this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2025
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As a non-Christian, what the hell is up with this story? How do people know she wasn't sleeping with some other man? Like is that explained? Were there no other men in the village or whatever? I have no idea how this makes sense. If a woman today said God got her preggo we would all assume it was just some guy she doesn't want people to know about. I'm so confused.
In the book of Matthew, the story goes like this:
Mary tells Joseph she's pregnant. Joseph realizes right away that she was an adulturer. If people found out, she was gonna be stoned. Joseph still loved her anyways, and was willing to protect her from that, so they went away. Joseph struggled knowing his wife was an adulturer. It wasn't until God came to him in a dream and told him his wife was carrying Jesus that he found peace with it.
Some of the narrative in the gospels is concerned with fulfilling the prophesies of Isaiah, since that would build a case for Jesus being the Messiah, which was something people were interested in at the time.
Isaiah didn't clearly prophesy a virgin birth, but the writers of Matthew and Luke were probably working from the Septuagint, a greek [mis-]translation which turns the prophecy into one of a virgin birth. So, thinking that a virgin birth was required, they wrote it into the story.
The question of whether someone claiming to be made pregnant by God is making a plausible claim, is fairly moot when the whole episode was probably made up anyway.
Also as a non-christian: I think you've got it backwards. Christians believe that she was a virgin because they believe Jesus was their god. Basically that it doesn't make sense to them that a perfect being could be gestated inside a dirty sex having woman, so it must be that she was a virgin.
Also Jesus had a habit of giving people nicknames (eg Simon Peter - the rock) I could see him having a disciple Mary the virgin and another one Mary the mother that got conflated. There's no evidence for this but idk it still seems more likely than virgin birth.
It is a common trophy for prominent romans to trace their heritage down to the gods in order to add legitimacy to their extraordinariness. Jupiter knocked up virgins left and right, that was a common story why someone would be in a heritage of devine decent. I believe the biblic storytellers did the same to give their protagonist the legitimacy and importance that was required by the times.
Concerning the fact that Jesus himself went around and told people he was the son of God didn't do him much good in the end if you for example watch The Passion of the Christ. I think the writers of the Bible (and their sources) may have been a tad on the dramatic side in prospect.