How Babies Were Made in Jesus’ Time

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Sexual intercourse in order to conceive children is such a basic human activity that we sometimes assume that all cultures have had more or less the same ideas about it as we have. So in reading accounts of procreation and conception in the Bible, it is often simply taken for granted that these people operated within a framework where, though the giving of life may be traced back to God, the human male and female participants must both have made their genetic contribution to any resulting offspring. Once it is pointed out that our modern assumptions are just that—modern […]

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Footnotes

See James E. Crouch, “How Early Christians Viewed the Birth of Jesus,” Bible Review 07:05; Edward J. Barrett, “Can Scholars Take the Virgin Birth Seriously?” Bible Review 1988.

See Pieter Willem van der Horst, “Did Sarah Have a Seminal Emission?” Bible Review 08:01. This article surveys the evidence for the ancient view that females produced their own seed.

Endnotes

Cf., e.g., Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals 2.4.738b20-23.

Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990), esp. pp. 4–8, 35–43.

Pieter Willem van der Horst, “Sarah’s Seminal Emission: Hebrews 11:11 in the light of Ancient Embryology,” in E. Ferguson, A.J. Malherbe, D.L. Balch and W.A. Meeks, eds., Greeks, Romans and Christians: Essays in Honor of Abraham J. Malherbe (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990), pp. 287–302.

For a fuller discussion and nuancing of the views summarized here, see L. Dean-Jones, Women’s Bodies in Classical Greek Science (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994).

Cf. Book of Wisdom 7:1, 2 and 4 Maccabees 13:19, 20.

Philo, Questions on Genesis 3.47.

See G. Kessler, Conceiving Israel: The Fetus in Rabbinic Narratives (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), pp. 65–126.

Cf. Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses 3.22.1; 5.1.2; Tertullian, De Carne Christi 16, 18.

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 3.31.5.

10.

Cf. e.g., Ignatius, Ephesians 7; Magnesians 10, 11; Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses 1.9.2–3; 3.4.2; 3.22.1.

11.

Most translations make the Hebrew easier for readers by interpreting Eve’s words with a phrase such as “with the help of the Lord” (NRSV).

12.

Cf. Kessler, Conceiving Israel, pp. 97–99, 121–123.

13.

Kessler, Conceiving Israel, p. 115.

14.

Cf. R.A. Burridge, What Are the Gospels? A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004).

15.

Plutarch, Theseus 2, 3, 36.

16.

Plutarch, Romulus 2–4.

17.

Plutarch, Alexander 2, 3.

18.

See e.g., Suetonius’ Life of Augustus. At the beginning of his work, Suetonius simply talks of Augustus as the son of Octavius by Atia and deals with his paternal ancestors, but then toward the end he includes the quite different story of Apollo coming to Atia in the form of a snake and of her giving birth to Augustus ten months after this so that it was held that he was the son of Apollo (Augustus 2, 4, 94). Similarly, Dio Cassius later gives his version of Augustus’s beginnings, also juxtaposing the two perspectives (Historiae Romanae 45.1).

19.

For a recent attempt to take these findings into account in relation to a Christian doctrine of incarnation, see A.T. Lincoln, Born of a Virgin? Reconceiving Jesus in the Bible, Tradition, and Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2013).