Miller, SBL

Did Matthew Believe in the Virgin Birth?

Robert J. Miller

The infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke agree on very little, but they do agree that Mary became pregnant while she was betrothed and that Joseph was not the father. We can safely conclude that this information came to Matthew and Luke from an earlier tradition. Luke certainly thinks that Jesus was born to a virgin (Luke 1:34-35). Since Matthew agrees with Luke that Joseph was not involved in the conception, it seems a fair assumption that he also agrees with Luke in understanding these circumstances as a virginal conception.

Yet the assumption that Matthew and Luke both knew a tradition about a virginal conception is just that: an assumption. It is a reasonable assumption, but not a necessary one. What Matthew and Luke actually knew from tradition is that Mary conceived while she was betrothed to Joseph. It might be that both evangelists construed that scenario to imply a virginal conception, but it might also be that Luke understands it that way and Matthew some other way. Which of these two possibilities is more likely remains to be seen.

Matt 1: 18 and 1:20 report that Mary was pregnant by (ek) the holy spirit. However, that does not necessarily indicate that Jesus has no human father. It is true that ek is a grammatically correct way to name the man responsible for a pregnancy, but that is not the only way the expression functions in Greek. Moreover, there are good reasons to think that Matthew is not using this phrase to exclude a biological father for Jesus. I will discuss four such considerations.

1) The Johannine writings repeatedly assert that Christians are "begotten by (ek) the spirit" or "begotten by (ek) God."

[John 1: 12-13; 1 John 2:29, 3:9, 4:7, 5:1, 5:18]

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Obviously, neither usage of ek connotes the absence of biological fathers.

2) The Old Testament has several references to individuals who are called "sons of God" and one passage in which God tells the newly-crowned king, "Today I have begotten you" (Ps 2:6-7). Several other passages name God as the direct cause of specific pregnancies, when it is obvious that the woman has had intercourse with her husband (Eve, Leah, Rachel, Ruth).

[Gen 4:1, 29:31-32, 30:22-23; Ruth 4:13.]

This Jewish way of thinking shows through in Paul's language when he describes Isaac as "begotten according to the spirit" and distinguishes him from Abraham's other biological son, Ishmael, who was "begotten according to the flesh" (Gal 4:29).

Such texts demonstrate that Jews (including Jewish-Christians) could freely refer to people who are begotten by God or begotten by the spirit without ever imagining that they were born to virgin mothers. In Matthew's Jewish world, being begotten by God was never understood to exclude being begotten by a human male. There is thus no reason for thinking that Matthew's description of the unborn Jesus as begotten by the holy spirit implies that he had no human father. If Matthew is referring to the virginal conception in 1: 18 and 1:20, he is using the language of divine begetting to mean something very different from what it means in every other passage in the Bible.

3) The Infancy Gospel of James contains a fascinating bit of dialogue relevant to our topic. In this gospel's annunciation scene, the angel tells Mary that she will conceive "by (ek) the word of God." Mary is puzzled and asks, "Am I going to conceive by the Lord, the living God, the way every woman does who gives birth?" (InJas 11:5-6). Mary believ6 what the angel says, but asks whether she will conceive the way all women do. The angel then explains that she will conceive without a man (InJas 11: 7).

The Infancy Gospel of James was written in a non-Jewish setting long after Matthew. Still, the author was aware that the expression "to conceive by the word of God" was ambiguous enough, even to gentile Christians who believed in the virgin birth, that he needed to narrow its meaning. The author has Mary ask her question so that he can have the angel clear up the ambiguity. The author knew that by itself the phrase "to conceive by the word of God" did not exclude a human biological father.

4) There is one more biblical passage directly relevant to understanding what Matthew means when he writes that Mary was pregnant by the holy spirit. That passage is in the story of Tamar in Genesis 38.

