The Virgin Birth
🔗Overview
The UPDV does not take a position on the virgin birth as a matter of faith. It takes a position on the text. Five distinct judgments (translational, text-critical, editorial, and reconstructive) converge to remove from the UPDV's reconstructed biblical text the usual explicit proof-texts on which the doctrine is commonly argued. The UPDV follows the Hebrew of Isaiah, selects the active reading at Matthew's genealogy, identifies editorial insertions, and makes a conjectural source-redaction reconstruction at Luke 3:23. What the reader does with the result is a matter of faith, not textual criticism.
These five judgments are:
1. Isaiah 7:14: translates the Hebrew as "young woman," not "virgin"
2. Matthew 1:16: selects the active reading: "Joseph begot Jesus"
3. Matthew 1:18-25: treats the birth narrative as a secondary editorial addition and omits it
4. Luke 1-2: excludes the infancy narrative as secondary (the full case is made in The Gospel of Luke)
5. Luke 3:23: conjecturally omits "as was supposed" as a coordinating qualification and reads directly that Jesus was the son of Joseph
Each judgment is documented in its respective article. This article summarizes the reasoning behind all five and shows how they relate to one another.
🔗Isaiah 7:14: The Young Woman
The UPDV translates Isaiah 7:14 as "the young woman is pregnant, and will give birth to a son," with a footnote noting the Septuagint's different rendering. This follows the Hebrew.
The Hebrew word is עַלְמָה (almah). It occurs nine times in the Old Testament.1 The word denotes a young woman of marriageable age and does not by itself specify whether she is a virgin, as BDB defines it, "young woman (ripe sexually; maid or newly married)."2 HALOT reports the definition "young woman (until the birth of her first child)" from its predecessor KBL, though HALOT itself flags this with a contra-citation to Wildberger.3 At Genesis 24:43, the almah is Rebekah, who is in fact a virgin — but the word labels her age and social status, while the text establishes her sexual status separately (24:16).
The Hebrew language has a word more closely associated with virginity: בְּתוּלָה (betulah). The word can carry the sense "virgin," though context may still clarify sexual status. At Genesis 24:16, Rebekah is called a betulah, and the text adds, "no man had ever lain with her." As Motyer notes, the requirement of virginity "is in the context, not in the word itself."4 Isaiah, however, chose the less specific almah, whose direct lexical rendering is "young woman."
🔗The Greek Translations
The Septuagint (LXX), the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures produced in the third and second centuries BC, rendered עַלְמָה at Isaiah 7:14 as παρθένος (parthenos), "maiden/virgin."5 This is the form Matthew quotes at 1:23.
The three major later Jewish Greek revisers all rendered it differently:
- Aquila (ca. 130 AD): νεᾶνις (neanis) — "young woman"
- Symmachus (late 2nd century): νεᾶνις — "young woman"
- Theodotion (mid-2nd century): νεᾶνις — "young woman"6
Whether these later translations represent a more accurate rendering of the Hebrew or a deliberate anti-Christian correction is debated. Watts notes that "these latter three are all Jewish translations from the era of Christianity, and so may in fact reflect anti-Christian attempts to 'tighten' the LXX's translation to more closely match the MT."7 But the philological result is the same either way: the Hebrew word means "young woman," and these three later Jewish revisers consistently render it that way.
🔗An Ancient Debate
The UPDV's rendering is not a modern innovation. Jewish scholars have made the same argument since at least the second century, and the church fathers responded to it directly.
Justin Martyr (ca. 155 AD) records the Jewish objection: "Since you and your teachers venture to affirm that in the prophecy of Isaiah it is not said, 'Behold, the virgin shall conceive,' but, 'Behold, the young woman shall conceive, and bear a son'..."8
Irenaeus (ca. 180 AD) names the translators responsible: "Not as some allege... 'Behold, a young woman shall conceive, and bring forth a son,' as Theodotion the Ephesian has interpreted, and Aquila of Pontus, both Jewish proselytes. The Ebionites, following these, assert that He was begotten by Joseph."9
Origen (ca. 248 AD) engages the Hebrew directly: "If a Jew quibbles that it is not written 'Behold the virgin' (ἡ παρθένος) but rather 'Behold the young woman' (ἡ νεᾶνις), we will say to him that the word Aalma (ἡ Ἁαλμά), which the Seventy rendered as 'virgin' (παρθένον), but others rendered as 'young woman' (νεᾶνιν), is also found in Deuteronomy applied to a virgin..."10 Origen acknowledges the lexical ambiguity but argues the context supports "virgin."
