I am now ready to end this thread of posts dealing with the stories of Jesus’ virgin birth – told differently in Matthew and Luke, not at all in John, and seemingly argued against in the Gospel of Mark. Earlier I should have given some terminology so that we could all be on the sam page.   There are different terms that are often confused: Immaculate Conception. This doctrine is *not* about Jesus’ mother conceiving as a virgin; it is about Mary’s *own* mother and how she conceived Mary.   Mary, in Roman Catholic thinking, did not have a sin nature.  Otherwise she would have passed it along to Jesus.  But how could Mary not have one, if she were born and raised like every other human?  The answer came in the medieval notion of the immaculate conception: Mary herself was conceived (by her mother Anna) miraculously: God did a miracle so that even though Mary was conceived through the sex act, she was not given a sin nature. Virginal conception. This is actually the view of [...]