Hail Mary! Was Virgin Mary Truly the Mother of God’s Son?

By John W. Loftus at 12/25/2024

 Hail Mary! Was Virgin Mary Truly the Mother of God’s Son?

 -- By John W. Loftus

Catholic Christians pray the rosary, which is a string of beads representing creeds and prayers to be recited. Devout Catholics are considered to recite it every single day. In it the Apostles’ Creed made the cut, which is recited one time. The Glory Be (Doxology) is recited five times, the Lord’s Prayer is said six times, but the Hail Mary prayer is recited a whopping 150 times!   

 As one who was raised a Catholic I was required to recite these things a number of times upon visiting the confessional booth, depending on the gravity of my sins. While the Hail Mary can be dated back to the 13th century, the current prayer dates to the 16th century: 


Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen. 

Logistics and Mary the Mother of God.

We need to start by briefly considering some logistics. Consider first, the logistics of how a real mother named Mary could conceive of God (or God’s Son).

The ancients commonly believed that the woman contributes nothing to the physical being of the baby to be born. They thought the child was only related to the father. The mother was nothing but a receptacle for the male sperm, which grew to become a child.

Today, by contrast, with the advent of genetics, most Christian thinkers try to defend the virgin birth on the grounds that the humanity of Jesus was derived from Mary and that his divine nature was derived from God. They do this because they know something about genetics and know Mary must have contributed the female egg that made Jesus into a man. But this doesn’t adequately explain how Jesus is a human being, since for there to be a human being in the first place minimally requires that a human sperm penetrate a human egg. Until that happens we do not have the complete chromosomal structure required to have a human being.

Now of course, God could conceivably create both the human egg and the sperm from which to create life inside Mary’s womb. But if it’s a created human life then it’s not God, who is believed to be eternal, and the creator of everything, who came to suffer and die to atone for human sins as a sinless God. Other problems emerge when it comes to the supposed genealogies and fulfilled prophecies.

Nevertheless, what if God had a body? He did, didn’t he? Sure he did, even though later Christian theology describes God as a Spirit. God is described as walking and talking with Adam and Eve, who even tried to hide from him in the trees of the garden (Genesis 3:8-10). Later on, Jacob prevailed over God in an all night wrestling match, after which Jacob said, “I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared.” God also let Moses see his body, even his backside (Exodus 33). After monotheism arrived God was still seen as having a body. He sat on a throne (Ezekiel 1; Daniel 7; Matthew 25:31; Revelation 5:1), and he rewarded the faithful by allowing them to see his face (Matthew 5:8; 18:11; Revelation 22:3-4). The first martyr Stephen saw Jesus “standing at the right hand of God” (Acts 7:56). Even at the end of times every eye will see him—and presumably recognize him—riding on a white horse to do battle with his enemies (Revelation 1:7; 19:11-21).[1]

So perhaps it isn’t too surprising Mormons still believe God has a body. But if so, they have to struggle with the virgin conception of Jesus. Was mother Mary a virgin or not? According to Brigham Young, the second president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “The Father came down and begat Jesus, the same as we do now.” Mormon apostle Bruce McConkie agreed, saying, “Christ was begotten by an immortal Father in the same way that mortal men are begotten by mortal fathers.” Two Mormon researchers ask us if it “is so disgusting to suggest God sired a son by sexual intercourse?”[2] Inquiring minds want to know.[3] But if God’s son was produced the old-fashioned way, his son Jesus was not conceived of a virgin after all!

Consider second, the logistics of how a real child could exist who was God (or God’s Son). A God incarnate would have a dual nature, 100% divine and 100% human, with everything essential included and everything nonessential excluded. Nobody has sufficiently been able to do this math!

There are several fatal problems with the notion of an incarnate Son of God. God is supposedly a necessary an uncreated being. Humans are essentially created beings. They cannot be reconciled. How can God be God if he has a body? How can humans be humans if we don’t have bodies? How can an infinite timeless God exist in time? How can Jesus be omniscient and also human? God is supposedly omnipresent, everywhere, but Jesus as a human being was not. Can a human be perfectly good incapable of being tempted to sin, and yet be tempted to sin? Christians themselves have shown the incoherence of a divine/human being by their 2000 year long disagreements over it.[[4]]

Some Important Epistemology.

The short answer to the question of this paper is no, an emphatic unequivocal no! No virgin ever gave birth to a son of God! In what follows is a longer answer, which could be backed up by a much longer answer.[[5]]

Let’s start with the obvious. Most people are indoctrinated into their religious faith, whether it’s Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Mormonism, or any others, or any of their respective sects. This is beyond dispute. The problem is that very few of them believe they were indoctrinated, or that their indoctrination led inexorably to their religious faith. They also reject the faiths of others based solely on their indoctrination.

Comedian Bill Burr best states the problem this way: 


“Everybody else’s religion sounds stupid. The first time I heard the story of Scientology I thought that is the dumbest stuff I have ever heard in my life, while simultaneously believing that a woman who never had sex had a baby that walked on the water, died and came back three days later.

Yeah, that made total sense to me!

So it just hit me one day. Why doesn’t Scientology make sense and my stuff does?

It’s because I heard their story when I was an adult. I heard my story when I was four years old.” 

On this we need to hear from more than a comedian.

Philosopher Dr. Peter Boghossian surveyed several bizarre paranormal and religious beliefs then concluded: 

“We are forced to conclude that a tremendous number of people are delusional. There is no other conclusion one can draw. The most charitable thing we can say about faith is that it’s likely to be false.”[[6]]

 Psychiatrist Dr. Valerie Tarico describes how people defend their paranormal and religious beliefs. She claims “it doesn’t take very many false assumptions to send us on a long goose chase.” To illustrate this she tells us about the mental world of a paranoid schizophrenic. To such a person the perceived persecution by others sounds real.


“You can sit, as a psychiatrist, with a diagnostic manual next to you, and think: as bizarre as it sounds, the CIA really is bugging this guy. The arguments are tight, the logic persuasive, the evidence organized into neat files. All that is needed to build such an impressive house of illusion is a clear, well-organized mind and a few false assumptions. Paranoid individuals can be very credible.”[[7]]

Anthropologist Dr. James T. Houk concludes: “Virtually anything and everything, no matter how absurd, inane, or ridiculous, has been believed or claimed to be true at one time or another by somebody, somewhere in the name of faith.”[[8]] 

So what can convince indoctrinated religious people they might be wrong?

The short answer is probably nothing. And yet, since many former believers have rejected their indoctrination there is hope. I’ve written a short answer on how this can be done.[[9]] In what follows here is a longer answer, which could be backed up by a much longer answer, found in a dozen (or so) books I’ve published on it (including several papers at Secular Web).