Tamar, in order to obtain the marital rights that her father-in-law had unjustly denied her, became pregnant by disguising herself as a prostitute and luring him into incestuous intercourse. When her pregnancy is discovered, Tamar is accused of being "pregnant by (ek) fornication" (Gen 38:24 LXX). Her father-in-law, Judah, has no idea that he is the father of her child and he orders that she be put to death. Tamar successfully defends herself by proving that she is "pregnant by (ek)" Judah, who then declares, "Tamar is on the side of justice, not F' (Gen 3 8:2526). Here we see two uses for the preposition ek, the second one to identify the man who participated in the conception, the first one to characterize its moral/spiritual quality.

We can be sure that Matthew was familiar with Tamar's story because he mentions her in the genealogy immediately preceding the annunciation to Joseph. The suspicion that a woman is "pregnant by fornication" is exactly what readers have to imagine is weighing on Joseph's mind-what else was he supposed to think? The revelation from the angel directly addresses his anxiety: Mary's pregnancy is not "ek fornication," as Joseph fears, but "ek the holy spirit." Neither ek-phrase is meant to exclude male sexual complicity; rather, both phrases describe what kind of conception this is: either sinful or holy. The angel tells Joseph, in effect, that regardless of how Mary became pregnant, her condition is now sacred. God has stepped in, has put this pregnancy under his protection, and plans to use it to serve his will.

3. Along with Tamar, there are three other women in Matthew's genealogy of Jesus: Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba (Matt 1:5, 6). Women were rarely included in ancient genealogies and so Matthew was making surely a point by adding them. But why add these specific women? All four of them had sexual histories marked by scandal or shame, hardly the kind of women one expects to be highlighted in the lineage of the Messiah.

As soon as the genealogy is finished, Matthew opens the episode of the annunciation by describing a situation fraught with the potential for scandal and shame: Mary is pregnant, but not by Joseph. The relevance of the women in the genealogy now becomes apparent. Here I quote Jane Schaberg:

Mention of the four women is designed to lead Matthew's reader to expect another, final story of a woman who becomes a social misfit in some way; is wronged or thwarted; who is party to a sexual act that places her in great danger; and whose story has an outcome that repairs the social fabric and ensures the birth of a child who is legitimate or legitimated. [Schaberg, Illegitimacy of Jesus (or via: amazon.co.uk), 33].

Matt 1:23

The greatest difficulty for the argument that Matthew does not assume a virgin birth is posed by Matt 1:22-23:

All this happened so the prediction of the Lord given by the prophet would come true: Look, the parthenos will conceive a child and she will give birth to a son, and they will name him Emmanuel (which means "God is with us").

If Matthew does not think that Jesus was born to a virgin, why would he quote this prophecy? What else could it describe except a virginal conception?

It may help to put the shoe on the other foot. Instead of asking what else Matt 1:23 could intend besides the virginal conception, let's put the question the other way around. If we didn't already think that Matthew was describing a virginal conception, would 1:23 by itself make us think that he was? In other words, if we read 1:23 without assuming that we already know what it means, would we think that it was about a virginal conception?

I think we would, but only on two conditions:

1. The word parthenos in Matthew would have to mean exactly what we today mean by the word "virgin."

2. "The virgin will conceive" would have to mean that she would conceive as a virgin. Neither of these conditions holds up well under scrutiny.

1. Does parthenos mean in Greek what virgin means in English? Not really. If a Greek speaker wanted to refer to a virgin, parthenos was the word to use, but that word was normally used in a more general sense to refer to girls or young women, in contexts where their sexual status was not in view. The only other time Matthew uses parthenos is in the parable of the ten parthenoi waiting for the bridegroom (Matt 25:1-13), a story which has nothing to do with virginity. The precise meaning of parthenos in the ancient world was something like "a young woman who has not yet had her first child." So is Matthew using parthenos in its usual sense (young woman) or in a special sense (virgin)? Unfortunately, the word itself doesn't help us answer that question. Since it could legitimately be used in either sense, its meaning here must be inferred from something else.