Rashi (1040-1105 AD), the foremost medieval Jewish commentator, identifies the almah as Isaiah's own wife: "the young woman — My wife will conceive this year."11 For Rashi, the sign is not a miraculous conception but the prophetic naming of the child.
Skinner's summary in the Cambridge Bible remains apt: "The patristic view maintained an all but unquestioned ascendancy within the Church till the dawn of historical criticism in the eighteenth century, when it began to be recognised that on the philological question the Jews were right."12
🔗Matthew's Text
🔗The Genealogy (1:16)
Matthew's genealogy repeats the active verb ἐγέννησεν (egennēsen, "begot") thirty-nine times from Abraham through "Jacob begot Joseph." The standard Greek text breaks the pattern at the final entry, switching to passive voice: "from whom [Mary] was born Jesus." The UPDV selects the active reading, "Joseph begot Jesus", attested in the Syriac Sinaiticus and recorded in Von Soden's critical apparatus in 1913. This is a minority reading, but an attested one with versional support, structural logic, and a documented scholarly lineage from Conybeare (1898) through Von Soden (1913) to the NEB and Jerusalem Bible margins.
For the full case (manuscript witnesses, the four-women syntactic argument, the lectio difficilior rebuttal, and the cumulative evidence) see Joseph Begot Jesus: The Active Reading at Matthew 1:16.
🔗The Birth Narrative (1:18-25)
The UPDV omits Matthew 1:18-25. This passage — the angel's appearance to Joseph, the explanation of Mary's pregnancy by the Holy Spirit, and the quotation of Isaiah 7:14 — is treated by the UPDV as an editorial addition to the Gospel. On this view the compiler drew on haggadic Moses-tradition motifs (pious father, wicked king, infant massacre) identified by Davies and Allison,13 and the concentration of formula quotations in Matthew's opening chapters is characteristic of what the UPDV identifies as editorial expansion. The standard critical commentaries on Matthew (Luz, Hagner, Nolland, France) do not treat this passage as a secondary insertion; the UPDV's editorial judgment goes beyond the usual compositional analysis, and the case is developed in the Matthew overview article.
Further evidence includes: no parallel in Mark; no parallel in Luke's fundamentally different birth account. The Ebionite Christians, according to Epiphanius (a hostile late fourth-century witness), used a form of Matthew that began at the ministry of John the Baptist — omitting both the genealogy and the birth narrative.14 His report directly attests that a gospel they called Matthew circulated without this material, which the UPDV judges consistent with its reconstruction.
Justin Martyr already knew of people who confessed Jesus as Christ while denying the virgin conception, calling him "a man born of men" (Dialogue with Trypho 48.4). A century later, Origen describes "two kinds of Ebionites": some accepted the virgin birth, while others said Jesus was born "as the rest of men." The evidence shows that the virgin conception was disputed among early Christ-confessors and, by Origen's time, explicitly within the Ebionite stream.15
For the full analysis, see The Book of Matthew.
🔗Luke's Text
🔗The Infancy Narrative (Luke 1-2)
The UPDV does not include Luke chapters 1-2. These contain the annunciation to Mary, the visit to Elizabeth, the Magnificat, the nativity in Bethlehem, the shepherds, the presentation in the temple with Simeon and Anna, and the boy Jesus in the temple — the primary Lukan basis for the virgin birth. The exclusion rests on multiple converging lines of evidence: internal evidence within Luke-Acts (Acts 1:1 fits more naturally with a gospel whose narrative scope began at the ministry of John, while the speeches in Acts never cite the birth narratives as proof from prophecy); the composite character of the chapters as an assembly of distinct traditional units; computational stylometry whose limited sample is consistent with, but does not independently establish, the grouping of these chapters with suspected editorial material; and Joseph B. Tyson's minority analysis of the Marcion evidence.16
For the full case, see The Gospel of Luke.
