Luke 1 Footnotes

1:35 Some scholars have understood the conception of Jesus by the Holy Spirit to be a late invention of the early church, especially since it appears explicitly in the NT only in Luke and Matthew. Most contemporary scholars dismiss as baseless, however, theories that the story was developed from or in response to pagan legends of supernatural conceptions, since suggested parallels bear little resemblance to the Gospel narratives. But there was no theological need to invent the virgin birth; other avenues for asserting the divinity of Christ (such as adoptionism, the view that Jesus the man became divine by adoption) were open and less fraught with the danger of inviting the charge that Jesus was illegitimate, which was in fact the pagan and Jewish response to the stories. In the end, the only real reason for rejecting the historicity of the virgin birth is a philosophical denial of the supernatural in general and of the incarnation in particular.