There is a gateway that leads to doubting the Gospel narratives as a whole, just as Genesis 1-11 is the gateway to doubting the Old Testament narratives as a whole.[[10]] The New Testament gateway is the virgin birth myth in the Gospels. It was the first tale that led me to doubting it all.

This epistemological question needs to be addressed at some length from the outset.

Probably the best tool to help culturally indoctrinated believers acknowledge the value of sufficient objective evidence is found in my book, The Outsider Test for Faith (2013). It challenges believers to question their own childhood faith for perhaps the first time, as if they had never heard of it before. It calls on them to require of their own faith what they reasonably require of the religious faiths they reject. It forces them to demand logical consistency of their doctrines, along with sufficient objective relevant evidence for them, just as they require of the religions they reject. (In what follows “sufficient evidence” should always imply, by itself, sufficient objective relevant evidence.)[[11]]

This test is a very useful fact-checking tool against false religious beliefs. It helps believers acknowledge the need for sufficient objective evidence, all by itself a hard task!). Then it goes on to show what that means by forcing them to consider how they reasonably examine the other religious faiths they reject. It teaches them to apply the same single standard across the board to their own religious faith, without any double standards. Here then is that standard: 

Reasonable people need sufficient objective evidence to

transform the alleged negligible amount of human testimony found in the Bible

 into verified or corroborated eyewitness testimony.

 But it does not exist. As I’ll share later it could exist, it just doesn’t.

When it comes to a philosophical case against miracles in general, I’ve defended David Hume’s arguments here at Secular Web[[12]] and edited a book on it.[[13]] David Hume argued, “No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous [i.e.,  “much more improbable”] than the fact which it endeavours to establish.” All claims about the objective world require sufficient evidence appropriate to the nature of the claim. The amount and quality of the evidence required is dependent on the type of claim being made. This applies to ordinary claims, extraordinary claims and miraculous claims.

A miraculous claim is one made about events that are impossible to take place by natural processes alone. Consequently a miracle is not merely an extremely rare event within natural world, or something that just happened “at the right time.” We know from statistics that extremely rare events take place regularly in our lives. Believers will quote their believing doctors who say the odds of being healed were “one in a million,” as evidence of a miracle healing. But a one in a million healing is not equivalent to a miracle in a world with seven billion people!

Statistician David Hand convincingly shows that “extraordinarily rare events are anything but. In fact, they’re commonplace. Not only that, we should all expect to experience a miracle roughly once every month.” He is not a believer in supernatural miracles though. “No mystical or supernatural explanation is necessary to understand why someone is lucky enough to win the lottery twice, or is destined to be hit by lightning three times and still survive.”[[14]] We should expect extremely rare events in our lives many times over. No gods made these events happen.

So a legitimate miracle claim, by its very nature, requires the highest level of the strongest objective evidence. The fact that a miracle requires this over and above the fallibility of ordinary human testimony is not an unreasonable demand. It’s the nature of the beast, especially in the distant past from sources we cannot cross-examine or fact-check for consistency and truth.

To believe a biblical tale of a miracle would require more than mere human testimony. On this point, just think of what it would take to believe someone who told you he consecutively sank 18 hole-in-one’s on a golf course. It would take some strong objective evidence (in terms of quality and/or quantity) to believe him. A miracle about an event that is naturally impossible, especially in the distant past, would be equivalent to believing a golfer who claimed he flew in the air from tee to tee while making 18 consecutive hole-in-one’s!

When it comes to a scientific case against miracles I produced an anthology showing the method and results of science falsify Christianity.[[15]]. Concerning the bogeyman of “scientism” I merely say that when it comes to the nature of nature, its regularities, and its origins, science (and the math built on it) is the only objective method to gain the truth.

In his 100th column for Scientific American Michael Shermer wrote:


“I conclude that I’m a skeptic not because I do not want to believe but because I want to know. I believe that the truth is out there. But how can we tell the difference between what we would like to be true and what is actually true? The answer is science…the scientific method is the best tool ever devised to discriminate between true and false patterns, to distinguish between reality and fantasy, and to detect baloney.”[[16]]       

The Christian apologist will almost always object at this juncture, saying this relies on an anti-supernatural bias. But the only bias justified is that science discovers what is objectively true and false about the world. Any conclusion that has sufficient evidence for it is true. Any conclusion that has sufficient evidence against it is false. We should always proportion our conclusions based on the probabilities. In cases where the results are inconclusive we should just admit we don’t know yet, like the origins of biological life. 

When it comes to miracles a supernatural bias has a very high reasonable burden of proof to meet. By contrast, the so-called bias of science has been very well-established. 

If a scientist cannot establish biblical miracles using the

scientific method, based on sufficient objective evidence, then

faith cannot do so, times a hundred thousand.

Philosophy and science converge on the historical critical method for understanding the Bible with its claims of miracles. This method, when properly understanding the Bible, is a forced one given the improbabilities within the biblical texts, and the many borrowed texts and forgeries. These things have been documented by early forerunners David Frederick Strauss, and Thomas Paine, which continues in today’s scholars like Bart Ehrman, the writings of Hector Avalos, and many others. Ancient historian scholar Richard Carrier posted a relevant online essay that looks at uncorroborated supernatural and miracles claims in the book of Mark [[17]].

It’s reasonable to use the standards of the historian to judge biblical claims of miracles. Bart Ehrman, an agnostic historian of Christianity, tells us: “From a purely historical point of view, a highly unlikely event is far more probable than a virtually impossible one like a miracle.”[[18]] Why not? What else can judge that which did, or did not take place?

James McGrath, a liberal historian of Christianity, has said,


“All sorts of fairly improbable scenarios are inevitably going to be more likely than an extremely improbable one. That doesn’t necessarily mean miracles never happened then or don’t happen now - it just means that historical tools are not the way to answer that question.”[[19]]

 

However, if a historian cannot establish biblical miracles

      using the historical method, based on sufficient objective

      evidence, then  faith cannot do so times a hundred thousand.

So Christian theists don’t have an objective method to claim biblical miracles occurred as reported in the Bible. They cannot do so by objecting to the philosophical arguments given David Hume. They cannot do so based on a scientist’s requirement for sufficient evidence. Nor can they do so based on a historian’s requirement for sufficient evidence. 

One thing for sure is we know what does not count as extraordinary evidence of the objective kind. Second- third- fourth-hand hearsay testimonial evidence doesn’t count, nor circumstantial evidence, nor anecdotal evidence as reported in documents that are centuries later than the supposed events, which were copied by scribes and theologians who had no qualms about including forgeries.

