Mankind will not emulate extraordinary leaders but instead fall to their knees, adore and worship them. Rather than follow a difficult example it is easier to deify the exemplar thus providing an excuse for not emulating him—“How can mere men do what gods can do?” This inclination to worship Jesus as a god rather than follow him as a man stems from the earliest days of Christianity. Christians take the belief that Jesus was “son of God” to mean he was divine. Proof is his Virgin Birth, a myth found from end to end of the Hellenistic world. Divine heroes were not the product of human fathers. Their mothers were impregnated as virgins by the god in some supernatural way.

If our ideas about the dates of the gospels are correct, within 60 years of the crucifixion, Jesus’s adoring followers had created the myth of the conception of Jesus by the Holy Ghost making him at least half a god from the start. He thus became an impossible role model for merely mortal men. Yet even the half of him that was human passed on by his mother was too much for the adorers—they wanted a fully fledged god. After centuries as a tolerated heresy, in 1854 the doctrine of “The Immaculate Conception of the Mother of God” was adopted by the Roman Church. It made Mother Mary into another perfect being, free of original sin, like Jesus. From her own birth date she was incapable of sin throughout her life. She was defined as a sinless mate for God Almighty to conceive a divine son. Jesus as a fine example of principled and dedicated manhood had been usurped by the adorers and worshippers.

Nothing certain is known about Jesus’s birth, childhood and early manhood. Indeed, few doctrines of the Christian faith are so slight in their foundations as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus. The virgin birth was not attested early in Christianity. Mark, John and Paul never mention a special birth, Paul even denying it explicitly, as if he had heard the rumour and wanted it scotching. The earliest Christian writings are Paul’s epistles, and no mention is made of the Virgin Birth in them. Paul could not be more explicit in recording that Jesus was “of the seed of David according to the flesh” (Rom 1:3) as if he were refuting the suggestion. He insists that Jesus was “born of a woman under the law” (Gal 4:4) but he does not know, or apparently care, who she was and he knows of no miracle in the conception. For Paul, Jesus was the Son of God through the “Spirit of Holiness” which did not require a supernatural conception.

Mark and the last gospel, John, have no narratives of Jesus’s birth and upbringing. The gospel of Mark is the next writing chronologically after the epistles. We have no proof it existed within forty years of the death of Christ yet it is ignorant of the tremendous miracle of the Virgin Birth. Both Mark and John begin the history with Jesus heralded and baptized by John the Baptist at the age of thirty. The original Mark was a description of the active career and death of a Jewish leader, appointed by John in his early manhood.

The implication of the omission of the birth stories from the final gospel might be that its author did not accept them. Since they were also omitted from the first gospel, either Mark did not know about them or he also did not accept them. These observations alone seem sufficient to treat them with distrust.

The wonderful story of the birth of Jesus does not publicly appear until at least a century after the event. What would an historian make of a legend about the birth of Napoleon which did not appear until a hundred years after he was born? Indeed, no church father cites the birth narratives as we now know them until Irenaeus in 177 AD. The early church could not consider the mother of God having a sexual relationship with any man lest doubt be cast upon Jesus’s title as Son of God. So it suited the church fathers to compose the birth narratives and justify them from the “prophecy” they found in Isaiah.