The Virgin Birth of Christ, by J. Gresham Machen (Harper and Brothers, 1930).

Most Christians who know about J. Gresham Machen, associate him with his most popular book, Christianity and Liberalism (1923). Even in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and extending outward to communions in NAPARC, Reformed Christians know Machen mostly through the book he wrote at the peak of the fundamentalist controversy, the one in which he argued plausibly and provocatively that liberal Protestantism was a different religion from Christianity. Controversy generates publicity, and Machen’s fame started and grew from his initial intervention into the church controversies of the 1920s and 1930s.

Yet, Machen himself considered The Virgin Birth of Christ, published in 1930 by Harper & Brothers, his magnum opus. The book’s title and the name of the publisher underscore the ambiguity of Machen himself, the gentleman scholar who took the side of populist and sometimes crass Protestantism. On the one hand, the virgin birth was one of the doctrines that fundamentalists insisted was essential to Christianity. Machen’s book, consequently, would seem to solidify his identification with those Protestants who sought to rid churches of theological liberalism. On the other hand, Harper & Brothers was a trade (not a religious or academic) press that published American authors from a wide variety of backgrounds. In other words, fundamentalists typically would have published with Fleming H. Revell, a New York religious publisher who originally brought to print the writings of Dwight L. Moody. Harper’s imprimatur indicated that despite the title, Machen’s Virgin Birth was not designed for the controversy in the churches, even if it was related. His purpose was mainly academic. This was a scholarly book that did little to help fundamentalists who wanted a quick and easy read before heading to the next meeting to strategize on defeating modernists. Weighing in at close to four hundred pages, Virgin Birth was neither a quick nor an easy read.

One reason for Machen’s own claim about the importance of the book was that the subject had followed him since he was a student at Princeton Theological Seminary. During his final year at Princeton (1904–1905), he wrote a long paper on the virgin birth for the New Testament fellowship prize. Machen’s essay not only finished first in the competition, but it also came with a scholarship that Machen used for his studies in Germany the next year. The research paper, divided in two, became Machen’s first publications, both under the title “The New Testament Account of the Birth of Jesus.” The first was published in 1905, the second a year later. Even though Machen’s work as a lecturer at Princeton after his return from Germany took him more in the direction of the apostle Paul (which led to The Origins of Paul’s Religion, 1921), he kept a hand in the scholarly literature on the virgin birth. One indication of this ongoing curiosity was his 1912 article, “The Hymns of the First Chapter of Luke,” in Princeton Theological Review.

After almost two decades away from the subject, in The Virgin Birth of Christ Machen followed the approach he had taken in his book on Paul (which he then used for some of his points in Christianity and Liberalism). Machen defended the supernatural character of Christianity through a close reading of the New Testament. He did so for the theological reason that salvation from sin depended on a direct (supernatural) intervention by God into human affairs. Nothing within a fallen world was capable of lifting men and women out of their guilt and restoring them to a loving relationship with a holy God. Machen’s emphasis on the supernatural followed from his academic purpose of taking the New Testament on its own terms. Rather than explaining away the miraculous as liberal Protestants did, Machen insisted that an honest reading of the Bible left no other conclusion but that God was from first to last the author of salvation.

As a lover of ancient Greek and Roman authors, for example, Machen was also well aware that the pagan religions were littered with supernatural events, figures, and significance. And yet, the New Testament narratives were completely different from the miraculous stories in Greek and Roman mythology. For instance, the Bible was silent on the amorous relations between gods and women that prevailed in ancient myths. In the gospels’ account of Christ’s birth, Machen wrote,      

the lofty Old Testament monotheism is abated not a whit; the awful transcendence of God, the awful separateness of God from the world, is never lost from view. Where in the New Testament story is there found any hint of a love of God for the maid of Nazareth, which could be analogous to the love of a husband for his wife? The question can scarcely even be asked, by any man of literary taste—to say nothing of any devout Christian—without a shudder. (338)

Machen added that in the pagan literature that inspired many of the ancient authors he esteemed, “the love of the gods for mortal women” was the “very point” of the stories—“the thing without which they could not possibly exist.” But to conceive of this kind of relationship in connection with the virgin Mary was to “do violence” to the biblical material (325).

