Was there really a virgin birth in the Bible? No and yes, in that order.
The virgin birth of Jesus to Mary is a cornerstone of Christian belief, and has been for nearly two thousand years. Yet for all its centrality, it remains a matter of controversy not just because of the boldness of the claim that a virgin woman conceived and gave birth, but because of two different kinds of confusion about the text. The result is that some people (wrongly) claim that both the Old Testament and the New Testament refer to Jesus’s birth to a virgin Mary, while other people (wrongly) claim that the virgin birth is just a mistranslation. The truth is more nuanced and more interesting.
On one hand, the Gospels of Matthew and Luke are clear on the matter.
According to Matthew 1:18, Jesus is born to Mary, who becomes pregnant before having sex with her betrothed, Joseph: “When Jesus’s mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit.” We recall that this is the second part of Matthew’s answer to the unasked question “Who is Jesus?”
The literal translation of the language here, from the NRSV, in theory leaves open various possible interpretations: for instance maybe Mary and Joseph were having sex before they lived together. So do other common translations, including the KJV, which attributes Mary’s pregnancy to the time before she and Joseph “came together.” But the text is clear, in spite of the euphemism for sex. Joseph and Mary had not yet had sex when Mary became pregnant.
To drive home the point, Matthew 1:19–20 explains that Joseph worried about marrying the now-pregnant Mary, but an angel explains to him that he shouldn’t be concerned, because the “child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.” Again, this leaves open the technical possibility that the child, though not Joseph’s, belonged to another man, but only if the angel was lying. And we find nothing in the text to support that suggestion.
Luke is even more direct. Luke 1:27 indicates specifically that Mary is a virgin. In verse 31, a visiting angel tells Mary that she will conceive, and she wonders, in verse 34, how that is possible since she is still a virgin—literally, “has not known a man.” The angel assures her in the following verses that she will conceive by power of the “Holy Spirit,” and, furthermore, that unlikely pregnancies are well attested, because nothing is too difficult for God. It’s still possible to try to find an out: Mary is a virgin when the angel visits, but maybe she doesn’t stay a virgin; maybe “know a man” isn’t exactly the same thing as having sex; and more. But these are clear attempts to force a reading onto the text that isn’t there. This is a passage about a virgin giving birth.
So that part is clear. Both Gospels report that Jesus was born to a virgin Mary.
The confusion starts with the continuation of Matthew’s account.
As the NRSV has it, “All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: ‘Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,’ which means ‘God is with us.’ "We already know that we should replace the word “fulfill” here with the more accurate “match.” Matthew is matching his account of Jesus’s virgin birth with part of the Old Testament.
The part he has in mind is Isaiah 7:14. And this is the first source of confusion, because Isaiah isn’t originally about a virgin. It’s about a young woman. The Hebrew word for the woman who gets pregnant in Isaiah 7:14 is alma, and we know from elsewhere that the word doesn’t mean “virgin,” but rather “young woman.”
How, then, could Matthew quote Isaiah? We saw in the last three chapters that the point of aligning two texts was that the words had to match up, even if the meanings did not. What matches here? In this case, the Greek translation called the Septuagint provides the bridge between Isaiah and Matthew, in the form of one tiny translation mistake. Where the Hebrew talks about a young woman (alma) in Isaiah, the Greek there refers to a virgin (parthenos).
Though it seems like a pretty big goof now, in antiquity most young women were virgins and most female virgins were young women, so translating one as the other was a pretty good approximation. We have lots of pairs of words now that are similar enough that mixing them up would be reasonable in most circumstances. One example is “village” and “town”; there are technical distinctions between the two (some people insist that a town has to have a market, while a village only needs a church), but they are mostly interchangeable. In a place where everyone drives a car, “automobile” and “vehicle” can be used in place of each other. For most people, “teenager” and “high-schooler” mean roughly the same thing, even though there are teenagers who are not in high school and high-schoolers who are not teenagers. Similar to these modern pairs, “virgin” and “young woman” in antiquity were close enough for most purposes.
