Introduction
Despite its overall brevity, Matthew’s infancy narrative is packed with cultural, historical, and mythological allusions which enrich the story’s meaning. Yet, most of this is entirely lost on even seasoned students of the Bible. The one point of contention that has somewhat made its way into the general public’s awareness is Matthew’s misuse of a prophecy in Isaiah.
Isaiah 7.14
‘Look, the virgin has conceived and shall bear a son, and they shall call him Immanuel.’
Per Matthew, the ‘son’ is Jesus, born to the ‘virgin’ Mary, an act predicted centuries in advance. But Isaiah was addressing a contemporary crisis, in which the birth of a particular ‘son’ would function as a sign that the crisis would soon be resolved. Matthew completely ignores this context. Worse still is the translation choice of ‘virgin’. Matthew quoted from the existing Greek translation of Isaiah, which used the word
Matthew’s author has isolated this sentence from its place in Isaiah, allowing him to shape the reader’s thoughts with his prior narrative. When they arrive at his citation of LXX Isa 7.14, they have been led to infer that
While it is certain that Isaiah was not talking about Jesus—the prophet was most likely referring to the birth of his own son, described with nearly identical language in the very next chapter—the above criticism of Matthew’s misinterpretation of the prophecy, common as it has become, may itself rest on a misinterpretation of Matthew’s infancy narrative at large, and hence also what he intends by citing LXX Isa 7.14. I was challenged by an acquiantance, what if Matthew did not intend for
Scandalous Women in Jesus’ Ancestry
Matthew’s gospel begins with a genealogy for Jesus. While this list provides Jesus’ lineage through his male ancestors all the way back to Abraham, it has long been noted the author draws attention to four women: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba.
When the patriarch Judah disrespected his daughter-in-law Tamar by failing to uphold the levirate marriage custom, she disguised herself as a prostitute to seduce Judah himself and conceived twins as a result. When the post-exodus Israelites attacked the city of Jericho, they were assisted by one of the city’s prostitutes, Rahab, who then married into Israelite society. In the days before Israel was ruled by kings, the Moabite widow Ruth traveled to Israel, where she seduced the landowner Boaz. Lastly, David had an affair with Bathsheba (‘the wife of Uriah’), which eventually led to the birth of Solomon.
All four women were known in the Hebrew Bible, or in post-biblical interpretation, for some manner of sexual scandal.
The common theological interpretation is that Matthew cited these women to demonstrate a broad interest in the fair treatment of women within the Christian community. He could point to them as examples of women who positively contributed to God’s plan (i.e. the lineage of the Messiah). Likewise, in an apologetics sense, Matthew is also interpreted as highlighting specifically scandalous women to justify Mary against false accusations that Jesus was the result of her committing adultery: no one may criticize Mary’s virginal pregnancy as a cover-up for a hidden sexual sin, because God made sure women guilty of sexual sins were part of the Messiah’s ancestry. This would be a sort of lesser-to-greater argument, though it is unnecessarily convoluted, since it assumes Mary’s actual innocence of any such sin.
Merely invoking the four women by name was sufficient enough for an attentive reader to recognize what pattern connected them, and so that the pattern extended to the next woman to be named: Mary. Instead of an unnecessarily convoluted interpretation in which Matthew categorizes Mary alongside these scandalous women as a defense for a sin for which Mary was not even guilty, perhaps Matthew was acting on the much simpler, more obvious reason: that Mary’s pregnancy was legitimately the result of a sexual scandal. That Matthew does not bother with an account of such a scandal is irrelevant, just as he does not weigh down the genealogy to describe the sordid details of any of the women.
A Son from the Holy Spirit
Having firmly implicated Mary as belonging to the same category as the other four women in the genealogy, Matthew transitions from genealogy to narrative. Mary, it turns out, was betrothed to a man named Joseph. He learns that she is pregnant, despite that they have not had sex. Because he valued mercy as an element of justice, he intended to divorce her privately, to avoid drawing attention to her infidelity and putting her in harm’s way. However, as far as God is concerned, Joseph would be making a mistake. God sends an angel to speak to Joseph in a dream, informing him that Mary will give birth to a savior for Israel. Both the narration and the angel’s speech to Joseph identify Jesus as divine in origin.
Matthew 1.18
Matthew 1.20
she was found to be with child from the holy spirit.
‘the child conceived in her is from the holy spirit.’
Giving credit to God for the conception or birth of a child was not unusual, nor was it mutually exclusive to that child being conceived through natural means.
Genesis 4.1
Now the man knew his wife Eve, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, ‘I have got a man from Yhwh.’
Genesis 17.15
God said to Abraham, ‘As for Sarai your wife, you shall not call her Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name. I will bless her, and moreover I will give you a son by her.’
2 Samuel 7.14
‘I [Yhwh] will be a father to him [Solomon], and he shall be a son to me. When he commits iniquity, I will punish him with a rod such as men use, with blows inflicted by the sons of men.’
