A few months ago, I posted a defense of the historical reliability of the virgin birth accounts in Scripture (you can read it here). It was not an exhaustive treatment, and after some further research, I'd likely frame some of it rather differently. But instead of weakening my conclusions, I think I've stumbled upon a point that strengthens them. In the course of some apologetics dialogues with a parishioner, it became clear that one of the most-used skeptical arguments against the virgin birth not only doesn't fit the data; the data actually provide a fairly significant argument in favor of the virgin birth.
Many skeptics will frame their reconstruction of events this way: (1) the only significant prophecy of the virgin birth in the Old Testament, Isaiah 7:14, uses a word that doesn't necessarily imply virginity (and there was a stronger word for "virgin" available in Hebrew, which the text does not employ); (2) when the OT was translated into Greek in the Septuagint, this term was erroneously rendered with a Greek word that more strongly implied virginity; (3) when the early Jewish-Christian community read Isaiah 7:14 two centuries later, after the events of Christ's life, they assumed that the Messiah had to be born of a virgin; (4) so they made up a false narrative about Jesus's birth to fit the presumed meaning of the prophecy.
There's some surface-level merit to this argument, enough that it might sound pretty convincing to those unwilling to actually research its claims. But I did research its claims, and they don't really hold up. I'll lay out the textual issues with the "virgin" terminology below, going into a bit more detail than my previous post, but the real thing that sinks the skeptical argument--and this new insight is the one I want to highlight--is that Step #3 of their argument doesn't actually fit the facts. What we know about Jewish interpretation in this period suggests that while most did accept a reading of Isaiah 7:14 implying virginity, they did not read this as necessitating a miraculous virgin birth. In other words, there was no contemporary expectation that the Messiah would have to be born of a virgin. The only reason for early Christians to read the Isaiah 7:14 prophecy that way, then, is because they actually believed a virgin birth had happened.
Let's dig into the details. First, the terminology: Isaiah uses the term 'almah to describe the person who will bear this child, and the term does not necessarily mean "virgin" (though the vast majority of 'almahs would, in fact, be virgins). Some modern Bible translations acknowledge this by translating
‘almah as “young woman.” But it’s not entirely true to say that there
was a better or clearer word for “virgin” in ancient Hebrew, and the issue comes down to a linguistic aspect called semantic range--the scope of different meanings and implications a single word can have, along with the complex connotations that ride along with the term. When translating a term from one language into another, it's simply the case that the semantic ranges for those terms usually will not be a perfect match. That means that if we're looking for a particular English meaning, like "virgin," it's linguistically unlikely that there would be a single word that maps exactly on the meanings and connotations that our word conveys. And that disparity is exactly what we find in this case.
Where our terminology of "virgin" highlights the presence
or absence of sexual activity, the available Hebrew words tend to add in other social aspects alongside (though absence of sexual activity, in the case of
both words and depending on usage, was also an assumed part of the semantic
range). ‘Almah does not simply mean “young woman.” It specifically
designates a young woman of marriageable age, usually applicable until the birth of her
first child. So it included under its umbrella both unmarried women (culturally
assumed to be virgins) and young married women who had not yet borne children.
The etymology of the term plausibly indicates that it originally leaned more
toward the former class than the latter, as it indicates a connection with the
root words for something “hidden” and “enclosed,” often employed in literary
allusions to virginity (as in Song of Songs). Even in later usage, it still
tended predominantly toward young, unmarried women (so, virgins). But is it a
straight-up word for our word “virgin”? No, because ancient Hebrew didn’t have
a word that only meant that, in the absence of other social considerations.
The
only other candidate is betulah, but this is not an
exact gloss for “virgin” either. A betulah was a young woman who was
still under her father’s care. Culturally, then, it was assumed that all betulahs
were virgins, and that was certainly a prominent implication of the term, but
not its sole meaning. It included an aspect of social placement relative to her
father’s house, an aspect which we just don’t have in our word “virgin.” Further,
even the virginity aspect of betulah is not quite as exact a match as
people make it out to be. In at least one place in the OT, a betulah is
associated with having a husband—Joel 1:8, while translated in various ways
because of this particular textual difficulty, literally says, “Mourn like a betulah
in sackcloth, grieving for the husband [ba’al – “husband,” not
“betrothed” or “bridgegroom”] of her youth.” This might refer to a young bride, no longer a virgin, who had to resort back to her father's care because of her husband's death.
So here’s where we start to see the difficulties. We want a
word that maps exactly onto our linguistic concern for the “virgin” aspect. But
there’s no exact fit; words just don’t work that way across languages and
cultures. Both ‘almah and betulah would have carried a significant
implication of virginity. And while one might be able to say that betulah maps
a little more closely onto the semantic range for virgin than does ‘almah,
I think that’s all you can say. It’s a matter of a few degrees, not a
black-and-white contrast. This is important to understand: by choosing ‘almah
instead of betulah, Isaiah was not choosing against a possible
reading of “virgin.” Both terms can easily fit that bill, depending on usage
and application.
Further, there are other significant reasons why Isaiah
might have chosen ‘almah. For
example, one could make a case that in Mary’s situation, ‘almah is just
the better fit for her social condition—definitely an ‘almah, but, at
least on some readings, maybe not a betulah anymore—she was betrothed,
and early traditions indicate that her own father had long since passed away.
