Contrary to what is often asserted, Paul never says Jesus had an actual “woman as a mother.” He says Jesus came “from a woman” but then says we are all born of the same woman. This “woman,” Paul says in Galatians 4, is an allegory for the physical world of flesh, not a person. He thus appears only to mean Jesus was given a human body of flesh to die in, a body subject to the physical world order. He does not say where this happened. Nor that it involved a birth. Or an actual woman.

I demonstrate this and answer all the usual attempts to object to it in my peer reviewed treatment in On the Historicity of Jesus (pp. 577-82). But this still often comes up as evidence Jesus had an earthly mother and thus definitely existed—so adamant are apologists, even secular scholars, to not read the actual argument Paul makes in context, and instead only quote him out of context. So here is an expose of why that’s bad scholarship.

Craig Evans

In my Analysis of the Carrier-Evans Debate I wrote roughly the following:

The phrase “born of a woman, born under the law” in Galatians 4:4 is an allegory for world order. As Paul explicitly says, the “mothers” he is talking about in his argument in Galatians 4 are not people but worlds (Galatians 4:24). In both cases Paul does not use the word he uses for human birth, but the word he uses for divine manufacture (“was created/made,” as in “came to be”), the same word he uses of God making Adam and our future resurrection bodies (1 Corinthians 15:37 and 15:45), neither of which are “born” to actual human mothers (or fathers). It thus is no response to this to say the phrase “came from a woman” was a common idiom for designating mortal existence; because we all agree Paul believed Jesus had had a mortal existence (see my discussion of this error in respect to McLatchie). So the question remains whether here this idiom is being used literally or figuratively.

Later Christians knew this and tried to change the words to what they needed to be there (and what Evans needs to be there), altering them both (simultaneously here and in Romans 1:3) to Paul’s preferred word for “born” rather than “made,” but we caught them at it, and those doctored variants are excluded from the received text. Experts now know that what Paul actually originally wrote in both passages was his preferred word for “made.” So we can’t tell if Paul means God manufactured Jesus a body out of Davidic seed (on which see What Did Paul Mean in Romans 1:3?), or if Jesus was born to some human father descended from David; nor can we tell if Paul thought Jesus was born of a real mother or only an allegorical one. So there is no usable evidence here. At all. Certainly not substantial evidence.

Zeba Crook

In my Commentary on my debate with Zeba Crook, I wrote roughly the following:

Crook challenged my claim that Paul is talking about an allegory in Galatians 4. I had argued Paul’s whole argument is that being “born of a woman” means being born to a certain world order, and not a literal biological birth to a literal woman. As Paul says, “this is an allegory” (Gal. 4:24). That he only gets around to explaining that his argument in Galatians 4 is an allegory toward the end of his argument (“twenty verses later,” as Crook says) is irrelevant. One would not say the Gettysburg Address is not about slavery because Lincoln only gets to mentioning slavery a dozen sentences in (even had that been the case—and it roughly is: the only reference to slavery in that Address, “a new birth of freedom,” only shows up in nearly the last line). Like Lincoln, Paul is making a single, coherent, interconnected argument. You can’t pick and choose sentences and read them out of context. The argument is the context. And I do not recall Crook answering my argument from vocabulary on this, either. So that argument remained unrebutted altogether.

Daniel Gullotta

In my article on Gullotta’s attempt to critique On the Historicity of Jesus I wrote roughly the following:

Gullotta seems to think I argue that Paul definitely did not mean Jesus had human parents; when in fact on the a fortiori side of my error margin, the upper bound of my probability (that 1 in 3 chance Jesus existed that is the actual conclusion of my book), I only argue we can’t tell (on the scant and ambiguous evidence we have). Maybe that’s what Paul meant. Maybe not. It’s unclear. And yet, a fortiori, I still count this as evidence for historicity (by 2 to 1). Even though the fact that it’s unclear is weird (why should Paul speak so weirdly, evasively, and unclearly about the parentage of Jesus?). But Gullotta ignores that point as well. He tries instead to “rescue the text” and restore it to traditional Christian faith assumptions.

