Born of a Virgin?: Reconceiving Jesus In The Bible, Tradition And Theology

by Andrew Lincoln

Unless we assume that this matter was of no interest to Matthew and his first readers, there are only two viable explanations of this gap in the account. One is that they are so familiar with a tradition that Jesus was conceived miraculously without any male involved in the process that this can simply be presupposed. Readers can then be expected to pick up on the one possible allusion to this tradition the account offers and realize that the term parthenos in the Isaiah citation should now be interpreted not, as expected from its LXX source, as a young woman but as a virgin. This is certainly possible and, despite the account’s lack of interest in depicting the conception as a miracle, is how most of its later readers have interpreted it, presumably under the influence of Luke’s story and later credal tradition. But there is, of course, another fairly obvious explanation. Matthew was aware of another tradition, one that Jewish opponents would use against Christian claims about Jesus, namely, that some other unidentified male was the father.