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To suggest that this (and Matthew's verse, "that which is conceived in [Mary] is of the Holy Ghost") is anything other than reported fact is to court blasphemy. The Holy Spirit's role in the conception in Mary's womb of God's Son, so spectacular and yet also touchingly intimate, is part of Christianity's theological bedrock and began entering the faith's creeds by the 2nd century. (Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy's beliefs go further, maintaining that Mary remained a virgin during and after Jesus' birth.) Says John Barclay, a New Testament expert at the University of Durham, England: "Theologically, this is the one thing that people will go to the stake for. If they defend the historicity of anything in the Christmas stories, they will defend this."
Raymond Brown was one who did not. Brown, author of the landmark work The Birth of the Messiah, dean of historical Jesus scholars until his death in 1998 and a Sulpician priest, observed that the idea of divine conception in the womb appeared to be part of a theological progression. The very first Christians thought that Jesus had become God's Son at his Resurrection; Mark, the first Gospel written, seemed to locate the moment at his baptism in the Jordan; and it is only by the time that Matthew and Luke were writing that believers had dated his Sonship to before his birth. Thus, if Mary was the eyewitness source for the Holy Spirit's direct involvement in Jesus' birth (and who else could it be?), her testimony was lost to Christians for half a century before Luke somehow picked it up. Weighing this, facts like Jesus' relatives' seeming ignorance of his messiahship in Mark and John and other clues, Brown concluded that both Matthew and Luke "regarded the virginal conception as historical, but the modern intensity about historicity was not theirs." Applying modern standards, he called the question "unresolved."
Such irresolution irks other Christians, who see Luke's line that "Mary kept all these things, pondering them in her heart," as a sign that she simply delayed telling people, and who must fight claims, some 2,000 years old, that the Nativities got the virginal conception wrong. Fellow Jews early on challenged Matthew's Gospel assertion that it fulfilled a prophecy in the Book of Isaiah that the Messiah would be born to a "virgin." (Isaiah's Hebrew actually talks of a "young girl"; Matthew was probably working from a Greek mistranslation.) Critics may also have alleged that Jesus' birth early in Mary's marriage to Joseph was the result of her committing adultery; much later Jewish sources named a Roman soldier called Panthera. Those accusations, some scholars believe, account for the verse in Matthew in which Joseph considers divorcing Mary before his dream angel allays his doubts. Related notions of Jesus' illegitimacy have never totally disappeared. Jane Schaberg, an iconoclastic feminist critic at the University of Detroit Mercy, has long maintained that parts of Luke's introduction to the topic echo the beginning of an Old Testament passage on rape ("If there be a virgin betrothed to a man, and if another ... should have lain with her"), suggesting violation as the cause of Mary's pregnancy. The Holy Spirit, in Schaberg's version, transmutes a ritually taboo pregnancy into an occasion of glory and the birth of the Holy Child.