First up is Paul talking about Jesus being born “of a woman.” A woman unnamed. And who has no obvious reason even to be mentioned, on Gullotta’s reading. I argue that this occurs in a speech that, following ancient canons of rhetoric, is building an argument to a conclusion, about how Jesus’s incarnation saves us, by taking us out of one realm (of flesh) and anchoring us in another (of heaven). Key to Paul’s entire argument is that Jesus had to be brought into the world of flesh, just as we are. It’s our commonality on that one fact that is the linchpin of Paul’s argument.

Gullotta says Paul can’t mean Jesus was, as Paul says we were, born to an “allegorical” woman (Hagar, the world of flesh: Galatians 4:19-31), because “Paul clearly focuses on his audience.” Um. Yes. And his argument is that Jesus and his audience are identical on this one specific fact. That’s literally Paul’s entire argument. Look how the argument started: Galatians 3:23-4:7. Compare to how it climaxes. Get it? The reason we must attach ourselves to Jesus, the reason this will work and save us, is because Jesus was, like us, “born of a woman.” What woman? The allegorical Hagar: the world of flesh. At no point is actually being born to an actual woman ever made relevant to Paul’s argument.

And that’s why Jesus’s atoning death frees us from Torah observance. Because we are now “heirs according to the promise,” meaning sons of the allegorical Sarah. How did we become heirs to the promise? By joining ourselves spiritually to the Heir to the Promise, Jesus. Through baptism we are adopted as sons of God (see Element 12 in OHJ, p. 108) and thus share this privilege with Jesus, and so cry “Abba! Father!” Seriously. Read Paul’s argument. It’s pretty darned clear (I’ll even walk you through it below).

Someone might then say, “But, Paul, what does being born of a woman have to do with any of that? You’re not making sense!” So Paul answers that question. What’s the answer? “I’m talking about allegorical mothers.” Literally. That’s what he says. He is talking about being born into the world of flesh (our fate); then being born into the world of heaven (the promise). Hence he transitions by bringing up the problem he’s trying to address again. His argument surrounds this, as a chiasmus (A:B:A): he starts by explaining his soteriology (Gal. 3:23-4:7), then he explains the problem (Gal. 4:8-18), then he explains how his soteriology solves the problem (Gal. 4:19-31). In no way does “being born of a woman” have anything actually to do with it. The logic of his argument only makes sense because he means what world order we and (briefly) Jesus were subject to. Not that he like we passed into it through a vagina. That’s not his point at all. And he makes clear to explain that’s not his point.

At the least this leaves us uncertain what Paul means about Jesus. Maybe he means a real woman for Jesus and an allegorical one for us. Though that would destroy the point and symmetry of his argument and introduce a detail irrelevant to his entire thesis. Or maybe he means the same of Jesus as he means for us. He could even believe Jesus was born to a human mother, while also not referring to that fact on this occasion, meaning only allegory here. Even at best we just don’t know.

It gets even more uncertain when we notice Paul uses peculiar vocabulary for Jesus: he chooses the word he uses for manufacturing bodies (Adam; and our resurrection bodies awaiting us in heaven), not the word he uses for human birth. A fact so disturbing to later Christians they tried doctoring the text of Paul to switch those very words. Gullotta tries to reinterpret Paul by saying the word Paul always uses for manufactured bodies but never for born bodies was used for “human births in other pieces of ancient literature” (a fact I even mention in OHJ). But that violates a basic principle of literary interpretation: what other authors’ idioms were, is irrelevant to what Paul’s was. And we can establish Paul’s idiom: everywhere else, he never uses that word of birth, always of divinely manufactured bodies; and he always uses a different word for birth. You can’t say “Paul would have used some other author’s style here.”

Maybe Paul scrambled his idiom (conveniently, precisely where the historicist needs him to have?). But you can’t know he did without a circular argument. This is the same principle by which we identify different authors of texts: by looking at how they differ in the way they use words. So appealing to how different authors used words, cannot help us argue Paul used words the same way. The only way to argue Paul used words the same way (and thus that his idiom was the same as theirs) is to find evidence of Paul doing that. And he doesn’t. Unless you assume the conclusion you are trying to prove. Which is a fallacy.

