This is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about: His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit.

Today, I’d like to focus on what it means to say someone had a miraculous birth. We must remember that the New Testament is primarily a first-century collection of writings, portraying a first-century mindset. The virgin birth stories in the Bible were written in an age and for an audience who understood such stories to be not literal events, but a means of honoring great men, heroes, or gods. Hellenistic stories were rife with the idea of a god impregnating a human woman. The births of Caesar Augustus and Alexander the Great are good examples. Jesus was neither the first nor the last in a long line of miracle births throughout the known world.

Thus, when a pagan polemicist named Celsus attacks Christianity in his letter On the True Doctrine, he does not bother to address the impossibility of a literal virgin birth for Christ, but rather, whether Christ deserves such a tale told about him. Celsus states, in pretending to address Jesus, “After all, the old myths of the Greeks that attribute a divine birth to Perseus, Amphion, Aeacus and Minor are equally good evidence of their wondrous works on behalf of mankind–and are certainly no less lacking in plausibility than the stories of your followers. What have you done by word of deed that is quite so wonderful as those heroes of old?”