Was Mary Really a Virgin? The Context Critics Ignore

This argument keeps surfacing and every time it does I find it both obnoxious and theologically lazy. The claim is that Mary was not actually a virgin because of one word, and that this somehow discredits the entire Bible.

Isaiah vs. Matthew

"Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel." Isaiah 7:14

"But he did not consummate their marriage until she gave birth to a son. And he gave him the name Jesus." Matthew 1:25

These two verses get pitted against each other constantly. The argument goes that Matthew quoted Isaiah, that Isaiah used the wrong word, and therefore the whole thing falls apart.

Except Matthew didn't quote Isaiah. And that is the whole foundation of this argument and the foundation is cracked from the get go. Reread both verses, because they are not the same. Matthew didn't quote Isaiah, he is recording what happened.

What Conveniently Disappears

Every time I see this argument play out, the same two verses conveniently go missing.

• "to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin’s name was Mary" Luke 1:27

•  “How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?” Luke 1:34

Those are some pretty bold and confident Scriptures. Unless the argument is that God chose a liar to carry His Son, and I somehow missed that (and the rest of Christianty), these verses can't be ignored. An argument built on two verses while ignoring everything else the Bible says on the same subject is not Biblical scholarship, it's cherry picking.

The Word That Started All of This

Here is where the arguers usually try to get smart. Isaiah used the Hebrew word almah which refers to a young woman of marriageable age. Because almah does not exclusively and only mean virgin, some say that Isaiah was not actually prophesying a virgin birth.

This is where cultural and linguistic context matters enormously. In ancient Israelite society an almah was a young unmarried woman. The cultural expectation, not the exception like we have now, was that she would be a virgin. Premarital chastity was not a preference, it was a given.

And Isaiah was a Hebrew writing to Hebrews. He used the word his culture understood to carry the meaning of purity and virginity before marriage. The word did not need to be more explicit because the cultural assumption was already built in, we have our own words in this culture that do the same thing.

When the Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Greek in the Septuagint the word used for almah in Isaiah 7:14 was parthenos, a word that explicitly and directly means virgin. The translators who knew both languages and both cultures made that choice for a reason.

Matthew writing in Greek used the same word. Not because he was quoting Isaiah but because he was writing the same definition Isaiah used centuries earlier.

What This Argument Actually Requires

To accept the claim that Mary was not a virgin you have to dismiss Luke's (who was a doctor) direct account, ignore the cultural weight and meaning of almah, context in general, ignore the Septuagint's translation choice, and assume that God chose a woman who lied to an angel about her own virginity.

That is a lot to ask.

A doctor does not look at one symptom and issue a diagnosis without asking more questions and reviewing the full picture. We should be bringing that same discipline to Scripture. One word pulled from one verse in one language does not discredit anything, it just shows how much more there is to understand when we are willing to look at all of it.

© Jane Isley. Want more content like this? Explore more articles in Word Studies.

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