I agree with that statement. However, I believe and teach that the assent is based primarily on faith and not on a formal historical analysis the result of which clearly demonstrates its historicity.
That is the semantic problem that has troubled this group all along. There is the popular, layman’s approach which says “we believe it happened so it must be historic”. And there is the formal analytical approach of the true historian which merely states that the historicity of the event cannot be determined from the evidence we have.
We appear to be making our closing arguments (and I guess it is about time for that). It should be noted that this historicist reading of the origins of the virgin birth story is not based on
hazy speculation or the work of one or two renegade scholars.
Where the Catholic Church once furiously defended the virgin birth as a real, historical event, John Meier, a Catholic scholar writing under the Vatican’s imprimatur (which assures the faithful that the work “is free of doctrinal or moral error”), can only conclude wanly that “taken by itself, historical-critical research simply does not have the sources and tools available to reach a final decision on the historicity of the virginal conception as narrated by Matthew and Luke.” Please listen as this sums up what I have been saying all along - that historical resaearch simply cannot rule on the historicity.
Meier’s Catholic colleague Raymond Brown, also writing under the **imprimatur (**and appointed to the Pontifical Biblical Commission by two popes), goes further, acknowledging that “the infancy narratives are primarily vehicles of the evangelist’s theology and Christology.”