Gullotta also makes the illogical argument that “Paul claims that Jesus was ‘descended from David according to the flesh’ (Rom 1.3), and thus,” contrary to what I argue, “this would mean that Jesus, for Paul, was a descendant of Sarah, and not Hagar.” Holy Moses. Paul was not so lousy a thinker as to confuse allegory with fundamentalist literalism. Paul explicitly says the Sarah he means is not a real mother, but a figure for abandoning the body of flesh and inheriting a heavenly existence (he is painfully explicit on that point). So why would Paul think being literally descended from David, which made one “literally” a descendant of an actual Sarah, have anything at all to do with being born of the allegorical Sarah in Galatians 4, the only Sarah Paul ever mentions there? Gullotta is making a total hash of Paul’s argument here. Sarah is not the mother of David in Galatians 4. She is the mother of all celestially reborn Christians (including the risen Jesus). Whether Paul also thought there was a historical Sarah is unknown (he might not have; his peer and contemporary Philo often didn’t think the historical figures in the OT were real people: see OHJ, p. 117), but it wouldn’t be relevant to the “Sarah” Paul is talking about in Galatians.

So, Gullotta, having totally failed to even look at what Paul’s argument in Galatians 4 was and thus not understanding any of it and consequently making no logical argument about whether he meant a real woman as opposed to an allegorical one, then moves on to what he calls the “clearest declaration of Jesus’ earthly humanity,” which is the fact that Paul calls him a man. But we already agree on that. That’s already entailed by mythicism. The question is not whether Paul thought Jesus wore a human body. It’s whether he wore it on Earth. And Paul never says he did. Plain and simple.

You can review my discussion of McGrath’s failure on this same point (who, like Gullotta, cannot have actually read my book and still have made this mistake) in Can Paul’s Human Jesus Not Be a Celestial Jesus? By contrast, Paul’s allegorical interpretation becomes reified historical fact in later Christendom, as I point out in How Did Christianity Switch to a Historical Jesus? There I show how odd it is that statements about what Christians believed went from (in Paul) no named mother in any creed (only allegorical, unnamed mothers in explications of creeds), to actual mandatory creeds asserting Jesus had a real mother (a century later), and that her name was Mary, and anyone denying this was to be condemned. Why was this totally unimportant in Paul’s day, but a dire requirement a century later, to flush out Christians who refused to affirm such creeds? Could it be because there were still Christians declaring this “mother” of Jesus to be an allegory and not a real woman, as indeed polemicists like Irenaeus were still contending with a generation later? (See OHJ, pp. 580-81.) There is no evidence it wasn’t; and some evidence it was.

It’s All Allegory Top to Bottom

As I more or less wrote in The Cosmic Seed of David, the same reasoning Paul uses in Galatians 3:29, where he declares that “if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.” Meaning, even non-Jews become born “of the seed of Abraham” at baptism. In other words, Paul is saying we come from the seed of Abraham allegorically, not literally; spiritually, not biologically. And as I just said above: How did we become heirs to the promise? By joining ourselves spiritually to the Heir to the Promise, Jesus.

So let’s walk through Paul’s argument, starting in Galatians 3, and thus walk through the actual context of his words here (using the NRSV translation for convenience):

²³ Now before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed. ²⁴ Therefore the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith.

Does Paul mean a literal guards, literal disciplinarians, literal prison? Or is he speaking allegorically already from step one? Clearly, allegorically.

²⁵ But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian, ²⁶ for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. ²⁷ As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. ²⁸ There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. ²⁹ And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring,^[a heirs according to the promise.

Does Paul mean literal disciplinarian? Literal children? Literally wearing Christ’s corpse-flesh? Literally Jews and Greeks and women and slaves don’t exist anymore? Literally descended from Abraham? Obviously not. His entire argument is couched in allegory in every sentence.

4 ¹ My point is this: heirs, as long as they are minors, are no better than slaves, though they are the owners of all the property; ² but they remain under guardians and trustees until the date set by the father. ³ So with us; while we were minors, we were enslaved to the elemental spirits of the world.

