I have sometimes heard people say that
it is crucial to accept the virginal conception either to distance Jesus from
sin or to safeguard his divinity. The New Testament passages about Jesus's
miraculous conception are concerned with neither of these things. Matthew and
Luke do not depict Jesus as the incarnation of a preexistent divine person,
while the Gospel of John does so without any mention of a miraculous
conception. No gospel connects Jesus's miraculous conception with avoidance of
the taint of original sin. Often contemporary theological views, at least in
their popular form, are a hodgepodge of snippets from the New Testament mixed
with modern ideas that the ancient authors of these works did not have in mind.
Hence the title of this chapter ["Y Chromosome?"]. If Jesus had no
human father, did he have a Y chromosome. If so, was it borrowed from Joseph,
miraculously created, or something else? If Jesus only inherited chromosomes
from his mother, he would be biologically female, having two X chromosomes. If
we ask about Jesus's chromosomes, we are asking questions the New Testament
authors do not answer. Yet as people who know about chromosomes, we cannot completely
set aside that knowledge when we read ancient texts. (James F. McGrath, The
A to Z of the New Testament: Things Experts Know That Everyone Else Should Too
[Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2023], location 3871-2804 of 3996, comment in
square brackets added for clarification)
