Today in the liturgical calendar we celebrate Mary’s visit to her cousin Elizabeth, which took place when both women were pregnant—with Jesus and John the Baptist, respectively. This seems like a good day to respond to a question posed by one of my readers a few weeks back.

He asked, “What is the historical evidence for the virgin birth?”

In response, here are a few thoughts on the doctrine of the virgin birth:

1. There is no historical evidence for the virgin birth.

Indeed, it’s hard to even imagine what kind of historical evidence there could even be. If you could go all the way back to the time when the events happened (or didn’t happen, I guess), all you would have is the word of a teenage girl and her fiancé. When she told you she was pregnant by the power of the Holy Spirit and not by sexual intercourse with her betrothed, you would either believe her or you wouldn’t. There’s really no way to produce evidence of sex not happening. It’s a matter of faith.

2. Christians have long believed in the virgin birth of Jesus.

Christians have affirmed a belief in the virgin birth since very early on. In the New Testament, both Matthew (1:18-25) and Luke (1:26-2:20) tell stories of a virgin named Mary who miraculously gave birth to a son. The Greek word translated “virgin” (parthenos) refers to an unmarried woman, though not necessariliy a virgin. However, both Matthew and Luke are clear that Mary has not had sexual relations with Joseph. Matthew says that Mary was pregnant “before they lived together” (Matthew 1:18). In Luke, Mary tells the angel Gabriel that she has “not known a man” (Luke 1:34). Both Gospel writers are clear that the child is not of human origin but is, in one way or another, from the Holy Spirit (Matthew 1:18; Luke 1:35).

3. It is possible to tell the Gospel of Jesus Christ without reference to the virgin birth.

While the story of the virgin birth appears in two of our gospels, biblically speaking it isn’t necessary to mention the virgin birth when telling the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Neither Mark nor John makes any mention of the virgin birth. When Paul tells the story of Jesus, he focuses almost exclusively on the crucifixion and resurrection without ever mentioning Jesus’s birth. This isn’t to say that these writers deny the virgin birth. They just don’t mention it. Either they didn’t know of any such belief or they didn’t think it was an important part of the gospel story.

4. The concept of the virgin birth of Jesus comes from a prophecy in Isaiah 7.

Matthew connects the virgin birth to a prophecy from the Old Testament prophet Isaiah. Matthew says,

All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the prophet: “Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call him Emmanuel,” which means, “God is with us.” (Matthew 1:22-23)

The original prophecy is found in Isaiah 7. In the original context, Isaiah wasn’t talking about the miraculous birth of a messiah. Rather, he was offering a sign to Ahaz, the king of Judah, that the siege of Jerusalem by Syria and Ephraim (which occurred in 734-731 BCE) would end soon. He points to a young, pregnant woman and tells Ahaz that the siege will be over before a newborn child can “eat curds and honey” (Isaiah 7:14-15). Eight centuries later, Matthew saw in this prophecy a prediction of Jesus as the messiah.

Incidentally, the Hebrew word in Isaiah’s prophecy is `almah, which refers not specifically to a virgin but rather to a woman who has not yet given birth to her first child. Indeed, the woman in Isaiah’s prophecy seems already to be pregnant. The Greek version of Isaiah translates the Hebrew `almah with the Greek parthenos, which more usually refers to a virgin. Matthew gets his prophecy from the Greek version of Isaiah.

 5. The story of the virgin birth is part of a long line of miraculous biblical birth stories.

While Mary is the only virgin to give birth in the Bible, her story is part of a long tradition of miraculous birth stories tracing all the way back to Sarah, the foremother of the Jewish people. The miracle of Sarah is that she gave birth to Isaac when she and her husband Abraham were too old to have children (Genesis 21). So, too, Isaac’s wife’s Rebekah was unable to have children until God blessed her (Genesis 25:19-28), as was Jacob’s wife Rachel (Genesis 30:1-8). Hannah, the mother of the great prophet Samuel, also became pregnant miraculously (1 Samuel 1). Even Mary’s own cousin Elizabeth became pregnant with John the baptizer after she had passed her childbearing years (Luke 1:5-25). Mary’s story connects her to this long tradition of miraculous births, though a virgin birth is the most miraculous of all.

 6. The virgin birth declares the power of God to create life.

Theologically speaking, the point of all of these miraculous birth stories is that God has the power to bring life where life seems impossible. Sarah could not have given birth to Isaac without God’s intervention. That means that Isaac—and all of the Jewish people descended from him—exist only because of God’s miraculous act of grace. They are not an accidental people. They are God’s people. So, too, with the virgin birth of Jesus.

 In that sense, Jesus’s virgin birth is a kind of foretelling of his resurrection. With the virgin birth, God creates life outside the normal processes of human reproduction. In the resurrection, God re-creates life out of death itself, signaling that the grave no longer has power over us. In both the virgin birth and the resurrection, God transforms a world characterized by scarcity and death into a new creation marked by life and abundance.

 7. The virgin birth also emphasizes the essential role of women in the redemption of the world.

Of course, God’s power to create life is only half the story of the virgin birth. Jesus is the Word made flesh, born of God and of Mary, each essential to the process. While it is the Holy Spirit who initiates the process, it is Mary who does the hard work of bearing the Christ child and bringing him into the world. It is Mary who raises him up and (at least according to John) Mary who inaugurates his ministry (John 2). Mary takes her place in a long line of women who carried forward the story of God in the world (along with Sarah, Hagar, Rebekah, Rahab, Ruth, Hannah, and Elizabeth, to name but a few).

When Jesus rises from the tomb, he will again appear first to women—Mary, Mary Magdalene, and Salome—who will bear the good news of the resurrection into the world. Without Mary—without women—God’s redemption of the world through Jesus Christ could not have happened.

 Want to know more about the theology of the virgin birth? Consider Kyle Roberts’s A Complicated Pregnancy: Whether Mary was a Virgin and Why It Matters.