Mark's Jesus eschews signs, so it makes sense that Mark omits any mention of Jesus' nativity such as Matthew and Luke have relying on Isaiah

 

 The virgin birth, according to Isaiah, is a sign, after all.

Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign [σημεῖον -- LXX]; Behold, a virgin [παρθένος -- LXX] shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. 

-- Isaiah 7:14

Behold, a virgin [παρθένος] shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us.  

-- Matthew 1:23

For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign [σημεῖον] unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.

-- Luke 2:11f.

There shall no sign [σημεῖον] be given unto this generation.

-- Mark 8:12

 

Always deny there's any evidence to the contrary when promoting the virgin birth

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 As does Walter Russell Mead, who says Christmas is a feminist holiday lol, here:

The early church wasn’t facing a sea of rumors about Mary’s prenuptial behavior, and if it had been, there are more convincing ways of scotching rumors than proclaiming a miraculous virgin birth. 

 Meanwhile . . .

I speak that which I have seen with my Father: and ye do that which ye have seen with your father. They answered and said unto him, Abraham is our father. Jesus saith unto them, If ye were Abraham's children, ye would do the works of Abraham. But now ye seek to kill me, a man that hath told you the truth, which I have heard of God: this did not Abraham. Ye do the deeds of your father. Then said they to him, We be not born of fornication; we have one Father, even God. 

-- John 8:38ff.

At Christmas thoughts do not naturally turn to Mary's crazy, problem child of the Gospel of Mark

Bart Ehrman, December 2014, here:

Mark does not narrate an account of Jesus’ birth. Mark never says a word about Jesus’ mother being a virgin. Mark does not presuppose that Jesus had an unusual birth of any kind. And in Mark (you don’t find this story in Matthew and Luke!!), Jesus’ mother does not seem to know that he is a divinely born son of God. On the contrary, she thinks he has gone out of his mind. Mark not only lacks a virgin birth story; it seems to presuppose that they [sic] never could have been a virgin birth. Or Mary would understand who Jesus is. But she does not.

It’s no wonder that when Matthew and Luke took over so many of the stories of Mark, they decided, both of them, *not* to take over Mark 3:20-21. They had completely different view of Jesus’ mother and his birth.

The Virgin Birth kerfuffle erupts among the Baptists, WaPo artfully avoids Roman Catholic Mariolatry and its Holy Quaternity

WaPo ends the story with this whopper, as if Roman Catholicism's thinking about Mary were less of a spectacle than that of the rubes in flyover country:

The Catholic Church teaches that the Virgin Mary was also conceived without sin to carry Jesus (the “Immaculate Conception” applies to hers, not his) and that she was “assumed” into heaven at the end of her life. Catholics name Mary as “blessed among women” and venerate her as a saint for her miraculous life.

Well not just "as a saint". She is the Queen of Heaven who reigns over the entire world and is to be worshipped, according to Pius XII in 1954:

From the earliest ages of the catholic church a Christian people, whether in time of triumph or more especially in time of crisis, has addressed prayers of petition and hymns of praise and veneration to the Queen of Heaven. And never has that hope wavered which they placed in the Mother of the Divine King, Jesus Christ; nor has that faith ever failed by which we are taught that Mary, the Virgin Mother of God, reigns with a mother's solicitude over the entire world, just as she is crowned in heavenly blessedness with the glory of a Queen. ...

It is gratifying to recall that We ourselves, on the first day of November of the Holy Year 1950, before a huge multitude of Cardinals, Bishops, priests, and of the faithful who had assembled from every part of the world, defined the dogma of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into heaven where she is present in soul and body reigning, together with her only Son, amid the heavenly choirs of angels and Saints. Moreover, since almost a century has passed since Our predecessor of immortal memory, Pius IX, proclaimed and defined the dogma that the great Mother of God had been conceived without any stain of original sin, We instituted the current Marian Year And now it is a great consolation to Us to see great multitudes here in Rome - and especially in the Liberian Basilica - giving testimony in a striking way to their faith and ardent love for their heavenly Mother. In all parts of the world We learn that devotion to the Virgin Mother of God is flourishing more and more, and that the principal shrines of Mary have been visited and are still being visited by many throngs of Catholic pilgrims gathered in prayer. ...

In order to understand better this sublime dignity of the Mother of God over all creatures let us recall that the holy Mother of God was, at the very moment of her Immaculate Conception, so filled with grace as to surpass the grace of all the Saints. Wherefore, as Our Predecessor of happy memory, Pius IX wrote, God "showered her with heavenly gifts and graces from the treasury of His divinity so far beyond what He gave to all the angels and saints that she was ever free from the least stain of sin; she is so beautiful and perfect, and possesses such fullness of innocence and holiness, that under God a greater could not be dreamed, and only God can comprehend the marvel." ...

"With a heart that is truly a mother's," to quote again Our Predecessor of immortal memory, Pius IX, "does she approach the problem of our salvation, and is solicitous for the whole human race; made Queen of heaven and earth by the Lord, exalted above all choirs of angels and saints, and standing at the right hand of her only Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, she intercedes powerfully for us with a mother's prayers, obtains what she seeks, and cannot be refused." On this point another of Our Predecessors of happy memory, Leo XIII, has said that an "almost immeasurable" power has been given Mary in the distribution of graces; St. Pius X adds that she fills this office "as by the right of a mother."