2. Even if Matthew gave parthenos the special meaning of "virgin," the meaning of "the virgin will conceive" is still not clear. What is puzzling here is the sense of the "will" in "will conceive." Does Matthew mean that the woman remains a virgin after the conception, i.e., that she conceived without sexual intercourse?

The everyday sense of "the virgin will conceive" connotes nothing miraculous. Someone who is now a virgin will conceive, but then she will no longer be a virgin. (A semantically analogous sentence would be "that bachelor will get married" or "that candidate will be elected.") So is Matthew using "the virgin will conceive" in its normal sense or is he describing a miracle? We have here the same kind of problem as before: the words by themselves can carry either meaning and so our decision about what Matthew means has to be made on other grounds.

What all this shows is that nothing in the ordinary meaning of the prophecy indicates that Matthew understood it to be a prediction of a virginal conception. The quotation could carry that meaning for Matthew, but only if he read that meaning into it, by 1) taking the noun parthenos in a specialized sense, and 2) construing the verb "will conceive" to point to a miracle. In other words, Matthew could find a virginal conception in this prophecy only if he already knew what he was looking for.

If Matthew is not telling a story of a virginal conception, why does he quote Isa 7:14? After all, "the young woman will conceive and give birth to a son" is fulfilled every time a boy is born to a young mother. If Matthew understood those words in their normal sense, they do not point to anything special about the birth of Jesus. There must have been something else in Isa 7:14 that caught Matthew's attention. We can see what that was by looking at the context Matthew designed for the prophecy: he introduced it immediately after the explanation of Jesus' name in 1:21. Notice the precise symmetry between 1:21 and the quotation of the prophecy in 1:23.

1:21 She will give birth to a son and you will name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.

1:23 She will give birth to a son and they will name him Emmanuel, which means "God is with us."

It's clear that Matthew wrote 1:21 to mirror the words of Isaiah in 1:23 and then added explanations of the meanings of "Jesus" and "Emmanuel" to ensure that his Greek-speaking audience understood the symbolism of these Semitic names. Matthew's primary interest in Isa 7:14 was the rich symbolism of the name Emmanuel, not the word parthenos.

[This position is not a novel one. There is wide agreement among scholars who have studied this passage carefully that the cash value for Matthew in Isa 7:14 has to do with the name Emmanuel.]

Conclusion

If we refrain from using Luke's infancy narrative to interpret Matthew's, it becomes difficult to take it as a story about a virginal conception. First, in a Jewish context generally, and in biblical usage specifically, the language of divine begetting never suggests a virgin birth. Second, conception by the holy spirit does not connote the absence of a human father. Third, the genealogy prepares us for a sexual irregularity and a woman whose plight is set right, not for a miraculous birth. Fourth, nothing in the normal sense of Isaiah's prophecy points to a virgin birth. The context in which Matthew quotes Isa 7:14 indicates that Matthew sees its prophetic significance focused on the symbolism of Emmanuel's name, not on the circumstances of his conception.

All this leads me to conclude that Matthew probably did not believe that Jesus had no human father. But why the "probably" in my position" There are two reasons for my hesitation. First, nothing in Matt 1: 18-25 positively rules out a virginal conception. If you take up that passage expecting a virginal conception, nothing is there to make you think otherwise.

[I also insist that if you come to Matt 1: 18-25 without expecting a virginal conception, nothing is there to suggest it. See above]

Second, a Jewish Christian wishing to write a story about a virgin birth, while still making the other theological points that Matthew makes, might well come up something close to what Matthew actually wrote.

To understand Matthew's perspective we need to keep in mind that the concept of a virginal conception was foreign to his Jewishness. The thought of Jesus being born without a human father would strike Matthew as a dangerously pagan notion. It is improbable that Matthew could bring himself to imagine that Jesus was virgin bom, even if he knew that other Christians held and taught this belief. Nevertheless, the possibility remains that Matthew accepted this innovation and then did his best to counteract its pagan overtones, by expressing it in the traditional Jewish language of divine begetting and by buttressing it with the quotation from Isaiah. I think this unlikely, but I can't see how to rule it out.