A professor at Cambridge, England, writing in The Expository Times, February 1969, insists that “from the strictly historical point of view, there is very little reliable data to which appeal may be made for the virginal conception of Jesus.” He discredits the accounts in the first two chapters of Matthew and Luke and then says “there is no other reference in the New Testament which any historian . . . would think asserted that Jesus was conceived of a Virgin without human father.” And a writer in Continuum, a Roman Catholic periodical (Winter-Spring 1969), states: “The virgin birth is a mythological or pictorial way of getting at [the] theological mystery of the gratuitous nature of salvation. . . . Those who originated the story . . . used the picture images . . . to represent their sense of the Messianic event.”

But those who do accept the Bible as God’s inspired Word have no difficulty in believing that He, who created Adam with sperm cells in the first place and who endowed womankind with the power to conceive and bear children, could also produce a sperm cell apart from any human and could place it in a virgin and so cause her to conceive without the aid of a male human. If we at all believe in God, we must grant him these powers, must we not? It is indeed noteworthy that the angel made this very point in reply to the virgin Mary’s question as to how she was to conceive since she was having no relations with any man. Said the angel, “because with God no declaration will be an impossibility.”​—Luke 1:36, 37.

Matthew tells us that Mary became pregnant by the spirit of God before she had intercourse with Joseph, to whom she was engaged. He also records how Joseph reacted to Mary’s being pregnant and how God’s angel assured him of how it came about. Moreover, the account makes the point that Joseph did not have intercourse with her until she had given birth to Jesus. (Matt. 1:18-25) Luke informs us of the very same facts, but all from Mary’s viewpoint or aspect. Luke and Matthew have about a dozen points in common. (Luke 1:26-35) Clearly, as far as Matthew and Luke are concerned, God, not some human, was Jesus’ Father. Even Mark might be said to testify indirectly to this fact. How so? In that, instead of recording that the people were asking, “Is this not the carpenter’s son?” he reports them as asking, “This is the carpenter the son of Mary . . . is it not?”​—Matt. 13:55; Mark 6:3.

Then again, many attack the virgin birth of Jesus on the basis that the first two chapters of Matthew and of Luke were added at a later time, and by some other hand. But there is absolutely no basis for this claim. For one thing, the writing style of the chapters in question is exactly the same as that of subsequent chapters. Note, for example, Matthew’s many references to the Hebrew Scriptures, a characteristic of his, and Luke’s medical language in these two chapters, a characteristic of his. Nor is there any manuscript evidence to support such claims. For example, there is evidence that Mark 16:9-20 and John 7:53–8:11 were added by a later hand; but there just is no manuscript testimony for impugning the authenticity of the first two chapters of Matthew and Luke. Neither the oldest Greek-manuscripts nor the versions or translations hint of such a thing. This is further supported by the fact that the early postapostolic writers, such as Irenaeus, Tertullian, Ignatius, Aristides, Justin Martyr, Origen and others, all accepted the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ birth from a virgin. As one authority puts it: “The witness of the Fathers to the virginal conception is unanimous and unquestioned.”a