This brings us to a statement found in a midrash on Genesis’ story of Judah and Tamar, one of the sexual scandals already mentioned.
Genesis 38.26
Testament of Judah 12.4–8
Then Judah acknowledged them and said, ‘She is more in the right than I, since I did not give her to my son Shelah.’ And he did not lie with her again.
So I had intercourse with her and she conceived. Not understanding what I had done, it was my wish to kill her. But she sent me secretly the pledges and utterly humiliated me. I summoned her and heard the words spoken in a mystery, when I was drunk and sleeping with her. So I could not kill her, because it was from the Lord. … But I did not go near her again
In this retelling of the story, Judah credits the scandal itself to God. It was common for reimagined versions of older tales to have a more explicitly deterministic theology embedded within them, anachronistically making characters aware of divine purposes centuries in advance. Judah inexplicably states that his sexual scandal came ‘from’ God, because this version of Judah was written by an author with a later, more developed theology about Israel’s twelve tribes and their respective roles over history.
Another version of the story transfers this statement from Judah to a revelation from the bat qol.
Targum Jerusalem 38.26
And Judah recognized the three witnesses, and rose to his feet, and said, ‘I implore you, my brothers, and you men of the house of my fathers, to hear me. With the measure that a man measures, so shall it be measured to him, whether good measure or evil, and every man who confesses his works is blessed. Because I took the coat of Joseph my brother and dipped it into the blood of a goat, and brought it before the feet of my father and said to him, “Know now whether this is your son’s coat or not,” the measure is according to the measure, and the rule to the rule. It is better for me to blush in this world than to blush in the world to come, better to burn with a fire that goes out, than to burn in the fire-devouring fire. Let Tamar my daughter-in-law be spared. She has not conceived a child by fornication, but because I did not give to her Shelah my son.’ The bat qol came forth from heaven and said, ‘Both of you are acquitted in the judgment. The thing was from the Lord.’ And he added not to know her.
No longer do we have a mere human peeking behind the curtain to glimpse God’s plan. Rather, divine authority itself reveals directly that God ordained the sexual scandal. This bat qol (literally ‘daughter of voice’, i.e. a small voice) was identified as a divine herald speaking on behalf of God, and was essentially synonymous with the ‘holy spirit’, the semi-personified activity or presence of God within creation.
Keritot 5b.24–25
Sifra, Shemini, Mekhilta DeMiluim II.37
And with regard to this matter Moses, our teacher, was concerned, thinking, ‘Perhaps, God forbid, I misused the anointing oil by pouring too much, which resulted in these two additional drops.’ The bat qol emerged and said, ‘It is like the precious oil upon the head, descending upon the beard; the beard of Aaron, that descends upon the collar of his garments, like the dew of the Hermon that comes down upon the mountains of Zion.’ This comparison serves to teach: just as the Hermon’s dew is not subject to misuse of consecrated property, as it is not consecrated but can be used by all, so too, the anointing oil that descends upon Aaron’s beard is not subject to misuse of consecrated property.
When Moses spilled the anointment oil on Aaron’s head, he recoiled and fell backwards, saying, ‘Woe unto me for defiling the anointment oil!’ He feared that too much of it had been spilled and that he may have derived benefit from it. Whereupon, he was reassured by the holy spirit, ‘Behold, how good and how pleasant is the dwelling of brothers together, as the precious oil upon the head, running down upon the beard, the beard of Aaron, running down over his garments, as the dew of Hermon running down upon the hills of Zion.’ Just as the dew is not defiled, the oil of anointment is not defiled.
The role of the bat qol in Targum Jerusalem’s version of the Tamar story brings the account yet another step closer to the holy spirit’s role in Matthew’s infancy narrative.
In his letter to the Galatians, Paul says that Jesus was ‘born of a woman’ (4.4). His phrasing, specifying a mother but no father, has often by taken as an allusion to the virgin birth. The phrase is actually an idiom which identifies the person as a human (cf. Job 14.1; 15.14; 25.4; Matt 11.11; Luke 7.28). It means nothing more than that. Paul’s use of the idiom ‘born of a woman’ signified nothing exceptional about Jesus’ parentage, prior to it being misinterpreted through the lens of later theology. In context, he was only identifying Jesus as a mortal man.
In the same way, attributing an idea, object, or action to being ‘from’ God did not require that it was supernatural or miraculous. This sort of expression was used to identify that such a thing came about because God decided it should, whatever the circumstances. Tamar’s deception of Judah was divinely ordained. The subsequent pregnancy was ‘from’ God.
The actual revelation to Joseph in Matt 1.20—that the conception of Jesus was ‘from the holy spirit’—should take priority over the preceding statement in 1.18. That is, we should read the revelation in Matt 1.20 as our point of reference for understanding how to interpret the statement, while Matt 1.18 should be read as a secondary parenthetical. Joseph, planning to divorce Mary, is told that her son is ‘from the holy spirit’, meaning that the scandal and the ensuing pregnancy happened because God decided it was necessary for his plan. This revelation appearing early in the narration, Matt 1.18, was the author getting ahead of himself, a sort of proleptic clarification.
