. . . Mary’s “unclean” status indicates that she
delivered a truly human Savior through ordinary childbirth. Though we
sometimes call the miraculous way Jesus was conceived the “virgin birth,” the
Bible gives us no indication that anything miraculous happened in the birth
process itself. Many early and medieval Christians were convinced that Jesus
could not have been delivered through natural childbirth because a natural
delivery would have broken Mary’s hymen, the physical evidence of her virginity
(see Deut 22:15-17). The second-century pseudo-gospel known as The First Gospel
of James (c. 150) concocted an elaborate story of how Mary could continue
to be a virgin after Jesus was born, including a pain-free birth (see Prot.
Jas 19:19-20). But the biblical account of Mary’s purification ritual means
we can dispense with this later, extrabiblical tradition that says she had a
painless childbirth or that she somehow delivered Jesus without incurring any
changes to her body. (Rhyne R. Putman, Conceived by the Holy Spirit: The
Virgin Birth in Scripture and Theology [Brentwood, Tenn.: B&H Academic,
2024], 155-56)
Luke, the only biblical author to provide an account of
Jesus’s actual birth, says nothing about a miraculous delivery whatsoever. Had
he believed that this occurred, it seems likely that he would have included it
in his account of this specific event. Furthermore, his inclusion of Mary’s
purification sacrifice contradicts the idea that Mary had anything other than a
natural birth. The Levitical law specifically states that a new mother “will
continue in purification from her bleeding” at least forty days (Lev 12:2-4).
If Mary did not bleed or deliver Jesus naturally, she would have no need for
the purification ritual that followed Jesus’s birth (Luke 2:22-24). The
extrabiblical tradition of Jesus’s supernatural birth simply does not coincide
with the facts of the biblical narrative. This miraculous birth story also
reads more like the gnostic idea that Christ simply “passed through Mary” than
a perspective that preserves Jesus’s true humanity. (Ibid., 357)
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