Does Paul mean we are literally minors, literally children? Does he mean literal property, literal estates? Does he mean literal trustees? Does he mean literal father? Obviously not. Again, this is allegory from top to bottom. His entire argument is built on allegorical assertions in every sentence. He only explicates the allegory here at the last line: when we were allegorically children we were literally slaves to “elemental spirits of the world.” And even they Paul identifies allegorically, as the “elements of the world,” usually meaning atoms of earth, air, fire, and water, but here widely agreed to mean, figuratively, the animating spirits of these (as Paul explains in Gal. 4:8-9).

⁴ But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, ⁵ in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children. ⁶ And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” ⁷ So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God.

Here we get the part where the contended line comes up. Note that Paul’s entire argument has been allegory in every single line from the beginning of his argument to now. So why would that suddenly change? Note that the contended line is crucially referencing a key allegorical line he started his argument with, that we are sons of Abraham and thus heirs to his estates (and thus to any promises made to Abraham—such as the eternal salvation of his descendants). So why would anything else in that same line not be referencing the same allegory? Should we assume Paul means a literal woman here? Because he doesn’t mean literal children or literal father, or literal heir to a literal estate, or even literal slave (in the sense of being the legal property of a human owner). It’s all allegory. So why would he suddenly switch out of allegory only when referencing a mother?

And we needn’t assume. Because as Paul pulls his argument to a close, he tells us. And before he tells us, he breaks out of allegory into a literal discussion of what he’s really talking about—thus forming the central pivot of his argument:

⁸ Formerly, when you did not know God, you were enslaved to beings that by nature are not gods. ⁹ Now, however, that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and beggarly elemental spirits? How can you want to be enslaved to them again? ¹⁰ You are observing special days, and months, and seasons, and years. ¹¹ I am afraid that my work for you may have been wasted.

¹² Friends, I beg you, become as I am, for I also have become as you are. You have done me no wrong. ¹³ You know that it was because of a physical infirmity that I first announced the gospel to you; ¹⁴ though my condition put you to the test, you did not scorn or despise me, but welcomed me as an angel of God, as Christ Jesus. ¹⁵ What has become of the goodwill you felt? For I testify that, had it been possible, you would have torn out your eyes and given them to me. ¹⁶ Have I now become your enemy by telling you the truth? ¹⁷ They make much of you, but for no good purpose; they want to exclude you, so that you may make much of them. ¹⁸ It is good to be made much of for a good purpose at all times, and not only when I am present with you. ¹⁹ My little children, for whom I am again in the pain of childbirth until Christ is formed in you, ²⁰ I wish I were present with you now and could change my tone, for I am perplexed about you.

Paul here uses one simile (“as an angel”) but no allegory in this aside. Even what you might suppose of the reference to “pain of childbirth” is not actually in the Greek; the word Paul uses is just “in pain.” Paul has stepped out of his allegorical argument to tell us (i.e. the Galatians) that he is literally talking about elemental spirits and the Galatians’ recourse to Jewish observances that are enslaving them to those spirits, and that he literally has to struggle to rescue them by bringing them back to Christ.

Paul then explains how his previous allegorical argument relates to what he just explained was the actual literal issue at hand:

²¹ Tell me, you who desire to be subject to the law, will you not listen to the law? ²² For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave woman and the other by a free woman. ²³ One, the child of the slave, was born according to the flesh; the other, the child of the free woman, was born through the promise. ²⁴ Now this is an allegory: these women are two covenants. One woman, in fact, is Hagar, from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery. ²⁵ Now Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia^[h and corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children. ²⁶ But the other woman corresponds to the Jerusalem above; she is free, and she is our mother.

Paul here tells a literal story from the Bible. Then immediately explains that story is actually an allegory. Why does Paul bring this up? What point does it have to the argument he just constructed? Why is this here? There is only one explanation that fits any canon of rhetoric: that when Paul speaks of children, heirs, estates, and women, he is speaking allegorically about the actual situation the Galatians are in. And the situation they are in is not “having passed through a vagina.” The existence of their mothers is irrelevant to Paul’s argument from the first step to last. Indeed, explicitly: Paul began by saying the Galatians are not literal descendants of Abraham, but allegorically so. They are thus not literally “born of women” in his argument, either, but allegorically so.