🔗Luke 3:23: Jesus Named Directly as Joseph's Son
The UPDV begins Luke 3:23: "And Jesus was about thirty years of age. He was the son of Joseph, the [son] of Eli," continuing directly into the genealogy. The Critical Text reads ὢν υἱός, ὡς ἐνομίζετο, Ἰωσήφ, "being the son, as was supposed/considered, of Joseph." Greek νομίζω carries a reputational sense with some tentativeness; it does not itself name Jesus as Joseph's son without qualification.17
Every complete Greek reading checked retains ὡς ἐνομίζετο or an equivalent form, and the Peshitta and Old Syriac Sinaiticus retain a corresponding unpointed ܡܣܬܒܪ clause.18 The UPDV's omission is therefore conjectural. It treats the phrase as a coordinating qualification associated with the attachment of Luke 1–2: the direct genealogy is grammatically complete without it, while the added phrase allows descent through Joseph to coexist with the virgin-conception narrative.22 Luke 4:22 supplies an internal control because its speakers call Jesus Joseph's son without qualification.
The direct reading also aligns, for internal source-critical purposes, with the UPDV's separate finding that Matthew's genealogy originally ended "Joseph begot Jesus." The two reconstructed genealogies converge on Jesus' direct descent through Joseph. That convergence is documented in Joseph Begot Jesus: The Active Reading at Matthew 1:16; it is internal source-critical coherence, not an omission witness for Luke 3:23.
The corresponding unpointed Syriac clause is traditionally understood in this Greek-derived context as consideration or supposition, but it does not securely establish a hidden "known as" sense or an alternate Aramaic Vorlage. Ephrem's Commentary on the Diatessaron I.26 likewise retains both a beginning expression and emphatic consideration wording. For Luke 3:23, Ephrem represents downstream Syriac reception of a qualified Gospel form, expressed through selective and rhetorically elaborated commentary; he supports neither omission and is not a diplomatic witness to Tatian's exact second-century text.19
The omission of ἀρχόμενος ("beginning") rests on a separate evidence chain. The Peshitta and Old Syriac Sinaiticus have no equivalent, and the Ebionite Gospel fragment quoted by Epiphanius reads simply that Jesus "was about thirty years old." That evidence supports the existing omission of ἀρχόμενος but not the conjectural omission of ὡς ἐνομίζετο, which the Syriac witnesses retain. For the full case, see The Gospel of Luke.
🔗Text and Faith
In each of these decisions, the UPDV applies textual and linguistic evidence to the text it reconstructs: the Hebrew text of Isaiah, the active reading at Matthew's genealogy, and the source-redaction reconstruction at Luke 3:23. The judgments rest on the meaning of a Hebrew word, the pattern and variants of a genealogy, the identification of editorial additions, and internal source-critical coherence. Some are straightforward translation choices; others are reconstruction judgments that go beyond what most modern editions print.
Taken together, these decisions remove from the UPDV's reconstructed biblical text the usual explicit proof-texts on which the doctrine is traditionally built.
It is important to note that removing these proof-texts does not diminish the Christological claim of Jesus' full divinity. This point has long been made from within Catholic tradition itself. Defending the historicity of the virgin birth, Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, wrote: "According to the faith of the Church, the Divine Sonship of Jesus does not rest on the fact that Jesus had no human father; the doctrine of Jesus' divinity would not be affected if Jesus had been the product of a normal human marriage. For the Divine Sonship of which faith speaks is not a biological but an ontological fact, an event not in time but in God's eternity."20
Ratzinger grounds the Church's teaching about Divine Sonship in "the Abba-Son dialogue" and "the relationship of Word and love" revealed in it; he connects its idea of being with the Johannine "I am." He then argues that contemporary objections to the Virgin Birth and Divine Sonship rest on "the false connection between the two."21 The textual question and the doctrinal question are separable, even within a tradition that affirms both.
🔗Notes
1 Gen 24:43; Ex 2:8; Ps 68:26; Prov 30:19; Song 1:3; 6:8; Isa 7:14; 1 Chr 15:20; Ps 46 title. See C. Dohmen, "עַלְמָה," Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, vol. 11 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), s.v.
2 F. Brown, S. R. Driver, and C. A. Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1907), s.v. עַלְמָה.
3 L. Koehler and W. Baumgartner, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (Leiden: Brill, 2001), s.v. עַלְמָה, sense 1c. HALOT reports the predecessor KBL definition "young woman (until the birth of her first child)" but flags it with a contra-citation to Wildberger (BK 10:290).
