In terms of Michael Martin's fourth chapter of CAC, on the virgin birth and the second coming, little needs to be said. On the virgin birth, Martin simply regurgitates the same stale objections that have been circulating in skeptical camps since the time of Thomas Paine: And little wonder, for he apparently believes that Christian scholarship on the issue ceased in the 1920s with J. Gresham Machen and Vincent Taylor. For his own side, he once again calls upon the privately-published work of Tanguay, as well as Michael Arnheim, author of Is Christianity True?, to whom he indebts, apparently, much of his material on the virgin birth. Thus we have yet another case where Martin might as well delete his name from authorial credit.

At any rate, we may briefly note that Martin hauls up 9 basic arguments against the virgin birth, all but one of which we have dealt with before in some fashion. They are as follows:

1. The alleged incompatibility of Matthew and Luke. Martin insists that there is "no remotely plausible way of reconciling the two accounts" [107ff] and objects mightily about details in one story being lacking in the other. For an examination of this issue, see here.
2. The usual about the Lukan census; [108] see Glenn Miller's item on this subject.
3. The usual about Isaiah 7:14 being misused [121]; again see Glenn Miller's relevant item.
4. The usual bit about the conflicting genealogies of Jesus, [110ff] with the typical lack of awareness of Jewish legal notions of fatherhood that would make Jesus legally Joseph's son, even with the virgin birth; see also Glenn Miller's work on this subject.
5. The usual denigration of the miraculous - no points for guessing!
6. The usual bit about no mention of the Slaughter of the Innocents in secular histories.
7. The usual bits about the virgin birth not being mentioned in Mark, John, or the Epistles. In this regard, Martin says that it is "very hard to understand" why the virgin birth "would not have soon become an important element of Christian doctrine" and been "widely preached and promulgated." [114] It is actually quite easy to understand if we have a little knowledge of the social context of the NT; moreover, as a doctrine it would have been part of the missionary preaching of the apostles - and would have long preceded the epistles. (Martin also objects to lack of mention of the virgin birth in secular sources, as if Josephus et al. were interested in describing in detail the particulars of Christian doctrine!)
8. An objection we have dealt with before from Robert Price, to the effect that it is implausible that a pregnant Mary would undertake such a journey; and finally,
9. A simple misreading of the text, in which Martin claims that it is "implausible" [108] that the family should seek refuge in an inn when Bethlehem was Joseph's "hometown". The text does not say this, however; it only says that Bethlehem was the destination because it was the seat of Joseph's ancestry. (We will explore this matter further as we develop our birth narratives reconciliation linked above; briefly, however, it is our hypothesis that Joseph did own land in the area, and that the problem of accommodations was due to their arrival at the time of one of the Jewish feasts.)

Thus it is that Martin provides nothing new on the virgin birth. His treatment of the Second Coming, however, is even shallower, and will require even less of a reply. A total of 6 pages is spent on the subject, and mostly follows uncritically the line that all of Jesus' sayings on the subject are "posthumous and inauthentic" [117]. Much is also made of the usual "this generation" inaccuracy, and Martin takes time to refute some eschatological views like Millerism that haven't been respected by anyone in the academic Christian community in decades. Not that we expect Martin to take careful treatments of eschatology like that of Witherington and Sproul seriously: As he declares that what views he does look at are merely attempts to "save Christianity from refutation" [119], we are already informed as to where the conclusion will rest.

I will close this short critique of Chapter 4 by pointing up a certain irony that has quickly become apparent in looking at Martin's book. One of the paeans of praise delivered up on the back cover is from one Peter Hare, who calls Martin "one of the very few first-rate philosophers who have had the fortitude and patience to carefully read much of the truly staggering amount of non-philosophical literature on Christian topics." In fact, Hare is in no position to make such an evaluation (he is a professor of philosophy at Buffalo University, and is therefore a "chum" of Martin's plugging one of his own!), but in fact Martin has done no such thing. He has read very, very little of that literature, and has accepted most of what he has read and that he favors uncritically; much of CAC far might as well have not had Martin's name on it, for all of the original thinking it displays. CAC is another in a long line of skeptical works that may be taken about as seriously as an episode of Seinfeld.