What this boils down to is that the early evidence of Jesus’s birth is that he was illigitimate. It is special pleading to say this conclusion is uncharitable because Mary claimed it was a miracle. It ought not to need saying that no Christian father would accept the same excuse for his daughter’s pregnancy, so there is nothing uncharitable about it. In those days, Greeks thought it possible for human women to be impregnated by gods, and it was used as an excuse in that culture, but no traditional Jewish culture was likely to accept it. The Christians who wrote the gospels were not traditional Jews. If they were Jews at all, they were writing for people in the Hellenized world outside Palestine where divine births were acceptable. The two birth narratives were quite plainly stuck on to the bios of Christ, and no scholar considers them to be anything other than myth. It leaves the notion of illigitimacy as the only explanation for Jesus being called the son of Mary. The question then is