Ask Mr Bible

● Negative consideration.  It did not occur in Bethlehem at the birth of Jesus.  In fact to the contrary, for had there been a medical doctor present to assist in the birth of Jesus (but not knowing the background of the event) he would have encountered nothing unusual in the delivery process itself.

● Positive consideration.  It did occur in Nazareth upon the announcement of Gabriel:

 “And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God” (Luke 1:35).

 Stated another way, the miracle of the incarnation was the supernatural conception of the body of Jesus within the womb of Mary without the aid of a human father!

Is the Virgin Birth Still Considered a Miracle?  In view of cloning?

The following response comes from Dr. Charles Detwiler, Biology Professor at Liberty University in Lynchburg, VA.

“Human beings will soon be able to cause a human egg cell with a somatic cell nucleus taken from another person to develop to full adulthood.  This adult will be a “clone” of the original adult from whom the somatic cell nucleus was taken.  If this sort of process is experimentally feasible, must we still view the doctrine of the virgin birth of Jesus Christ as being dependent on a miracle?  Wouldn’t a slight alteration have occurred in the womb of Mary that would allow one of her ova to commence development and to produce the body of our Lord?”

Parthenogenesis, the development of unfertilized eggs to adulthood, is known to occur albeit rarely in the animal kingdom.  The main problem in viewing Christ’s birth in this way, is that the offspring of this process are invariably female in gender unless the maternal parent is able to store sperm within her body.  Scripture explicitly states (Luke 1:34) that Mary was a virgin—that she had not had a sexual relationship with any man.  It also states (Matt. 1:25) that she had no such union until after the birth of Christ.  If, therefore, it is not possible for a human sperm cell to have been within the virgin Mary’s body, and if Jesus was genetically and therefore biologically a male, clonal descent from his mother is simply not possible.  There is only one possibility left.

The maternal contribution of Mary must have received sufficient genetic information to have produced a normal male body for our Savior to inhabit.  This required the presence of biological information that simply could not have resided within Mary’s own genetic information.  Scripture clearly indicates that this information did not find its source in the body of Joseph or any other human male alive at the time.  The conception of Christ must have been, as always assumed in Christian teaching, a miracle.  Jesus Christ’s body could not have been a clone of anyone present on earth at the time.  Rather, in some miraculous way, the Holy Spirit of God, produced within the body of His precious “daughter” a deposit of information sufficient to generate, biologically, “the son of Abraham, and the son of David.”  And in a still higher miracle that same Holy Spirit infused that body with His own Being, such that our Savior was entirely, the son of Abraham, the son of David, and the son of God.

When we consider the soul of man, genetic cloning contains its own mysteries that biologists will not by their technical methods account for or explain.  But the conception of our Lord is a miracle of biological and theological proportions vastly beyond the scope and possibility both of cloning technology and normal conception of mortal human beings.  Could it have been the greatest miracle ever to have come from the hand of Almighty God?