Virgin birth of Jesus

“Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel” (which means, God with us).

— Matthew 1:23

The virgin birth of Jesus is the doctrine that Mary conceived Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit, without a human father (Matt. 1:18-25; Luke 1:26-38). The virgin conception is not a display of power for its own sake: by excluding a human father, it secured that Christ, unlike every other descendant of Adam, was not conceived under Adam’s headship, so that his human nature could be genuinely sinless from its first moment.¹

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession states that the Son of God “did, when the fullness of time was come, take upon him man’s nature, with all the essential properties and common infirmities thereof, yet without sin; being conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary, the Holy Spirit coming down upon her, and the power of the Most High overshadowing her; and so was made of a woman of the tribe of Judah, of the seed of Abraham and David according to the Scriptures.”² The confession ties the virgin conception directly to Christ’s sinlessness (“yet without sin”) and to his genuine, scripturally-traced humanity (“made of a woman”), holding both together rather than treating the miracle as evidence for one at the expense of the other.

Biblical Basis

When the angel Gabriel told Mary she would bear a son, she asked, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?” His answer named both agent and result: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God,” adding, “for nothing will be impossible with God” (Luke 1:34-35, 37). Matthew records the same event from Joseph’s side and reads it as the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy: “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel” (Matt. 1:23, quoting Isa. 7:14), a name meaning “God with us.”³ The virgin conception is itself an instance of the same power that overshadowed Israel’s judges and tabernacle (cf. Exod. 40:34): “nothing will be impossible with God” is not a general remark about God’s power but the direct answer to how a virgin could conceive.⁴

Related Doctrines

References

Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 14, “The Only Begotten Son of the Father.” ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 8, “Of Christ the Mediator,” para. 2. ↩
Matthew Barrett, None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2019), chap. 9, “Is God Bound by Space? Omnipresence.” ↩
Barrett, chap. 10, “Is God All-Powerful, All-Knowing, and All-Wise? Omnipotence, Omniscience, and Omnisapience.” ↩