4 J. A. Motyer, Isaiah: An Introduction and Commentary, Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1999). Motyer, a conservative evangelical, notes that betulah "is not sufficient by itself to denote virginity but needs the explanatory qualification" and that "the requirement is in the context, not in the word itself." He notes that Isaiah chose the word that "came nearest to expressing 'virgin birth'" among available options — an argument that concedes the point: neither Hebrew word means "virgin" without contextual support.
5 W. Bauer, F. W. Danker, W. F. Arndt, and F. W. Gingrich, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), s.v. παρθένος.
6 Dohmen, TDOT 11, s.v. עַלְמָה, §II.2. TDOT prints "neánias" (νεανίας, masculine ("young man"), which is a typographical error; the correct form is νεᾶνις (feminine) "young woman"), as confirmed independently by J. Skinner, The Book of the Prophet Isaiah, Chapters I.–XXXIX., Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1896), Additional Note on 7:14-16; Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses 3.21.1; and the church fathers who cite the Jewish objection using the feminine form.
7 J. D. W. Watts, Isaiah 1-33, Word Biblical Commentary 24, rev. ed. (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2005), Excursus: Isaiah 7:14 and the Virgin Birth of Jesus.
8 Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 43. The same objection recurs at chapters 67, 71, and 84. Justin's First Apology 33 discusses the virgin birth but without recording the Jewish counterargument about the Greek rendering.
9 Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses 3.21.1, trans. A. Roberts and J. Donaldson, Ante-Nicene Fathers 1 (Edinburgh, 1885; repr. Peabody: Hendrickson, 1994).
10 Origen, Contra Celsum 1.34-35 (PG 11.741-742).
11 Rashi on Isaiah 7:14, trans. from Sefaria. Rashi identifies the almah as the prophetess of Isaiah 8:3.
12 J. Skinner, Isaiah I.–XXXIX., CBSC, Additional Note on 7:14-16.
13 W. D. Davies and D. C. Allison, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel according to Saint Matthew, International Critical Commentary, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988), on Matt 1:18-25.
14 Epiphanius, Panarion 30.13. The Ebionites used a form of Matthew that began with the ministry of John the Baptist, omitting both the genealogy and the birth narrative.
15 Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 48.4 (PG 6.581-582): τοῦ ἡμετέρου γένους ... ἄνθρωπον δὲ ἐξ ἀνθρώπων γενόμενον ("of our race/kind ... a man born of men"). The reading τοῦ ἡμετέρου γένους is the printed text; some editors emend to ὑμετέρου ("your race") to identify the group more directly with Jewish Christians, while others retain ἡμετέρου and read the group as a heretical wing associated with the Christian name. The interpretive dispute does not affect the basic point: Justin knows of people who confess Jesus as Christ while denying his virgin conception. Origen, Commentary on Matthew Book XVI.12 (PG 13.1179-1180), commenting on Matt. 20:30, names "the twofold Ebionites" (οἱ διττοὶ Ἐβιωναῖοι): some confess Jesus born of a virgin as Christians do, while others say he was generated "as the rest of men" (ὡς τοὺς λοιποὺς ἀνθρώπους). Cf. Origen, Contra Celsum 5.61, 5.65 (PG 11.1293-1294; 1303-1304). The tradition that the Ebionites used a form of Matthew without the genealogy is also reflected in the Cohortatio ad Graecos (PG 6.401-402): "cutting off the genealogies in Matthew, they begin from the point we mentioned" (Παρακόψαντες γὰρ τὰς παρὰ τῷ Ματθαίῳ γενεαλογίας, ἄρχονται τὴν ἀρχὴν ποιεῖσθαι). Bostock cites Justin and Origen for the same point but states it too broadly; Origen's evidence is more precise, showing division within the Ebionite stream rather than uniform denial.
16 J. B. Tyson, Marcion and Luke-Acts: A Defining Struggle (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006). See also The Gospel of Luke.
17 BDAG, s.v. νομίζω, renders Luke 3:23 as "he was, as commonly held, the son of Joseph" (sense ②: "to form an idea about something but with some suggestion of tentativeness"). BDAG's parallels (Appian, Pausanias) use the verb for public recognition without implying the belief is incorrect. English translations typically render it "was supposed" or "was thought to be," and in the traditional context, a Gospel that includes a virgin birth narrative, the implication that the supposition was incorrect is natural. But BDAG itself does not assert that the supposition is incorrect.
