The Virgin Birth of God

Author: Stan Guthrie
December 14, 2023
Joseph, a carpenter living in a forgotten backwater called Nazareth, is looking forward to spending his life with Mary and raising a family with her. Until the wedding day, she is betrothed to him. The days pass quickly and joyfully as the wedding approaches.
Then one day Mary calls Joseph aside with the most shocking news possible. This beautiful virgin girl says that she is pregnant. Joseph’s field of vision momentarily goes black, and his knees buckle. Faintly, he hears Mary say that the child is from the Holy Spirit and that she has been faithful. Joseph has never known Mary to be a liar, and he believes in God’s miraculous power as much as anyone … but not this story. 
Rather than drag Mary’s name through the mud, Joseph decides to divorce her quietly. That night, however, he has a dream. An angel of the Lord appears with a message:

“Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” 

When Joseph wakes up, all has changed. Joseph ditches his skepticism and takes Mary as his virgin wife and steels himself to defend her honor when the whispers inevitably begin. Certainly it was a convincing dream, but what explains Joseph’s complete and sudden about-face?
Matthew the Gospel writer says succinctly: 

All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet:
“Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
and they shall call his name Immanuel” (which means, God with us).

Joseph likely knew this prophecy, which appears in Isaiah 7:14. Critics have said that the word translated “virgin” in Isaiah, alma, actually means a young woman of marriageable age, and that the prophecy was fulfilled in the life of Isaiah himself, in the birth of his own son, as a sign that God would quickly defeat Judah’s enemies.
Yet this is not the whole story. Jews in Joseph’s time likely saw Isaiah 7:14 as both fulfilled in the prophet’s life and also as a larger messianic prediction. The Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Old Testament widely circulated in the first century, translates the Hebrew term using the Greek word parthenos, which means …virgin. 
Jews such as Joseph therefore viewed the prediction as having a larger, miraculous fulfillment—Immanuel, God, would be with them. Upon reflection, this prophecy may have reinforced the angel’s amazing words to Joseph’s troubled heart.
It is not surprising that many Jews would combine this prophecy about Immanuel with Isaiah 9:6, which also looks ahead to the birth of a Divine Child:

For to us a child is born,
… and his name shall be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
    Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

This coming child, Isaiah says, is born of a virgin because he is God himself. No wonder Joseph was so willing to accept Mary’s story. The question is, are we?

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Stan Guthrie is minister of communications at New Covenant Church. This article is taken from his book, A Concise Guide to Bible Prophecy: 60 Predictions Everyone Should Know (Baker, 2013).

Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash.

 ¹ One spurious (and longstanding) charge was that Mary became pregnant by a Roman soldier named Panthera. See, for example, Peter Schafer, Jesus in the Talmud (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 19-20.

  ² G.K. Beale and D.A. Carson, editors, Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 4; see also Isa. 8:3.

 

 

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