Dr Meredith Lake

There are four accounts of the life of Jesus in the Christian New Testament.

One of them, the Gospel of Matthew, that one does give you a little bit.

It quotes an older text from the Jewish scriptures, it's complicated, written hundreds of years before the birth of Jesus, that talks about a virgin giving birth to a son.

But the people who read the original text didn't think it was about Jesus.

Not unless they could see into the future, I suppose.

And he talks about how Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be pregnant, quote, through the Holy Spirit.

There are even stories of Roman emperors apparently conceived in this way.

So it's not unique to the storytelling of Christian and Jewish writers.

So there's a whole history of stories about women having babies when they thought that wasn't possible and then that child growing up to do something amazing for their communities.

they're tapping into a narrative trope there.

And so the emphasis is often not on how did the baby come to be?

It's more about life out of nothing, an idea of creation when there was no hope and there was no life that somehow by the agency of the divine becoming possible in the world.