The Virgin Birth

The two gospels that give the claim tell it from opposite sides and agree on very little else. In Matthew the narrative follows Joseph, who learns of the pregnancy, plans to divorce Mary quietly, and is stopped by a dream; the family is in Bethlehem, flees to Egypt, and settles in Nazareth afterwards. In Luke the narrative follows Mary, who is told directly and answers; the family lives in Nazareth, travels to Bethlehem for a registration, and returns. The two genealogies of Jesus differ as well, and both run through Joseph, which is itself a puzzle the tradition has had to explain.

Matthew quotes Isaiah as fulfilled: behold, a virgin shall conceive. The Hebrew of that verse uses almah, a young woman of marriageable age, which does not by itself specify virginity; the Greek Septuagint renders it parthenos, which ordinarily does. Whether the Greek translation shaped the Christian claim or was reached for afterwards to support a claim made on other grounds is a genuine and long-running argument among scholars, and the two positions are not separable by the text alone.

Mark, which is generally taken to be the earliest gospel, begins with an adult Jesus and says nothing about his birth. John opens with the Word rather than with a nativity. The letters of Paul, written before any of the gospels, say that Jesus was born of a woman and born under the law, and no more.

The claim entered the confessional formulas very early, and its place there is why it carries a weight that its two gospel attestations alone would not give it. Both the Apostles and the Nicene creeds state that Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary, and both are recited weekly across Catholic, Orthodox and most Protestant churches, so a Christian who says nothing else about the birth says this.

The Quran affirms the conception without a human father in two extended passages, one in the chapter named for the family of Imran and one in the chapter named for Mary. Mary is told of a son and asks how, given that no man has touched her, and the answer is that God creates by saying be. The same passages reject the inference that Jesus is therefore the son of God, comparing his creation to that of Adam, who had no parents at all. So the two traditions agree on the event and disagree entirely about what it shows.

In the modern West the doctrine became a boundary marker. When American Protestantism divided in the early twentieth century, the virgin birth appeared on the short lists of fundamentals that a candidate for ministry could be asked to affirm, and it has been argued over on those terms since. It is also routinely confused with the immaculate conception, which is a Catholic doctrine about Mary being conceived without original sin and concerns her own conception rather than that of Jesus.