Paul’s statement about Jesus having a mother makes no sense in this context. It serves no function in his argument at all. And thus has no explicable reason to be there. Unless it is a part of his entire argument that he now explains here was an allegory: we are allegorically heirs to Abraham; and we are allegorically sons of Hagar, just as Jesus briefly became. And it is precisely because Jesus submitted to the same worldly state, that he was able to defeat it with his death. And it is precisely because he did that, that we can save ourselves by attaching ourselves to him, spiritually.

At no point does Paul’s argument require or even imply Jesus had a real biological mother. All it requires, as Paul carefully explains, is that Jesus assumed a body subject to the elements of the natural world, a body such as we have. And such as Adam once had—who was not born out of a vagina either. Jesus thus became a son of Hagar, so that his death could secure his status as a son of Sarah. And we will follow him in this, if we are, like him, to become heirs to the Kingdom of God. Gentiles (Paul’s target audience here) don’t become heirs to the Kingdom of God by being born out of a Jewish vagina. Jews don’t either: you are never Jewish, and thus heirs through Abraham, until you are circumcised. Christians need only become heirs by spiritual union with Christ. So they have no need of circumcision.

Hence Paul concludes his argument, after a citation of scripture—saying that now “the children of the desolate woman are more numerous than the children of the one who is married,” which Paul is again clearly interpreting allegorically, not literally—with the declaration that:

²⁸ Now you, my friends, are children of the promise, like Isaac. ²⁹ But just as at that time the child who was born according to the flesh persecuted the child who was born according to the Spirit, so it is now also. ³⁰ But what does the scripture say? “Drive out the slave and her child; for the child of the slave will not share the inheritance with the child of the free woman.” ³¹ So then, friends, we are children, not of the slave but of the free woman.

Here Paul refers to Jewish (and possibly Jewish Christian) harassment or persecution of Gentile Christians, and intimates those who so harass or persecute will be disinherited. Not because all Jews will be (as they are literally descended from Sarah and thus literally heirs, provided they enter the covenant by circumcision), but because those who remain allegorically enslaved to evil spirits will be. Because those who are “born under the law” literally are not who Paul is talking about here. As he explicitly said: he means those figuratively born under the law; as in, those whose bodies remain enslaved to elemental powers. And if Paul means that for everyone, he means it for Jesus. That’s the whole point. Which does not require Jesus to have had a real mother. It only requires him at some point to have been mortal. So the Galatians would not think “vaginal birth” is what Paul meant. And Paul outright says that’s not what he meant. “This is an allegory,” he says. And as we can see, he means his entire argument is allegorical—as it clearly is, from its very start at Galatians 3:23 all the way down to when he first begins explicating its literal meaning, which is after verse 4:4. Not at verse 4:4.

We therefore have no business interpreting verse 4:4 literally. That’s to ignore Paul’s entire argument and the entire context he establishes for that argument. And it’s to ignore Paul’s explicit statement that the women he has been talking about this whole time are allegorical and not literal women. They are metaphors for which world order our lives are subject to. So we can’t get from this any confident conclusion that Paul thought Jesus had a human, earthly mother. That’s not his argument. And neither he nor the Galatians would have needed to believe that to have made or understood this argument.

Not Getting the Point

In Desperately Searching the Epistles I wrote something like the following:

Someone recently suggested this means that the women people are born to in Galatians 4 can’t be allegorical as Paul says they are, because being “born according to the flesh” means being born to (the allegorical) Hagar, as Paul says. So if that’s what Paul meant when he said Jesus was also born of the same mother, then at the conclusion of his argument (Gal. 4:28-31) Paul would be saying that Jesus is now persecuting the children of the celestial mother (the allegorical Sarah), and surely that can’t be. Paul wouldn’t have said that. Therefore (so this argument goes) he can’t have meant that about Jesus.

But this is confused. Paul says Jesus was only born of the ‘flesh woman’ (Hagar, the world of flesh) to die. But when Paul wrote Galatians, Jesus had already long since died; Jesus had already become instead born of the heavenly woman (Sarah). As he is now the Heir. Paul’s entire point from verse 3:23 to verse 4:31.

