As Christians would have it, Jesus was born of a virgin, just as predicted in the Old Testament by Isaiah. The Virgin Mary is revered by many religious people all over the world, and frequently makes appearances in obscure locations, usually in the form of rust stains on refrigerators and oddly-shaped cheese mold.
But I digress. This is not about the virgin herself, but the virgin birth, both the true and the false of the very idea.
Let's take a look at the original prophesy for a moment. It's found in the seventh chapter of Isaiah. The context is that of a war between Israel and Judah. The birth of the baby foretold therein is intended to be a sign that a planned siege of Jerusalem would fail. It actually has nothing to do with a messiah figure.
"Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. Butter and honey shall he eat, that he may know to refuse the evil, and choose the good. For before the child shall know to refuse the evil, and choose the good, the land that though abhorrest shall be forsaken of both her kings."
In other words, it's talking about events taking place at that time, not some point in the future. In fact, Isaiah himself tries to fulfill this prophecy in the following chapter:
"And I went unto the prophetess; and she conceived, and bare a son. Then said the Lord unto me, Call his name Maher-shalal-hash-baz. For before the child shall have knowledge to cry, My father, and my mother, the riches of Damascus and the spoil of Samaria shall be taken away before the king of Assyria."
…Which promptly failed to happen. Oh, well. C'est la vie.
Of course, there's something even more problematic with this prophecy than the skewed timeframe. And that has to do with the word "virgin" itself. In Hebrew, the word for "virgin" is "bethulah." It appears in many places throughout the Old Testament, generally describing the spoils of war that God's conquerors got to keep for themselves. It was never used in the supposed "prophecy."
The word used there was "almah," which simply means "young woman." It's the feminine form of "elem," which means "young man." The New Testament use of "parthenos," which does mean "virgin," is simply a mistranslation of "almah." In other words, the Greek translators goofed. No virgin birth was ever predicted.
So much for the fiction of virgin birth. Now for the facts.
It's called parthenogenesis (for what should be obvious reasons after reading the last few paragraphs), and it's just what it sounds like: an asexual form of reproduction where no male is involved.
It happens quite a lot, especially in lizards. Effectively, what happens is that the ovum fails to split its own genes. So, instead of having an egg with half the normal amount of chromosomes merging with a sperm of similar makeup, the egg simply retains all of the mother's chromosomes by itself, allowing for a birth with the full number of chromosomes required for that species.
How common is it? Well, among lizards, it's not uncommon at all. In fact, the whiptail lizards of the Cnemidophorus genus are notorious for it. The tesselated whiptail lizard is the largest known vertebrate that regularly practices parthenogenesis. In fact, no males of this lizard are even known to exist.
But what about mammals? More specifically, what about humans?
Well, there's no good reason for it not to occur. Now, as it happens, many Catholic nuns have claimed to have had virgin births, but all were disproved (surprise, surprise). Simple tests can verify it, including a skin graft test. Small patches of skin from mother and child are exchanged. If the grafts "take," then it's verified. If it fails, it means the genetic makeup isn't identical, which causes the graft to slough off. Thus, no virgin birth.
In mammals, including humans, parthenogenesis would result in an XX chromosome pair, which means the child would be female. No Y chromosome would be present for the male to result. (The exception to this is with snakes, which don't have X and Y chromosomes, but W and Z instead. And unlike mammals, the homozygous condition in snakes produces males instead of females.)
So, in a nutshell, Jewish prophecy never meant a future messiah. It never talked about a virgin, one way or another. And even if Mary had undergone parthenogenesis, Jesus would have been a girl.
