Even in the second century people had begun to correct the verse and
change the original plural into a singular—that is, to relate it directly to Christ
himself and to his creation ad birth taken in a physical sense. This correction
certainly involves a misunderstanding, and perhaps not the original text; but it
seems to me that the misunderstanding might very well not rest on pure chance,
but that the association with the idea of Jesus’ virgin birth was intended all
along. That would, in fact, mean that we should here have to do with a polemic
allusion; for a virgin birth in the literal sense, as others had asserted it as
regards Jesus, is rather, through the extension of the idea to Christians as a
whole, robbed of its meaning and repudiated. Just as natural descent from
Abraham does not prevent the children of Abraham from being described, not as
such, but as children of the devil, so the believers, without prejudice to
their natural creation and birth through an earthly father and mother, are to
be regarded as pure ‘children of God’, ‘of virgin birth’ like God’s only Son—who
yet had Joseph as his father. (Hans von Campenhausen, The Virgin Birth in
the Theology of the Ancient Church [trans. Frank Clarke; Eugene, Oreg.:
Wipf and Stock, 2011; repr., London: SCM Press, 1954], 16-17)
