Virgin birth of Jesus

The virgin birth of Jesus is the Christian and Islamic doctrine that Jesus was conceived by his mother, Mary, through the power of the Holy Spirit and without sexual intercourse.^[1] Christians regard the doctrine as an explanation of the mixture of the human and divine natures of Jesus.^[2]^[1] The Eastern Orthodox Churches accept the doctrine as authoritative by reason of its inclusion in the Nicene Creed,^[2] and the Catholic Church holds it authoritative for faith through the Apostles' Creed as well as the Nicene. Nevertheless, there are many contemporary churches in which it is considered orthodox to accept the virgin birth but not heretical to deny it.^[3]

The narrative appears only in Matthew 1:18–25 and Luke 1:26–38,^[4] and the modern scholarly consensus is that it rests on slender historical foundations.^[5] The ancient world didn't possess a thoroughly modern understanding that male semen and female ovum were both needed to form an embryo;^[6] this cultural milieu was conducive to miraculous birth stories,^[7] and tales of virgin birth and the impregnation of mortal women by deities were well known in the 1st-century Greco-Roman world and Second Temple Jewish works.^[8]^[9]

The Quran asserts the virgin birth of Jesus, deriving its account from the 2nd century AD Protoevangelium of James,^[10] but denies the Trinitarian implications of the gospel story (Jesus is a messenger of God but also a human being and not the Second Person of the Christian Trinity).^[11]

Texts[edit]

In the entire Christian corpus, the virgin birth is found only in the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke.^[4] The two agree that Mary's husband was named Joseph, that he was of the Davidic line, and that he played no role in Jesus's divine conception, but beyond this they are very different.^[12]^[13] Matthew has no census, shepherds, or presentation in the temple, and implies that Joseph and Mary are living in Bethlehem at the time of the birth, while Luke has no magi, flight into Egypt or massacre of the infants, and states that Joseph lives in Nazareth.^[12]

Matthew underlines the virginity of Mary by references to the Book of Isaiah (using the 2,200 year old Greek translation in the Septuagint, rather than the only 1,300 year old mostly Hebrew Masoretic Text) and by his narrative statement that Joseph had no sexual relations with her until after the birth (a choice of words which leaves open the possibility that they did have relations after that).^[14] Luke introduces Mary as a virgin, describes her puzzlement at being told she will bear a child despite her lack of sexual experience, and informs the reader that this pregnancy is to be effected through God's Holy Spirit.^[15]

There is a serious debate as to whether Luke's nativity story is an original part of his gospel.^[16] Chapters 1 and 2 are written in a style quite different from the rest of the gospel, and the dependence of the birth narrative on the Greek Septuagint is absent from the remainder.^[17] There are strong Lukan motifs in Luke 1–2, but differences are equally striking—Jesus's identity as "son of David", for example, is a prominent theme of the birth narrative, but not in the rest of the gospel.^[18] In the early part of the 2nd century, the gnostic theologian Marcion produced a version of Luke lacking these two chapters, and although he is generally accused of having cut them out of a longer text more like our own, genealogies and birth narratives are also absent from Mark and John.^[17]

Theology and development[edit]

Matthew and Luke use the virgin birth (or more accurately the divine conception that precedes it) to mark the moment when Jesus becomes the Son of God.^[29] This was a notable development over Mark, for whom the Sonship dates from Jesus's baptism, Mark 1:9–13 and the earlier Christianity of Paul and the pre-Pauline Christians for whom Jesus becomes the Son at the Resurrection or even the Second Coming.^[29] The Ebionites, a Jewish Christian sect, saw Jesus as fully human, rejected the virgin birth, and preferred to translate almah as "young woman".^[51] The 2nd century gnostic theologian Marcion likewise rejected the virgin birth, but regarded Jesus as descended fully formed from heaven and having only the appearance of humanity.^[52] By about AD 180 Jews were telling how Jesus had been illegitimately conceived by a Roman soldier named Pantera or Pandera, whose name is likely a pun on parthenos, virgin.^[53] The story was still current in the Middle Ages in satirical parody of the Christian gospels called the Toledot Yeshu.^[54]^[55] The Toledot Yeshu contains little historical material, and was probably created as a tool for warding off conversions to Christianity.^[54]

According to Kärkkäinen, the virgin birth in relation to the incarnation was seen as proof of the divinity of Christ but that the Age of Enlightenment offered a full-scale rebuttal of the doctrine, and that the only way for classical liberals to continue believing the virgin birth was to resort to the notion of myth, though this elicited a vigorous reaction from conservatives.^[56] This division remains in place, although some national synods of the Catholic Church have replaced a biological understanding with the idea of "theological truth," and some evangelical theologians hold it to be marginal rather than indispensable to the Christian faith.^[56] Today, the traditional doctrine of the virgin birth is still defended by conservative theologians.^[57]^[58]^[59]