Let all Christians, therefore, glory in being subjects of the Virgin Mother of God, who, while wielding royal power, is on fire with a mother's love. ...

[M]ay Christians gather, in small numbers and large, to sing her praises in churches, in homes, in hospitals, in prisons. May Mary's name be held in highest reverence, a name sweeter than honey and more precious than jewels; may none utter blasphemous words, the sign of a defiled soul, against that name graced with such dignity and revered for its motherly goodness; let no one be so bold as to speak a syllable which lacks the respect due to her name. ...

By this Encyclical Letter We are instituting a feast so that all may recognize more clearly and venerate more devoutly the merciful and maternal sway of the Mother of God. 

-- AD CAELI REGINAM

ENCYCLICAL OF POPE PIUS XII ON PROCLAIMING THE QUEENSHIP OF MARY TO THE VENERABLE BRETHREN, THE PATRIARCHS, PRIMATES, ARCHBISHOPS, BISHIOPS, AND OTHER LOCAL ORDINARIES IN PEACE AND COMMUNION WITH THE HOLY SEE

What Kind Of Faith Is It When You Say Jesus Is Your Husband And The Father Of Your Child?

From The New York Times, here:

Evangelicals are assuring single moms that God has a plan for them, and it still includes marriage — just not in the way they expected. Rita Viselli found herself pregnant at age 35 with the child of a man she was casually dating. She was a recovering drug addict, the troubled daughter of a single mother herself, and a recent convert to evangelical Christianity. In 2000 she began a Bible study for single mothers in her living room in Southern California. She taught them what she had realized: “I have a husband. His name is Jesus Christ. I have decided that he will be my daughter’s father, and she has grown up being told that God is her father. He is real in our house,” she told me. “He has provided for me and my child better than 10 husbands could have.”

This connubial language pervades the small but growing world of evangelical single mothers’ ministries. It has deep roots in Christian spirituality. In mystical marriage to Jesus, medieval nuns and laywomen found one of the few paths to spiritual authority open to them, an escape from repressive reality. When Margery Kempe, an English mystic born around 1373, heard Jesus say “I take you, Margery, for my wedded wife,” she “felt the fire of love burning in her breast.”

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What if Mary the mother of Jesus thought the same way? That God was the father of her bastard baby? Is that how the Son of God idea started in Christianity, and the idea of the virgin birth, as a kind of spiritual rationalization of a poor woman's predicament which fatefully imbedded itself in the mind of Jesus because that's what Mary kept telling him all his life?

"And call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven."

-- Matthew 23:9

For Most Protestants, It's Mary's Perpetual Virginity Which Is The Problem

Philip Jenkins, here, who notes the Feast of the Nativity of Mary on September 8th:

As recently as 1950, Pope Pius XII stated that “we pronounce, declare, and define it to be a divinely revealed dogma: that the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory.” ... [F]or most Protestants (and some Catholics), the ideas I am describing – the whole Marian lore – is so bizarre, so outré, so sentimental, and so blatantly superstitious that it just does not belong within the proper study of Christianity. If anything, it’s actively anti-Christian. Even scholars prepared to wrestle with the intricacies of Gnostic cosmic mythology throw up their hands at what they consider a farrago of medieval nonsense. ... [T]hat response is profoundly mistaken. If we don’t understand devotion to Mary, together with such specifics as the Assumption, we are missing a very large portion of the Christian experience throughout history. It’s not “just medieval,” any more than it is a trivial or superstitious accretion.

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That's right. The perpetual virginity of Mary is no more outrageous than the virgin birth of Christ, except that for Protestants it conflicts with the evidence that Jesus had brothers during his lifetime. To them the Romanists engage in special pleading when they say that the plain sense of these texts isn't the plain sense and should be understood in the light of the much later "apocryphal" evidence which maintained Mary's perpetual virginity and that his "brothers" must have been only his nephews or cousins.

More to the point, however, missed by most commentators, is that Jesus' rejection of normal family relationships is paramount in the Synoptic narratives mentioning his brothers and mother, and is rooted in his apocalyptic worldview of an imminent end of the world. Being tied down by a wife and children or a mother and a father and siblings, or a job or possessions or the cares of this life generally, all will hold you back and keep you from escaping from the wrath which is to come, and come soon. To repent is to turn your back on all this. The historical development is that when this Apocalypse he preached failed to materialize, this part of the teaching was transformed into an idealization of celibacy and virginity.

The Virgin Birth Claim Was Already Strong Enough To Be Attacked By The Time Of John

Jesus saith unto them,

"If ye were Abraham's children, ye would do the works of Abraham. But now ye seek to kill me, a man that hath told you the truth, which I have heard of God: this did not Abraham. Ye do the deeds of your father.

Then said they to him,

"We be not born of fornication; we have one Father, [even] God."

Jesus said unto them,

"If God were your Father, ye would love me: for I proceeded forth and came from God; neither came I of myself, but he sent me."

-- John 8:39-42