J. Gresham Machen’s The Virgin Birth of Christ: Then and Now

This article considers the context of J. Gresham Machen’s The Virgin Birth of Christ and how it developed as the result of years of labor; it outlines the argument of the book and documents its reception. For Machen, positive evidence for the virgin birth and the failure of alternate explanations point to the supernatural fact of the virgin birth. His scholarship and interactions with a broad array of scholars set him apart from fundamentalists. Machen’s Virgin Birth remains an essential treatment of the topic and an important work in apologetics and New Testament studies.