This post has two responses from Claude.ai beginning with a summary of Andrew Lincoln’s article “How Babies Were Made in Jesus’ Time” (Biblical Archaeology Review 40.6, 2014), drawn from his book Born of a Virgin? Reconceiving Jesus in the Bible, Tradition and Theology. The PDF of the article is in Dropbox/Christianity/Virgin Birth directory.
Core argument
Lincoln contends that modern readers import anachronistic genetic assumptions into New Testament conception accounts. Ancient authors worked from Aristotelian biology, in which the male supplies the logos and pneuma (the formative, animating principle) while the female contributes only the material substance via menstrual blood, with the womb as the “oven” that cooks the male seed into shape. This was part of what Thomas Laqueur termed a “one-sex/flesh model,” where male and female were points on a single hierarchical spectrum rather than biologically distinct categories.
Why this matters for Jesus’ humanity
Under this ancient framework, Mary alone could supply Jesus’ full human substance even without a human father — God’s Spirit simply took the place of the male seed as the animating principle. This is precisely why patristic writers like Ignatius and Irenaeus invoked the virgin birth against docetic claims that Jesus only appeared human: Mary’s contribution was considered sufficient. Lincoln notes the irony that our modern chromosomal understanding (mother providing X, father providing Y) actually inverts this logic — a virginal conception without a human father would now seem to undermine full humanity rather than secure it.
The “three-party” pattern in Jewish scripture
Lincoln traces a literary convention in Hebrew Bible texts where conception is described as involving God, the father’s seed, and the mother’s womb — but with the father’s role frequently elided to emphasize divine initiative. He cites Jeremiah 1:5 (“Before I formed you in the belly I knew you”), Isaiah 44:2, and the birth announcement to Manoah’s wife in Judges 13, where the human father’s role is simply assumed rather than narrated. A rabbinic text (Leviticus Rabbah 14.5) makes this explicit, reading David’s conception (Psalm 51:5) as God directly inserting the seed despite his parents’ indifference.
Resolving Matthew/Luke’s internal tension
Lincoln addresses how Matthew and Luke can both affirm a virginal conception and Jesus’ Davidic descent through Joseph (cf. Romans 1:3, John 1:45, Acts 2:30). He argues Matthew resolves this through legal adoption — Joseph’s naming of Jesus grafts him into the Davidic line. Luke, however, simply juxtaposes both traditions without harmonizing them, which Lincoln says matches a known convention in Greco-Roman biography (he cites Plutarch’s Lives of Theseus, Romulus, and Alexander, plus Suetonius on Augustus), where subjects are sometimes given both an ordinary human parentage and a divine/miraculous one side by side, without the ancient author or audience treating this as a contradiction.
Conclusion
Lincoln’s larger point is that the coherence of “Jesus as virginally conceived yet fully human” depends entirely on ancient biological assumptions moderns no longer hold — so any contemporary theological restatement of the virgin birth needs to reckon with that gap rather than read modern genetics back into the text.
Want me to pull together how this piece fits alongside your other reading — say, Fredriksen or Bazzana — or would a closer look at the ancient embryology sources (Aristotle, Philo, the rabbinic material) be more useful?
2nd Prompt – Pull together how this piece [Lincoln’s article] fits alongside my other reading — say, Fredriksen, Bazzana, Ehrman and Tabor.
This piece pairs naturally with the others you’ve been working through — Lincoln gives you the biological/literary substrate that Fredriksen, Bazzana, Ehrman, and Tabor each build on (or push against) in different directions.
The shared starting point: Paul and Mark don’t know a virgin birth
All four scholars converge on something Lincoln’s article gestures at but doesn’t dwell on: the earliest Christian writing — Paul’s letters, then Mark — shows no awareness of a virginal conception. Paul’s two references to Jesus’ origin are ordinary: Galatians 4:4, “God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law” (NRSV), and Romans 1:3, that he was “descended from David according to the flesh” (NRSV). Both use standard birth language with no hint of anything unusual. Lincoln’s article actually explains why that’s theologically coherent rather than merely an omission — Jewish scriptural convention (Jeremiah 1:5, Isaiah 44:2) routinely credits God with fashioning a chosen figure “in the womb” while simply not mentioning the father, without thereby denying he existed. So on Lincoln’s reading, Paul’s silence isn’t evidence against a human father; it’s the normal way scripture talks about someone whose life has divine purpose.
Fredriksen: the Davidic-messiah framework
Fredriksen’s work (including her essay “Pauline Polytheism and the Triumph of the Davidic Messiah,” in the Paul within Paganism volume) reads Romans 1:3-4 as Paul deploying Jesus’ Davidic descent within a thoroughly Jewish apocalyptic-messianic frame, aimed partly at a pagan audience who had their own categories for gods fathering exceptional men. This dovetails with Lincoln’s point about Greco-Roman biography’s habit of giving a figure both an ordinary lineage and a divine begetting (Plutarch on Theseus, Romulus, Alexander; Suetonius on Augustus). Fredriksen’s broader project on Paul and Judaism — including the Augustine comparison you’ve read — keeps Paul’s Christ resolutely within a Jewish covenantal horizon; Lincoln’s discussion of Luke shows one evangelist doing exactly what Fredriksen would expect: preserving Davidic physical descent through Joseph (Acts 2:30; 13:23) and layering a divine-conception story on top, without treating them as competitors.
Bazzana: pneuma as the connecting concept
This is probably the tightest link. Lincoln’s whole argument hinges on ancient pneuma — semen’s “vital heat/animating spirit” in Aristotelian biology, later replaced by God’s Spirit in Mary’s case. Bazzana’s Having the Spirit of Christ (Yale, 2020) — particularly his chapter “The Last Adam Became a Life-Giving Spirit: Christ and Pneuma in Pauline Theology” — argues Paul’s pneuma language is best read not as later theological abstraction but through cross-cultural anthropology of spirit possession: pneuma as an active, quasi-material force that takes hold of and transforms a person. That’s the same conceptual world Lincoln is describing for conception — pneuma as a formative, almost physical agent rather than a metaphor. Read together, they suggest Luke’s “the Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you” (Luke 1:35, NRSV) isn’t a special one-off miracle-formula so much as an application of the same possession/animation logic that, per Bazzana, structures how the whole early movement understood spirit-filled experience generally.
Ehrman: harder skepticism about harmonization
Ehrman treats Matthew’s and Luke’s infancy narratives as later legendary accretions that are not just independent but genuinely contradictory — different genealogies, different itineraries, different theological agendas — and he’s skeptical that ancient audiences experienced them as smoothly compatible in the way Lincoln argues via the Plutarch/Suetonius parallel. Where Lincoln says ancient biographical convention let dual paternity coexist without strain, Ehrman’s instinct (consistent across his popular and academic work) is that these are competing origin stories reflecting the theological development of high Christology, retrojected earlier and earlier — virgin birth in Matthew/Luke, pre-existent Logos in John — rather than genre conventions both evangelists comfortably shared. It’s a real disagreement in interpretive posture, not just detail: literary-sympathetic reading (Lincoln) vs. redaction-critical suspicion (Ehrman).
Tabor: pushing the question into “what actually happened”
Tabor takes the furthest step, treating the birth accounts as apologetic responses to a scandal rather than theological convention. His recent work (summarized in a series of guest posts on Ehrman’s blog tied to his book The Lost Mary) revisits the “Pantera” tradition — the Tosefta and Celsus material naming a Roman soldier as Jesus’ actual father, later moralized in rabbinic polemic and the Toledot Yeshu. Tabor has walked back the strongest version of his earlier Jesus Dynasty claim; his current position is that Jesus’ father is essentially unknown, and Joseph is unlikely to have been the biological father, rather than confidently naming Pantera. It’s worth flagging that this remains a minority position — Maurice Casey rejected the Pantera hypothesis for lack of evidence placing that soldier in the region, a conclusion Christopher Zeichmann’s more recent epigraphic study affirms. Jane Schaberg’s earlier feminist-critical The Illegitimacy of Jesus argued a related thesis on independent grounds, reading the infancy narratives themselves as preserving traces of a tradition of illegitimate conception that Matthew and Luke are managing rather than inventing from nothing.
How they fit together
The four form something like a spectrum on the same question — why do virginal-conception and normal-Davidic-descent traditions sit side by side in the New Testament?
- Lincoln + Fredriksen: this is intelligible and even expected given ancient biology and Greco-Roman biographical convention; no contradiction needs resolving, and Paul’s silence is theologically unremarkable.
- Bazzana: supplies the pneumatological mechanism underneath Lincoln’s account — pneuma as possession-force, not metaphor.
- Ehrman: treats the coexistence as a real seam in the tradition, evidence of theological development rather than stable convention.
- Tabor (with Schaberg): pushes past literary explanation entirely, asking whether the birth narratives are apologetic cover for a remembered scandal.
Given how you’ve been building this out — the Acts Seminar and Pervo/Tyson material on second-century dating, plus Fredriksen on Paul’s Jewish frame — Lincoln’s piece slots in as the biology/genre-convention layer that both Fredriksen and (implicitly) the later infancy-narrative daters need to explain how Matthew and Luke could plausibly narrate divine conception for readers steeped in Aristotelian embryology, whether or not you find Ehrman’s or Tabor’s more skeptical readings persuasive on top of that.
