When looking at the virgin birth of Christ, a few disturbing historical facts can be noted. First, due to a dramatically different understanding of how conception takes place, people in ancient times may have been more prone to accept virgin births than those living in the modern era. We have, for example, this case from the late medieval period:
In 1637 in Grenoble, France, the aristocrat Madeleine d’Auvermont was put on trial for adultery. Despite the fact that her husband had left France four years earlier, Madeleine had recently given birth to a healthy baby boy. In the face of what seemed like damning evidence she protested her innocence, claiming that she had thought—ahem—intensely about her husband at night and had conceived through the power of imagination.
Various physicians and theologians were consulted on the case and declared that this was theoretically possible. (You’d think that the theologians maybe spoke a little more forcefully than the physicians.) The child was named the legal offspring of her husband and heir to the de Montleon fortune.
But, the acceptance of a virgin birth is not limited to medieval culture. Even today, it is not uncommon for women to claim that they became pregnant without benefit of sexual intercourse:
Of 7870 eligible women, 5340 reported a pregnancy, of whom 45 (0.8% of pregnant women) reported a virgin pregnancy (table 1)
Is there any medical evidence that such parthenogenesis could take place? While most sources would say "no", there was at least one study done in the 1950s that was a little, shall we say, unsettling:
The remaining eight pairs were examined by Balfour-Lynn (1956), who blood typed mothers and daughters and found antigens present in six daughters that were absent in their mothers, clear evidence of genetic differences. In another pair, the mother had blue eyes and the daughter brown eyes, indicating genetic differences. In the single remaining case, "Mrs. Alpha and daughter," there was apparent genetic identity in blood groups and several other genetically determined traits including electrophoretic analysis of serum. The probability of such a close match between a mother and daughter produced by heterosexual reproduction was less than one chance in a hundred (P < .01).
But, of course, if parthenogenesis happened, the child would be female, like her mother. Jesus was male, therefore not the product of parthenogenesis. True, offspring of the same sex would be necessary for typical parthenogenesis, but what if the offspring were of a true hermaphrodite? We have a 2016 study that used true hermaphroditic rabbits as the test cases:
In the literature, pregnancy cases that developed through self-fertilization were not reported
in humans. However, autofertilization was detected in mammalian hermaphrodites such as
domestic rabbit... The number of hermaphrodite pregnants (sic) with ovotestis reported in the literature is 14 while the number of
pregnancies in these cases is 26 [7–20]. In these pregnancies, there were one premature, one immature,
one stillborn and one abortion performed due to
unwanted pregnancy. One baby died 2 h after the
birth. There was also an ongoing pregnancy during
the publication of the relevant literature. All of the
babies born apart from these were healthy. All of the
babies (fetuses) whose gender was reported were
male (Table 1).
Hermaphrodites could exhibit female mothers with male offspring. That is a little unexpected. This report from 2009 confirms the findings:
Background: There are 11 reported cases of pregnancy in true hermaphrodites, but none with advanced genetic testing. All known fetuses have been male.
Case: A true hermaphrodite with a spontaneous pregnancy prenatally known to have a remaining portion of a right ovotestis, delivered a male neonate. The mother has a 46, XX karyotype with polymerase chain reaction demonstrating low levels of the Yq12 sequence. Postpartum androgen levels were normal.
Conclusion: Partial removal of testicular tissue may enhance fertility in hermaphrodites, and there may be a genetic basis for the progeny to be male.
For the last century or so, Christians have had a propensity to explain the reported astronomical or meteorological phenomenon around the Gospel stories (the star of Bethlehem, the darkness at the Crucifixion, etc.) as simply a divine intervention that exhibited as a natural phenomenon. That is, the Star of Bethlehem was really a great conjunction of planets while the darkness at the Crucifixion may have been caused by a sandstorm. This propensity was not restricted to modern Christians. Even Augustine shared this propensity:
“Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of the world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion [quoting 1 Tim 1:7].” ― Augustine of Hippo, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, Vol 2
Even in the Old Testament, physical reality was used to prove contact with the divine. Gideon's fleece, Daniel's vegetarian diet and the Deuteronomic warning against false prophets all use physical reality as the final test. Reality trumps human eyewitness testimony.
Christians do not use divine revelation to confirm experimental science, that is, we do not say, "well the experimental results must be accepted as correct because experiment conforms with what God says." Similarly, only the most fundamentalist of Christians say, "We reject any experimental result which does not conform with Biblical revelation." Rather, we use experimental science as the norm which serves to confirm divine revelation: "this event could have happened as the Bible reported, because we have experimental evidence which supports the possibility that the divinely inspired eyewitness testimony could be true."
The physical world is the norm which norms the Bible. Even the Bible, both Old Testament and New Testament, attests that this is the appropriate way to approach the Divine Word.
But, while the biological phenomenon of virgin birth can now potentially be explained via experimental science, it is doubtful that Christianity will allow biology to explain the miracle.
