Around this time of year, you will begin to find folks who insist we don’t need to believe in the virgin birth. After all, the Hebrew word almah, found in Isaiah 7:14 pointing forward to the coming Messiah, can mean maiden or young woman. So, can’t we just accept that the Messiah would be born to a young woman and avoid all the awkwardness of defending weird stuff like virgin births? There are a number of problems with taking this line.
Gospel writers have a clear understanding
It is pretty hard to escape the fact that, whatever almah might mean in Isaiah 7:14, both Matthew and Luke seem pretty clear that it meant virgin. Matthew’s case doesn’t really rest on one particular word. Rather, in Matthew 1:18-25, he describes the fact that Mary became pregnant ‘from the Holy Spirit’ (cf. vv18, 20) and insists this was a specific fulfilment of the words in Isaiah 7:14. It wasn’t merely that a young woman was now pregnant, but that a virgin was pregnant.
Luke makes matters clear by labouring the point. In Luke 1:27, he uses the Greek word parthenos to denote that Mary was a virgin. On top of that, he points out she was unmarried presently and only engaged to Joseph. He later points out Mary questioning how it will be possible for her to give birth since she is a virgin (cf. 1:34) only, this time, she is recorded as a saying andra ou ginōskō (lit. do not know a man), that is, she has not had sexual relations to get pregnant. Luke doesn’t just land on the word virgin, but records Mary’s words that she had not had sex with a man. Luke leaves us with no doubt the prophecy was not merely speaking about a young woman.
The big issue here is, if Isaiah did merely intend to prophecy that a young woman will give birth, the gospel writers have landed very hard on there being a virgin birth. Either, they are misappropriating OT prophecy that isn’t conveying what they claim or, worse, they have made up something that has not happened. Failing that, we have to believe Mary and Joseph lied in their recounting of events to the gospel writers and both Luke and Matthew were both independently so stupid that they unquestioningly believed them, even in the face of Isaiah’s prophecy supposedly saying clearly the sign was merely that of a young woman giving birth. However we cut it, both Matthew and Luke insist there was a virgin birth and their entire gospels are brought into question if there was not.
It was supposed to be a sign
Perhaps most obviously, Isaiah’s prophecy expressly tells us that God was going to give his people a sign. That sign, according to Isaiah 7:14, is that a virgin will give birth. Of course, if we are to simply understand almah as young woman, then we are being asked to understand that the sign from the Lord that the Messiah has come is that a young woman will give birth to a child. The big problem here is that almost every child was born to a young woman back then. If we understand almah as young woman, this sign would be a virtually impossible to decipher. A virgin giving birth to a son is not something that happens in the ordinary run of things and can legitimately be called a sign. A young woman giving birth to a son is about as ordinary as it gets and makes a mockery of calling it a sign. Contextually, young woman makes no sense as a reading.
Inherited guilt
The previous two points are textual ones. Both the context and the specific words point in the direction of a virgin birth. But there are also some significant theological issues if there was no virgin birth. Chief amongst which is the problem of inherited guilt.
The Bible is clear that that all are guilty because all are born in Adam. That is, Adam is our biological father and we inherit his imputed guilt at conception. This is the doctrine of Original Sin. The upshot of which means, if there was no virgin birth, then Jesus had a human biological father through whom he would have inherited Adam’s guilt. But if Jesus is born with the stain of Adam’s guilt, then he cannot be the perfect, spotless saviour we need. He would be an inadequate saviour.
Sinful nature
By the same token, if there was no virgin birth, Jesus would have inherited a sinful nature from his human father. Luke is particularly at pains to point out that Jesus was born of the Holy Spirit. He was conceived by the Spirit.
That is important because, prior to the Fall, Adam and Eve were able to both sin (posse peccare) and not to sin (posse non peccare). After the Fall, they lost that ability and were no longer able not to sin (non posse non peccare). All human beings inherit that sinful nature making it impossible for them not to sin. However, the Bible also teaches, when we become believers God puts his Spirit in our hearts and, because of his work in us, it becomes possible for us not to sin . We are, like Adam and Eve before the Fall, capable of not sinning (posse non peccare) and capable of sin (posse peccare).