We also know subjective feelings or experiences or inner voices don’t count as objective evidence when it comes to biblical miracle claims, nor someone who tells others his writings are inspired, nor alleged divine communication through dreams, or visions. Nor can the special pleading of subjective psychic divine communication from the supposed Holy Spirit, as William Lane Craig asserts.[[20]] 

We also know believers cannot reasonably justify their belief in miracles ex post facto (i.e., after the fact) by depending on their priors, also called background information. This is information learned over the years throughout our lives, which everyone has accumulated from childhood onward. We use it to judge what is true or false as we encounter it in life. We don’t usually judge new information any other way except by way of our accumulated background information. So Christian apologists use their background information to justify their cultural indoctrination. 

But the fact is that background information is not background knowledge! Knowledge is justified true belief, based on logic and sufficient relevant evidence. Information alone is not necessarily knowledge. Knowledge is based on facts, solid facts, otherwise all we have are opinions which is something anyone can have. One’s upbringing doesn’t automatically produce factual background knowledge, especially when it comes to culturally different religions.[[21]] Using Bayes’ theorem won’t help convince anyone either.[[22]] 

The intractable difficultly is that there is no miracle claim in the Bible that has anything other than uncorroborated testimony for it, and most all of it is hearsay, written by others. The earliest authors in the first century, even if we date them based on conservative scholarship, are the conjectured Q Gospel (40 CE), the Gospel of Thomas (50 CE), Paul’s authentic letters (50 CE) and the Gospel of Mark (65 CE). But when it comes to Q there is no resurrection of Jesus in it, as is the case with the Gospel of Thomas. 

When it comes to the original Gospel of Mark, which lacked the forged ending (16:9–20), it ends without any proof of the resurrection of Jesus, since there are no appearances to the disciples of Jesus. It just had an unevidenced announcement: “He has risen! He is not here.” Also included was a prediction that was unfulfilled in Mark’s gospel: “He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.’” But Jesus didn’t appear to them in Mark. Paul said if Jesus wasn’t raised then their “faith is in vain”? (I Cor. 15:15-18) So why are there no post-resurrection appearances in Mark? Why no proof, if it was so important to stress according to Paul? 

The only alleged eyewitness New Testament writer is the apostle Paul, and even he says his Damascus Road experience was a “vision.” In his defense before the tribunal of King Agrippa the Great, Paul says, “I was not disobedient to the vision from heaven.” (Acts 26:19) But this isn’t really news. Paul was himself a visionary (see II Corinthians 12:1-4)[[23]] This is hardly the stuff reasonable thinkers require.[[24]]

We can even admit there really might have been a miracle-working Jesus. It’s just that we do not have any objective evidence for those miracles today. So what if he may have done them? It changes nothing. From today’s perspective, using reasonable standards of evidence gathering, there’s no reason to think he did.

On Testing the Virgin Birth Claim Itself

Let’s turn now to the virgin birth. William Lane Craig is on record as saying:


The virgin birth was a stumbling block to my coming to faith—I simply could not believe such a thing. But when I reflected on the fact that God had created the entire universe, it occurred to me that it would not be too difficult for Him to make a woman pregnant.[[25]] 

Wait just a minute! Whether there’s a god who may have impregnated Mary isn’t something Craig can assume. He cannot assume the god who is believed to have done this miracle, did it! To believe that a god did a miracle depends on the probability of the objective evidence all by itself, apart from any god. That’s because any god can turn a mysterious set of circumstances into a miracle.[[26]] Also, it doesn’t follow that if a god did one miracle, he did the other miracles he is believed to have done. 

Maybe a non-trinitarian god exists who doesn’t need a virgin birth miracle, like Judaism or Islam? This is the main problem all theistic apologists must face. They cannot punt to a specific god as the god who did a given miracle. They must first show sufficient evidence that such a god did in fact do it, and this evidence must not be depend entirely on the belief that a particular god who is believed to have done it, did it. 

Surely liberal clergy are closer to the truth on this. According to a poll of 7,441 clergy the following ministers said they didn’t believe in the virgin birth was “a biological miracle”:


Methodists 60 %

Episcopalians 44 %

Presbyterians 49 % 

American Baptists 34 %

American Lutherans 19 %

UK Catholic Priests in the UK 25%

Church of Scotland 37% [[27]]

So this is not a Christian versus atheist debate! Maybe a god doesn’t exist, but this is a debate between conservative evangelical Christians with everyone else who does not believe Mary is the Mother of God!

Let’s lay out the facts for believers who haven’t seen them fact-checked. There is no objective relevant evidence to corroborate the Virgin Mary’s story. Before there can be a virgin birth one must first show Mary wasn’t pregnant. We hear nothing about her wearing a misogynistic chastity belt to prove her virginity. No one checked for an intact hymen before she gave birth, either. After Jesus was born, Maury Povich wasn’t there with a DNA test to verify Joseph was not the baby daddy. One must show neither Joseph nor any other man was not the baby daddy.

We don’t even have first-hand testimonial evidence for it since the story is related to us by others, not by Mary or Joseph. At best, all we have is second-hand testimony by one person, Mary, as reported in two later anonymous gospels, or two people if we include Joseph, who was incredulously convinced Mary was a virgin because of a dream--yes, a dream (see Matthew 1:19-24).[[28]] We never get to independently cross-examine Mary and Joseph, or the people who knew them, which we would need to do since they may have a very good reason for lying (pregnancy out of wedlock, anyone?). Who knows but that it’s all just a mythical tale, as explained later, so there was no one to fact-check?

Now readers might simply trust the anonymous Gospel writers who wrote down this miraculous tale, because it says so in this particular Holy Book, but why? How is it possible they could find out that a virgin named Mary gave birth to a deity? Think about how they would go about researching it. No reasonable investigation could take Mary’s word for it, or for that matter Joseph’s word. With regard to Joseph’s dream, it makes no difference that in his dream an angel told him Mary was telling the truth. It was still a dream. Angels in dreams don’t actually exist. Thomas Hobbes tells us, “For a man to say God hath spoken to him in a Dream, is no more than to say he dreamed that God spake to him; which is not of force to win belief from any man.”[[29]] So the testimonial evidence is down to one person, Mary, which is still second-hand testimony at best, as reported in two later canonical gospels. Why should we believe that testimony? 

As fellow blogger Daniel Mocsny said,


“I wonder about the special pleading at play here. Would, for example, a theologian who treats ‘The’ virgin birth as a credible claim be equally as generous to his own pregnant and unmarried teenaged daughter if she made the same claim as Mary, and on the same strength of evidence (i.e. her ipse dixit i.e. bare assertion)? To the theologian I would say, if you wouldn’t buy that explanation from your own daughter, why would you be more inclined to trust Mary’s claim when we only have it on multiple levels of hearsay, if ‘Mary’ even existed at all?”

