MATTHEW DID NOT TEACH MIRACLE CONCEPTION OF JESUS

The Gospel of Matthew seems to say that Jesus had no father but the Holy Spirit and was born of a virgin.

Now girls in those days were married as soon as it was thought they could get pregnant.  Mary was only engaged then so she was younger than the norm even in those depraved barbarian days.  She was also poor and we know nothing about her state of health.  Her condition would have been akin to an eight year old being pregnant today.  We read that Joseph married her.  He must have said the baby was his.  Also, we are told he did not provide a proper home for her and had her on a donkey for a long journey.  A pregnant child?  What a misogynistic abuser he was!  In Catholic tradition, predictably he is the second highest ranking human person in Heaven.  Mary is the first.

The Gospel of Mark has Jesus being referred to as the son of Mary by others. Matthew when revising Mark's material describes Jesus as having a mother called Mary rather than being called the Son of Mary and states that he is the carpenters son. Compare Mark 6:3 with Matthew's parallel at 13.55. Is this not the carpenter the son of Mary says Mark. Matthew turns it into "Is this not the son of the carpenter and is his mother not called Mary?" Mark's version tells us that as the Jews had to call Jesus the Son of Mary it implies that he had an unnamed father.

Matthew starts off with a genealogy for Jesus Christ. It says that all the generations from Abraham to Jesus make up three sets of fourteen which is too incredible a coincidence to be right. The fact that Matthew puts four women in the genealogy who had been naughty sexually certainly hints that Mary had misbehaved with Joseph. The loose women are mentioned to show that Jesus had loose women as ancestors so his mother might have been a naughty girl too.

It calls Jesus, Jesus Christ. Christ means Messiah which means anointed one or king. Any king of Israel was a Messiah.

One of Jesus’ ancestors was the infamous Jeconiah or Jehoiachin to whom the Lord God revealed that none of his descendants would be blessed by him and allowed to take the throne of Israel. Matthew made the mistake of giving information that Jesus was not the Messiah at all but a fraud. It is convenient that this blunder is not mentioned in Haley’s Alleged Discrepancies of the Bible. Haley claims that Matthew left some kings out of the genealogy in which this man’s name appeared because they were so wicked! An obvious lie!
 
Against the view that the genealogy was symbolic and not literal one has to ask what is the point of creating a non-literal and symbolic genealogy? The gospel writers believed in miracles so the three sets of fourteen might have been thought by Matthew to have been a miracle. You cannot take the sets as a hint that the genealogy was not to be taken seriously. If it was, then who is to say that anything in the gospel is meant to be taken seriously?

This is Matthew’s story about Jesus’ origin. Mary had just got betrothed to Joseph and was found to be pregnant by the power of the Holy Spirit and Joseph being a fair person did not want to divorce her and shame her but to send her away quietly. And angel made him change his mind when he told him that the baby was by the Holy Spirit and the baby fulfilled a prophecy from Isaiah that a virgin shall conceive and bear a son called Emmanuel. Joseph did not have sex with her until she had a son who he called Jesus.

Joseph thought she had been with another man and got pregnant. But she could have come into contact with Joseph’s sperm, or anyone's, which would have meant the pregnancy was a marvel worked by the Holy Spirit though not a miracle in the magical sense.

The Holy Spirit has no sperm so he did not fertilise Mary. Making a sperm out of nothing to do the trick cannot amount to conception by the Holy Spirit.

We will leave others to consider this argument: "In those days nobody knew what conception was.  It merely described how a man took pleasure and a baby came months later.  If so, did Mary have an experience where she felt sexually used and abused by some spiritual force?  Poltergeist stories report something invisible and undetectable raping the victim". Some sick fantasists like the idea of spirits and forces doing things like that.
 
Did the Holy Spirit make Mary’s egg multiply without a sperm?  The idea back then would not have occurred to anybody. Eggs were not thought of then.
 
So considering the options then the Spirit did not literally become Jesus’ father so don’t take the notion of Mary conceiving by the Holy Spirit too literally, it stands for something.  It cannot be taken literally anyway for it is too unclear anyway.
 
The doctrine is clear that the Holy Spirit is not Jesus' father in any sense. So conception by the Holy Spirit is definitely very vague. Conception by the Holy Spirit is a parable for what else could it be for it is obvious the Spirit cannot be Jesus' father and yet he must be.
 
It stands for an unusual conception but not necessarily a magical/miraculous one.
 
By “conceived of the Holy Spirit” Matthew might have meant a conception by a man without intercourse which certainly can happen. The Holy Spirit was believed to have caused the pregnancy in the sense that it was so unusual and seemingly almost impossible. It is a miracle in the sense of a marvel. God had more to do with it than he would have even had penetration occurred. If X’s sperm was put into Y’s testicles and Y fathered a child with this sperm then it would still be true to say that Y's woman conceived by Y. You could also say that the conception took place by X too.
 
The angel told Joseph not to be afraid to take Mary as his wife for she conceived what was in her by the Holy Spirit. This is a metaphor for saying that the Holy Spirit approved and assisted the conception. It does not exclude Mary for example having got pregnant accidentally or by sexual molestation. It does not exclude a human father. It is simply silent on the mechanics of the conception. The Holy Spirit is not a man and doesn’t make sperm and Jesus is not the Son of the Holy Spirit. Conceived by the Holy Spirit just means that the child was a gift from God in some unique sense.
 
If Mary had committed adultery and got pregnant, that would not mean her child couldn’t still be a gift from God and the Son of God in the sense that he was God’s top man. Adultery is not excluded at all. The sin was in the adultery not in having the child for the child was just the consequence of sin and that doesn’t make having the child a sin.  The story runs best if you assume that Mary was not deliberately getting pregnant.
 
Joseph decided not to part with Mary when an angel explained that the pregnancy was approved by God.  He did not ask any questions.
 
Even if the angel excluded adultery, that could be a hint that Joseph’s sperm was used by God and the Holy Spirit made her pregnant by him without intercourse. It could be argued that even God has no right to make a married woman pregnant without her man.

The main thing is that the word conceived is there and it means male intervention. Rape by a male spirit would be included.  Remember the Holy Spirit gets he and him pronouns.