Virgin birth

The virgin birth of Jesus is the Christian and Islamic teaching that Jesus was conceived by his mother, Mary, through the power of the Holy Spirit and without sexual intercourse. Christians regard the doctrine as an explanation of the combination of the human and divine natures of Jesus. The Eastern Orthodox Churches accept the doctrine as authoritative by reason of its inclusion in the Nicene Creed, and the Catholic Church holds it authoritative for faith through the Apostles' Creed as well as the Nicene. Nevertheless, there are many contemporary churches in which it is considered orthodox to accept the virgin birth but not heretical to deny it. In the New Testament, the narrative appears only in Matthew 1:18–25 and Luke 1:26–38, and the modern scholarly consensus is that it rests on slender historical foundations, though conservative scholars maintain its historicity. The ancient world did not possess a thoroughly modern understanding that male semen and female ovum were both needed to form an embryo; this cultural milieu was conducive to miraculous birth stories, and tales of virgin birth and the impregnation of mortal women by deities were well known in the 1st-century Greco-Roman world and Second Temple Jewish works. The Quran asserts the virgin birth of Jesus, deriving its narrative from the 2nd-century AD Protoevangelium of James, but rejects the Trinitarian interpretation of the Christian account, emphasising that Jesus was a human messenger of God rather than divine.