Machen used a similar approach to explain the early church’s reference to Jesus as “the Son of God.” Many Gentile Christians would have come to faith in Christ after having believed that Zeus was father of gods and men. The Greek king of the gods, according to the ancient myths, begot children by human mothers. This was also true of stories about the births of figures like Alexander the Great, Plato, and the Roman emperor Augustus. “These great men were ‘sons of gods’” (335). Gentile converts to Christianity may well have read the New Testament in a similar light. But in the pagan literature, Machen argued, polytheism was pronounced, if not “the centre and core of the whole complex of ideas” (338). For Matthew and Luke, God’s love for the virgin Mary had no hint of the sexual attraction a husband has for his wife.  The New Testament accounts were completely chaste compared to the "the pagan stories of the loves and hates of the gods” (339).

Just as with his book on the apostle Paul, in The Virgin Birth Machen recovered the supernatural character of Scripture and salvation but without letting the New Testament stories become just one more instance of the alien ideas that ancient people had before the rise of modern science. Machen was a scholar steeped in the world of ancient learning and myths. Unlike his modernist Protestant opponents, he did not pit the backwardness of the ancient world against the “progress” of modern society, the rationale for adapting Christianity to modern educated people. The supernatural aspects of the Bible did not offend Machen, if only because his mental universe included a world, pagan and Christian, where deity intervened regularly in human affairs. But Machen’s defense of the supernatural (and the virgin birth) was not a simplistic or wooden defense like that proposed by some fundamentalists. Machen understood Christ’s birth in the context of both the Bible’s plan of salvation and the ancient world inhabited by the apostles and early church.

Machen’s sensitivity to the oddness of the virgin birth was also evident when he discussed the difficulties that modern Christians might have with the origins of Christ’s human existence. Here, Machen did not use the doctrine as a cudgel by which to shame theological liberals. Instead, he argued that the virgin birth aligned best with humanity’s need for a savior whose entrance into the world was unlike any other leader or great man. Not only did the virgin birth mean that Jesus was born without sin—unlike the rest of humanity descended from Adam and Eve—but the virgin birth fixed the time when the incarnation began. “Did the Son of God unite with the man Jesus at the baptism as Gnostics supposed?” Machen asked hypothetically. “Was the man Jesus received up gradually into union with the eternal Son?” Such questions invited “erroneous answers” without the virgin birth as an answer. “Without the story of the virgin birth we should be living constantly in a region of surmises like the errors of the heresiarchs in the ancient Church,” he warned (394).

What still lingered at the end of the book was a question of pastoral concern—how much doctrine, including the virgin birth, was necessary to believe to be a Christian. “Some knowledge is certainly required,” Machen wrote, “but exactly how much is required we cannot say.” He acknowledged that in troubled times like the 1920s, many of little faith were unsure what to believe about the virgin birth. For that reason, Machen saw wisdom in not drawing a line in the sand that made salvation depend on belief in “the stupendous miracle narrated in the first chapters of Matthew and Luke” (395). Such a concession did not mean the virgin birth was a matter of indifference. He added that “even if the belief in the virgin birth is not necessary to every Christian, it is certainly necessary to Christianity” (396). Someone could possibly believe in the resurrection but not in the virgin birth. This was a “halfway” conviction unlikely to endure. In the end, the New Testament “account” of Jesus was most convincing when taken as a whole, namely “that Jesus did not come into the world by ordinary generation but was conceived in the womb of the virgin by the Holy Ghost” (397).

As impressive as Machen’s book may have been, from its mastery of the relevant scholarship to the sensitive questions of apologetics and doubt, The Virgin Birth was published in what was likely the busiest and most discouraging time of Machen’s life. He had just lost two years of debates about the legality of reorganization of Princeton Seminary, in which he was often the target of personal attacks. He had only a year before the book appeared, led in founding Westminster Seminary, a herculean effort that left little time for anything but logistics and correspondence. And yet, in the midst of that tumult in his professional and personal life, Machen brought to completion his life-long inquiry into the New Testament’s birth narratives. If The Virgin Birth did not appeal to readers, then or now, the way Christianity and Liberalism has, the reasons have little to do with the quality of the 1930 book. The Virgin Birth is three times longer and much more scholarly than Christianity and Liberalism. Yet, Machen’s “magnum opus” has all the strengths of his most popular book—a defense of Christianity as a religion of redemption, based on the Bible’s testimony, and resolutely a supernatural work of God.

Darryl G. Hart is distinguished associate professor of history at Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, and serves as an elder at Hillsdale Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Hillsdale, Michigan and as a member of the Committee on Christian Education. Ordained Servant Online, December, 2025