The Birth of Jesus

If Jesus had been conceived by a human father before Joseph and Mary had begun their lives together as husband and wife (either by Joseph himself, a soldier or someone else), then the Holy Ghost would have provided a convenient cover story for the early church. Such speculation can be only that: speculation, and even contemplating it is interesting chiefly for the window it opens on the ferocity of early debates over Jesus. To the first believers the virginal conception was not a fiction to hide an embarrassing truth but a way of understanding their Lord's uniqueness. He was not a prophet or a god but the son of God who, in the words of the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, came to "share our human nature, to live and die as one of us, to reconcile us to you, the God and Father of all."

Jesus was such a revolutionary force that both Matthew and Luke sought to make him comprehensible in the context of established Jewish imagery and prophecy. In Luke, Mary's indelible 138-word reaction to the incarnation ("My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour") is a powerful echo of Hannah's 264-word prayer of thanksgiving in I Samuel when she learns she is pregnant ("My heart rejoiceth in the Lord... I rejoice in thy salvation"). Jews hearing Mary's story were thus able to associate Jesus with past figures of deliverance.

Matthew makes an even more explicit connection with the Jewish past, stating outright that Jesus is answering ancient expectations. Citing Isaiah 7:14--"Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us"--the evangelist writes: "Now all this was done that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet."

A problem with this elegant passage from Isaiah is that it may have long been mistranslated and misinterpreted. In his magisterial work "The Birth of the Messiah," Raymond Brown calls the conflict over this single, consequential verse one of "the most famous debates" in the history of Biblical interpretation. He notes that the original Hebrew used by the prophet is more properly translated as "the young girl," not "the virgin," and the overall context of the Hebraic Isaiah passage "does not refer to a virginal conception in the distant future. The sign offered by the prophet was the imminent birth of a child, probably Davidic, but naturally conceived, who would illustrate God's providential care for his people." The Greek sense of the term--and Matthew was likely working from the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible--suggests that "the virgin" will conceive, Brown writes, "by natural means, once she is united with her husband." It is one Biblical war without apparent end: in the early 1950s, when the translators of the Revised Standard Version rendered the King James "virgin" as "young woman"--a defensible textual decision--some literalist believers burned the new Bibles.

Geography, as Napoleon is said to have remarked, is destiny, hence the Gospels' emphasis on Jesus' birthplace. The expectation was that the Messiah--understood in the early first century as a David-like king who would end Roman occupation and rule over a new golden age for Israel and for the whole world--would come from Bethlehem, the village in which David had been born.

In the Gospels, some objected to the messianic claims made for Jesus by pointing out that he was a Nazarene. Matthew attacks that skepticism head-on, writing simply that Jesus was born "in Bethlehem of Judea" and that wise men from the East, guided by a star, went there in search of the baby who inspired this celestial sign. Could there have been such a star? Halley's comet is estimated to have made an appearance in 12 B.C., and Matthew may have appropriated the detail long afterward. He could also have been thinking of a line from the Book of Numbers: "There shall come a Star out of Jacob, and a Sceptre shall rise out of Israel."