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Every yr on Christmas, Christians have a good time the birth of their religion’s founder, Jesus from Nazareth of Galilee. Part of this celebration includes the claim that Jesus was born from a virgin mother named Mary, which is key to the Christian understanding that Jesus is the divine son of God.
The virgin birth could seem strange to a contemporary audience – and never simply because it runs counter to the science of reproduction. Even within the Bible itself, the thought is never mentioned.
As a scholar of the New Testament, nonetheless, I argue that this story’s original audiences wouldn’t have been delay by the supposed “strangeness” of the virgin birth story. The story would have felt far more familiar to listeners at the moment, when the traditional Mediterranean was filled with tales of legendary men born of gods – and when early Christians were paying close attention to the Hebrew Bible’s prophecies.
What the Bible does – and doesn’t – say
Strikingly, the New Testament is comparatively silent on the virgin birth except in two places. It appears only within the gospels of Matthew and Luke, written a couple of many years after Jesus’ death.
The Book of Matthew explains that when Joseph was engaged to Mary, she was “found to be pregnant through the Holy Spirit.” The author links this unexpected pregnancy to an Old Testament prophecy in Isaiah 7:14, which states “the virgin will conceive and provides birth to a son, and she is going to call him Immanuel.” According to the prophet Isaiah, this child could be an indication to the Jewish those that God would protect them from powerful empires.
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Now nearly all of early Christians outside of Judea and throughout the Roman empire didn’t know the Old Testament in the unique Hebrew, but quite a Greek translation referred to as the Septuagint. When the Gospel of Matthew quotes Isaiah 7:14, it uses the Septuagint, which incorporates the term “parthenos,” commonly understood as “virgin.” This term differs from the Hebrew Old Testament, which uses the word “almah,” properly translated as “young woman.” The slight difference in translation between the Hebrew and the Greek may not mean much, but for early Christians who knew Greek, it provided prophetic proof for Jesus’ birth from the Virgin Mary.
Was the assumption within the virgin birth based on a mistranslation? Not necessarily. Such terms were sometimes synonymous in Greek and Jewish thought. And the identical Greek word, “parthenos,” can also be present in Luke’s version of the story. Luke doesn’t cite the prophecy in Isaiah 7:14. Instead, this version of the Nativity story describes the angel Gabriel announcing to Mary that she is going to give birth regardless that she is a virgin. Like in Matthew’s version of the story, Mary is told that her baby shall be the “son of God.”
Human and divine?
For early Christians, the thought of the virgin birth put to rest any rumors about Mary’s honor. It also contributed to their belief that Jesus was the Son of God and Mary the Mother of God. These ideas became much more vital through the second century, when some Christians were debating Jesus’ origins: Was he simply born a human being but became the Son of God after being baptized? Was he a semi-divine being, not likely human? Or was he each fully divine and fully human?
The last idea, symbolized by the virgin birth, was most accepted – and is now standard Christian belief. But the relative silence about it in the primary few many years of Christianity doesn’t necessarily suggest that early Christians didn’t consider it. Instead, as biblical scholar Raymond Brown also noted, the virgin birth was likely not a significant concern for first-century Christians. They affirmed that Jesus was the divine Son of God who became a human being, without trying to clarify exactly how this happened.
Greco-Roman roots
Claiming that somebody was divinely born was not a recent concept through the first century, when Jesus was born. Many Greco-Roman heroes had divine birth stories. Take three famous figures: Perseus, Ion and Alexander the Great.
One of the oldest Greek legends affirms that Perseus, an ancient ancestor of the Greek people, was born of a virgin mother named Danaë. The story begins with Danaë imprisoned by her father, the king of Argos, who feared her since it was prophesied that his grandson would kill him. According to the legend, the Greek god Zeus transformed himself into golden rain and impregnated her.
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When Danaë gave birth to Perseus, they escaped and eventually landed on an island where he grew up. He eventually became a famous hero who killed the snake-haired Medusa, and his great-grandson was Hercules, known for his strength and uncontrollable anger.
The playwright Euripides, who lived within the fifth century B.C., describes the story of Ion, whose father was the Greek god Apollo. Apollo raped Creusa, Ion’s mother, who abandoned him at birth. Ion grew up unaware of his divine father, but eventually reconciled along with his Athenian mother and have become referred to as the founder of varied Greek cities in modern-day Turkey.
Lastly, legends held that Zeus was the daddy of Alexander the Great, the Macedonian ruler who conquered his vast empire before age 33. Alexander was supposedly conceived the night before his mother consummated her marriage with the king of Macedon, when Zeus impregnated her with a lightning bolt from heaven. Philip, the king of Macedon, raised Alexander as his son, but suspected that there was something different about his conception.
A well-known kind of hero
Overall, divine conception stories were familiar in the traditional Mediterranean world. By the second century A.D., Justin Martyr, a Christian theologian who defended Christianity, recognized this point: that virgin birth wouldn’t have been regarded as “extraordinary” in societies acquainted with Greco-Roman deities. In fact, in an address to the Roman emperor Antoninus Pius and philosophers, Justin argued that they need to tolerate Christian belief within the virgin birth just as they did belief within the stories of Perseus.
The idea of the divine participating within the conception of a baby destined for greatness wouldn’t have seemed so unusual to an ancient audience. Even more, early Christians’ interpretation of the prophecy in Isaiah 7:14 from the Septuagint supported their belief that Jesus’ origin was not only divine, but foretold of their prophetic scriptures.
