Virgin birth, et cetera...

Mark Shea, a Catholic apologist has a pretty cool blog entry today on the virginity of Mary, among other things:

The average modern reader of Matthew assumes Joseph disbelieved Mary and wanted to divorce her as an adulteress. Pictures come to the mind very easily of a Mary "pregnant out to there" and fumbling to explain to a skeptical Joseph that, well, it's not the way it looks and there was this angel, you see...

But surprisingly, there's another view of Joseph, one which Scripture supports better than the "Suspicious Joseph" portrait commonly accepted by modernity. In fact, it's a way of viewing Joseph's actions that was shared by such Church Fathers as Jerome, the greatest biblical scholar of antiquity.

Put yourself in Joseph' s shoes. You are a first century Jew, not a 21st-century materialist. Not just God, but angels, the afterlife, miracles, visions, and the whole supernatural world is, for you, as normal and real as daylight and sun on the flowers. Mary is a deeply godly woman you have known extremely well for years whom you both love and trust. She tells you she received a Visitation from an angel, not months after she becomes pregnant, but hours—perhaps minutes—after the angel has departed. She is breathless and astonished. But she's not given to hysteria or tall tales and she's dead serious. She tells you the angel said she would bear a son by the Holy Spirit. She's not "pregnant out to there" when she says this. She just says it. Perhaps she's not even sure she's pregnant, since the angel has given no timetable on when this shall happen. There's no guilt or shame in her eyes. And given all you know of her, the idea of her a) sleeping around (with who? This is a small town!) and b) coming up with this sort of story to cover it up is about as likely as Mother Teresa visiting some secret lover and then trying to cover it up by claiming she was impregnated by aliens. It's simply beyond her character to create such a wild story. So, to your amazement and fear, you find Mary's story is less incredible to you than the proposition of Mary's unchastity.

Especially since that's not all Mary says. She also reports that the angel said her aged cousin Elizabeth is pregnant too. There's been no news from Zechariah and Elizabeth for several months. Then, a few days later, word comes from the Judean hill country: Elizabeth is pregnant despite her advanced age. The hair stands up on the back of your neck. And as weeks and months roll on, you find your beloved Mary is indeed pregnant too. She looks at you with absolutely honest eyes and says, "Remember what I told you about the angel and his message?"

If you have 10 minutes and the interest, there's some really, really good stuff here: LINKAGE!