It’s a line most of us shoot past as we sing it, but it’s there to make a point. We don’t think twice about God being a real baby. It doesn’t hit most of us as hard as it should. It’s too familiar. Jesus, Mary, Joseph, manger, cows, donkey, sheep, shepherds, angels, yep, check, isn’t that sweet, what’s for dinner?

The story hit most of the people of the first few centuries hard. It felt really, really strange to them. Most of them thought the Virgin Birth the stupidest, most disgusting idea ever. Think of some guy coming to your door to tell you about a religion that required you eat flies and cockroaches, and you’ll have some idea of how the claim that God was born of a woman would have hit many of the ancient pagans.

Abhors Not the Virgin’s Womb

I mean the line in the Christmas hymn “O come, all ye faithful” that runs, “Lo, he abhors not the Virgin’s womb.” I always assumed it was just a poetic way of bringing up the Virgin Birth.

We sing it in the second verse, which makes a theological statement stuck in the middle of the verses celebrating Jesus’s birth. The verse goes: “God of God, light of light; Lo, he abhors not the virgin’s womb; Very God; begotten, not created.” And then the chorus: “O come let us adore him, etc.”

Hating, detesting, loathing and recoiling from the Virgin’s womb is exactly what God would do. Or so they thought.

It’s not a poetic way of bringing up the Virgin Birth. Think about the weird choice of word. “Abhor” means to look at something with disgust and hatred. It has synonyms like detest, loathe, recoil from. What’s the point of telling the world Jesus abhorred not the Virgin’s womb?  That He didn’t hate it? Why would He?

The answer points to how radical an idea the Incarnation was to people in the ancient world. The Incarnation wasn’t just unthinkable for them, it was gross. For two reasons.

First, they couldn’t believe that God would be born of a woman. The ancient pagans (the males, that is) did not think much of women. They felt women’s bodies and especially the reproductive parts were disgusting. The idea that God — God! — would be kept for nine months in a woman’s womb and then pass through the birth canal, that idea horrified them.

Second, they couldn’t believe that God would be human at all. The ancient pagans thought the spiritual much better than the material. God was spiritual. He wouldn’t take a human body, because bodies trapped us in this world. It would be like locking yourself all crunched up in a small box, and throwing away the key. God just wouldn’t do that. No way.

A World That Didn’t Like the Incarnation

Put those two things together and you have a world that really, really didn’t like the Christmas story. The Virgin part didn’t really bother them. They believed in miracles. It was the pregnancy and birth part they hated.

Hating, detesting, loathing and recoiling from the Virgin’s womb is exactly what God would do. Or so the old pagans thought.

Take, for example, a third-century pagan philosopher named Porphyry of Tyre. He wrote a book called Against the Christians and one of the things he had against Christianity was its belief in the Incarnation.

Someone might be silly enough to believe that the gods actually live in the statues, he said. But still, “his idea would be a much purer one than that of the man who believes that the Divine entered into the womb of the Virgin Mary, and became her unborn child, before being born and swaddled in due course, for it is a place full of blood and gall, and things more unseemly still.”

He had a low opinion of people who worshipped statues. They weren’t smart enough to realize that the statue only represented the god. But even they were smarter than the dumb Christians who thought that God was actually born of the Virgin Mary and became man. That, he thought, was just stupid.

Luke’s Big Warning

We think the gospel of Luke begins with a heart-warming story. We’ve had 2,000 years of Christianity to get used to it. It really begins with a loud warning to its first readers: You’re not going to like this. It’s almost an anti-sales pitch.

The great fourth century Church Father St. John Chrysostom had some of the pagan feeling about the body. Maybe that helped him see what an amazing story the birth of Jesus is.

“What am I to say, or what am I to speak?” he said in one of his Christmas homilies. “For the miracle strikes me senseless. The Ancient of days has become a child. He who sits on a high and lofty throne is placed in a manger [and] is turned about by human hands. He who tore the bonds of sin asunder is entwined in swaddling-clothes.”

We’re not struck senseless the way Chrysostom was. The story’s too familiar. It’s too cute and sweet. It seems natural to us that God was born a baby like the rest of us. But the early pagans saw it right. God doesn’t do this.

But He did. O, come, let us adore Him.