Word: testament
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...Scholars see this as an excellent indicator of Matthew's background and audience. A Jew living in a primarily Jewish community (either in Galilee or what is now Lebanon), he was brought up, like most of his neighbors, on the Jewish Scriptures (which Christians now know as the Old Testament). Making someone called Joseph a recipient of prophetic dreams would evoke an earlier dreamer of the same name: the Joseph whose sleeping visions of fat and lean cows in the Book of Genesis helped pull his people into Egypt and indirectly to their destiny at Mount Sinai as recipients...
...spectacular and yet also touchingly intimate, is part of Christianity's theological bedrock and began entering the faith's creeds by the 2nd century. (Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy's beliefs go further, maintaining that Mary remained a virgin during and after Jesus' birth.) Says John Barclay, a New Testament expert at the University of Durham, England: "Theologically, this is the one thing that people will go to the stake for. If they defend the historicity of anything in the Christmas stories, they will defend this...
...considers divorcing Mary before his dream angel allays his doubts. Related notions of Jesus' illegitimacy have never totally disappeared. Jane Schaberg, an iconoclastic feminist critic at the University of Detroit Mercy, has long maintained that parts of Luke's introduction to the topic echo the beginning of an Old Testament passage on rape ("If there be a virgin betrothed to a man, and if another ... should have lain with her"), suggesting violation as the cause of Mary's pregnancy. The Holy Spirit, in Schaberg's version, transmutes a ritually taboo pregnancy into an occasion of glory and the birth...
...Testament scholars have delved deeper into the pagan faiths that competed with early Christianity for followers, Mary's virginity has been challenged from the opposite direction--not as an impossible novelty but as a theme borrowed from the literature of the non-Jewish world. Stephen Patterson of Eden Theological Seminary lists divinely irregular conceptions in stories about not only mythic heroes such as Perseus and Romulus and Remus but also flesh-and-blood figures like Plato, Alexander and Augustus, whose hagiographers reported he was fathered by the god Apollo while his mother slept. "Virgin births were a rather Gentile thing...
...imagined the Holy Spirit and Mary engaged in the kind of physical divine-human intercourse that vividly marked many Greek and Roman myths, is one of the most rancorous areas of the new scholarship. Brown found no merit in it. "Every line of Matthew's infancy narrative echoes Old Testament themes," he argued. "Are we to think that he accepted all that background but then violated horrendously the stern Old Testament [rule] that God was not a male who mated with women?" Other scholars claim that Luke especially might have been familiar with pagan models closer to the spiritual interaction...