The Virgin Birth is a key doctrine of the Christian faith, and is also held by Muslims (Qur'an 3.47). However, Muslims do not call Jesus "Son of God", rather "Servant of God". In the Qur'an, Jesus (Isa in Arabic) is consistently termed "Isa ibn Maryam" - a matronymic - because, in Muslim belief, he had no biological father.
The doctrine asserts that Jesus was conceived in the womb of his mother, the Virgin Mary, without the participation of a human father. Instead, the Incarnation (not the Immaculate Conception -- see below) took place when the Holy Spirit "overshadowed" Mary. This was not understood to mean that the human body of Christ was created ex nihilo (from nothing), for the tradition of the Church is that Christ "took his flesh from Mary." This is also understood to be a miracle, something not possible without divine intervention.
This doctrine is frequently confused with the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. The latter, held by Roman Catholics, states that the Virgin Mary was conceived "without the stain of original sin". Mary, however, unlike Christ, was conceived in the ordinary way: i.e. she had a human father as well as a human mother (whose names, according to Catholic and Orthodox tradition, were 'Joachim' and 'Anna'/'Anne' - or 'Jehoiakim' and 'Hannah' in Hebrew).
Another reason that Christians who accept the Virgin Birth consider it to be significant is that it shows Jesus' divine and human natures at once united, paving the way for all of humanity to be united with God. Eastern Orthodox tradition says that from the time Jesus was born, the flaming sword was removed from the Garden of Eden, making it possible for humanity to re-enter Paradise.
Some Christians, rejecting orthodoxy, do not believe in the Virgin Birth. Research by many groups, including Christian researchers, indicates that among both the clergy and the laity (in all branches of Christianity) beliefs in central tenets of the faith such as Virgin Birth or bodily Resurrection is highly variable.
In the wider sense, arguments for and against the Virgin Birth depend on fundamental philosophical assumptions: if one believes God does not exist, or if God exists but does not perform miracles, the Virgin Birth cannot have taken place in any traditionally accepted sense. One problem is that in parthenogenesis, where a female gives birth without the intervention of the male, the offspring must be female also since the mother has no Y chromosome to pass on to a male offspring. The Virgin Birth violates a materialist philosophy and science based upon it. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that some philosophers since the modern era have come to accept the possibility of miracles.
There are also objections to the doctrine of the Virgin Birth based on Scriptural and Philological debates.
At 3:1 there is an abrupt change of subject and the story begins again. Nevertheless, this is characteristic of many stories in the Gospels and the author of Luke may simply be beginning a new segment of his narrative. Arguments regarding the addition of material to a narrative (Redaction and Form criticism), especially when the material in question is present in the earliest manuscripts, have received significant criticism in the last 20 years and are now regarded as dubious by some textual critics.
Critics of the "double attestation" argument cite many "inconsistencies" between the accounts of Matthew and Luke regarding Jesus' birth. According to Matthew, Joseph was forewarned of the virgin birth by an unnamed angel; in Luke it is Mary who is notified of this by the angel Gabriel. Matthew tells us that Joseph and Mary were residents of Bethlehem who moved to Nazareth after Jesus' birth in order to avoid living under Archelaus: according to the better-known story in Luke the couple lived in Nazareth and only traveled to Bethlehem in order to comply with a Roman census. Luke locates the birth in a manger; Matthew has it in a "house". Luke mentions that Mary was the sister of Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist, has the new-born Jesus visited by shepherds, and mentions several long hymns uttered by various characters, such as Mary's Magnificat. None of this is mentioned by Matthew, who instead tells us of the visit of the Magi, the massacre of the innocents by Herod, and the flight into Egypt.
There are thus two rival explanations for the "double attestation" of Matthew and Luke regarding the virgin birth of Jesus:
Many of the letters of Paul are considered older than Matthew and Luke, and Paul does not take a clear opportunity to refer to Mary as a virgin when he describes the birth of Jesus:
The phrase in Greek is γενομενον εκ γυναικος, genomenon ek gunaikos, "having-become of a-woman", not γενομενον εκ παρθενου, genomenon ek parthenou, "having-become of a-virgin". Christian apologists reply that Mary's virginity was not relevant to Paul's reasoning at this point, and point out that he uses a special verb to describe Jesus' birth, which he plainly regarded as a special event. However, Jesus' birth would have been special to Paul whether or not it had taken place by parthenogenesis, and if Paul had not known of the virgin birth, it could never have been relevant to any of his reasoning and so could never have appeared in his writing. This argumentum ex silentio, or "argument from silence", cannot be conclusive, but skeptics of the virignal conception argue that it does increase the probability Paul was unaware of the virgin birth.