“It seems to me that our starting level of skepticism of Immaculate Conception ought to be the same for every woman of childbearing age who presents as pregnant. Our immediate working assumption is that every pregnant woman got to be pregnant either as a result of having sex with a man, or by having a man’s genetic contribution introduced by some medical procedure. The notion of miraculous conception would simply never cross our minds as a serious possibility.”

On this fact Christian believers are faced with a serious dilemma. If this is the kind of research that went into writing the Gospel of Matthew—by taking Mary’s word and Joseph’s dream as evidence—then we shouldn’t believe anything else we find in that Gospel without corroborating objective evidence. But this lack of evidence for Mary’s story speaks directly to the credibility of the Gospel as a whole. For if there’s no good reason to believe the virgin birth, there’s no good reason to believe the resurrection myth either, since the gospel story of Jesus appearing bodily to his disciples is first told in Matthew’s Gospel.[[30]]

In an online discussion fundamentalist apologist Lydia McGrew suggested I’ve got this all wrong. Her response was that the author of Matthew’s gospel merely reported that Joseph’s dream convinced him that Mary told the truth about her pregnancy and nothing more. But if so, why is Joseph’s dream included in Matthew’s gospel at all? If McGrew is right, it wouldn’t do anything to lead reasonable people to accept Mary’s story. Her testimony would still stand alone without any support. It would be tantamount to admitting Joseph was incredulously convinced by less than what a reasonable person should accept. It would also encourage readers to consider their own dreams as convincing on other issues. 

The undesigned coincidence of McGrew’s suggestion would sow the seeds for doubting Matthew’s Gospel, the second of four Gospels (and the later two gospels which borrowed from it). If the author of the gospel of Matthew was merely reporting Joseph’s dream without first fact-checking it, then nothing prohibits us from concluding the author was merely reporting other tales in his gospel, without fact-checking them?

Apologists and theologians now use the minimal facts approach of Gary Habermas, Mike Licona, and William Lane Craig, who want to focus on a set of minimal facts nonbelieving scholars [almost] all agree on when it comes to the resurrection of Jesus.[[31]] They sweep off the table everything else, including our  unanimous agreement that a virgin named Mary did not give birth to an incarnate God. Apologists separate these issues because the virgin birth narratives in the Gospels speak directly to the illogical and unevidenced nature of the gospel narratives as a whole.

Significant Problems with Mother Mary Giving Birth To God’s Son.

What we know is that neither of the two earliest New Testament writers refer to the virgin birth of Jesus. Neither the apostle Paul nor the author of the gospel of Mark specifically and unequivocally referred to it. That’s very telling. It’s inconceivable neither of them mentioned it. The virgin birth story was an unimportant afterthought for the later gospels of Matthew and Luke. This only makes sense as an invention made up on hindsight to explain how Jesus came down to earth from the sky above the clouds.

Additionally, in the gospel of Mark the family of Jesus themselves thought he was crazy, not God’s son. “He is out of his mind” they said, and tried “to take charge of him (Mark 3:19–21, 31–35). This makes no sense if the virgin birth stories are true in the later gospels of Matthew and Luke. How could his mother Mary forget how her son Jesus was conceived, or what was said about him at the time of his birth? Mary, we read, heard the angel Gabriel say her newborn boy would be called “the Son of God” (Luke 1:35). Her cousin Elizabeth told Mary she was the “mother of my Lord” (Luke 1:43), and she herself said, “from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed” (Luke 1:48). No mother would ever forget the circumstances of his birth, if it happened as reported.

In Luke’s gospel when Mary first hears from the angel Gabriel that she’s to give birth, she objects by saying, “How shall this be, since I know not a man?” (Luke 1:34). Surely Mary wouldn’t feel it necessary to inform Gabriel she hadn’t had sex with any man. If this conversation took place at all, she would’ve said, “How shall this be, since I know not my husband.” So Mary’s stated objection to the angel is also a literary invention.

It gets worse. There are seven facts to consider.

1) The Genealogies are Inaccurate and Irrelevant. The royal genealogies of Jesus in the later gospels of Luke (3:23–37) and Matthew (1:1–17) have historical problems with them. For instance, Matthew’s gospel makes Jesus a descendent of king Jeconiah (1:11), even though the prophet Jeremiah had proclaimed none of Jeconiah’s descendants would ever sit of the throne of David (Jeremiah 22:30).

The genealogies of Jesus are irrelevant if he was born of a virgin. Jewish royal lineages are traced through men not women, so Luke’s genealogy is irrelevant since it traces the lineage of Jesus through Mary. Matthew’s genealogy is equally irrelevant, since it traces the lineage of Jesus through Joseph, who was not his father, according to gospel accounts. To desperately claim Mary’s baby was a new divine creation unrelated to the lineages of either Mary or Joseph, also makes the genealogies irrelevant. For then it wouldn’t matter which mother’s womb God decided to create his son inside. 

In no other case is a supposed or adopted son a legitimate heir to a throne. So John Beversluis writes:

“Either Joseph was the biological father of Jesus or he was not. If he was, then Jesus was a gene-carrying descendent of David, and God’s promise to David was fulfilled. If he was not, then Jesus was not a gene-carrying descendent of David, and God’s promise to David was not fulfilled.”[[32]] 

Modern genetics decisively render the genealogies irrelevant since one cannot even have a human being without the genetic contributions of both a male seed and a female egg. Cloning human beings is still off in the future. Nonetheless, if one were to clone a female the result would be a female baby, not a boy. 

2) Jesus Was Not Born in Bethlehem. In Matthew 2:5-6 we’re told the Messiah was to be born in Bethlehem near Jerusalem, in the southern part of Israel. But the precise phrase “Bethlehem Ephratah” in the original prophecy of Micah 5:2 refers not to a town, but to a family clan: the clan of Bethlehem, who was the son of Caleb’s second wife, Ephratah (1 Chron. 2:19, 2:50–51, 4:4). Furthermore, Micah’s prophecy predicts a military commander who would rule over the land of Assyria (which never happened), and was certainly not about a future Messiah.

The earliest gospel of Mark begins by saying Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee, in the northern part of Israel, not from Bethlehem in the south (Mark 1:9). In the later Gospel of John, Jesus was rejected as the Messiah precisely because the people of Nazareth knew he was born and raised in their town! They rhetorically asked, “How can the Messiah come from Galilee?” They said, “A prophet does not come out of Galilee” (John 7:42, 52).

Since Jesus was from Nazareth of Galilee he couldn’t be the Messiah. Period! So Matthew and Luke invented conflicting stories to fix this problem. In Matthew’s gospel—the one most concerned with making Jesus fit alleged prophecies—Joseph’s family is originally living in Bethlehem where Jesus was born (Matt. 2). To show Jesus was the Messiah, the author invented the Bethlehem Star as astrological “proof” he was born exactly where the Messiah was supposed to be born. To get Jesus to Nazareth he tells us Joseph was warned in a dream to flee to Egypt, because Herod was slaughtering two year old children (Matt. 2:15). Then after Herod died he tells us Joseph took his family to reside in Nazareth (Matt. 2:21–23), the town Jesus was known to have come from.

