The virginal conception is only weakly attested within the New Testament. It is found nowhere in Paul, in our earliest gospel, Mark, or the fourth gospel, John.
Where and when then did the idea that Jesus was born of a virgin arise?
One proposal which is popular online is that Matthew can be credited with this theological innovation. Reading the Greek text of Isaiah, this is what he found:
‘Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel’ (7:14)
Yet there is a fly in the ointment. In the Hebrew original, it does not explicitly say that a virgin will conceive. The word there is almah, which could refer to a young woman or a maiden, not a virgin or betulah.
Thus it is said that Matthew, reading a Greek translation of the Hebrew Isaiah, concocted the idea of a virgin birth based on a mistranslation; he mistook Isaiah’s ‘young woman’ for a ‘virgin’, and so created the myth of the virginal conception.
This theory has been popularised, among others, by Richard Dawkins. In The God Delusion, he notes that “this one translator’s slip was to be wildly inflated and give rise to the whole preposterous legend of Jesus’ mother being a virgin!”
And it is not only polemicists who have made this argument. When Hebrew Bible Professor, Francesca Stravrakapoulou, was asked on day-time television what biblical literalists should do with this striking piece of information, she replied, “Learn Hebrew!” I suspect that she would wish to say the same to Matthew himself.
To lay my own cards on the table, I do not think that Isaiah 7:14 is a predictive prophecy of the Christ. It is widely agreed that the young woman is serving as a ‘sign’ is her own generation. This is not to say that Christians cannot read the ‘young woman/virgin’ in reference to Mary, but only that it was not in Isaiah’s mind.
Moreover, it does not seem to me that the Isaiah passage is referring to a woman who is a virgin at the moment of conception. There is no indication that young women will conceive in anything but the normal way. The reason why it is a sign to Ahaz is not because of the supernatural mode of conception, but because of its timing.
Isaiah goes on immediately to say: “He will be eating curds and honey when he knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right, for before the boy knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right, the land of the two kings you dread will be laid waste.” This timing is the the force of the ‘sign’ the child will be to Ahaz.
Nevertheless, following other mainstream scholars (e.g. Goodacre here), I am highly suspicious of the narrative that Matthew has fabricated the virginal conception on the basis of this verse. In this piece, I want to unpack three reasons why.
Does Matthew Narrate a Virgin Birth?
My first quibble with the idea that Matthew invented the virginal birth on the basis of Isaiah is that there is not a consensus that Matthew does narrate a virgin birth.
Remarkably, aside from his quotation of Isaiah 7:14, Matthew tells us very little about how Mary conceived Jesus. He notes that the birth was ‘from the Holy Spirit’, yet to an ancient Jewish reader, this would not necessarily imply the non-involvement of a human father. He also notes that Joseph did not have relations with Mary until after she had given birth – yet this simply confirms expectations surrounding marriage.
There is therefore a minority reading of Matthew’s text that Matthew does not actually make clear that Mary was a virgin. According to this reading, the reason why Matthew is interested in Isaiah 7:14 is not because it describes a parthenos giving birth. Rather, his interest lies in the term Emmanuel, which he translates as ‘God with us’ and returns to in an inclusio at the end of his gospel (cf. 28:20). In quoting Isaiah, Matthew is setting us up to see Jesus as God’s presence throughout his narrative.
On this minority reading, Matthew would be read something like this: Mary is found to be pregnant with Jesus from someone unknown; Joseph (rightly) wants to divorce her, but is assured that it is ‘through the Holy Spirit’ that she has conceived – that God has done a work in her life – and therefore Joseph continues his marital plans.
To be sure, I think there are strong reasons for maintaining the traditional reading. One is that by the time Matthew was writing, there was an interpretation of the Spirit’s involvement as implying the non-human involvement of a father. Another is that Matthew’s story tallies well with what we know from other ancient birth stories, where the child is born of a god and the (adoptive) father remains abstinent.
Yet it is worth noting that this is not the only way to read Matthew’s text. I believe that Matthew’s ambiguity on this point was already a point of discomfort to ancient readers. This is one reason why Luke may have set out to write his own birth story. He wanted to make it absolutely clear that the virgin Mary had ‘not known a man.’
Scripture Historicised or Tradition Scripturalised?
A more serious problem for the common idea that Matthew derived the virgin birth from Isaiah is that it assumes that he has invented material from the Scripture. At first, this may not seem an unreasonable inference. We know that other ancient writers did indeed compose their own stories out of the scriptural material. John Dominic Crossan famously described this process as “prophecy historicized.”
Yet it is apparent this is not the only method by which Matthew engages scripture. We have instances where Matthew does not invent material out of scripture but rather uses scripture to describe material which he has traditionally received – what Mark Goodacre calls “tradition scripturalized.”
