Virgin Birth

The logical and the faithful know that God can do what He wills*, while the skeptical question how. But the doubtful do neither.


It strikes me that there should be at least two main attributes ascribed to a Virgin Birth that a skeptic should consider;

1. No human father
2. No normal delivery through the birth canal

In both cases there would no disruption or breaking of the evidence of virginity. There may be some wiggle room or slight of hand possible, but I am not considering In Vitro Fertilization, IVF or Caesarean section delivery here.



In the past I have speculated that God could have cloned Jesus from his mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and then simply modified one of the X chromosomes to a Y, triggering the production of testosterone and thereby incarnating Jesus as a male. I'm sure God the Father understands Somatic cell nuclear transfer.

Along this same line of reasoning but in a much better developed argument, Maria Hsia Chang wrote an article published in the December 2015 New Oxford Review, titled "Putting Jesus to the DNA Test..The Virgin Birth: Where Science meets Scripture"

In this article Chang explains that the "mechanism that determines maleness is the SRY (Sex-determining Region) gene on the Y chromosome. Once SRY is activated, cells produce testosterone and anti-Müllerian hormones, turning genderless sex organs male."

Chang goes on to explain that there is a rare (4 out of 100,000) XX male syndrome where the SRY gene gets inserted or crosses over to an X Chromosome, producing a genetically female XX person who is phenotypically (and for all intents and purposes) male. This syndrome "is usually caused by unequal crossing over between X and Y chromosomes during meiosis (a specialized type of cell division that reduces the chromosome number by half) in the father, resulting in the X instead of the Y chromosome containing the male SRY gene."

Chang summarizes by stating then asking: "Jesus, being born of a virgin without a human father, whose phenotype (appearance) was unmistakably masculine, would be an XX male with one of His X chromosomes containing the SRY gene. Can all this be substantiated by DNA evidence?"


She provides interesting insight into an answer, that genetic testing on the blood stains on both the Shroud of Turin and the Sudarium indicate XX.



As for the second attribute of a virgin birth, the delivery, of which Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich says that our Lady was surrounded with brilliant light, "When the hour of midnight arrived Mary was transported in an ecstasy....raised a certain height from the ground;" then "The Blessed Virgin, raised from the earth in her ecstasy, prayed and turned her eyes to her God, of whom she had become the mother, and who, a feeble new-born infant, was lying on the ground before her." All the while Joseph could not watch, "who was still praying with his face to the ground."



This I equate to Jesus' passing through the locked door in the upper room where the Apostles were hiding, on Easter Sunday after His resurrection. However, those familiar with quantum physics discoveries that atoms themselves are almost entirely enpty space, and protons, neutrons and electrons may not actually be physical but 'waves', It seems no great leap of faith or reason to view this as one physical manifestation made up of mostly empty space passing through another physical manifestation also made up mostly of empty space, in one case the molecules of a locked door, in the other the molecules of the cells of the Blessed Virgin's womb and flesh. A generation that understands Star Trek transporters with their Heisenberg compensators surely can recognize these types of concepts as possible explanations for a Virgin birth.



* God is omnipotent, but He cannot contradict Himself, therefore since He is Truth He cannot lie. In effect God wants what He cannot create, force or bring forth: our love.