Clemency suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value reader offers and events

Click here for the latest Spectator Wine Offers

Letters

Wednesday, 16th January 2008

Spectator readers respond to recent articles

London W2

Sad modernist notion
Sir: It is rather sad to see Admiral Liardet trotting out those old ‘modernist’ notions that I thought had been put to rest some time ago (Letters, 12 January). I leave aside his gratuitous libel of some of the Fathers of the Church — I dare say the City of God can stand it.

But it is ironic that, in citing Galatians iv 4, he hits on a text which, far from showing that St Paul had not heard about the Virgin Birth, carries the clear implication that he did know about it. What biographer has ever commented of his subject that he was born of a woman? We all were. It would be an absurd tautology. The Apostle must therefore mean something more, and it seems reasonable to suggest that he means that Christ was born, in human terms, exclusively of a woman, without male agency.

Turning to the old chestnut that ‘virgin’ was a mistranslation of ‘young woman’, I am confident that the Gospel writers had as firm a grasp of both the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint as Admiral Liardet. First, the term ‘young woman’ referred to the subject’s status, not her age: she was unmarried and, unless of easy virtue, a virgin; so he is attempting to distinguish between things that do not differ. Second, it will be remembered that the event of a virgin conceiving and bearing a son was to be a sign. What kind of sign would have been provided if merely a young woman had borne a child — it happens all the time — and why should the fruit of such a quotidian occurrence be named Emanuel, God with us?

Dr Brian Campbell

Glasgow

Desert Island diss

Sir: Kate Chisholm comments that Kirsty Young has yet to breathe new life into Desert Island Discs (Radio, 12 January). Far from resuscitating the programme, I fear that Kirsty has her heel firmly planted on its windpipe. Things are not helped by the irritating way she asks all her castaways, ‘And when the waves sweep up the beach and threaten to wash away all your discs, which one will you rush to save?’ Why can’t she just say, ‘And of your eight records, which one is your favourite?’?

Dr Andrew Mason

Norton, Bury St Edmunds

Previous page 1 | 2 | 3

Guy Liardet

February 12th, 2008 3:56pm

with regard to the Virgin Birth question and Dr Mason's letter, my 'libel' of the early church fathers was based on St Augustine of Hippo's fathering of a son on his North African concubine, his disertion and subsequent statement that it was wrong for a woman, even an elderly sister, to live under the same roof as a Servant of God. St Jerome, always a rich source of misogynistic quotes, wonders whether it is licit for a virgin to bathe at all, 'for in seeing their own bodies there is the potential for desire'. The 'Custody of the Enclosure' in the Rule of the Poor Clares is redolent of a prurient sexual repression and mistrust. The historian Howard Bloch in his chapter 'The Poetics of Virginity in 'Medieval Misogyny and the Birth of European Romantic Love' (1991)paints a sad picture of the church's deep psychosexual muddle. Paul in Galatians Ch4 is heralding the essential normalcy of God's gift of his Son - the Word made Flesh, if you like- if he had known about,believed in, needed a virgin birth to prop up Christ's divinity, he would surely have said so, loud and clear. Geza Vermes (The Changing Face of Jesus 2001)deals with the 'mistranslation' question in scholarly fashion - the meaning of the words betulah and parthenos, Jewish legal definitions of virginity which include a girl pregnant before her first menstruation (not unusual in some societies even today) who is classified as a 'virgin mother'