Virgin Birth of Jesus — Biblical and Biological Perspectives
How a mistranslation led to the birth of a doctrine.
Many Christians believe Mary was still a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus. Over time this belief has become an integral part of the Christian faith. Roman Catholics hold the Virgin Mary in high esteem.
Let us try to determine when and why the doctrine of the virgin birth originated.
A Biblical Perspective.
The story of the Virgin Mary giving birth to Jesus was first mentioned in the Gospel of Matthew. Bible scholars believe this document was written in about 80 AD.
Matthew states that Mary discovered she was pregnant while engaged to Joseph. She had not had sexual intercourse with a man yet and was still a virgin. Joseph had a dream in which an angel appeared to him and told him that Mary had conceived by the Spirit and that he was not to abandon her as he had planned. Being a just person, he took her to be his wife instead.
The book Luke was probably written about a decade after Matthew. The author further elaborated on the story about the conception and birth of Jesus. He used poetic language and added drama to the story.
Gabriel appears to Zechariah announcing that his wife Elizabeth, even though she was old, would become the mother of John the Baptist. This left him literally speechless. According to Luke’s account, Elizabeth and Mary were related and possibly pregnant at the same time. In this account, Mary even paid Elizabeth a visit.
Let us go back to a time before the gospels of either Matthew or Luke had come into being.
Paul wrote his letters or epistles in the 5th decade of the first century, about 20 to 30 years after Jesus was crucified. He did not mention a virgin birth at all. Being Jewish, he probably knew about the expectations around the apocalyptic appearance of the Messiah. He must have been aware of the passage in Isaiah predicting the coming of a person known as Immanuel, meaning God is with us.
Mark was written in about 60 or 70 AD. He omitted the account of the virgin birth as well. We have to assume that Mark and Paul were unaware of the existence of a theory regarding a virgin giving birth to a male child. Alternatively, they did not consider it important enough to mention. I think the former explanation is the most plausible of the two, as the story was just too important to ignore.
Did Matthew come up with the account of the miraculous birth of Jesus himself?
It is possible that around 65 AD, somebody had noticed the passage in Isaiah and connected it with Jesus. And so the idea of a virgin birth started to circulate. Matthew could have picked up the story this way.
But why was the virgin birth narrative important to Matthew?
The gospel he wrote differed from Mark and Luke in that he primarily addressed Jewish Christians that believed in the appearance of the Messiah in the last days.
Matthew went to great lengths to prove that Jesus was the Messiah. He quoted verses from the Old Testament that could sometimes only vaguely connect the man from Nazareth with the Jewish Messiah.
He made between 60 and 90 references or allusions to passages in the Old Testament. Texts were sometimes quoted out of context, and it was probably not the way the authors of these books intended them to be interpreted. But he really had a go at it. Some of it fitted his agendum better than others, and Matthew used every piece of available evidence he could lay his hands on.
About three hundred years before the time of Jesus, the Hebrew Masoretic text or Tanakh was translated into Greek. This resulted in the creation of the Septuagint. This was the version of the Bible Jews, including the author of the book Matthew, probably relied on as many of them were speaking Greek and not Hebrew.
Matthew refers to Isaiah 7:14 that, according to him, predicted that a virgin will have a son who will be called Immanuel. The original text used the Hebrew word that transliterates to almah. It means a young woman of childbearing age. It does not have anything to do with virginity. So the woman may or may not have been a virgin.
The birth narrative described by Matthew seems to be based on a mistranslation of the Hebrew word for a young woman. No mention of virginity was made by Isaiah in this context.
People tend to see what they expect to encounter. Some translators of the Bible used the term young woman when they translated the specific text in Isaiah. Many others used the word virgin because that is basically what Matthew said it should be!
Erik Manning wrote an in-depth discussion on the word almah.
A Biological Perspective
When Matthew described the conception of Jesus, he must have used the concepts regarding procreation as it stood then. This was probably based on the theories proposed by Aristotle. He studied fetuses from different animals and concluded that semen interacted with menstrual blood in the uterus to induce curdling thereof. The father of the child imparted a life force or pneuma to the fetus; the soul only entered the fetus 40 days after conception. Both father and mother contributed to the properties of the baby according to this theory.
Another idea could have been doing the rounds during those times. The womb could be seen as merely the vessel for pregnancy, nurturing the man’s seed, which grows in it like a seed in the soil.
The only thing we can learn from the facts stated by the Bible is that a baby is formed in her mother’s womb. It does not give further details.
When Adam and Eve ate fruit from the tree in the middle of the garden, the sin they committed was transmitted to or inherited by their children and all infants born subsequently.
Until as recently as the 20th century, some Russian biologists believed that the actions of parents can have an effect on the genes of their offspring. It is known as Lysenkoism. If modern scientists could believe dubious theories, the notion held by early Christians that sin was inherited is not all that preposterous.
It was only during the 18th century that the ovum was observed under the microscope. Soon afterward, people realized that sperm from the male and an egg cell from a female were needed to produce a baby.
Nearly every cell in the human body has 23 sets of chromosomes. This results in 46 chromosomes in each individual cell. Half of the genetic material is inherited from the one, and the rest from the other parent. When a sperm or ovum is produced, some part of the genetic material is first exchanged between pairs of chromosomes. The chromosome count is then halved in a process called meiosis. The sperm and ovum, therefore, have only 23 chromosomes each. After fertilization, the full complement of 46 chromosomes is restored.
Women have two X chromosomes, one of which is transferred to the ovum. Males have one X and one Y chromosome. The sperm can have either one X-chromosome that would produce a daughter or a Y-chromosome that would result in a son.
Is it possible for a woman to give birth to a baby without the fertilization of an ovum? The phenomenon is known as parthenogenesis and has been described in fish, amphibians, and reptiles. Although it is theoretically possible in humans, it is unlikely to happen. Jenny Graves goes into more detail here.
So when would it be possible for a virgin to fall pregnant? The most logical explanation would be for semen to find its way into her vagina without penetration. This was not what people who told the virgin birth tale had in mind.
If it was possible for the ovum to retain the 46 chromosomes resulting in a pregnancy, the child would have only the mother’s genetic material. Its sex would therefore be female and not male. This is the reason why parthenogenesis can be safely ruled out in the case of Jesus.
If God fertilized one of Mary’s ova with his own genetic material, it would be possible for the child to be a male. This would solve the above problem. In a case like this, Jesus would have been half human and half divine, as he would possess DNA from both human and godly origins. He would not be fully man and fully God as modern Christians like to believe.
This would result in Jesus inheriting half a dose of ancestral sin from his mother. But wait, the Catholics have a solution! It is known as the immaculate conception. It claims that Mary was free from the original sin since her conception. As a consequence, her son would be without sin too, especially if his father was without sin as well.
Another solution to Jesus being born without a sinful nature would be to get rid of human genetic material altogether. An embryo which only has God’s DNA (whatever that may mean — I did not realize God had DNA) is implanted into the womb of Mary. That would make her a surrogate mother as the child she carried would not be her own; she only provided the uterus for it to develop in.
But then, why bother with pregnancy and birth at all? Why not just leave a fully formed baby in a basket on Joseph’s and Mary’s doorstep, to be found by them when they opened the door in the morning, like in the case of baby Moses who was discovered by the pharaoh’s daughter in the reeds at the edge of the river.
For an omnipotent God, it would be easy to create an adult male. Jesus could then just walk into Nazareth, like the character in the Netflix film Messiah, who seemingly appears out of nowhere in the first episode of the series.