But there was no census, no massacre of children, and no Bethlehem star.

3) There Was No Census. Luke’s gospel tells us something bizarre, that Joseph had to go to Bethlehem to register for the census because “he was from the house and lineage of David.” (Luke 2:4) According to Luke’s genealogy king David had lived forty-two generations earlier. Why should everyone have had to register for a census in the town of one of his ancestors forty-two generations earlier? There would be millions of ancestors by that time, and the whole empire would have been uprooted. Why forty-two generations and not thirty-five, or sixteen? If this requirement was only for the lineage of King David, what was Caesar Augustus thinking when he ordered it? He had a king, Herod.

Both Matthew and Luke said Jesus was born during the time of Herod the Great (Matthew 2:1, Luke 1:5). Herod died in 4 BCE, so Jesus was born at the latest in 4 BCE. The only known census of that period was a local one in Galilee which took place in 6 CE by Syrian governor Quirinius. There’s a gap of ten years between Herod’s death and the alleged census, which means there was no census at the birth of Jesus. But Luke’s gospel said it was a world-wide census, not a local one. And that census didn’t take place at all, for as Raymond Brown tells: “A census of the known world under Caesar Augustus never happened” and he reigned from 27 BC to 14 AD.[[33]] 

German theologian Ute Ranke-Heinemann concludes after fact-checking Luke’s nativity narrative that:


“If we wish to continue seeing Luke’s accounts… as historical events, we’d have to take a large leap of faith: We’d have to assume that while on verifiable matters of historical fact Luke tells all sorts of fairy tales but on supernatural matters—which by definition can never be checked—he simply reports the facts. By his arbitrary treatment of history, Luke has shown himself to be an unhistorical reporter—a teller of fairy tales.”[[34]]

4) There Was No Slaughter of the Innocents. In Matthew’s gospel king Herod was said to have ordered all the male children “in Bethlehem and all the surrounding countryside” to be slaughtered (2:16) because he was worried one of them could usurp his throne. But there is no other account of such a massacre in any other source. It’s clear that the first century Jewish historian Josephus hated Herod. He chronicled in detail his crimes, many of which were lesser in kind than this alleged wholesale massacre of children. Yet nowhere does Josephus’ mention this slaughter even though he was in a position to know of it, and even though he would want to mention it.

5) There Was No Star of Bethlehem. Matthew’s gospel says: “The star, which they the Magi had seen in the east, went on before them until it came and stopped over the place where the child was.” (2:9–10). There is no independent corroboration of this tale by any other source, Christian or otherwise. No astrologer/astronomer anywhere in the world recorded this event, even though they systematically searched the stars for guidance and predictions of the future. More significantly the author of Luke chose not to include the story of a Star, Magi, or the attempt on Jesus’ life, which is telling, since his gospel was written after “a careful study of everything” he says, so readers could know what actually took place from what didn’t. (1:1-4).

Theories for this Star include a comet, a supernova, the conjunction of planets, a Type Ic hypernova located in the Andromeda galaxy, and others. H. R. Reimarus (A.D. 1768) observed long ago that even if it were some sort of comet with a tail, “it is too high to point to a specific house.” If it were a miraculous star, then why didn’t everyone in the vicinity see it? Pope Leo I (A.D. 461) proposed that the star was invisible to the Jews because of their blindness. But then why did it appear to pagan astrologers? 

The fatal problem is that none of these theories conform to what the text actually says in Matthew’s gospel. The Magi follow the star to Jerusalem where they inquire of King Herod about the birth of the Messiah, the king of the Jews. Then they follow the star to Bethlehem. We read, “they went their way; and lo, the star which they had seen in the East went before them, till it came to rest over the place where the child was.” (Matt. 2:9; Revised Standard Version). But there’s no way to determine which specific house a star stopped over, if it did! This is only consistent with pre-scientific notions of the earth being the center of the universe with the stars being moved by a god who sits on a throne in the sky.[[35]] 

Stars don’t move in the sky, and they certainly don’t appear to move in a southern direction from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. They all appear to move from the east to west, like the sun, because of the spin of the earth. 

The Star is no problem for the Biblical worldview though. In the Bible stars move: “The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises.” (Eccl. 1:5). They can also stop: “The sun stopped in the middle of the sky for about a full day. There has never been a day like it before or since.” (Joshua 10). [[36]] 

When we compare Matthew and Luke’s accounts, Raymond Brown concludes:


“Despite efforts stemming from preconceptions of biblical inerrancy or of Marian piety, it is exceedingly doubtful that both accounts can be considered historical. A review of the implications explains why the historicity of the infancy narratives has been questioned by so many scholars, even by those who do not in advance (i.e., a priori) rule out the miraculous.”[[37]

6) The Nativity Prophecies Are Fake News.  A prophecy in Isaiah 9:6–7 says: “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” In Luke 1:31-33 the language is similar to Isaiah’s description of Jesus. 

But any Jew writing at that time might express the same hope for a Messiah/savior who would rescue their nation from their oppressors. An expressed hope for a future Messiah is not to be considered a prediction, unless along with that expressed hope are specific details whereby we can check to see if it was fulfilled in a specific person. Isaiah provides none. With no details there isn’t any real prediction. 

Matthew 1:20–23 claims Isaiah 7:14 predicts Jesus’ virgin birth. First of all the Hebrew word for virgin used in Isaiah 7:14 is betulah. It’s used five times in the book of Isaiah. Isaiah 7:14 isn’t one of them. The word used in Isaiah 7:14 is ‘almah, which means young woman, or simply girl. It does not specify a virgin. Full Stop. The gospel of Matthew’s error was to use a 200 year old Greek translation of the Hebrew, which used the word parthenos. Originally the Greek word parthenos meant “young girl,” but by the time Matthew wrote his gospel that word had been changed by usage to signify a “virgin” rather than a young girl. This is not unlike how the words “nice” and “gay” have changed in meaning over the years. So Matthew grossly misunderstood the original Hebrew text in Isaiah by incorrectly claiming Jesus was to be born of a virgin. 

Let’s consider exactly what Isaiah 7:1-16 actually says in context:


In the days of king Ahaz the Lord said to Isaiah, “Go forth to meet Ahaz, and say to him, ‘Take heed, be quiet, do not fear, and do not let your heart be faint because Syria, with Ephraim, has devised evil against you saying, ‘Let us go up against Judah and let us conquer it.’” Thus says the Lord God: “Within sixty-five years Ephraim will be broken to pieces so that it will no longer be a people."

