page_title: Miraculous births
section_title: Jesus
hierarchical_section_title: Miraculous births / Christianity / Jesus
caption_attribution_description: Modern Hand painted Romanian icon of the Nativity
context_page_description: Stories of miraculous births often include conceptions by miraculous circumstances and features such as intervention by a deity, supernatural elements, astronomical signs, hardship or, in the case of some mythologies, complex plots related to creation.
context_section_description: The Gospel of Luke and the Gospel of Matthew describe the nativity of Jesus. In the account in the Gospel of Luke, Mary learns from the angel Gabriel that she will conceive and bear a child. She asks "How this can be, since I am a virgin?". He tells her "The Holy Spirit will come upon you … nothing is impossible with God.’ She responds: "Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word".
  At the time that Mary is due to give birth, she and her husband Joseph travel from their home in Nazareth to Joseph's ancestral home in Bethlehem to register in the Census of Quirinius. Finding no place for themselves in the inn, Mary gives birth to Jesus and she places him in a manger (feeding trough). An angel of the Lord visits the shepherds guarding their flocks in nearby fields and brings them "good news of great joy": "to you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is the Messiah, the Lord." The angel tells them they will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.
  In the Gospel of Matthew, the impending birth is announced to Joseph in a dream, in which he is instructed to name the child Jesus. A star reveals the birth of Jesus to a number (traditionally three) of magi, Greek μάγος, commonly translated as "wise man" but in this context probably meaning "astronomer" or "astrologer", who travel to Jerusalem from an unspecified country "in the east".
  After the 1st century, traditions flourished that represented the thinking of that time, and also preserved source material for many of the ideas in the "theological writings of the church fathers." In their present form the pseudepigraphal writings contained in the Sibylline Oracles include literature written from the 2nd century BC through the 6th century of the Christian era. They contain some material relevant to the birth and infancy of Jesus. But this passage in the Oracles, Book III, probably represents the hopes of pre-Christian Alexandrian Jews.
  "Be of good cheer, O maiden, and exult; for the Eternal, who made heaven and earth, has given thee joy, and he will dwell in thee, and for thee shall be an immortal light.
  And wolves and lambs promiscuously shall eat grass in the mountains, and among the kids shall leopards graze,
  And wandering bears shall lodge among the calves, and the carnivorous lion
  shall eat straw in the manger like the ox,
  and little children lead them with a band. For tame will be on earth the beasts he made,
  
  And with young babes will dragons fall asleep, and no harm, for God’s hand will be on them."
  Later, the church fathers refer to subsequent books in the Oracles that are clear allusions to Christ, and probably dated from the close of the second or beginning of the 3rd century AD. The first Christian theologians demonstrated in their writings their knowledge of such non-canonical sources.
  The non-canonical gospels contain much that is pertinent. The apocryphal literature departs from the Christian canon and its legends have many elements similar to pagan stories representing popular beliefs of the church from the second Christian century on through the Middle Ages.
caption: Romanian icon of the Nativity.
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