So why wouldn’t Isaiah 7 use betulah, which would indicate virginity in
a slightly more unambiguous way? Maybe because it wasn’t the right word for
what Mary was. If one wanted to stress virginity-as-such, then betulah would
likely be the clearer term, but that runs into two problems: first, as already
noted, Mary didn’t fit the other social elements of a betulah, and
second, the prophecy does double duty in making reference to both proximate and
future events, and in this case it seems pretty clear that the partial
proximate fulfillment in Isaiah’s day was not understood as a virgin birth. For
the prophecy to do what it was called on to do, it had to have some ambiguity
packed in; there’s no way around that. So does that still leave the Christian interpretation of the
passage leaning on a word that might-or-might-not clearly indicate virginity?
Sure. But Hebrew just doesn’t give us a better word choice in this instance, to
meet the purposes the term had to serve.
At this point, it’s instructive to note that the Jewish Septuagint translators, two centuries before Christ, chose to translate the term as parthenos—a reasonable translation choice, given the available overlaps of the semantic ranges between Hebrew and Greek, and one that leans fairly directly (though again, not entirely unambiguously) toward the implication of virginity. Most scholars today accept that this is the reason the Jewish translators of the Septuagint made this choice: they believed that the implication of ‘almah in Is. 7:14 included virginity, otherwise they likely would have chosen a different word. That’s something of a supposition, but it’s pretty widely held. We don’t have a lot of evidence for exactly how pre-Christian Jews read ‘almah in Is. 7:14, but the scant evidence we do have, including the Septuagint, leans in favor of the idea that they genuinely saw it as saying “virgin.”
But the fact that pre-Christian Jews apparently thought the passage spoke of a virgin does not necessarily imply that they believed the Messiah would have a miraculous virgin birth. All the evidence (or lack thereof) shows that that was not an idea that entered their minds. Most people get this element wrong, so it’s important to be clear, or else the lack of pre-Christian Jewish messianic expectations centered on a virgin birth might look troubling. Take, for instance, the Dead Sea Scrolls, which include midrashes on Is. 7 that convey no sense of a future virgin birth. Could the fact that there was a lack of Jewish expectation of a virgin birth mean that we’ve been reading Is. 7:14 wrong all along? No, I think that framing it that way is actually looking at it backwards, and in fact the evidence before us paints a pretty strong picture that what happened here was, indeed, the virgin birth of Christ.
Let me explain. Our best readings, especially as based on the Septuagint, suggest that Jews in the centuries before Christ likely did read ‘almah in Is. 7:14 with an implication of virginity, but (from the Dead Sea Scrolls and elsewhere) that they did not assume that this indicated a miraculous virgin birth. They simply read the verse, quite naturally, as implying a prudent gap in the middle: “The virgin [who will then get married and have sex] will conceive and give birth to a son…” That’s a pretty natural way to read the verse, to be honest. God chooses a virgin, and it makes sense that he’d pair her up with someone, and they will have a baby. Pre-Christian Jews seem to have thought that ‘almah implied virginity from what we can tell, but there was no significant textual reason to jump from there right to a miraculous virgin birth—not unless you knew of one that had actually happened, that is!
I think this element clearly undercuts the skeptical position. Skeptics frequently make the argument that the pressure of a messianic expectation connected to a virgin birth forced the earliest Christians to make up a story that fit that mold. But that skeptical argument no longer holds water, because there is no evidence for any such messianic expectation. The standard Jewish reading of the text, even when read as “virgin,” was simply not seen to necessitate a miraculous virgin birth, and so there would have been no pressure on early Christians to make up the story of the virgin birth just to fit it. No one had yet envisioned Is. 7:14 in that manner (at least, that we know of), so there would have been no pressure at all to use the passage as a motivator to fraudulently make up a whole infancy narrative. Once we realize that there were no significant expectations of a virgin birth, the whole concept of Matthew and Luke frantically scrambling to make up a story that fits that reading falls away into silence. Rather, the best explanation for the Christian attitude to the text is that the virgin birth actually happened, and then, in light of that event, Christian exegetes were able to see and make sense of Is. 7:14 in a way that no one had ever really considered before.
So again, it’s only after the virgin birth of Christ that Christians went back to this passage with new eyes and were able to perceive what had lain out there in the open all along. That’s actually the way most of the Messianic prophecies in the OT played out, and I don’t think it’s fair to the text to assume that this one should somehow play by different rules. The pattern matches God’s consistent habit of declaring his “mystery” through the ages, often by hints and allusions that will only fully make sense later on, and then revealing it all in Christ when the veil is taken away.
Are there other possibilities here that critics can appeal to? Sure, in the absence of evidence, the only limit is their imagination. Skeptics could try to impugn Mary by making the story a fraud she perpetrated to cover up an infidelity, or suggest the implausible notion that culturally distant ideas from mystery-religion myths had a formative influence on the earliest layer of Christian belief. All of those are pretty wild stretches, though—a grasping for alternative explanations because one simply doesn’t want to believe the plainest one: that early Christians were convinced the virgin birth actually happened, and that’s why they told the story. The main counter-narrative that has so often been told—that the expectation of a miraculous virgin birth forced early Christians to make up the story—simply doesn’t fit the available facts.
All things considered, when looking at early Christianity as it was actually situated in Second Temple Judaism, the best explanation for their reading of Is. 7:14 is that they honestly believed the virgin birth was true, otherwise there would have been no pressure or need to appeal to that passage at all.
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