Many modern readers are surprised that the hugely influential Septuagint would make do with “good enough” or “close enough” or “almost” for its translation. But the goal of the Septuagint was never just to mimic the Hebrew exactly, and we frequently find rough or imprecise translations. For instance, the Hebrew of Genesis 24:16 describes a “young woman who was a virgin,” but the Septuagint, content with near matches for vocabulary, inadvertently changed that into the silly “a virgin who was a virgin.” It didn’t matter. The point was still clear.
There is, though, one case in which the difference between a young woman in general and a virgin specifically is crucial, and that is when she is pregnant. The Hebrew of Isaiah 7:14 reads, “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Emmanuel.” But the Greek turns that into “a virgin is with child.” The Greek version of Isaiah 7:14 is a mistranslation of the Hebrew.
So it’s true that Isaiah 7:14 is about a sign, but—in spite of the Greek—the sign is certainly not a virgin birth. It’s not even clear that the sign is the birth at all. The sign might be the child’s name, “Emmanuel,” which means “God is with us.” Or, based on the next verse, the sign might be the child’s diet: “He shall eat curds and honey by the time he knows how to reject evil and choose good.” And the text doesn’t indicate when the sign will appear.
The only thing that is clear, from this passage and from the larger context, is that the prophet Isaiah intercedes during a spat between God and a king named Ahaz. Starting in verse 10, God and Ahaz engage in verbal sparring over whether Ahaz needs to ask for a sign from God: God taunts Ahaz, “Go ahead, ask for a sign.” The king replies, “I don’t need a sign; I trust you.” This is when Isaiah intervenes and tells Ahaz not to worry. God isn’t helpless. God will take the initiative and “give you a sign.” (This is why the NRSV says, “the Lord himself ”—to indicate “of his own accord,” similar to the way a parent might chastise a child: “I shouldn’t have to tell you to do your chores. You should know to do them yourself.”) The sign— whatever it is—is from God for King Ahaz.
The Greek mistranslation of Isaiah 7:14 that turned a pregnant young woman into a pregnant virgin is unfortunate, but hardly a matter for too much concern. There are far worse mistranslations in the Greek Septuagint. (We already saw in that the Greek turned the Hebrew verb “take” in the Ten Commandments into “desire,” and we noted that the Greek added the word “word” to Deuteronomy 8:3, making it easier for Matthew to quote that text to mean that we can subsist on God’s word alone.)
Many English translations, misunderstanding the way Old Testament passages are quoted in the New Testament, insist on rendering the Hebrew of Isaiah 7:14 as “virgin,” even though it’s clear that the original word there means “young woman.” Frequently, the motivation behind this purposeful mistranslation is to bolster the account in Matthew, reinforcing Jesus’s virgin birth.
But the reasoning is faulty. We already know that the same words in the Old Testament and the New Testament can mean different things. This is the pattern we saw with “what God says” that became “God’s word” and with the voice crying about the wilderness that became a voice in the wilderness. Quoting out of context was acceptable and even desirable. Furthermore, there are other inconsistencies between Matthew and Isaiah. Most obviously, the child in Isaiah is named “Emmanuel” while the child in Matthew is named “Jesus.” And as we saw above, Matthew even quotes the part of Isaiah that mentions Emmanuel’s name (“All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: ‘Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel’ ”).
Some people look at the text of Matthew and conclude that the writer just made a mistake based on the faulty Greek translation in the Septuagint. But in light of all of the evidence, this doesn’t seem likely. It’s not just that the children have different names and the contexts don’t match. Matthew would certainly have known Hebrew. And this is not the only place where Matthew quotes an Old Testament passage completely out of context.
Rather, the Greek mistranslation opened the door for Matthew to connect the virgin birth in the New Testament to an otherwise unrelated passage in the Old Testament, which, in its new context, provided commentary on Jesus’s life as Matthew understood it.
So originally there was no virgin birth in the Old Testament. Then a mistranslation created one. And there was a virgin birth in the New Testament all along.
In this case, the misunderstanding comes from two sources: a general misconception about the Greek word plirow and a specific translation error in the ancient Greek Septuagint. But at least we are able to identify the mistakes clearly.
Excerpted from The Bible Doesn't Say That: 40 Biblical Mistranslations, Misconceptions, and Other Misunderstandings . Copyright © 2016 by the author and reprinted by permission of Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press, LLC.
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