This is an updated version of a piece I first published on 6th December 2019.

In 2013, Andrew Lincoln published Born of a Virgin? Reconceiving Jesus in the Bible, Tradition, and Theology, presents a case for denying the virgin birth (more properly, the virginal conception) of Jesus.

As Jason Engwar says,

‘Lincoln is a supernaturalist who accepts traditional Christian concepts like the deity of Jesus and his resurrection, but rejects other traditional positions, such as Biblical inerrancy and the historicity of the virgin birth. He thinks Joseph was Jesus’ natural father.’

According to Lincoln, only two biblical sources (the Gospels of Matthew and Luke) can be adduced with any confidence as teaching a virginal conception.  In the case of Matthew, it is only on balance that Lincoln thinks that he does affirm it: Mt 1:18, for example, may simply imply divine enablement of a normal conception.  In both cases, it is quite likely that, in keeping with the literary conventions of the day, the authors felt free to ‘invent’ history in order to be able to say that the Old Testament scriptures had been fulfilled.

According to Lk 1:34 Mary was indeed a virgin at the time of her conception, but if ancient historians could invent special births for Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and others, then the Gospel-writers were simply following suit.  But (writes Lincoln) Luke also includes the contrary tradition that Jesus was conceived and born through normal sexual intercourse between Joseph and Mary.

Lincoln stresses the ‘step-parallelism’ between Luke’s accounts of John’s and Jesus’ nativities.  At point after point, the birth of Jesus is portrayed as similar to, but also more than, that of John.  This being so, then if the conception of John is presented as near-impossible because of Elizabeth’s old age, then the step-parallelism would break down if Mary’s impediment was simply that she was a young unmarried woman.  It would be retained, however, on the assumption of Mary’s virginal conception of Jesus.

Although John clearly attributes deity to Jesus, he doesn’t assume virginal conception in, say, Jn 1:13 or Jn 8:41.  But it may be that here, as elsewhere, John simply assumes what had already been taught in the oral and written tradition (including in Matthew and/or Luke).

Lincoln notes that ancient biographies were often least reliable in matters relating to their subjects’ childhood years, sometimes presented conflicting accounts (natural and supernatural) of their subjects side-by-side.  Luke’s Gospel is similar in these respects, and it would appear that Luke’s infancy narratives were designed to emulate pagan accounts that made unhistorical claims about a great person’s childhood.  Indeed, according to Lincoln, Luke’s record of the circumstances of Jesus’ birth is unhistorical in a number of respects (but, we must respond, such a view conflicts with the Evangelist’s declared interest in factuality; also, items such as the notorious census of Quirinius are not so problemmatic as is often supposed).

Lincoln identifies a three-stage development of the doctrine of the virgin birth within the pages of the New Testament.  The earliest tradition was that Jesus was the ‘seed of David’ conceived by Mary and Joseph by normal means.  (Lincoln regards this as the ‘majority witness of the NT, and nearest to the truth of the matter).  The next tradition was the Jesus was fathered by a man other than Joseph (hence Mk 6:3 identifies Jesus as ‘the son of Mary’).  The last tradition concerned a virginal conception.  This is clearest in Luke 1-2 (plus Lk 3:23), which were a later addition to that Gospel.

Although belief in the virgin birth eventually became the majority position in the Christian church (along with a raft of accretions, including Mary’s perpetual virginity), the prevailing view in early Christianity was that Jesus was conceived by Joseph and Mary through normal sexual mean.

This view, writes Lincoln, is reflected in Paul’s letters, Mark, the Johannine literature, and the Letter to the Hebrews.  References such as Mark 3:21-35, John 1:45, and Romans 1:3 tend to support this, according to Lincoln.  However, he does concede that they are by no means incompatible with belief in a virgin birth.

Other scattered New Testament passages – Mk 6:3; Jn 8:41; Gal 4:4 – that seem to imply a virginal conception are not (Lincoln maintains) relevant to it.  On the other hand, references to Jesus as ‘the seed of David’ (Rom 1:3; 2 Tim 2:8) are best understood as affirming normal patrilineal descent.  But here is a weakness in Lincoln’s argument: if Jesus could not legitimately be regarded as ‘the seed of David’ if he had been virginally conceived equally applies if (as Lincoln conjectures) he had been conceived as an outcome of rape.  In both cases, Jesus’ status as David’s heir comes about by his being ‘adopted’ by Joseph.

Lincoln is correct to say that Matthew 1:18 (‘with child by the Holy Spirit’) does not necessarily imply a virginal conception.  He is also correct to say (by analogy with the crucifixion) that a ‘shameful’ conception (by rape or fornication) cannot be ruled out on moral grounds, as if God would never do such a thing.  But there is not a shred of evidence that such a thing happened.

Certainly, Mary is represented in Matthew and Luke as a righteous person, just as Joseph is (Matthew 1:19).  Such ‘righteousness’ would, in historical context, very probably exclude that possibility.

Although within the pages of the New Testament the issue of Jesus’ parentage is not prominent, it became so in the centuries following.  Based on the prevailing Aristotelian thinking, it was thought, in those days, that the mother determined her child’s entire phenotype, with the father only contributing a ‘life-force’.  From a theological perspective, the virginal conception sits fairly comfortably within that frame of reference.  But we now know that a child’s mother and father contribute an equal number of chromosomes, with the father specifically contributing the ‘Y’ chromosome in the case of a male child.  So how, given this knowledge, could we then say that Jesus was ‘fully human’, if he did not have a human father as well as a human mother?  Lincoln is convinced that whereas Heb 2:17 affirms that Jesus was ‘fully human in every way’, a virginal conception would actually make him less than human.  But this is not necessarily so.  In Hebrews 4:15, for example, we read that Jesus was tempted ‘in all things’, but we do not infer from that that he experienced every sort of temptation that is common to the human race.