.…

 “The Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, a maiden (almah not betulah) shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. Before the child knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land before whose two kings you are in dread will be deserted.” 

The context for the prophecy in Isaiah tells us that before a son born of a “young woman” (not a virgin) “is old enough to know how to choose between right and wrong the countries of two kings (i.e., Syria and Samaria) will be destroyed” (7:15-16). The prophecy was actually fulfilled in Isaiah 8:3 with the birth of his son Maher-shalal-hash-baz. 

Robert Miller comments:


“The imminent birth of the baby is the point. The birth is coming soon enough to be a sign for King Ahaz that God will protect the throne of David during the current military crisis. The birth of which Isaiah speaks can be a sign for Ahaz only if it is imminent. Isaiah could not possibly have intended to predict the birth of Jesus, for the obvious reason that a birth over seven hundred years in Isaiah’s future could not be a sign to Ahaz.”[[38]] 

Miller goes on to say,


“Even if we take the Greek translation parthenos to refer to ‘virgin,’ it means only that a woman who is now a virgin will become pregnant. No miracle is intended. Every woman who gets pregnant was once a virgin. In both the Hebrew and Greek, the divine sign is the timing of the conception, not its manner.”[[39]] 

About this alleged virgin birth prophecy an apologist named Garrett Kell clearly places blind faith above reason. He says Matthew’s virgin birth interpretation is correct because it is inspired by the same God who inspired Isaiah 7, despite the fact they are irreconcilable.


“Matthew is telling us that Isaiah, whether he knew it or not, was speaking of the Messiah—and that his prophecy is fulfilled and realized in the miraculous conception of Jesus. We can trust Matthew’s interpretation of Isaiah 7 because his writings are inspired by the same Spirit who inspired Isaiah’s prophecy.”[[40]]  

In the book The Case for the Real Jesus, Lee Strobel interviewed Dr. Michael Brown, an evangelical expert on Messianic prophecy. Here is the crucial conclusion of Brown on this prophecy from Isaiah to Matthew:

                    “Lee Strobel: Did Matthew misinterpret this?

Brown: It’s a tough passage.

Strobel: What’s your conclusion?

Brown: That it’s impossible to determine exactly what the prophecy meant to the original hearers when it was delivered.”[[41]] 

Biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan tells us what really happened: “Clearly, somebody went seeking in the Old Testament for a text that could be interpreted as prophesying a virginal conception, even if such was never its original meaning.”[[42]] 

7) The Virgin Birth of Jesus Has Pagan Parallels. Robert Miller shows us many important people in the ancient world were believed to have been the product of virgin births:

“People in the ancient world believed that heroes were the sons of gods because of the extraordinary qualities of their adult lives, not because there was public information about the intimate details of how their mothers became pregnant. In fact, in some biographies the god takes on the physical form of the woman’s husband in order to have sex with her.”[[43]] 

Then Miller proceeds to document some of these stories. There was Theagenes, the Olympic champion, who was regarded as divine for being one of the greatest athlete’s in the ancient world. Hercules was the most widely revered hero of the ancient world. He was promoted to divine status after his death, and it was said he was fathered by Zeus. Alexander the Great was believed to be conceived of a virgin and fathered in turn by Heracles. Augustus Caesar was believed to be conceived of a virgin and fathered by Apollo, as was Plato, the philosopher. Apollonius of Tyana was believed to be a holy man born of a virgin and fathered by Zeus. Pythagoras the philosopher was believed to be a son of Apollo. There were also savior-gods, like Krishna, Osiris, Dionysus, and Tammuz, who were born of virgins and known to the Gospel writers centuries before. 

All that these virgin birth claims show is that these people were important, and that’s it. None of them are taken to be literal virgin births. So it should not come as a surprise that the early Christians came up with similar myths about Jesus. The virgin birth is myth all the way down with no historical reality.

Justin Martyr tells us this is the case. He was a second-century Christian apologist who tried to convince the pagans of his day of the truth of Christianity. In his First Apology he wrote

When we say that the Word, who is the first-birth of God, was produced without sexual union, and that he, Jesus Christ, our teacher, was crucified and died, and rose again, and ascended into heaven, we propound nothing different from what you believe regarding those whom you esteem sons of Jupiter...Of what kind of deeds recorded of each of these reputed sons of Jupiter, it is needless to tell to those who already know...[I]f we even affirm that he [Jesus] was born of a virgin, accept this in common with what you accept of Perseus.[[44]] 

Richard Miller (unrelated to Robert) focuses on the points made by Justin Martyr. [[45]] He comments as follows:


Justin contends there is “nothing new” about the Christian tales of Jesus. They are the same in kind as the Greco-Roman demi-gods: sired by human and divine parents, a tragic death, immortalization / resurrection, ascension, etc., which are the adorning themes of a superhero, not of real events in time and space.

 

Justin essentially says: ‘Our new hero is just like your own, except ours is awesome, whereas yours are the deceptions of demons.’

 

Justin offers no historical evidence.

 

Justin’s ‘case’ is that Jesus had more ancient prophetic oracles, or was a more perfect symbol of morality, and that’s it.

Why doesn’t Justin offer any historical evidence? Because none was needed, just as there was none needed for the sons of Zeus. Hero deification was based solely on the perceived greatness of the deceased. 

But Wait, Is There Something Else? 

There is an early Christian forgery called the Proto-Gospel of James (Dated 140-170 AD) which was falsely claimed to be written by James the brother of Jesus, before any of the canonical Gospels. This Gospel was rejected as authentic by the early church. It’s supposed to provide the objective evidence that Jesus was born of a virgin named Mary.

The Proto-Gospel of James follows a lot of what we read in the canonical gospel accounts, which is significant, since it repeats some of the fraudulent claims in the gospels, such as the world-wide census under Augustus Caesar, the sign of the Star of Bethlehem, the slaughter of the innocents, and the claim Joseph was convinced by a dream that Mary was impregnated by God.

In the Proto-Gospel of James we’re told Joseph and Mary were accused by a priest of being fornicators, so he ordered them to participate in a barbaric trial by ordeal, based on passages like Numbers 5. They were both ordered to drink contaminated water from the floor of the temple, which would be polluted by animal feces and blood from sacrifices. If they were guilty of lying about their pregnancy Mary would suffer a miscarriage, or her and Joseph could both die. According to the Proto-Gospel of James they drank it and survived, so they were exonerated. 

One wonders, of course, if Joseph would really “go to the mat” for Mary based on a mere dream. Nonetheless, trials by ordeals don’t work. They’re barbaric and unbecoming of a God to require them. If anyone thinks otherwise we might use them to double-check whether accused murders were correctly acquitted in court trials. Just have them eat contaminated meat, or drink measured amounts of arsenic, cyanide, or venom. Watch and see!

