?
ARCHBISHOP ROWAN WILLIAMS: Pass on the oxes and asses. They don’t figure very strongly in the gospels, so I can live without the ox and asses.
SIMON MAYO: And the wise men with the gold, frankincense, and myrrh –- with one of the wise men normally being black and the other two being white, for some reason?
ARCHBISHOP ROWAN WILLIAMS: Well, Matthew’s Gospel doesn’t tell us that there were three of them, doesn’t tell us they were kings, doesn’t tell us where they came from. It says they’re astrologers, wise men, priests from somewhere outside the Roman Empire.
That‘s all we’re really told. So, yes, ‘the three kings with the one from Africa,’ that’s legend. It works quite well as legend.
SIMON MAYO: But would they have been there?
ARCHBISHOP ROWAN WILLIAMS: Not with the shepherds, they wouldn’t. So if you’ve got shepherds on one side and three kings on the other, there’s a bit of conflation going on.
SIMON MAYO: And pulling back further: Snow on the ground?
ARCHBISHOP ROWAN WILLIAMS: Very unlikely, I think. It can be pretty damn cold in Bethlehem at this time of the year, but we don’t know that it was this time of year because, again, the Gospels don’t tell us what time of year it was. Christmas is the time it is because it fitted very well with the winter festival.
SIMON MAYO: Just as a side issue on the kings and the wise bit: Do you have a problem with astrologers being seen as wise men? There’d be many people in your church who would think, actually, astrology is bunk and should be exposed as bunk, and the idea of saying that they are wise is somewhat farcical?
ARCHBISHOP ROWAN WILLIAMS:: Well, I ‘m inclined to agree that astrology is bunk. But you’re dealing there with a world in which people watched the stars in order to get a sort of heads up on significant matters, and astrologers were quite a growth industry, people who were respected and had a kind of professional technical skill and were respected as such.
The thing here, of course, is what’s the skill about? Well it’s all bringing them to Jesus. It’s not about fortune-telling or telling the future, it’s about a skill of watching the universe which leads them inexorably towards this event. So I don’t think it’s a justification of astrology.
SIMON MAYO: So if we’re pulling back even further then, is there a star above the place where the child is?
ARCHBISHOP ROWAN WILLIAMS: Don’t know. I mean Matthew talks about the star rising, about the star standing still. We know stars don’t behave quite like that, that the wise men should have seen something which triggered a recognition of something significant was going on, some constellation. There are various scientific theories about what it might have been at around that time and they followed that trek. That makes sense to me.”
Well, all of this is gobbledygook. The archbishop is an intellectual wonker, apparently not a truly believing Christian. He is questioning contemporaneous biblical Gospel accounts based upon nothing but pure speculation and idle theory, no information or true research.
The man is ideological and egotistic, not a true believing Christian, and just mouthed off as a babbling idiot.
The queen should fire him as the global Anglican prelate and replace him with a true Christian believer.
You can contact Archbishop Rowan Williams at his plush Lambeth Palace offices and residence at telephone 011-44-20-0207-898- 1280 or facsimile 011-44-20-0207-261-1765.
