Journal: Tyndale Bulletin
Volume: TYNBUL 45:1 (NA 1994)
Article: The Imagery Of Birth Pangs In The New Testament
Author: Conrad Gempf

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TynBul 45:1 (1994) p. 119

The Imagery Of Birth Pangs
In The New Testament1

Conrad Gempf

Summary

It is perhaps surprising that in the patriarchal culture of first century Palestine, male teachers such as Jesus and Paul should speak or write to ostensibly predominantly male audiences using as an image a pain that has never been felt by males. The reason for this particular image is often presumed to be that birth pangs are a pain that lead to a positive result, but, especially given the Old Testament use of the image, this is unlikely to be the primary meaning for the image. Alternatives are explored: birth pangs, as well as being a ‘productive’ pain, are an ‘intense’ pain, a ‘helpless’ pain, and a ‘cyclical’ pain that once begun must run its course.

I. Introduction

One of the most pervasive modern images of Christianity is that of being ‘born again’. But this ‘new birth’ tends to be a very idealised business with a lot of the unpleasantness of the real life birth process left out of the picture. One rather expects that in the culture of the biblical world, even more patriarchal and andro-centric than our own, the intense period of suffering that follows the long months of discomfort would be skipped over lightly, since it never happens to the men who shape the tradition, but only to the women, whose ‘job’ it is sometimes seen to be. The account of birth found in the Wisdom of Solomon (7:1-5) seems typical of this skipping over of the pain:

I also am mortal like everyone else, a descendant of the first-formed child of earth; and in the womb of a mother I was moulded into flesh, within a period of ten months, compacted with blood, from the

TynBul 45:1 (1994) p. 120

seed of a man and the pleasure of marriage. And when I was born, I began to breathe the common air, and fell upon the kindred earth; my first sound was a cry, as is true of all. I was nursed with care in swaddling clothes. For no king has had a different beginning of existence; there is for all one entrance into life, and one way out.

Certainly main-line English-speaking scholarship of the past century or so has tended to pass over such events quickly and blushingly and on to the event of the birth itself. Many books about ‘Life and Culture in the Roman Empire’ leap from a paragraph about marriage, with perhaps a sentence about sex within marriage, to the rituals and responsibilities of brand-new parents. Books that discuss pregnancy or labour or delivery are hard to find and on the fringe.

The Bible expresses no such reticence, and the matter of birth-pains is mentioned explicitly fro...

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