The American Spectator
By Jeremy Lott
12.22.09
Every year at about this time, readers can count on a few Christmas-themed articles appearing in newspapers and magazines that question the Virgin Birth of Jesus Christ. It really is something to see the wide variety of people who get worked up over this ancient Christian belief.
Scientific reductionists -- the Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins set -- will tell us that it's impossible. By definition, a virgin cannot be with child. Certain biblical scholars will be trotted out to poke holes in the dogma, by making points about the Bible passages in question that sound convincing to non-scholars. And moderate, embarrassed believers such as Newsweek editor Jon Meacham will try to smooth things over. The Virgin Birth, they will say, is symbolically but not historically or scientifically important. It's about new life or specialness or some other non-offensive, wooly-headed thing.
The scholars will say that the verse in Isaiah (7:14) that prophesies a "virgin shall conceive and bear a son" is a mistranslation. "Virgin" could be "young woman," you see. They will point out that only two of the four Gospels of the New Testament mention the Virgin Birth and that the Virgin Birth Gospels (Matthew and Luke) do not agree about many details. They will say that the earliest Gospel (Mark) leaves it out entirely.
Therefore: Who can say what really happened? The point of this exercise is to paint defenders of the virgin birth as narrow fundamentalists who cling to two tenuous, unscientific, conflicting scraps of the biblical text that rely on a questionable translation of Old Testament prophecy. There are perhaps a dozen problems with this approach. We'll focus on three:
One, it manages to misrepresent all four Gospels at the same time. Matthew and Luke have miraculous conception and birth narratives. Mark and John are rooted in the first chapter of Genesis. That itself says something about Christ's origin. According to the first chapter of John, "In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God and the Word was God." In Jesus, "the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us."
In fact, all four Gospels are rooted in Genesis. Modern audiences tend to focus on the creation narratives of the first few chapters and skip over the genealogies. To a first century Middle Eastern audience, those lists were far more important. Echoing this, both Matthew and Luke attempt to construct genealogies of Jesus, and in the process both books finger God as the father and Mary as the mother.
Two, in pointing out contradictions between Matthew and Luke, scholars and more progressive believers think that they are scoring points against literalism and fundamentalism. The supposed contradictions do present a problem for some believers, but they help make their case as well. Historians are trained to suspect collusion of sources: if two accounts line up too neatly, then one is likely based on the other and thus less valuable. It's better to have two divergent accounts -- even wildly divergent accounts -- of the same event to serve as confirmation of the details where they agree.
The stories about Jesus' conception and birth in Matthew and Luke are far enough apart -- the "wise men," the flight to Egypt, and the murder of innocents are in Matthew but not Luke; the census, the shepherds, the meeting between the mothers of the still unborn Jesus and John the Baptist are unique to Luke -- that they must come from different sources. They both agree about the Virgin Birth.
Three, the case for a mistranslation of Isaiah is simply beside the point. Yes, the word in Hebrew could be rendered "young lady" but that's irrelevant. When an angel tells Mary that she will have a child and she wonders, "How will this be, since I am a virgin?" (Luke 1:34) she's not saying "since I am a young lady." The Gospel writers, the popular early Greek translation of the Old Testament called the Septuagint, and the early church all understood it to mean "virgin," and their understanding is what matters here.
None of this is indisputable proof for the Virgin Birth, nor is it meant to be. We can give evidence for miracles but cannot replicate the results in a laboratory, and the chasm between history and mystery is where faith comes in. However, the hostility of scientific reductionists to the idea does not make nearly as much sense as it used to. Now, with advances in reproductive technology, a woman who was biologically a virgin could in fact conceive a child. Experiments in animal DNA are showing that you can manipulate eggs in such a way that sperm is not necessary to create a whole new creature. If scientists in the 21st century can manage it, is it really such a stretch to say that God 2,000 years ago would have been up to the task?