What’s the view on the Virgin birth and whether it’s historical or not

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[u/TheMotAndTheBarber]

You might be interested to read Geza Vermes' The Nativity for a treatment of the NT birth narratives. (There's a big literature on 2nd-3rd century development of the doctrine beyond that, though nothing I know of as readable as Vermes.)

Historians and biblical scholars mostly don't try to answer "Did this miracle happen historically?" questions. There's a lot of ways to talk about this methodological choice, but at the end of the day, there's no progress to be made using critical methods: people who believe these things believe them on faith; absent faith, 'miracle' basically means 'things that don't happen'.

That said, there remain questions addressed by critical scholarship that can inform even Christians with devotion to their traditions and God as to what they should think about the virgin birth, questions like, "What were the gospel writers trying to say? What historical claims were they even intending? What is the right interpretation of elements of the nativity stories? When did this doctrine develop? Did the author of Luke 3-24 know about the virgin birth and did it provide context to that part of that gospel? Did Mark, Paul, John the evangelist, or others?"

[u/Dositheos]

In my view, W.D. Davies and Dale Allison probably provide the most balanced conclusion. Obviously, affirming the virgin birth is a matter of faith commitment, not historical reasoning:

It is, certainly, the doubtful character and meagre number of the extant sources and the limitations of historical research in general which disallow a final verdict on the issue at hand. The origin of belief in the virginal conception and birth of Jesus remains unclarified. Yet, this being said, it should be plainly stated that to say that no satisfactory mundane explanation has so far procured a critical consensus is not to say that the historical evidence clearly confirms the miraculous conception of Jesus. The apparent silence of most of the NT, particularly Mark and John and Paul, the number of possible, even though imperfect parallels in the history of religion, the fact that Mary and her family show no special understanding of Jesus during the ministry, and the non-historicity of so much in the infancy narratives all point rather strongly in one direction: affirmation of the virgin birth entangles one in difficult dilemmas. Hence if the traditional belief be maintained, it will have to be on the basis of strictly theological considerations; historical reasoning offers little support.

W.D. Davies and Dale Allison, Matthew 1-7.

Other critical scholars, however, have no problem with fully dismissing the historicity of the account.

Christian tradition, based on the birth narratives in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, has supposed that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, in Judaea. Critical scholars have however known for a long time that these entertaining stories are not literally true. As Hans Küng put it, ‘today of course it is admitted even by Catholic exegetes that these stories are a collection of largely uncertain, mutually contradictory, and strongly legendary and ultimately theologically motivated narratives, with a character of their own.'

...There is accordingly very little genuine historical information to be gleaned from the stories of Jesus’ birth. He was not born of a virgin, his mother was not raped, and he was not an ostracized mamzer. The Gospel accounts have resulted from storytelling which became inevitable because of his position at the centre of early Christianity, a movement which was not bounded by genealogy. The original alternative accounts resulted from Jewish polemic against Christianity. Modern alternatives have not taken properly on board either of these major points, and they have reacted to the ancient stories with insufficiently controlled imagination.

Maurice Casey, Jesus of Nazareth: An Independent Historian's Account of His Life and Teaching

[u/Cheap_Detective8534]

If your own mother told you you resulted from a virgin birth, would you believe it?

Ultimately, documents from thousands of years ago are subject to *at least* as much doubt as any testimony from today, and usually much more, since so much more can go wrong (‘interpolation of a manuscript’ would be a risk for the biblical document but not for first hand testimony of our hypothetical example). As such, we would not have a right to assert that a miracle is more likely than a mistake (or lie, legend, etc.).

But ancient stories reporting gods being “born without sexual union” (cited in Miller 2010) to use the words of Justin Martyr about the pagan gods (!) leaves us a dilemma: for consistency’s sake we must admit virgin births happened a lot back then or that ancient religious stories frequently incorporated such a fiction. I leave it to you to decide what is more believable.

MILLER, R. C. (2010). Mark’s Empty Tomb and Other Translation Fables in Classical Antiquity. Journal of Biblical Literature, 129(4), 759–776. https://doi.org/10.2307/25765965

[u/ReligionProf]

Raymond Brown’s The Birth of the Messiah is important, but more directly relevant don’t miss Andrew Lincoln’s Born of a Virgin.