According to Matthew, Jesus had a legitimate Davidic pedigree through his legal father Joseph (Miller, Born Divine, 89, 91).

The Preposition ek

Matthew’s use of the Greek preposition ek in his two references to Mary’s being pregnant “by a holy spirit” is not necessarily an indication that Jesus has no human father. It is true that ek is a grammatically correct way to name the man responsible for a pregnancy, but that is not the only way the expres sion functions in Greek. Moreover, there are good reasons to think that Matthew is not using this phrase to exclude a biological father for Jesus. Here we need to go slowly and examine several texts in detail. This may seem like a lot of trouble over a two-letter word. But understanding the pre cise nuance of the ek is crucial to discerning the meaning of Matt 1 :18-25, and the meaning of that passage is crucial to a critical investigation of the vir gin birth. There are four considerations that support the conclusion that Matthew’s use of “begotten by (ek) a holy spirit” does not imply a virginal conception.

• 1. The Johannine writings repeatedly assert that Christians are “begotten by (ek) the spirit” or “fathered by (ek) God” (see pp. 226). Obviously, neither usage of ek connotes the absence of biological fathers.

• 2. The Old Testament has several references to individuals who are called “sons of God” and one passage in which God tells the newly-crowned king, “Today I have fathered you” (Ps 2:6-7, see p. 223). Several other passages name God as the direct cause of specific pregnancies, when it is clear that the woman has had intercourse with her husband (see p. 225). This Jewish way of thinking shows through in the New Testament when Paul describes Isaac as “begotten according to the spirit” and distinguishes him from Abraham’s other biological son, Ishmael, who was “begotten according to the flesh” (Gal 4:29). These examples from the Jewish Bible and Paul the Jew are the appropri ate context for understanding the claims in the Gospel and First Letter of John that Christians are divinely begotten, for these writings evince a thoroughly Jewish mentality. All these texts show us that Jews (including Jewish Christians) could freely refer to people who are fathered by God or begotten by the spirit without ever imagining that they were born to virgin mothers. Matthew is the most thoroughly Jewish author in the New Testament. It is clear that in his Jewish world the concept of divine begetting had nothing to do with the physical circumstances of conception. Being fathered by God was never understood to exclude being fathered by a human male. In light of this, there is no reason for thinking that Matthew’s description of the unborn Jesus as begotten by a holy spirit (Matt 1: 18, 20) implies that he had no human father. If Matthew is referring to the virgin birth in 1: 18 and 1 :20, he is using the language of divine begetting to mean something very different from what it means in every other passage in the Bible.

• 3. The annunciation scene in the Infancy Gospel ofJames contains a fas cinating bit of dialogue that sheds light on our topic. The angel tells Mary that she will conceive “by (ek) the word of God.” Mary is puzzled and asks, “Am I going to conceive by the Lord, the living God, the way every woman does who gives birth?” (InJas 11:5-6). Mary believes what the angel says, but asks whether she will conceive the way all women do. The angel then explains, in words copied from Luke’s gospel, that she will conceive without a man (InJas11 :7). The Infancy Gospel ofJames was written in a non-Jewish setting long after Matthew’s gospel. Yet the author was aware that the expression “to con ceive by the word of God” was ambiguous enough, even to gentile Christians who believed in the virgin birth, that he needed to narrow its meaning. He has Mary ask her question so that he can have the angel supply further clarifi cation. The author knew that by itself the phrase “to conceive by the word of God” did not exclude a human biological father.

• 4. There is one more biblical passage that is directly relevant to under standing what Matthew means when he writes that Mary was pregnant by a holy spirit. That passage is in the book of Genesis, toward the end of the story of Tamar, one of the four women that Matthew inserts into his genealogy of Jesus (Matt 1 :3). Tamar, in order to obtain the marital rights that her father-in-law had unjustly denied her (see pp. 82-83), became pregnant by disguising herself as a prostitute and luring him into incestuous intercourse. When her pregnancy is discovered, Tamar is accused of being “pregnant by (ek) fornication” (Gen 38:24 LXX). Her father-in-law, Judah, has no idea that he is the father of her child and he orders that she be put to death. Tamar successfully defends her self by proving that she is “pregnant by (ek)” Judah, who then declares, “Tamar is on the side of justice, not I.” (Gen 38:25-26). Here we see two uses for the preposition ek, the second one to identify the man who participated in the conception, the first one to characterize its moral/spiritual quality. We can be sure that Matthew knew Tamar’s story because he mentions her in the genealogy immediately preceding the annunciation to Joseph. The suspicion that a woman is “pregnant by fornication” is exactly what readers have to imagine is weighing on Joseph’s mind-what else was he supposed to think? The revelation from the angel directly addresses his anxiety: Mary’s pregnancy is not “ek fornication,” as Joseph fears, but “ek a holy spirit.” Neither ek-phrase is meant to exclude male sexual complicity; rather, both phrases describe what kind of conception this is: either sinful or holy.

• The angel tells Joseph, in effect, that regardless of how Mary became pregnant, her con dition is now sacred. God has stepped in, has put this pregnancy under his protection, and plans to use it to serve his will. Joseph, a man of justice (Matt 1: 19), is instructed to do justice (i.e., make things right) for the woman and her child, for God has chosen this child to be Israel’s savior.

The Four Women

Along with Tamar, as we have noted, three other women appear in Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus: Rahab the prostitute, Ruth the seductress, and Bathsheba the rape victim (Matt 1 :5, 6, see p. 84). Since women were rarely included in ancient genealogies, we know that Matthew was making a point by adding them and that he could bank on his readers noticing their presence in the list of Jesus’ ancestors. Readers who knew the Old Testament would wonder why Matthew had gone out of his way to mention four women, all of whom had sexual histories marked by scandal or shame, hardly the kind of women one expects to be highlighted in the lineage of the Messiah. As soon as the genealogy is finished, Matthew opens the episode of the annunciation by describing a situation fraught with the potential for scandal and shame: Mary is pregnant, but not by Joseph. The relevance of the women in the genealogy now becomes apparent. Mention of the four women is designed to lead Matthew’s reader to expect another, final story of a woman who becomes a social misfit in some way; is wronged or thwarted; who is party to a sexual act that places her in great danger; and whose story has an outcome that repairs the social fabric and ensures the birth of a child who is legitimate or legiti mated (Schaberg, lUegitimacy, 33). On the other hand, if Matthew means that Mary’s pregnancy was the result of a virginal conception, it is very difficult to discern what connection he saw between Mary and the women in the genealogy. Their stories feature no divine interventions, and certainly no miracles. If Matthew had wanted to prepare readers for a miraculous birth, he could have mentioned Sarah, mother of Isaac, and Rachel, mother of Jacob-both of whom conceived through miracles-instead of Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba.