I think current and ongoing arguments over the historicity of the virginal conception of Jesus tend to obscure some of the differences in Matthew and Luke’s rather different narrations of it.
Luke seems to do two things with it. First he backgrounds it with a range of OT echoes of unlikely conceptions, accompanying it with another contemporaneous improbable pregnancy. In such a way he situates Jesus’ birth in line with the way God has repeatedly acted to save his people. Secondly, he produces a narrative which fits the model of Aristotelian biology, where the divine Spirit quickens feminine matter with a more powerful energy than any male might manage. However, there may also be a hint in his language of the Holy Spirit that echoes the creation story, and certainly this hint is fruitful for later theologies of recapitulation and new creation. This is further developed in his (delayed) genealogy taking Jesus back to Adam.
By contrast, Matthew really doesn’t do anything with it. If anything, his account is more of a justification of it. He finds some women with atypical sexual history and decorates his genealogy with them, and he searches out a relatively obscure text in Isaiah which no-one else had associated with messianic prophecy. But there is no obvious way in which the virginal conception of Jesus plays any significant role in the theological development of Matthew’s narrative. It suggests to me that it is more likely Matthew is working with a source tradition of a virginal conception (or at the very least an irregular one) and rather than inventing a story from a prophecy, uses a prophecy to remove embarrassment from a story he already has.
Of course, like nearly everything written on the birth narratives, there is more guesswork than fact in this observation.
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Nice post. Especially the comments on Matthew’s possible dilemma of the virgin birth he had to work with. Thanks
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