In the Proto-Gospel of James there was a midwife for Mary, along with another woman named Salome. Upon the birth of Jesus the midwife believed, but Salome said, “Unless I thrust in my finger, and search the parts, I will not believe that a virgin has brought forth.” Then “Salome put in her finger, and cried out, and said: Woe is me for mine iniquity and mine unbelief, because I have tempted the living God.” Her hand began to drop off “as if burned with fire.” Salome prays for forgiveness for questioning God, and her hand was healed.[[46]] Reminiscent of the tale of Doubting Thomas, who refused to believe Jesus was resurrected until he inserted his fingers into his wounds, Salome refused to believe Mary was a virgin until she fingered her. Supposedly she checked for an intact hymen, which had to be a miracle since a baby would have torn her hymen. 

This late dated forgery containing an additional miracle, such as Salome’s healed hand, doesn’t provide support for the original miracle claim of the virgin birth. It isn’t considered objective evidence nor is it considered good testimonial evidence. In fact, Salome’s unevidenced miracle is not to be considered evidence for an unevidenced virgin birth by the alleged Mother of God!

This forged gospel contains known historical falsehoods as it’s based on what we read in the gospels. It is late, untrustworthy and inauthentic. It doesn’t provide the needed objective evidence or testimonial evidence to support a miracle claim. It is therefore irrelevant. 

So let us imagine what could have been... 

If an overwhelming number of Jews in first-century Palestine had become Christians that would’ve helped. They believed in their God. They believed their God did miracles. They knew their Old Testament prophecies. They hoped for a Messiah/King based on these prophecies.[[47]] We’re told they were beloved by their God! Yet the overwhelming majority of those first-century Jews did not believe Jesus was raised from the dead.[[48]] They were there and they didn’t believe. So why should we?

If I could go back in time to watch Jesus coming out of a tomb that would work. But I can’t travel back in time. If someone recently found some convincing objective evidence dating to the days of Jesus, that would work. But I can’t imagine what kind of evidence that could be. As I’ve argued, uncorroborated testimonial evidence alone wouldn’t work, so an authenticated handwritten letter from the mother of Jesus would be insufficient. If a cell phone was discovered and dated to the time of Jesus containing videos of him doing miracles, that would work. But this is just as unlikely as his resurrection. If Jesus, God, or Mary were to appear to me, that would work. But that has never happened even in my believing days, and there’s nothing I can do to make it happen either. Several atheists have suggested other scenarios that would work, but none of them have panned out.[[49]] 

Believers will cry foul, complaining that the kind of objective evidence needed to believe cannot be found, as if we concocted this need precisely to deny miracles. But this is simply what reasonable people need. If that’s the case, then that’s the case. Bite the bullet. It’s not our fault it doesn’t exist. Once honest inquirers admit the objective evidence doesn’t exist, they should stop complaining and be honest about its absence. It’s that simple. Since reasonable people need this evidence, God is to be blamed for not providing it. Why would a God create us as reasonable people and then not provide what reasonable people need? Reasonable people should always think about these matters in accordance to the probabilities based on the strength of the objective evidence. 

If nothing else, a God who desired our belief could have waited until our present technological age to perform miracles, because people in this scientific age of ours need to see the evidence. If a God can send the savior Jesus in the first century, whose death supposedly atoned for our sins and atoned for all the sins of the people in the past, prior to his day, then that same God could have waited to send Jesus to die in the year 2024. Doing so would bring salvation to every person born before this year, too, which just adds twenty centuries of people to save.

In today’s world it would be easy to provide objective evidence of the Gospel miracles. Magicians and mentalists would watch Jesus to see if he could fool them, like what Penn & Teller do on their show. There would be thousands of cell phones that could document his birth, life, death, and resurrection. The raising of Lazarus out of his tomb would go viral. We could set up a watch party as Jesus was being put into his grave to document everything all weekend, especially his resurrection. We could ask the resurrected Jesus to tell us things that only the real Jesus could have known or said before he died. Photos could be compared. DNA tests could be conducted on the resurrected body of Jesus, which could prove his resurrection, if we first snatched the foreskin of the baby Jesus long before his death. Plus, everyone in the world could watch as his body ascended back into the heavenly sky above, from where it was believed he came down to earth. 

Christian believers say their God wouldn’t make his existence obvious. But if their God had wanted to save more people, as we read he did (2 Peter 3:9), then it’s obvious he should’ve waited until our modern era to do so. For the evidence could be massive. If nothing else, their God had all of this evidence available to him, but chose not to use any of it, even though with the addition of each unit of evidence, more people would be saved. 


[1] See God: An Anatomy (2022) by Francesca Stavrakopoulou.

[2] All quotes to be found at “Redefining the Virgin Birth: Mormonism on the Natural Conception of Jesus” by Bill McKeever and Aaron Shafovaloff, at https://www.mrm.org/virgin-birth.

[3] If readers think God was merely accommodating his revelation to ancient pre-scientific people, they need to consider why God would not reveal his true nature to them then  do some incredible miracles to prove it? See what I wrote about it here: Debunking Christianity: The Accommodation Theory of the Bible

[4] On this issue I highly recommend chapter 19. Was Jesus God Incarnate? in my book, Why I Became an Atheist, pp. 370- 398

[5] Seen in my collected works, especially Why I Became an Atheist, and The Case against Miracles.

[7] The Dark Side: How Evangelical Teachings Corrupt Love and Truth (Lulu.com, 2006) pp. 221-22. Debunking Christianity: A Review of Valerie Tarico’s Book, “The Dark Side.”

[8] James T. Houk, The Illusion of Certainty (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2017), p. 16.

[9] See my paper, How to Change the Minds of Believers, at Secular Web.

[11] This will be seen as follows. As to needing “relevant” evidence, believers will focus on irrelevancies like ancient manuscripts and archeological findings. Yes we have 4th century manuscripts, but that's only evidence of ancient non-eyewitness 2nd 3rd 4th handed down hearsay testimony, as written by authors who were not themselves eyewitnesses. So it’s irrelevant as objective evidence.

They also point to the archaeological findings of the Pool of Siloam in Jerusalem, where Jesus supposedly told a blind man to go and be healed, and was healed (John 9:1-7). But findings like these are not considered relevant objective evidence. At best what Christians have are archaeological findings that are consistent with what they believe. They don’t confirm what they believe, in the same way as the city of Bethlehem is consistent with the claim Jesus was born of a virgin, but doesn’t confirm it, or as the city of Roswell, New Mexico, is consistent with the claim aliens are real, but doesn’t confirm it. This kind of evidence is not unimportant, but is still irrelevant to whether a miracle took place. Artifacts like these merely provide the back drop for the tales being told, and nothing more. They’re akin to what Homer wrote in The Iliad and The Odyssey about the miraculous deeds of the gods and goddesses using identified places as backdrops. See Debunking Christianity: Disconfirming Evidence is Decisive

[13]  Loftus, ed., The Case against Miracles (United Kingdom: Hypatia Press, 2022).