Skeptics argue that like the resurrection appearances, the virgin birth may be an example of the gradual supernaturalization of the Christian story. Some scholars have argued that early Christians did not claim that Joseph was not the biological father of Jesus. They point to the geneaologies in Matthew 1-2, and Luke 1-2, which use descent through Joseph to demonstrate that Jesus was the heir to King David. Moreover, the Ebionites (a group of Palestinian Judeo-Christians rejected by Gentile Christians as heretics) maintained that Jesus was naturally conceived.
It might be argued, given he asserts the divinity of Jesus Christ in his writings and refers to him as υιος Θεου, Huios Theou ("Son of God"), Paul's failure to reflect upon the nature of Jesus' birth could suggest that neither he nor his readers felt the need to confront the issue, possibly because they took the divinity of the Virgin Birth for granted (much as they might take the direction of sunset for granted in Ephesians 4:26, when Paul fails to specify that it occurs in the West). However, the precise direction of the sunset has no obvious theological relevance, while the Virgin Birth certainly does; and, given Paul writes expansively about the theological significance of Jesus' death and resurrection, one might ask why he neglects this aspect of Jesus' life. Examine, for example, Paul's words at the very beginning of Romans:
This seems to say that Jesus was human by the flesh and divine by the spirit: he was the "seed of David" by descent in the male line through Joseph. Furthermore, he was declared to be the Son of God by his virgin birth as well as by his resurrection from the dead, and later in Romans Paul says this:
Why is a body begotten of a virgin by the Holy Spirit called a ομοιωματι σαρκος αρματιας, homoiomati sarkos harmatias, a "likeness of sinful flesh"? These and similar references may suggest that Paul does not mention the Virgin Birth because it had not yet been created as a way of honoring Jesus or overcoming the difficulties of reconciling human flesh and divine spirit, and although Paul refers to Jesus as "Son of God" after his death, Jesus repeatedly refers to himself in life as υιος του ανθροπου, Huiou tou Anthropou, "Son of Man" (20 etc; Mark 2:10 etc; Luke 5:24 etc; John 1:51 etc).
In light of this, most recent scholars of the infancy narratives have argued that the theological significance of Jesus' Birth did not become a Christian concern until later in the 1st century (See R.E. Brown, Birth of the Messiah - J.A. Fitzmyer Gospel of Luke). That is, the early Church seems to have "worked backwards" in its theology - focusing initially on the death and resurrection of Christ (see nearly all of Paul's letter), then becoming concerned with his life (Gospel of Mark), and later faced with addressing his birth (Matthew and Luke). Nevertheless, it is important to realize that the order of dating for these works is still in dispute, and arguments based on these datings unsure.
In the King James Bible, a traditional Protestant translation, the verses in question run like this:
Other newer translations translate it similarly: The New King James version says
Many modern translations concede that the word in the Hebrew does not mean "virgin". The Revised Standard Version says:
This demonstrates that many Christian scholars, both Protestant and Catholic, prefer the traditional translation of the Hebrew in the context of Isaiah 7:14, while many others do not.
Skeptics argue that this is not a very clear prophecy of the birth of Jesus Christ. For example, (1) what does the "butter and honey" refer to? (One possible response to the "butter and honey" problem: it is a reference to one who, metaphorically, "has eaten good meat his entire life in order to spit out the bad meat if it ever touched his lips". Note that the "butter and honey" reference is immediately followed by the comment on an ability to choose between good and evil; this may suggest that they are related.) (2) Why is Christ, who was sinless from birth in the traditional Christian understanding, described as having to learn to refuse the evil and choose the good? and (3) This passage within the latter translations states clearly that the "young woman" within this prophecy is already pregnant with a child. This makes this prophecy about the coming Messiah Jesus very difficult to explain as the prophecy would have already been fulfilled during Isaiah's time. Some Christian aplogists have attempted to explain this problem of temporal context as: a) the latter translations are in error, and b) the latter translations are correct, but that the prophecy has a "double-application" for both Isaiah's time and the first century.
Thomas Paine argued in the second part of The Age of Reason that Isaiah's prophesy (7:16) turned out to be false. He based his conclusion on the the 2 Chronicles (chapter 28) account of heavy defeat of Ahaz.
Skeptics raise even greater questions about the translation of the first verse in this passage:
Christian apologists respond that the passage is a double reference— a sign both to Ahaz that the alliance against him would be destroyed, and to the house of David as a whole that was threatened with extinction. This is shown by the Hebrew which uses "singular you" for the former and "plural you' for the latter. With the former, Isaiah reassures Ahaz that the alliance would be destroyed before his own son Shear Jashub, who was present (v. 3), would "learn to refuse the evil and choose the good".
