When I questioned this, a whole host of other things came into question shortly thereafter. It was shocking, scary and then illuminating. My current position on a lot of topics might be ultimately wrong and I’m okay with that. 

Two natures of Christ. 

In Judaism, being a Jew passes through the mother. Jesus’ human nature comes through Mary.

To be God with Us, Jesus had to have a divine nature along with the human nature. Jesus’ divine nature comes through the Holy Spirit. 

I don’t care what Aristotle and Augustine thought about being complete or incomplete. What the Virgin Birth means is God did get down and dirty with us. For Jesus’ human nature, God did need a human. The other virgin birth stories only show how much humans recognized the need for this to happen. 

Is this something I think about frequently? No. If I am to accept the two natures of Jesus, though, it is needed. 

Nervous!! I realize what you’re aiming to say but only the Church Fathers who don’t want humanity divinized will go there with you (and you don’t want to hang out with them!). For Christ to be intimately bound to human nature Christ must be born of the Holy Spirit and a human body. It’s not an issue of sex as a dirty or sullied thing so much either- in fact, sex isn’t the big issue. The issue, well (a) what does the Biblial narrative say, but also (b) christologically and soteriologically speaking, Christ has to be the second person of the trinity, not just a male’s seed impregnating Mary. So while the virgin birth may be appealed to as having to do with the purity of Mary (and I’m a fan of understanding of Mary as being herself immaculately conceived), the much larger issue at stake is the union of Man with God within Mary because of her intimate union with the Holy Spirit, actually a far more scandalous concept than a knocked up woman. 

She must be pure because her Son is Christ who purifies her by God’s being knit into the fabric of humanity even as God and also Man receive nutrients from her umbilical cord. (Think of the annunciation like a pre-pentecost event!) If you have a ‘regular’ human child, which the divine mind/spirit/whatever kind of pops into sometime after conception you end up with (a) heresy and (b) a human who isn’t the God-Man, who can’t actually draw us back into the divine life (see notes on Nestorious and Apollinarius from CH 13). Hence the real issue isn’t whether or not she had sex before marriage. The issue is whether or not Christ is fully divine and fully human from the moment of conception, which he has to be, in order for us to be drawn into the perichoetic life of the trinity (thereby allowing us to dance on saturdays!).  

Keep thinking and writing ) and you’re in my prayers!
A

Interesting … I’ve been wondering the same. My son is dating a young girl and if he ever comes home and tells me that she is pregnant by the holy spirit … as much as I might want to believe him, I probably won’t … so why am I believing Mary and Joseph?

Interesting but it will take a bit more than this to convince me… but, as you say, your not convinced either.  That said, I think the virgin birth is beautiful as it is.  The fact that he chose a peasant, a poor young girl in the shadow of the Empire doesn’t need an added element of infidelity to be a good story.  nevertheless… the way you trace the biological logic is fascinating

Chad, I’m really delighted you wrote this. Tweedy academic type that I
am, I’ve long been conscious of the textual and historical difficulties
of the infancy narrative*. This was a real problem for me when I became a
Christian – on the one hand I was utterly convinced of the divinity of
Jesus and of His Resurrection, but on the other hand I found His ‘origin
myth’ to be highly unlikely (not because I thought being born of a
virgin was impossible for the Son of God, but because the attestation
seemed completely unreliable).

I settled this in my mind by realizing that it just didn’t matter. The
Incarnation, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection are not affected one
jot by the state of His mother. The Virgin Birth I see in a similar vein
to the Infancy Gospels that sprung up in the second century – they were
responses to the wish to know more about Jesus as a person, often
adopting the trappings of other myths common at the time.

*Briefly, the infancy accounts in Matthew and Luke are contradictory;
the census somehow requires people to register for tax in a province
they don’t even live in (one in an entirely different constitutional
position, even) for a reason that makes no sense; and finally, Jesus’
family appear in several episodes during His ministry telling him to
come home and worrying that He might be mad – a strange thing to do for a
child announced by an angel and born without loss of virginity.

Chad, it was imperative that Mary was a virgin.  Only then would Jesus be able to be given full authority in heaven and on earth.  Heavenly Father, earthly mother.  He bridged that gap.  It was also a type and shadow of our new relationship with the Father…  the Holy Spirit is our Father, and our bodies are our “mother”.  The anointed “I” is birthed within us and grows to maturity, even as the fleshly “I” wanes in the emerging light.  That is, it will grow in direct proportion to how we feed it.

Never mind the problem with God having an illegitimate child.  He kept the House of Judah around for long enough to bring forth His Son, then 40 years later finally divorced them as he did the House of Israel so many centuries prior.

I should add a slight pedantic note – you seem to have mixed up your “virgin”/”young woman” argument. The word in the Greek NT is ‘parthenos’ which most definitely does mean virgin. However, the passage in Isaiah uses ‘almah’, the Hebrew for ‘young woman’ (it can refer to a virgin, but does not imply it). So Matthew and Luke certainly intended us to read that Mary was a virgin, but the prophecy they see this as fulfilling does not require a virgin birth. However, the Septuagint inaccurately translates ‘almah’ as ‘parthenos’ (think of the English word ‘maiden’ to see how easily some languages can slip between the meanings) and so people relying on Greek translations of Scripture would be under the impression that a virgin birth would be required.

(Incidentally, there are some interesting implications of the Isaiah 7:14 prophecy applying to Jesus – the passage goes on to say that Immanuel must learn to reject evil and choose good)

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