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Christ was born as a result of fornication. Jesus may well have lived with many of his contemporaries thinking of him as a bastard child. However, John gives no account of Christ's nativity, but simply quotes Christ as saying before Pilate: "I have been born for this, and for this I have come into the world, that I might bear witness to the truth" (John 18:37). This shows that John believed Christ to have been born into this world and the fact that he elsewhere writes of him as being made flesh (John 1:14) and coming down from heaven (John 3:13) does not negate this. Had Christ been born in the usual way, as the result of sexual relations between a man and a woman, it is difficult, if not impossible, to see in what sense we could think of these happenings as being real.

Paul and the other epistle writers do not specifically write of the virgin birth. This is no doubt because, although Christ's virgin birth underlies the teaching as to who He is, it is who He is that is really important and what is to affect us, rather than the fact that he was born of a virgin. Paul speaks of Christ as "come of woman"(Galatians 4:4). Had he said come of man (a male) there would be a difficulty, but in what Paul says there is nothing that negates the account of Christ's birth in the Gospels. "Come of woman" would take us back in mind to Genesis 3:15 where the seed of the woman is spoken of; the one who would crush the serpent's head (that is, Satan's). Paul or any of the other epistle writers nowhere negate the nativity narratives as given in Matthew and Luke. Luke was often a fellow traveller of Paul (He wrote the account of Paul's journeys in the Acts), and Paul was acquainted with James the Lord's Brother, so Paul could hardly have been ignorant of the facts connected with Christ's nativity (Philemon 24; Galatians 1:19).

(3) The Old Testament basis for the doctrine

There is only one passage where a virgin is said to give birth to a child and that is Isaiah 7:14 where it says: "Behold, the virgin shall conceive and shall bring forth a son, and call his name Immanuel". There is an emphatic article before virgin. It is not any virgin. The translation has been questioned, some saying that it should read young woman. The real problem is that it is probable that persons may be biased in their judgement on this issue, depending on their general beliefs as to the reality of prophecy, the inspiration of Scripture, and the truth that Jesus was the Christ. If it is admitted that Jesus was born of a virgin and that this was prophesied by Isaiah it is difficult not to accept that Jesus was the Christ and thus Christianity is proved true. No doubt because of this Jews maintain the view that the passage in Isaiah means simply that a young woman shall conceive and so translate it (see the JPS translation of the Old Testament). It is noteworthy that of the seven instances where the Hebrew word Almah appears in the Bible only in this case and one other (Proverbs 30:19) do they translate it as young woman. In all the other cases they translate it as maiden or damsel (singular and plural as appropriate). The matter has been the subject of contention since the earliest days of the Church's history, one of the earliest Church Fathers, Justin Martyr, having reasoned about it with the Jews.

The Septuagint Greek translation which the Apostles appear to have often used has virgin in Isaiah 7:14 and this translation having been made many years before Christ came into this world the translators can't fairly be accused of bias either for or against Christianity. A perusal of the other cases where the word Almah appears in the Bible (Genesis 24:43; Exodus 2:8; Psalm 68:25; Proverbs 30:19 and Song of Songs 1:3; 6:8) will demonstrate, in all but the passage in Proverbs where the translation is debatable for other reasons, that the persons mentioned were with varying degrees of certainty young unmarried women. None of the translations that I have perused are consistent in their translation of the word Almah save Youngs literal which consistently uses the word virgin. The Authorised version uses virgin four times, maid twice and damsel once. Other words sometimes used by other translations are maiden, girl and young maiden . There is no general consistency. It is sometimes said that there is another Hebrew word for virgin (Bethulah) that could have been used by Isaiah. However, although this word is more commonly used in the Old Testament (some 50 times) on 12 occasions the Authorised Version translates it by words other than virgin. Anyone who has access to an analytical concordance (I use Youngs) can check out the facts for themselves. The fact is that today we very rarely in my experience refer to an unmarried young woman specifically as being a virgin, though when talking about someone in that condition as a girl, virginity is implied. Referring to a female as a damsel or maiden similarly in

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