Virgin Birth?
(Unwrapped: the Truth about Christmas #11)
What's in the series? Previous: Matthew's list of Jesus's ancestors Next: Virgin Birth foretold? (part 1)
The virgin birth of Jesus:
- features in both Matthew's and Luke's accounts, although they are independent
- is a very strange claim, if it is not true – so easy to disbelieve it
- is not borrowed from pagan myths
- matters, because it shows that Jesus was unique
- does not fit into a naturalistic way of looking at the world
- fits in with the rest of Jesus's life
- fits in with the Old Testament view of a God who speaks and acts in history
- should not surprise us, if Jesus really was the Son of God
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Is the Virgin birth borrowed from Pagan Myths?
Skeptics often claim that it is. But here is what the very well known agnostic scholar Bart Ehrman (-not usually an endorser of the Biblical record-) says about it:
In none of the stories of the divine humans born from the union of a god and a mortal is the mortal a virgin. This is one of the ways that the Christian stories of Jesus differ from those of other divine humans in the ancient world. It is true that (the Jewish) God is the one who makes Jesus’s mother Mary pregnant through the Holy Spirit (see Luke 1:35). But the monotheistic Christians had far too an exalted view of God to think that he could have temporarily become human to play out his sexual fantasies. The gods of the Greeks and Romans may have done such things, but the God of Israel was above it all.
Here is another video, which takes the claims about pagan legends as seriously as they deserve to be taken:
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