18 NA28 and UBS6 both retain ὡς ἐνομίζετο at Luke 3:23. Every complete Greek witness checked retains a form of the qualification. The Peshitta and Old Syriac Sinaiticus retain a corresponding unpointed ܡܣܬܒܪ clause, traditionally understood in this Greek-derived context as consideration or supposition; the Curetonian is not extant at this verse. The unpointed consonants do not independently settle the Syriac morphology or establish a hidden "known as" sense. No published ECM apparatus is yet available for Luke. The finding is therefore limited to the complete Greek and versional witnesses checked.
19 Ephrem, Commentary on the Diatessaron I.26, Syriac text in Louis Leloir, ed., Commentaire de l'Évangile concordant: texte syriaque (manuscrit Chester Beatty 709), printed p. 26; English translation in Carmel McCarthy, Saint Ephrem's Commentary on Tatian's Diatessaron (1993), 54–55. The Syriac has ܕܫܪܝ ܗܘܐ ܡܪܢ ("that our Lord began/had begun") and ܐܝܟ ܕܢܣܬܒܪ ܡܣܬܒܪܘ ܕܒܪܗ ܗܘ ܕܝܘܣܦ, an emphatic consideration clause. McCarthy renders the latter "as it were, just considered to be the son of Joseph." In the same section, Ephrem interprets Jesus as Mary's son rather than Joseph's; that is downstream theological reception, not evidence for either omission. McCarthy treats the age datum separately in the baptism section §1a (83): "Jesus was about thirty years, when he came to be baptized," with a note identifying Luke 3:23. I.26 is therefore selective commentary, not a continuous quotation of the whole verse.
20 Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, rev. 2nd ed., trans. J. R. Foster (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 274–275. Originally published as Einführung in das Christentum (Munich: Kösel-Verlag, 1968); first English edition (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969). The quoted passage appears continuously on p. 275 in chapter II §1, "Conceived by the Power of the Holy Spirit and Born of the Virgin Mary." The discussion begins on p. 274 by denying that the conception narrative supplies the ground for Jesus' Divine Sonship, then distinguishes biological conception from the ontological claim. The chapter as a whole defends the historicity of the virgin birth. Ratzinger affirms the event; the passage is an in-tradition demonstration that the textual and doctrinal questions are logically separable, not a denial of the conception narrative. The same passage is also cited in Raymond E. Brown, The Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus (New York: Paulist Press, 1973), 42 n. 56, and in Gerald Bostock, "Divine Birth, Human Conception," Expository Times 98, no. 11 (Aug 1987): 331–333.
21 Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, 2004 ed., 276 (continuation of chapter II §1). Ratzinger writes: "The Church's teaching about the Divine Sonship of Jesus is based, not on the story of the Virgin Birth, but on the Abba-Son dialogue and on the relationship of Word and love that we found revealed in it. Its idea of being does not belong to the biological plane but to the 'I am' of St. John's Gospel..." He then says that "the contemporary aversion to both the tidings of the Virgin Birth and the full acknowledgment of the Divine Sonship of Jesus rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of both and on the false connection between the two that seems to be widely assumed." The passage continues by explaining that the conception narrative carries its own theological weight — continuity with the Old Testament pattern of barren-mother miraculous births (Sarah, Samuel's mother, Samson's mother, Elizabeth) that mark salvation as gift rather than human achievement — without that role grounding the metaphysical doctrine of divinity.
22 I. Howard Marshall, The Gospel of Luke: A Commentary on the Greek Text (NIGTC; Exeter: Paternoster, 1978), on Luke 3:23, says that ὡς ἐνομίζετο "may have been added by Luke to his source in order to avoid possible misunderstanding in relation to chs. 1–2," while rejecting Sahlin's stronger proposal of a later interpolation as "unwarranted." Joseph B. Tyson, Marcion and Luke-Acts: A Defining Struggle (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006), 118–119, argues that the parenthetical comment casts doubt on Joseph's paternity and that "it is plausible that these words were added by the canonical author or a later copyist." These are source-critical proposals, not omission witnesses.