The bottom line question for people of faith is, does Scripture teach it? If so we believe it. And does it matter? We can safely assume if it happened it matters, even if we are not able to fully understand it.

Thankyou for showing that Scripture teaches it. I would simply add that the literary trajectory of Luke also supports it. Elizabeth has a fairly miraculous conception – pregnant in her later years. Mary’s conception is more miraculous – a virgin conceives.

Does it matter? Donald Mcleod’s comment in The Person of Christ always bears repeating.

‘The virgin birth is posted on guard at the door of the mystery of Christmas; and none of us must think of hurrying past it. It stands on the threshold of the New Testament, blatantly supernatural, defying our rationalism, informing us that all that follows belongs to the same order as itself and that if we find it offensive there is no point in proceeding further.’

I confess the latent unbelief in questioning, or even worse, indifferent, trivialising postures from those who claim to be believers angers me. The ‘has God really said’ hermeneutic of doubt has a Serpent at its origins. It seemed sophisticated then and doubtless seems sophisticated now, but led then and will now to unbelief and spiritual ruin. I am appalled by how casually revealed truth such as the virgin birth can be dismissed as inconsequential or profaned by invented larrys. If I am trampolining I want all the springs intact. I don’t want to make my position precarious by foolishly removing lots of springs to see if it still works. With such a russian roulette mentality it will not be long before I remove one spring too many.

This is not a plea for jettisoning our critical faculties but for using them from the vantage of an hermeneutic of trust rather than suspicion.

Finally, I wonder how far the virgin birth serves as a prototype for ‘the new birth’. Each new birth of the Spirit is supernatural. It involves the Holy Spirit creating a ‘Holy Thing’ in a vessel which is unclean. Perhaps if the Virgin birth is an unnecessary spring so also is the new birth by the Spirit.

There are a number of possibilities, including Matthew ripping this text out of its context, allegory, and typology. A typological interpretation would say that the two situations are analagous, and, in some way, God’s pattern of action is mirrored in the New Testament. So just as the almah (young woman) gave birth to a child called Immanuel as a sign indicating the deliverance of the nation of Israel from their enemies, the parthenos (virgin!) gave birth to a child (the Son of God!) called Immanuel (God Incarnate!) as a sign indicating the deliverance of the nation of Israel (now with more Gentiles!) from their enemies (sin!). I believe that Matthew is pointing to this analogous pattern of God’s action, and that in New Testament God has done something far beyond our imagination.

My weak attempt at explaining typology notwithstanding, check out Carson and Beale’s “Commentary on the New Testament’s Use of the Old Testament”: they give a full explanation of typology from an Evangelical standpoint. That means respecting the historicity of the original events and the original context (unlike allegory). They then go through every Old Testament allusion, citation, and quotation in the New Testament they could get their hands on and give a full exposition.

I do, on the other hand, find the grammatical evidence very weighty – the fact that the LXX translates almah as parthenos is significant. Furthermore, where Matthew’s Old Testament quotes overlap with the Synoptics, he quotes from the LXX, but where an OT quotation is unique to his Gospel Matthew’s translation does not match the LXX – perhaps indicating that he provided his own translation from the Hebrew. This would imply that Matthew has a command of both Greek and Hebrew, and if he writes parthenos it is intentional and not just copying from the LXX.

Either way, the reading in the Gospels are clear. Jesus was born of the Virgin just like our historic orthodox creeds say. I just wanted to provide some options here.

Finally, note that it is Jesus’ opponents in John 8:41 who suggest that Jesus was born of sexual immorality. Not the greatest pattern to follow.

some have suggested that the sin nature of humankind is passed on through the male line. Jesus’ virginal conception and birth was necessary in order to insure that his human nature not be derived from the male line, which transmits the sin nature. Since Jesus was to be born without a sin nature, he therefore had to be born without the agency of a man.

How do we evaluate this theory? Before criticizing it we should note that Jesus did not, in fact, possess a sin nature. This much is clear from Scripture, even in Luke 1:35: “the one to be born will be called Holy.” The question is: did the absence of the male factor insure his sinlessness?

The answer has got to be “no.” This whole approach is wrong. There is no biblical evidence to suggest that humanity’s sin nature is passed on through the male seed. This theory is based on a speculative misunderstanding of transmission of original sin. Women as well as men share in the sin nature communicated to us from Adam (Psalm 51:5, “In sin did my mother conceive me”). Mary had a sin nature and confessed her need for a savior (Luke 1:47, “My spirit rejoices in God my Savior”). Job 15:14 has implications for the woman as well as the man: “What is man, that he could be pure, or one born of woman, that he could be righteous?”

All the biblical and medical evidence confirms that both man and woman contribute toward the substance of the new offspring. The mere elimination of the male factor in his human conception would not, therefore, have insured Jesus’ sinlessness. Mary would have transmitted her sin nature to Jesus since Jesus partook of the substance of his mother had not the Holy Spirit prevented it. The preservation of Jesus’ human nature from sinful defilement owes to the Holy Spirit’s involvement in the conception, not necessarily to the virginal conception. The Holy Spirit preserved Jesus “at conception and through birth” from the contamination of sin that would have otherwise proceeded from Mary.