Some scholars, however, claim that the Septuagint does not use parthenos very precisely, as it translates at least three different Hebrew words by it: bethulah, "maiden/virgin"; `almah, "maiden/virgin"; and נערה, na`arah, "maiden, young woman, servant". The meaning of the word parthenos in the Septuagint is sometimes expanded in a way not seen in the Isaiah of the (albeit centuries younger) Masoretic texts:
Additionally, the Greek-English Lexicon edited by Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott lists other meanings for the word:
Finally, there is archaeological evidence that Jewish speakers of Greek used the word parthenos elastically; Jewish catacombs in Rome identify married men and women as "virgins," and some have suggested that in this case the word was used to call attention to the fact that the deceased was someone's first spouse (although it is notable that this usage is from several centuries before the translation of the Septuagint ). Certainly, Jews stopped using the more explicit Septuagint translation as Christianity spread, and post-Christian Jewish translations into Greek use νεανις, neanis, meaning "young (juvenile) woman", rather than parthenos.
Some have argued that the Virgin Birth is a Christian borrowing from paganism. The impregnation of mortal women by gods is common in pagan mythology. This is not technically virginal conception, since virginity is lost by definition when the sex act is initiated. Christian apologists have noted that the obvious sex of the pagan myths is missing in the Gospels:
A pagan myth of virgin birth may also underlie the disputed verses from Isaiah:
This philological reasoning seems to raise four possibilities: virgin birth is a pagan concept that Christianity has 1) taken from contemporary paganism; 2) taken from pre-Mosaic paganism through Isaiah; 3) taken from contemporary paganism and justified from Isaiah, who took it from pre-Mosaic paganism; 4) produced independently of all forms of paganism, though sharing similar vocabulary. If pre-Mosaic paganism supports Isaiah, and Isaiah supports Matthew and Mark, paganism has anticipated Christianity, perhaps because God was preparing the way for Christianity or because, as some Church Fathers argued, the Devil was blasphemously imitating Christianity. On the other hand, if paganism does not underlie Isaiah, there are several possibilities. Perhaps virgin birth was invented separately, first in paganism, then in Christianity. Perhaps the idea of asexual conception was so different from the idea of conception through sexual intercourse with a deity that there was little or no borrowing in either direction. Or perhaps, despite the earlier date of the Ugaritic text, virgin birth existed first in Judaism, without any other instances than this one, and was borrowed by paganism. The obvious difficulty with this idea is that virgin birth was much more prominent in paganism, where it occurs in many myths in many different areas, than it was in Judaism, where it occurs (if at all) in a single verse late in the Old Testament. Nevertheless, the argument that virgin birth was a Jewish concept first borrowed by paganism and later incorporated into Christianity was first made by Justin Martyr in The First Apology of Justin, written in the second century. Justin also made this argument in his Dialog with Trypho, in which he debates with a Jew called Trypho:
Justin was clearly not referring to any Ugaritic texts, as these texts were not known in his day; he was referring to Greek paganism. That the Devil is responsible for the similarities between paganism and Judaism is not generally accepted by modern scholars, partly because the Devil's influence would be impossible to disprove. The Devil could not, for example, imitate Christianity or Judaism before either existed, without violating the generally accepted historical rule that a culture cannot be influenced by a culture that does not yet exist; even though in point of fact it is likely that if "the patriarch Jacob" existed, he was contemporary with the inscriptions at Ugarit. In a similar vein, it might also be argued that God had chosen to out-do these earlier human myths, all as part of his Plan.
Christian apologists point out that if in fact the writer of Isaiah intended to borrow the idea of a virgin birth from an older pagan tradition, we might expect to find Isaiah using more explicit language to indicate that a virgin was meant. However, if Isaiah had borrowed the story from pagans, he might be expected to speak in the same way as the pagans, and that is what he does, according to the scholar quoted, who notes the "remarkable" similarity of the Ugaritic and the Hebrew. However, Isaiah may speak the same way as the pagans simply because he came from a similar sociological and semantic context. If Isaiah received a new prophecy direct from God, on the other hand, he had no tradition to conform to, and he could have expanded the meaning to make it completely unambiguous. That he did not choose to make it unambiguous is thus an apparent difficulty for the Christian interpretation of the text, though the ambiguity could be seen as being intended, if one supposes that God had a dual purpose for the text (i.e., to serve one function in Isaiah's time and another function later). Isaiah's prophecy departs from the Ugaritic version of the virgin birth by having the female be entirely human, whereas in the Ugaritic culture, the virgin was another deity, on par with the male; but this is exactly what might be expected if the myth were borrowed from paganism, since Judaism has only one male deity; a female deity in a borrowed myth might thus conceivably become a female human.
In June 2006, it was revealed that a British insurer, britishinsurance.com, had provided a £1 million insurance policy to three Scottish women to provide cover in the event of one of them having a virgin birth. The payout was to cover the costs of bringing up the Christ. The policy was cancelled following pressure from the Catholic Church. *.
Blessed Virgin Mary | Christian philosophy | Jesus | Christian theology | Gospel episodes | Christian miracle narrative
Jungfräuliche Geburt | Conception virginale | Maagdelijke geboorte | 処女懐胎 | Jomfrufødsel
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