Consider this passage about Jesus’ healings:
“That evening they brought to him many who were possessed by demons, and he cast out the spirits with a word and cured all who were sick. This was to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet Isaiah, “He took our infirmities and bore our diseases.” (8:16-17)
Here, Matthew uses the prophet Isaiah to describe Jesus’ healing activity. Yet he clearly has not invented Jesus’ healing ministry from Isaiah. Rather, it is the other way around: Matthew has inherited traditions that Jesus was a healer (one of which was the gospel of Mark), and then uses Scripture to give this an explanation.
So it also may be with the virginal conception. Matthew could have received a tradition that Jesus was supernaturally conceived, and then found the Greek text of Isaiah to support this view. Of course, there is no way for me to prove this. Yet it would explain why so many of Matthew’s scriptural citations look like really loose pegs upon which to hang his narrative. It is a fascinating and curious fact that if you take all of these citations citations away, Matthew’s narrative stands on its own.
This may suggest that Matthew is not working from scripture and historicising it. He is working from the sources and tradition he has received and finding scriptures which support those traditions. He is ‘scripturalising’ his tradition.
Whence then a Virgin Birth?
This brings us back to our initial question: where and when did the idea of the virginal conception arise? If Matthew has not simply read it out of Isaiah 7:14, where did he come across the notion that Jesus was born of a virgin?
This question is very difficult to answer because we do not have access to Matthew’s sources. There are a number of live options for biblical scholars. One is that Matthew already a piece of tradition – or had heard an accusation – that Jesus was born out of wedlock, and was attempting to respond or understand this tradition. This may explain why Matthew’s genealogy focuses unusually on a number of ‘Davidic’ women who conceive in mysterious circumstances. Another position, defended recently by Joan Taylor, is that Matthew was dependent upon family traditions.
I believe an important piece of context is that Matthew was not alone in presenting his hero as born of a god without the involvement of a human father. Stories of supernatural conceptions were common in the ancient world – and I have written elsewhere about the similarities between these stories and the gospel accounts.
In this context, it is not surprising that the early Church developed the idea that Jesus was born without a human father. This belief may have arisen as soon as extended reflection on how Jesus would be born was considered. In this scenario, Matthew and other Jesus-followers may have quite naturally come to believe that Jesus was supernaturally conceived, and found Isaiah to confirm their belief.
As I draw to a close, one must meet one all too popular objection to the idea that supernatural conceptions provide a useful context for understanding the idea of the virgin birth. This is the argument that no Jewish writer would liken the birth of Jesus to the births of divine (or semi-divine) pagan figures. In those instances, a male god impregnates a woman. Yet no such anthropomorphism exists in the gospel accounts.
I think that this objection is mistaken on two fronts. The first is that it mistakes what many elite pagan writers believed about supernatural conceptions. Consider the writings of Plutarch. He thought it was philosophically non-sensical to say that gods had sex with women – rather, their spirit and power (pneuma and dynamis) caused the birth of the child. These are the same terms in which Luke casts Jesus’ conception.
The second problem is that it assumes a wedge between Judaism and the wider Graeco-Roman world which did not exist. The evangelists were writing ancient ‘lives’ or bíoi – a distinct form of literature which emerged from the Hellenistic world. As such, it is wholly unsurprising that we find them reflecting on Jesus’ birth in a way that made sense to their pagan contemporaries. This is not to say that the gospels are not distinctively Jewish, but rather that they are not decidedly anti-Greek.
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A young woman holds a baby in her arms. The child is hers, even though she is a virgin. But the young woman in this case is not Mary of Nazareth, but an unnamed daughter of an Egyptian Pharaoh (Exod 2:6-10). True, she is an adoptive mother, not a biological one. She seems to be unmarried, since she is identified only with reference to her father. And the birth story of Moses has suspicious resemblances to the much older birth legend of Sargon. Nevertheless, the parallels the gospels set up between Jesus and Moses make it interesting that in Moses' background is a strange tale of virginal motherhood.
This is a great read!
A few contemporary writings to Isaiah 7 that are interesting:
• Akkadian-Sumerian psalm to Assur (broken) may refer to the Assyrian King Tukulti-Ninurta I being “begotten by the god Enlil and placed in a maiden”. Hard to say for certain as it’s broken.
• Sumerian literature claiming that the god Ningirsu implanted the King of Lagash, Eannatum, in his mothers womb
Also interesting is that there’s an exact Ugaritic equivalent to Isaiah 7 saying “behold, the young woman will bear a son”. In that text it’s referring to the Canaanite moon-goddess Nikkal giving birth, and the baby remains unnamed, but it’s fascinating that this rhetoric was present, and generally concerning royalty.
It’s hard to say how aware Matthew would have been of 5-10th century BCE sign-birth patterns outside of the Hebrew Bible, but he almost subverts the pattern in that the “king” being announced has no earthly royalty or political power.