And Matt, this is the 10-minute Bible hour, and we're gonna have another one of those conversations that if you don't want your kids to ask you questions about conception, you might just wanna have them jump in after you've previewed this one because we're talking about how baby Jesus happened. So there's your warning. Three, two, one, and here we go. You have been advised. Okay, how did this actually happen? We started messing with this question yesterday, but I think it's a completely fair, not gross, reasonable question for someone who's reading the biblical account to wonder. And calm on. Everybody is gonna wonder about that no matter how holy they try to act. What actually went on? Well, I mentioned yesterday that the historic Catholic and Christian position is there was not a physical union with God, which leaves us with what? What does it mean in Luke chapter one when it says, the angel answered, the Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you? So the Holy One to be born will be called the Son of God. Look, even those of us who are really into the faith thing, we still live in the natural world, and our naturalistic assumptions are constantly reaffirmed as we go through our day-to-day life. So it's very difficult to come across a passage where it looks like the best read on what the authors are trying to convey is that somehow miraculously, God impregnated Mary. Now, how did he do that? He put sperm cell or like dude chromosomes and stuff just in there miraculously? I mean, I guess it could be. Do you just skip that phase and go right to now there's a completely fertilized egg and it's viable and now we're just ready to go and it's just in there? I have no idea, but I tell you who has been theorizing about this is science. For whatever reason, for like the last 15 years, people have been really interested in trying to offer some kind of explanation for the virgin birth. And before those of you who are people of faith just write this off as being desperate and nonsensical and worthy of being mocked, look, I think it's cool that people who maybe don't believe the same things that we do are at least trying to interact with this material and think about it. What they seem to be trying to do is rationalize the human behavior that happened in the first century. So instead of just assuming that everybody was nuts and crazy and insane and believed in ridiculous magic, they're assuming that people in the past were smart and could vet things and they were convinced that a thing happened. I mean, that's the best explanation for the whole Jesus phenomenon, is that something happened, or at least people had very good reason to believe it. So there's all these theories that float around. And you remember me using the Greek word Parthenos yesterday, which is the Greek word for virgin. So parthenogenesis is the fancy term for when in nature a pregnancy occurs apart from sperm, apart from a male presence. And I'm not smart enough, nor do I want to take the time to break down exactly how that happens. But some people argue that it's a product of being under incredible stress and pressure as a species environmentally or whatever. But what we find is that these, let me see if I can get this right, parthenogenic pregnancies occur in some vertebrates, but are not viable hardly ever in mammalian vertebrates. Now, again, this is not what I do for a living. I don't know. I'm reading what other smart people have written down. But it's interesting that the parthenogenesis theory has been floating around and getting a little bit of popularity in the last 10, 12, 15 years. But with that comes all kinds of problems in terms of how that pregnancy would be viable, how unique genetically Jesus would have to be for that to have occurred. There is apparently an example of a young man who was a product of what looks like a parthenogenic pregnancy, or maybe it was a different kind of fluke pregnancy in the mid-2000s, wherein the mother had intercourse with a man, and then the inviability of the pregnancy was made viable by the presence of the male genetic material, creating a relatively healthy kid who is a product of a crazy set of circumstances that would happen basically almost never in the history of ever. Like this crazy account of this young woman in, I think it was Lesotho, who got stabbed while she was engaged in sexual activity that didn't involve intercourse, and somehow the wound opening allowed for her to become pregnant. Who knows if this is even true or real? But it's really interesting to watch science try to wrestle with finding some kind of explanation for a virgin birth, other than she just lied about stuff and she actually had sex with somebody, and that's how she got pregnant. What's interesting is that the text itself actually precludes some of those theories because again, in Matthew chapter one, Matthew goes out of his way to make it very clear he had no union with her until she gave birth to a son. So I guess it's fun to theorize about some kind of weird freak of science situation where there is a partway through an existing pregnancy fertilization that makes it now viable, but the text precludes that. The text presents Mary as telling the truth, and not just telling the truth, but being enthusiastic in responding to what God is doing in her life. May it be to me as you have said, she declares. So she certainly wasn't regarded as a liar or a scum or an object of question. She was regarded in the earliest days of Christianity as being exemplary and blessed above all women. In fact, that's the language that the messenger gives to her. So it's interesting to hear people outside of faith or on the fringes of faith wrestle with what I think is a completely fair question. Bottom line is this I've read the text, I've thought about it, all I can come up with is the text taken in the context of the much larger claims of the text, says that God did something miraculous, Jesus was conceived, and that he was born without sin to a virgin, fulfilling the prophecy in the Old Testament, which gets us to the second question. Why does it matter? Wouldn't it just be okay if we were like, look, I don't want to defend this whole virgin birth thing. I don't want to have to believe this in my own brain to be able to believe in God. Can't I just do a version of Christian faith where I don't have to believe this part and instead just appreciate Jesus as a great teacher and the Messiah and the Son of God? Well, you can do whatever you want, my friend. I don't own the Bible and I don't own the internet, and I certainly understand what it is to wrestle with it. I mean, I think I think what I'm supposed to say right now is no, absolutely you can't, because this is what the Bible says, and you're on the wrong side of everything, and that's heresy. But I mean, come on, what are we doing here? We're we're doing the honest process of faith. I will try to give you a sense of what the text says and what the historical Christian belief has been, and then you do whatever you need to do with it. Here's the deal: what I know is this Hebrews 7 describes Jesus as a very uniquely positioned high priest who is able to do things and perform in a role that nobody else can perform in, and part of the reason is because of his birth. So let me see, Hebrews 7, where is it? I should have looked this up. Verse 26. Such a high priest meets our need, one who is holy, blameless, pure, set apart from sinners, exalted above the heavens. So the idea here is that Jesus isn't like everybody else. He's doing something different and is something different, because the stain of sin is not upon him in the same way that it is on other people. He is fully God. First Timothy 3.16, there are a lot of three sixteens, says, Great indeed we confess, is the mystery of godliness. He was manifested in the flesh, vindicated by the spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory. It's this holistic statement about the divinity and humanity of Jesus, of the presence of the Spirit in the life of Jesus. And so, really, what we're getting into right here after the genealogy is some of the most important and most fought over in the early church theology in all of Christianity. And that is that Jesus is fully God and fully man, that he was born without sin, that he was born in such a way that he wasn't part of the problem, that he wasn't touched by the problem or affected by the problem in the way you and I are. He was born into a position by which he could actually do something about the problem instead of just suffering for the problem. So then what we have is this high priest, this perfectly positioned go-between between God and man. This is kind of the big theme of all of the book of Hebrews that I just referenced, who alone is qualified to solve the problem of sin. Now, at this point in Matthew chapter one, we're not even hinting at what that solution is going to look like yet. There's a whole lot more that needs to happen in terms of understanding who Jesus is and what his kingdom is about and what he's going to do, but we're going to get to all of that stuff as we move deeper into the text. Quickly, on the way out the door, I cannot say thank you enough or enough times to the patrons who make this program possible. Everybody who supports over at patreon.com slash the TMBH podcast. You are awesome. Thank you so much. And again, everybody who supports here or over on the YouTube channel at patreon.com slash TMBH, every single person supporting at any level for however long are a couple weeks away from receiving in the mail an enamel TMBH pin, which I think is really awesome and is far too small a way to say thank you, but it's what I can afford. So thank you, thank you, thank you so much for being here, for listening. For those of you who support, thank you even more. Can't wait to connect with you tomorrow. I'm Matt. This is the TMBH Podcast. Talk to you soon.