It is also often claimed that Paul references Jesus coming into existence “from a woman” to establish he was Jewish, and so surely that must be what Paul is doing here. That actually isn’t what Paul is arguing—he is talking about belonging to different world orders here, not whether or not Jesus “was Jewish.” And that is never how Paul elsewhere does this—everywhere else when Paul wants to establish Jesus as Jewish he references his coming from the seed of Abraham, Jesse, or David. But above all, it makes no sense for Paul to do this. Because back then, Judaism wasn’t matrilineal. You could not establish someone’s status as a Jew by reference to their mother; Jewish descent was established by one’s father. Even in mixed or illegitimate unions, e.g. where a Jewish woman conceived by a Gentile or with someone she was forbidden to, the status of the child was always that of the inferior partner—so if by a Jew and a Gentile, the inferior status is Gentile. And even that does not make one Jewish. To enter God’s covenant (and thus become a Jewish heir to the Kingdom), you had to be circumcised.

Hence only a Jewish father could ensure a woman’s offspring had a Jewish ancestry (as clearly stated in the Mishnah law, Qiddushin 3.12, and reiterated in Mishnah law Yebamot 7.5); but even that was not sufficient to enter you into the covenant (see my detailed discussion of this fact in The Incompetent Crankery of the Israel Only Movement). Indeed, anyone from “un-kosher” lineages—any descent from a mixed or illegal union—could not “return to congregation” with Jews for ten generations, per the law of the mamzer (Deuterononomy 23:2). So there is no intelligible reason why Paul would choose “mother” here to indicate Jewish descent. Nor could it refer to being in the Jewish covenant; circumcision did not occur until eight days after birth. Indeed, Paul does not even say this woman was Jewish. Even a virgin birth would require citing her patrilineal descent to ensure her offspring was Israelite. And “being an Israelite” is not “being Jewish” in the sense of entering the covenant to become divine heirs; because the only way even “a Jew by birth” became subject to Torah law was by circumcision (Genesis 17:14), not birth. So the only available reason for Paul to mention a “woman” here at all is his whole argument about allegorical mothers. Not actual mothers. And as this is the only reason Paul himself ever mentions to be talking about mothers in his argument, we have no basis for assuming he meant by it something else.

Conclusion

Paul’s statement in Galatians 4:4 cannot be taken out of context and be correctly interpreted. This is as true of this verse as every other in the Bible. This should be obvious to anyone serious about sound scholarship. But when we put that verse back in context, the context we find it in is an extended allegorical argument entirely constructed out of allegorical premises about parentage and childhood and inheritance law, in which never is Paul referring to anything literally, and which culminates in Paul ultimately outright saying his whole argument has been allegorical, and explaining his point as actually being about supernatural realities, and what world order we are subjecting ourselves to, and how to escape one for another, which he describes as transferring one mother for another. Throughout, Jesus is the analogy to ourselves. And Paul concludes by explaining, basically, that to be saved we have to exchange mothers just as Jesus did. At no point in this argument does it make any sense to take Paul as meaning a “mother” in a literal sense. Such an idea is jarringly out of place, contrary to what Paul says, and to the entire structure of his argument, and serves no discernible purpose for his argument.

And this means that even at best we cannot know that Paul is referring to Jesus having a real mother here, even if somehow he was. Because the evidence is as good or better that he is referring to a figurative, symbolic mother. And this is so even if Jesus existed and Paul knew he had a mother. Because regardless of what he otherwise believed, Paul just isn’t talking about Jesus’s actual mother here. So we can’t use this passage as evidence Jesus existed. That may be disappointing to those who desperately need there to be evidence Jesus existed. But there is no way to recover this passage as evidence for that conclusion. Not on the evidence as we so far have it. And yet, guess what? On the upper bound of my margin of error, I counted this as evidence he existed. It’s just on that account weakened as evidence, for all the reasons I just laid out, and have explained elsewhere (not just in On the Historicity of Jesus but now as well in Jesus from Outer Space).

-:-

This article was updated in 2022 with references to subsequent articles and material therefrom.