According to Lincoln, then, belief in the virgin birth undermines the incarnation, for it would imply that Jesus wasn’t fully human.  But this is not necessarily so, since we regard Adam and Eve as fully human, even though they were not created through natural means of sexual reproduction.

Lincoln wonders what sort of physiology, and what sort of miracle, would be required for a virginal conception to take place that was fully consistent with Jesus’ full humanity.  Was the required Y chromosome miraculously transferred from Joseph to Mary?  If so, why?  And what would that say about sexual intercourse between a man and a woman?

In response, it is now possible to postulate mechanisms whereby Jesus may have been  virginally conceived and yet endowed by such mechanisms with a Y chromosome or those components of it that are regarded as essential for ‘maleness’.

When Matthew 1:19 informs us that Joseph abstained from sexual intercourse with Mary until after the birth of her child, this could be taken to mean that, being a righteous man, he refrained from intercourse during the pregnancy.  [But if it was as simple as that, why did Matthew bother to even mention it?].  The mention, in Matthew 1:23 of the fulfilment of Isaiah would suggest that the Evangelist thought of both conception and birth as miraculous.

Lincoln thinks that Luke placed contradictory accounts of Jesus’ birth side by side.  But, once again, this would conflict with the Evangelist’s stated aim in Luke 1:1-4.  It is more likely that Luke considered expressions such as ‘son of David’ and ‘seed of David’ to be consistent with a virginal conception.

Even if we acknowledge that Paul makes no reference to the virginal conception, we must agree that Luke and Paul had a close and mutually respectful relationship, making it more likely that the Apostle would have known about, and agreed with, the Evangelist about its factuality.  Similarly, since both Matthew and Luke draw heavily on Mark’s Gospel, it makes good sense if they all held the same view.

If, as Lincoln thinks, Paul, the author of the Johannine literature, Mark and other influential leaders in early church held that Jesus was conceived by natural means, we would expect that view to be widespread in the early church.  But it is questionable that it was so.

More generally, Lincoln’s view requires an acceptance that the New Testament documents contradict one another.  But there is every indication that the early christians would not have accepted that premise.

In his celebrated work on this subject, Machen notes that ‘the virgin birth was attacked by outsiders just because it was known as one of the characteristic Christian beliefs.’

Lincoln maintains that the biblical account of the Virgin Birth is comparable to the extra-biblical account of the miraculous birth of, say, Augustus.  Christians would accept the former but not the latter (says Lincoln), on the basis of some preconceived notion about the inspiration and authority of the biblical texts.  But Jesus is a far more likely candidate for a miraculous entry to the world than Augustus (or Romulus, or Apollonius, etc.)

We can agree with Lincoln that the doctrine of the virginal conception is not of central importance.  But we think that he has sold this doctrine at too high a price: the teaching of Matthew and (especially) Luke are clear enough.  To say that Mark, for example, ‘knows nothing’ of the virgin birth is rather pointless, since he does not give any account of Jesus’ birth.  If the famous ‘young woman’ passage from Isa 7:14 (which the LXX and then Matthew renders as ‘virgin’) is read in context, it will be noted that the offspring of that young woman/virgin is also ‘Immanuel’ (‘God with us’) and then becomes ‘Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace’ (Isa 9:6).  The alleged parallels with Greco-Roman stories of special births are, on closer examination, found to be less than convincing.

It is a pity that Lincoln, for all his careful scholarship, gives so little weight to eyewitnesses (Richard Bauckham’s noted work on this subject had been published a few years prior to Lincoln’s book).  There is good evidence from the New Testament documents that both Mary and (at least some of) her other offspring became believers.  They would have been able to correct the testimony about the virginal conception at an early stage, if that had been necessary.

It seems that Lincoln makes too sharp a separation between ‘fact’ and ‘meaning’.  The biblical story of virginal concept can, for him, have the second quality without the first.  But the recognition of meaningful literary parallels by no means undermines factuality (see Kostenberger’s review).

As noted, Lincoln seeks to remain faithful both to the critical and confessional aspects of the Christian faith.  He asks, then, if it is possible for us to doubt that Jesus was (literally) ‘born of a virgin’ and yet continue to affirm this very belief every time we recite the creed.  Lincoln thinks that it is possible.  He explains:

‘If the Apostles’ Creed’s statement that Jesus ‘descended into hell’ can be reinterpreted in the light of the shift away from an ancient cosmology as a way of depicting his full experience of death and its consequences or the Nicene Creed’s statement that ‘he came down from heaven’ can be taken in a non-literal fashion as utilizing ancient cosmological mythology to articulate the notion of incarnation, there should be no impediment to reinterpreting the virginal conception in the light of the shift away from an ancient biology.’

Lincoln declares that he is not an antisupernaturalist.  Indeed, he thinks that his conclusion – the Jesus was probably born as a result of the sexual union of Joseph and Mary – actually safeguards the doctrine of the incarnation.  But it is reasonable to ask what would happen if the same approach that Lincoln applies to the virginal conception (which he denies) were applied to the resurrection (which he affirms).