The Focal Point in the Isaiah Prophecy
By the time we arrive at Matthew’s citation of Isaiah’s prophecy, we have found nothing which requires us to understand Matthew as suggesting Mary conceived Jesus by a miracle. For this reason, it does not appear Matthew misapplied
It may be demonstrated this was Matthew’s intention by how he reiterates the message later in his gospel. At no point does he so much as allude to Mary having conceived while a virgin. (In fact, Matthew retains the perspective of his source, the Gospel of Mark, that Jesus had a contentious relationship with his mother and other family, who were unaware of his divine purpose; cf. Mark 3.21, 31–35; Matt 12.46–50.) But Matthew does echo the sentiment that ‘God is with us’ through the divinely-ordained son, at the very end of the book (28.18–20). These two declarations about Jesus become a framework for the overarching gospel narrative, the interpretive key for understanding what God was accomplishing through Jesus.
This brings us to the final statements on the question of Mary’s virginity and the identity of Jesus’ father. The couple gets married, so that when Mary gives birth it is Joseph who names him, an act by which he claims Jesus as his own son. Matthew later illustrates Joseph’s legitimate fatherhood in his revision of Mark, changing the identification of Jesus—by the people from his hometown, no less—from ‘the carpenter’ (Mark 6.3) into ‘the carpenter’s son’ (Matt 13.55).
Bava Batra 134a.10
One who says, ‘This is my son,’ is deemed credible. One who says, ‘This is my brother,’ is not deemed credible with regard to his other brothers’ obligation to share the inheritance with the subject of his statement. When one claims that this man is his brother, this claim is accepted with regard to the speaker’s own portion, and the man in question takes a share of their father’s inheritance with him (i.e. from his portion).
This does not mean that Joseph was the biological father of Jesus. It only settled his fatherhood as a legal matter.
The following statement that Joseph ‘did not know her until she had borne a son’ likewise only related to the duration of her pregnancy. Between the time of conception and birth, Joseph and Mary did not have intercourse. The specific phrasing ‘did not know her until’ contradicts the notion that Mary remained a virgin her entire life (other passages explicitly mention Jesus’ siblings: 12.46–47; 13.55–56). However, in the same way, it neither specifies that she was a virgin prior to their eventual sexual union.
Conclusion
Matthew’s infancy narrative is often parsed as the author having written down an existing oral tradition about the birth of Jesus, which he edited it into his distinct ‘Matthean style’. While I still find this possible, I now wonder if a simpler, more likely explanation is that the author himself invented the story. Perhaps he did so to explain why Jesus was chosen to become the Messiah at his baptism: God had, in fact, made this decision even before Jesus was conceived, and the baptism only happened to be the point when God executed the commission. This would be comparable to how the decision to call Jeremiah to become a prophet had been decided by God even before the man’s conception (Jer 1.5). This did not make Jeremiah the son of a virgin.
The genealogy in Matt 1.1–17 begins the infancy narrative by gently leading the reader to categorize Mary alongside four other women involved in sexual scandals. Verse 1.18 provides a brief overview of the problem: Mary was pregnant, and Joseph, the man to whom she was betrothed, was not the father. The author leaves out the details of how Mary got pregnant. Perhaps he did not know the story, or he did not care to preserve it. In the following verses, 1.19–21, we learn that Joseph was a compassionate man who nonetheless felt betrayed. But he had his worries dispelled with a divine revelation: Mary was pregnant because God decided she needed to be, because he decided her son will be a savior for Israel. There is no indication in the text that God made her pregnant ex nihilo. With 1.22–23, the divine ordination of Jesus is explained with an appeal to prophecy: through Jesus, God will be ‘with’ Israel. So, in 1.24–25, Joseph is filled with conviction and marries Mary, claiming Jesus as his own son (13.55), making him a descendant of David (1.1, 20; 9.27; 12.23; etc), per Joseph’s ancestry detailed in the genealogy.
The story remains intelligible without finding in it a virgin birth.
In further consequence of my recent thoughts on the synoptic problem, rather than speculating that Luke independently received the story of Jesus’ birth from the same source, it may be that Matthew was Luke’s source here. Following this theory for the moment, it may be that: Matthew introduced an infancy narrative in which Jesus was born to the ‘young woman’ Mary as a result of sexual scandal and was adopted by Joseph according to God’s plan, but the story was soon after misinterpreted by readers unfamiliar with some of the more distinctly Judean concepts. In the early second century, Luke haphazardly rewrote Matthew’s account to fit alongside other material about John the baptizer, introducing the concept of Jesus’ miraculous conception to a virgin to a wide audience. Later still developed the notion that Mary remained a virgin her entire life. These later ideas were read backward into Matthew (and other early Christian texts), becoming a circular proof for the now-common interpretation of Matthew’s infancy narrative.