There are all types of variations in myths about Gods and humans having offspring. Sometimes it was just like Mary/Jesus sometimes different. Like the Greek goddess who had sex a lot with Zeus but after a magic bath she became a virgin. They still produce demigods however it's done.
The style of birth used with Mary has happened in myths before Christianity.
"In other words, the idea of a virgin born, sexlessly conceived god already widely existed in paganism before Christianity arose. And Hera isn’t the only example. If you really insist on the idea being gods born of women who never had sex at all, the pagans had those, too. Perseus was most famously conceived by golden rain falling from the ceiling into the womb of the virgin
Danaë, who remained a true virgin, never penetrated by any sexual organ anywhere, all the way to the god’s birth. One might still quibble and say gold coins counts as sex (as later painters imagined the myth to imply), but that’s a stretch, and in any case, it’s neither how the notion was conceived in antiquity (ancient iconography showed the gold falling in droplets, like a literal rain, more evocative of a ubiquitous
urban myth of parthenogenesis: semen entering a womb without any organ penetrating the hymen) nor how it was universally understood by pagans: as even Justin Martyr had to admit, this counted as a virgin birth, and everyone said so."
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The virgin birth myth for Jesus was, certainly, almost entirely modeled on Jewish precedents, both in and out of the Bible—from the miraculous impregnation of Sarah in the OT, to the miraculous conception of Moses in Philo’s
Life of Moses and the
Biblical Antiquities. But it was a syncretic creation, combining those Jewish elements, with pagan, producing a hybrid, just like every other instance of cultural diffusion (e.g. the way the Romans altered the Athena story when adapting it to Minerva): something different from anything before, yet fully explained by all its precedents. I should also add, for those who will inevitably ask, yes, it’s true, the original Hebrew scriptures did not predict a virgin birth, although their Greek translations could still have inspired the idea, evidencing a third source, the paganized Judaism of Hellenism: see my discussion in
The Problem of the Virgin Birth Prophecy.
More relevant though I think was the fact that the idea of God spontaneously creating people was already a Jewish notion for centuries before Christianity came along: it’s precisely how Adam and Eve came to be. If God could fashion them without sex, he could fashion Jesus without sex. Just as he would fashion our future new bodies without sex (2 Corinthians 5). And like Romulus as a pre-existent deity given a body, Jesus was a pre-existent deity given a body (see
OHJ, Element 10, pp. 92-96), making sexual conception less pertinent a means anyway, even if the authors were not already disgusted by the idea of sex and thus already inclined to leave it out of any pagan model they borrowed from.
But borrow they did. Before Christianity arose, pagan theology was already awash with women conceiving asexually, and also promulgated the idea of women giving birth as still virgins. Judaism had no comparable idea. Even the prophecy of Isaiah 7:14 would have been read by Jews through a Jewish interpretational filter—a filter that lacked any other notion except that a virgin would conceive on her wedding night in the usual way—
until they had a pagan filter to see it through. Only then, though Isaiah 7 never mentions a virgin
birth (only that a maiden
will become pregnant; not that she would then remain a maiden), would any Jew imagine it could have said what
pagans might have imagined: that this mother will
remain a virgin, thus portending a miracle. That step in reasoning is pagan. And only comes from a pagan milieu. The Christians assimilated their godman to pagan godmen, by Judaizing the pagan elements required. Thus, they preferred the pagan godmen who were fathered sexlessly by God’s
pneuma and
dynamis (a la Plutarch), upon women who chastely never had sex with anyone else either, so that even the vagina itself that the godman would pass through would be pure of sexual corruption. Ra came by such a way. Perseus as well. And if we allow
revirginizing magic, Hephaestus, too. And if they, why not Jesus?
Christians just need to get over this, and accept that their religion is just another evolution of paganism, one more splinter sect of competitive superstitions and mythologies. Its ideas have been cobbled together from the dismembered parts of other religions that preceded it. And when you really think about it, this Frankenstein’s monster is, well, kind of silly. Sexless reproduction and virginal birth canals? How desperate must you be to deny the natural facts of human bodies. And how ruined and sullied your minds must be, to think there is anything at all bad or dirty about one random awkwardly shaped piece of flesh touching another for fun—or babies."
Virgin Birth: It's Pagan, Guys. Get Over It. • Richard Carrier