[14] David Hand, The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day (Scientific American, 2014).

[15] Loftus, ed., Christianity in the Light of Science: Critically Examining the World’s Largest Religion, (Prometheus Books, 2016).

[16] “I Want to Believe” (July 2009)

[18] Erhman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don’t Know About Them), (HarperOne; 2010), pp. 171-179.

[22] Christian apologist Kyle Alander attempted to clarify his view of background knowledge using a Bayesian analysis. Very briefly, and strangely enough, he doesn’t understand background knowledge as something “being built incrementally over time.” It “is not formed through the accumulation of evidence over time but is instead understood as a unified network where evidence is evaluated based on its explanatory coherence with other established facts and propositions.” The Educative Matrix. pp. 67-69 Kindle.

Now there’s no doubt that a Bayesian analysis of knowledge acquisition is all about belief change, as Alander rightly says. That’s what Bayes is designed to do! However, most all of people, most all of the time, defend their cultural religious indoctrination because their brains prohibit it, Bayes be damned! What's Wrong with Using Bayes' Theorem on Miracles? » Internet Infidels If nothing else, scroll down to the heading, #3.

 They do this because of the background information they learned since childhood (not knowledge), which is very unlikely to be dislodged later in life. Strange isn’t it, that a God who wants us to believe requires of us to learn and apply the math of Bayes, first known in 1763! In any case, Alander needs to explain why even scholars accept a Bayesian analysis of knowledge yet disagree.

[25] William Lane Craig, Apologetics: An Introduction, (Moody Press, 1984), p. 125.

[26] When it comes to the supposed resurrection of Jesus, at its very best, historians would say there just isn’t enough evidence to speculate on a god when there are plenty of other natural explanations. Even if these explanations are unlikely, they are eminently more likely than that Jesus walked out of his grave after being brain dead for about three days. That being said, I support one explanation over others: Debunking Christianity: “The Rationalization Hypothesis: Is a Vision of Jesus Necessary for the Rise of the Resurrection Belief?” — by Kris Komarnitsky

[27] Bob Unrah, “ ‘Fairy Tale’: Many Pastors Don’t Believe Jesus Born of Virgin,” https://www.wnd.com/2015/12/christian-preacher-nativity-story-just-fairy-tale/

[28] Joseph’s dream is used in the Gospel of Matthew’s narrative to help explain why Mary was not put to death for dishonoring him because of adultery. There are five other dreams in this gospel account which were all intended to save someone’s life. So, Joseph’s dream was probably meant to save Mary’s life too (Matthew 1:19-23; 2:12; 2:19-23; & 27:19). Matthew J. Marohl shows in Joseph’s Dilemma: “Honor Killing” in the Birth Narrative of Matthew (Wipf & Stock Publisher, 2008), that “Joseph’s dilemma involves the possibility of an honor killing. If Joseph reveals that Mary is pregnant, she will be killed. If Joseph conceals Mary’s pregnancy, he will be opposing the law of the Lord. What is a ‘righteous’ man to do?” Marohl: “Early Christ-followers understood Joseph’s dilemma to involve an assumption of adultery and the subsequent possibility of the killing of Mary.”

 This was part of their culture. Honor killings were justified in both the Old and New Testaments. Jesus even agreed with the Mosaic Law (Exodus 21:17; Leviticus 20:9) against his opponents on behalf of honor killings of children who dishonored their parents (Mark 7:9-13). The tale of the woman caught in adultery, where Jesus exposes the hypocrisy of her accusers, doesn’t change what Jesus thinks of the law either (John 8; Matthew 5:18). See more here: Debunking Christianity: “God of Genocide? A Debate on Biblical Violence” The Text of My 12 Minute Debate Opener Against Randal Rauser

[29] Leviathan, chap. 32.6.

[30] On the resurrection, see Loftus, The Case against Miracles (United Kingdom: Hypatia Press, 2022), chapter 17.

[31] What are these so-called agreed upon facts? That 1) Jesus died by crucifixion, 2) his disciples believed he arose and appeared to them, 3) that the church persecutor Paul was suddenly converted, 4) James, the brother of Jesus, who was formerly a skeptic converted, and that 5) the tomb of Jesus was empty. Debunking Christianity: Minimal Facts

[33] On these topics I recommend Paul Tobin, The Christian Delusion, Chapter 6: “The Bible and Modern Scholarship” pp. 148-180.

[34] Uta Ranke-Heinemann, Putting Away Childish Things, (New York: Harper San Francisco), 1995, p. 14

[35] On this see Aaron Adair, The Star of Bethlehem: A Skeptical View (Onus Books (2013).

[36] Edward Babinski has written a monumental work of the cosmology of the Bible, in The Christian Delusion, chapter 5, pp. 109-147.

[38] Robert J. Miller, Born Divine: The Births of Jesus & Other Sons of God (Polebridge Press Westar Institute, 1993), pp. 95-96.

[39] Miller, Ibid.

[40] Gareth Kell, “Is Jesus Really the Virgin-Born Child in Isaiah 7?” Is Jesus Really the Virgin-Born Child in Isaiah 7?

[41] Lee Strobel, The Case for the Real Jesus (Grand Rapids, Zondervan, 2007), p. 217.

[42] John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (New York: Harper-Collins, 1989), pp. 16–23.

[43] Robert J. Miller, Born Divine, p. 134

[44] Justin Martyr, First Apology, 21.

[45] For the best analysis of this see Richard C. Miller, Resurrection and Reception in Early Christianity (Routledge, 2017).

[47] To see how early Christian’s misused Old Testament prophecy, see Robert J. Miller’s excellent book, Helping Jesus Fulfill Prophecy (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2015).

[48] The most plausible estimate of the first-century Jewish population comes from a census of the Roman Empire during the reign of Claudius (48 CE) that counted nearly 7 million Jews. See the entry “Population” in Encyclopedia Judaica, vol. 13. In Palestine there may have been as many as 2.5 million Jews. See Magen Broshi, “Estimating the Population of Ancient Jerusalem.” Biblical Archaeological Review Vol. 4, No. 2 (June 1978): 10-15. Despite these numbers, Catholic New Testament scholar David C. Sim shows that “Throughout the first century the total number of Jews in the Christian movement probably never exceeded 1,000.” See How Many Jews Became Christians in the First Century: The Failure of the Christian Mission to the Jews. Hervormde Teologiese Studies Vol. 61, No. 1/2 (2005): 417-440.

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