Can you question the Virgin Birth and still be a Christian?

[TreasonousBastard]

16. Of course, just as one can question the resurrection...

and most, if not all, of the rest of early Christian mythology.

First, questioning is not denying-- it is searching for truth. But, in the event you actually meant denial, that shouldn't preclude being a Christian, either.

Of course, this all depends on one's definition of "Christian". There are OT prophecies that had to be fulfilled in the mythology and there are some statements in the NT that seem to narrow the definition, but nothing, absolutely nothing, survives from living witnesses of Jesus' time on the planet. Much was destroyed by the early church, and the surviving Apocrypha hints at what else might have been out there.

So, if one insists on absolute belief in the written Word (and often only one "approved" version of said Word) there are damned few Christians in this world. Even the most fervent of fundies manage to explain away passages they don't buy, whilst the rest of us prefer to buy into a fairly loose understanding of the mythology with a belief that might be a mile wide but a half-inch thin.

Pretty much every religion has a divine mythology, some more detailed than others. But, nobody really believes, or ever believed, the Earth sits on a stack of lesser gods, or that the sun was really a flaming chariot. I'll leave it to the anthropologists to explain how and why myths develop, but develop they do and they tend to come in handy at times. With Christian mythology, we really aren't any more bound to believe the details than the Greeks were to believe thunderbolts were from a pissed off Zeus.

The myths, like parables, illustrate underlying beliefs and ethical codes.