A virgin did conceive.
I will not be the first person to tell you this, but the prophet Isaiah did not unequivocally predict the birth of a Messiah by parthenogenesis. St Matthew’s account of the annunciation to Joseph of the birth of a son to Mary, his betrothed, concludes that “All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: ‘Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son…’” (Matthew 1:22-23), a citation of Isaiah 7:14. The wording in St Matthew’s Greek is identical to that of the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament.
Yet if one looks up the Hebrew one finds that the word here translated “virgin”, in Greek parthenos, does not necessarily mean a woman who has never had sexual intercourse. That word, ’almah, means a girl of marriageable age, or indeed a married woman who has not yet born a son. In point of fact, even the Greek word does not have to mean a woman who is virgo intacta. It is often suggested that St Matthew has misunderstood this arguably ill-translated verse of Isaiah, decided that it applies to Jesus, probably because the child is then called Immanuel, which does indeed mean ‘God [is] with us’, and then falsely drawn the conclusion that Jesus had no human father. Upon that false conclusion he has based the story he tells which very strongly implies that Joseph is not Jesus’s biological father. I suppose the teller of this sceptical tale would have to go on and say that St Luke, who makes Our Lady’s virginity much more explicit, has taken this mistake of St Matthew and run with it.
Moreover, our sceptic might add, Isaiah was not even talking about some future messiah. His prophecy pertained to his own time, and was God’s response to King Ahaz’s anxieties about the threat to Judah of the Syro-Ephraimite alliance, a matter that was ancient history when Christ was conceived. So Christians, on the basis of a mistranslation of an anachronistic reading of an irrelevant text, have come up with the idea of a virgin birth, in order to back up their claim that Jesus is the Son of God.
Happily for us, this tale of the stupidity of sex-hating Christians is wrong in many respects. In the first place, St Luke’s story of the annunciation to Our Lady shows no hint of dependency upon St Matthew’s Gospel. Luke is insistent that he did his own investigations (see Luke 1:3), and he seems to have come independently to the same conclusion, not on the basis of a prophecy but through historical testimony; we can only suppose that he spoke to Jesus’s mother, and indeed it would be surprising if he had not, or at least to people who knew her.
Secondly, St Matthew is not a stupid man. A man steeped in the scriptures, he knows full well what the original context of Isaiah 7 was – it is, after all, right there in the book. He knows that parthenos translates ’almah, and he knows that neither word must necessarily mean sexual inexperience. But he also knows, and he shows this over and over in his Gospel, that a prophecy in the scriptures can point beyond itself to an utterly unexpected fulfilment. Whether or not the historical Isaiah had any meaning in his mind beyond his immediate political circumstance we cannot say, but if we believe that prophecy means anything more than “some people are insightful”, then we cannot rule out the possibility, even the likelihood, that God might speak through his prophets more than the prophets themselves know. This should be especially unsurprising when the oracle concerned is, on the surface, one about God’s power to save, his faithfulness to his promises and his desire to proclaim to his people a message they are not ready to hear.
But perhaps most importantly, Christians do not need Jesus’s mother to be a virgin in order for him to be the Son of God. It is surely obvious that what we don’t mean by that expression is that Jesus is the biological son of God. Biologically, as the Church has always insisted, he is completely human, and it is of course a miracle that such a human should be born with only one natural parent.
We don’t need our Saviour’s birth to be, humanly speaking, miraculous, but it is certainly appropriate! The lack of a human father is not there to, as it were, “make room” for a divine one: God and Our Lady are not Christ’s two parents in the same way that Tony and Lin are my two parents, each – if they will forgive the expression – doing half the job. To reiterate, we don’t need Jesus not to have a human father in order for him to be fully divine. He is fully divine and fully human, not half and half.
The virgin birth of Christ is not necessary, but it is appropriate. It is a miracle – like the remarkable births of Isaac or Samuel or John the Baptist, only even more remarkable. It points to – but does not prove – the unique identity of Christ as the man who is God, eternal Son of the eternal Father. The idea that the earliest Christians had to scrabble around desperately looking for an Old Testament text that would justify their belief in the Virgin Birth so that they could “prove” that Jesus is the Son of God is a combination of misunderstanding and a cynical prejudice that Christians are both dishonest and stupid. The reality is that this extraordinary and unique event points to the so-much-more extraordinary and unique identity of Jesus Christ, our Saviour, our brother.
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