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Even without taking high-school biology, Joseph knew where babies come from. Yet he believed Mary's story. Should we?

The answer is yes, for anyone who believes in the full authority of the Bible. But because many today don't take Mary's word for it, we asked Richard Longenecker to sketch the shape of the debate for CT's readers.

When they tell their stories of Jesus' birth, Matthew and Luke have little in common. Matthew dwells on the fulfillment of prophecy, the visit of foreign astrologers, and the slaughter of the innocents. Luke, by contrast, reports the poetic utterances of Zechariah, Mary, and Simeon, and focuses on Mary's relatives and the visit of the shepherds.

Matthew 1:18-2:23 and Luke 1:5-2:52 are quite different. Neither writer seems to have known the other's account. Yet Matthew and Luke make one major point in common—that Jesus was born of a virgin through the power of the Holy Spirit. This agreement, amidst otherwise diverse presentations, suggests that a common tradition regarding the Virgin Birth existed before either writer recorded his story.

How did a divine mystery, agreed on by the Gospel writers, become the subject of debate?

From at least Ignatius of Antioch (writing about A.D. 110) to the nineteenth century, almost all Christians accepted the Virgin Birth as both a fact of history and a datum of theology. Believers expected marvelous events to accompany God's actions, and so the miraculous served to support faith. In addition, the Virgin Birth fit nicely with church teaching about Jesus' being the Son of God and having a sinless nature.

After the eighteenth-century intellectual revolution we call the Enlightenment, however, the miraculous created suspicion rather than faith-even among Christians. This stemmed from more than mere rationalism or the association of miracles with credulity. It also arose from the conviction that God works in and through a history like our own-and a history studded with miracles is not the kind of history we know. So in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries many scholars refused to believe that Jesus was conceived any differently from anyone else. Furthermore, the doctrine of the Virgin Birth seemed impossible to reconcile with the true humanity of Jesus.

Today, scholars are sharply divided regarding the Virgin Birth. Is it a fact of history—that is, that Jesus was conceived in the womb of a virgin without the aid of a human father? Or should it be considered an attempt of the early church to translate the mystery of God becoming a human being into terms intelligible to unsophisticated people, and so to be taken as a symbol of the truth that Jesus' birth was God's gift to humanity given entirely by grace, but without any necessary reference to the mechanics of procreation?

If the Virgin Birth is so clearly taught by Matthew and Luke, why would some Christians question it? One answer is that the earliest Christian preachers fail to mention it, and the earliest confessions of faith omit it.

To judge by the book of Acts, the apostles' sermons did not refer to Jesus' virgin birth, but began with his adult ministry and focused on his death, resurrection, and ascension (see, for example, Peter's Pentecost sermon of 2:14-36). But that is to be expected. In choosing a replacement for Judas, the apostles stated his successor must be one who had "been with us the whole time the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from John's baptism to the time when Jesus was taken up from us" (1:21-22, NIV). And it is the redemptive events that transpired during the time the apostles were eyewitnesses that the early Christian preachers proclaimed.

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December (Web-only) 2000, Vol. 44