As a Progressive Christian, I often perceive a pressure to ‘progress’ in all the ways others are, but why would I do that? One of the key drivers for becoming progressive in the first place was to escape group-think, and I won’t allow myself to be bound to a replacement set of dogma which can’t be questioned or divided up.
In the run up to Christmas, I see a lot of folk discounting the virgin birth as if it were utterly unjustifiable. I’ve done my studies, and I disagree. Briefly, I want to take you through the basic argument for the virgin birth, based on the language used in the Bible.
There are two key verses to look at, the first of which is a prophecy in Isaiah 7:14,
“Behold, a virgin will be with child and bear a son, and she will call His name Immanuel”
The Hebrew word translated ‘virgin’ is referenced in Strongs Concordance (H5959) as Al-mah or Al-maw. Like many Ancient Hebrew words, it has multiple possible meanings, and the translator has to choose which fits best from the context. Those possible translations are ‘a young woman, a damsel, a maid, or a virgin’. Three of those four translations mean virgin.
Some, however, have decided al-mah could just be referring to a young woman, which makes sense in the immediate application of the prophecy but not in its ultimate fulfilment. I’ll explain:
In the immediate context of the verse, Isaiah is prophesying that a young woman would have a child and whilst that boy was young, two enemy kingdoms would be overthrown, but that’s not the end of the story. Prophetic messages in the Bible often refer to more than one event. Jesus quoted prophecies that had already been fulfilled in the time they were proclaimed, and stated that they found their ultimate fulfilment in him. Isaiah 61, for example – “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me…” – was a promise of restoration to the Israelites after being ruled over by other kingdoms. When Jesus first announced his ministry, he read out this passage in the Hebrew Temple and proclaimed that the prophecy had been fulfilled in him that very day. Importantly, the second/ultimate fulfilment of Old Testament prophecies are always far greater than the immediate fulfilment.
The prophecy in Isaiah 7 was ultimately fulfilled in Jesus, as the writer of Matthew’s Gospel makes clear:
She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins. All this took place to fulfil what the Lord had said through the prophet: “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel” (which means “God with us”).
The second fulfilment of the prophecy is immeasurably greater than the first, serving as a sign that God is with us.
The Koine Greek word translated ‘virgin’ is ‘parqenoj’, and is referenced in Strongs (G3933) as having several possible meanings, which are:
1) a virgin
1a) a marriageable maiden (also meaning virgin)
1b) a woman who has never had sexual intercourse with a man (also meaning virgin)
1c) one’s marriageable daughter (culturally, Jewish women who were considered marriageable were virgins.).
The other two meanings only apply to men. So then, we have the Hebrew word Al-Mah, three out of the four possible translations of which mean virgin, and the Koine Greek word parqenoj, all four translations of which mean virgin.
The context of this ultimate fulfilment of the prophecy is the promise of a great sign of God’s union with humankind – Immanuel, God with us. An ordinary pregnancy would hardly be any kind of special sign, would it? Rather, it would go unnoticed from a theological point of view. I think this implies that, of the possible meanings of the word, ‘virgin’ is the only sensible way to go when translating the Greek verse, which specifically applies to the birth of Jesus.
Holding to our faith
I greatly value the progressive community and have found solidarity there when asking difficult questions and reaching new conclusions. That said, there may well be some group-think going on, just as there is in any faith community – a pressure to latch on to a new set of dogma rather than continue to sift things through, study them for yourself, bring them to God, and ultimately keep the good and dump the bad.
For anyone feeling pressured into abandoning or diminishing beliefs about Jesus’ birth, life, miracles, teachings, death, resurrection, and ascension, I promise you that you can keep hold of all that stuff as a thinking believer. Certainly, that has been the case for me.
Merry Christmas to all readers!
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