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

Historical Development

The Ebionites and the Nazarenes

Charles Hodge traces the doctrine’s earliest rejection to the Ebionites, a sect of Jewish Christians in the early church who denied Christ’s deity by holding him to be “a mere man, the son of Joseph and Mary, distinguished from other men only by his holiness and his extraordinary endowments.”⁵ A related but distinct sect, the Nazarenes, “acknowledged his miraculous conception” and so “elevated Him above all other men,” yet still fell short of confessing his deity, treating the virgin birth as a mark of unusual honor rather than as evidence that its subject was God himself.⁶ Hodge notes that from the beginning, confessing Christ’s deity, not merely his unusual birth, was “the one indispensable condition of Christian fellowship,” so these Jewish sects “existed outside of the Church, and were not recognized as Christians.”⁷ The Second Helvetic Confession (1566) later named the Ebionites directly in stating the church’s contrary teaching, confessing that the eternal Son “was made the Son of man, from the seed of Abraham and David, not from the coitus of a man, as the Ebionites said, but was most chastely conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the ever virgin Mary.”⁸

A nineteenth-century textual challenge

Bavinck records a later challenge to the doctrine from textual criticism: it “has been attacked throughout the history of the church and again in the late nineteenth century by textual critics who claim, from the evidence of a Syrian text, that the reference to virgin birth in Matthew 1 was not original.”⁹ He judges that “the textual evidence does not warrant this conclusion,” and holds that the doctrine “has been part of Christian confession from the time of the earliest symbols of the faith,” attested independently in both Matthew’s and Luke’s infancy narratives.¹⁰

Objections and Responses

The virgin birth was borrowed from pagan myths about the sons of gods. Bavinck answers that the resemblance is only superficial: pagan birth fables are marked by “the shameless glorification of sensual lust attributed to the gods,” a world removed from “the simplicity, the delicacy, and the sanctity” of the Gospel accounts.¹¹ If anything, he argues, the likely direction of influence runs the other way: such fables would have made the earliest Jewish believers more reluctant, not more willing, to adopt a story that looked like them, so the doctrine’s presence in the Gospels counts against a theory of later borrowing rather than for one.¹²

Doesn’t the virgin birth require also believing Mary remained a virgin for the rest of her life? No. Bavinck distinguishes the two questions: the virgin birth itself, Christ’s conception by the power of the Holy Spirit without a human father, is what secures his sinless human nature and is confessed by the church universally. Mary’s perpetual virginity is a separate, later question concerning the identity of Jesus’s “brothers and sisters” named in the Gospels (Matt. 12:46-47; 13:55; Mark 6:3), on which faithful interpreters have disagreed (cousins, Joseph’s children from a prior marriage, or Mary’s own other children), and Bavinck calls that dispute “dogmatically of secondary importance” next to the conception itself.¹³

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.” ↩
Charles Hodge, “Chapter III. Person of Christ,” in Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 397. ↩
Hodge, 397. ↩
Hodge, 397. ↩
The Second Helvetic Confession (1566), chap. 11, “Of Jesus Christ, True God and Man, the Only Savior of the World.” ↩
Bavinck, chap. 14. ↩
Bavinck, chap. 14. ↩
Bavinck, chap. 14. ↩
Bavinck, chap. 14. ↩
Bavinck, chap. 14. ↩