James Orr, in his treatise written expressly to prove the historical fact of the virgin birth, denies that the prophecy of Isaiah could be applied to Jesus. Here we have an orthodox writer who firmly believes in the miraculous conception, shattering the great cornerstone of the church's foundation for this belief. He says that the word "almah" was not Hebrew for virgin at all, but meant only a marriageable young woman. He says it can have no connection with Jesus, and thus he agrees with Thomas Paine, but for opposite reasons.
While Orr evidently considers that all pagan tales of divine paternity are legends, he affirms that the case of Jesus is genuine. Just why God became Deus Genetrix only once, he does not explain. If God approved of this method of creation, he would surely have performed it more than once. That he should have chosen a woman at all seems strange, when he could have produced Jesus without female assistance. Why should he have given his son, coexistent with the father, and, as such, undoubtedly of a fully developed intelligence, all the discomfort and danger of infantile life? If Jesus were but another phase of the godhead, one of the divine eternal trinity, it was degrading and ridiculous to have inflicted him with the processes of foetal life, with all the embryonic phases of development from ovule, through vertebrate and lower form to human guise; to have given him the dangers of human gestation and parturition, the inconvenience of childhood, with teething and other infantile discomforts, and the slow years of growth. Why did he inflict all these things on a part, a third, of himself, in many years of preparation for but a few years of preaching, when he could have produced the Christ in a wonderful manner, full grown in all the beauty and dignity and strength of perfect and sublime manhood? Probably some will answer that then Jesus would have been regarded as an impostor. But no more doubt could be cast on such an appearance than has been thrown on the doubtful story of the purity of Mary. Orr, in his haste to prove his belief, gives a very good argument against it (page 82) in the words, "The idea of a Virgin birth ... was one entirely foreign to Jewish habits of thought, which honored marriage, and set no premium on virginity." Therefore, it could not have been of Jewish origin. The Jews never accepted it, and it grew up only under the influence of Gentile converts.