If there was no virgin birth, Jesus – like all human beings – was born with such a human nature that it is impossible for him not to sin. If that is true, then we lose the impeccability of Christ. We cannot say Jesus was sinless because he would have been born in a state where it is impossible for him not to sin. That is why Luke makes such a point of saying Jesus was conceived by the Spirit. Jesus was born in such a way that it was possible for him not to sin from conception. Jesus was born of the Spirit so that it was, rather than inheriting a sinful nature that made it impossible not to sin, he was conceived by the Spirit so that it was possible for him not to sin.
But if there was no virgin birth, there is no sinless saviour. There is no impeccable Christ. There is necessarily a time from conception in which it was not possible for Jesus not to sin. He would have inherited such a sinful nature from his parents. But as it is, the Bible is at pains to say he was conceived by the Spirit – in the same way believers are given new birth by the Spirit – making it possible not to sin. Without a virgin birth, we do not have a sinless saviour.
Merely human
If Jesus was born to two biologically human parents, then he is clearly born like everyone else before or since. That is to say, he is born as a mere human. You could take the view that Jesus was born as a human to two biologically human parents and ‘the Christ’ descended on him later. That was the view of Cerinthus. Of course, if Cerinthus was right and ‘the Christ’ descended on Jesus at his baptism, we run into the same problems as above. We are left with an almost certainly sinful Jesus who has lived 30 years of his life under the law without any ability to keep it.
But an even bigger problem with Certinthianism is it denies the divinity of Jesus. If he has two human parents, then he is not divine. If ‘the Christ’ is something that descends on Jesus later, and is added to him, that makes Jesus something less than God and later more than a man. Either he becomes a demi-god or a super-human. Either way, he then fails to be an adequate and appropriate representative for mankind, not being properly like one of us, and an inappropriate mediator on the part of God not being fully like him either.
Even if we somehow get around all of that (and I’m not sure we can) if Jesus is merely human, then he can only pay for sin like a human can. Which is to say, finitely. But the punishment for sin is infinite; it is why Hell is eternal. If Jesus was merely human, even if he somehow managed to keep the whole law perfectly (and as we’ve seen, he wouldn’t be able) he could only offer a finite sacrifice in his finite person. There would never be a time he could say ‘it is finished’ because the infinite punishment for sin would never be paid by his finite human nature. If we reject the virgin birth, we reject a divine saviour with an infinite nature capable of paying the infinite price of sin. We are left with a finite saviour incapable of saving anyone.
We must beware of those who would argue we can dispense with the doctrine of the virgin birth. The technically true argument that almah can mean young woman is undercut entirely by the textual, contextual and theological evidence to the contrary. The danger of denying the virgin birth is that we lose a divine saviour, we lose a sinless, perfect sacrifice, we lose any sense of an actual sign the messiah has been born and we are in danger of having to throw out the entirety of the gospels as untrustworthy. There is an awful lot on the line.
The main reason for insisting upon young woman as the translation is to get around the awkwardness of maintaining what some perceive to be the fanciful position of a virgin giving birth. But it can’t escape our notice that there quite a lot of other stuff in the Bible that is similarly difficult to explain beyond the miraculous. From the opening chapters of Genesis throughout the scriptures, we see miraculous stuff happening and God doing all sorts of things we rightly insist, in the ordinary run of things, would be impossible. If our hope is to free ourselves of such awkward things by denying the virgin birth, we will find ourselves cutting out an awful lot of the Bible when we repeatedly run into God doing things that are impossible to square with a materialistic view of the world. That will simultaneously causes us major problems with accepting the integrity any part of the Bible. If, however, we happily accept that all things are possible for the God of the universe who can make everything from nothing simply by the power of his word, the awkwardness of defending a virgin birth, attributed to this self-same God, largely melts away.