Where Did Jesus Get His “Y” Chromosome?

“Despite our efforts to keep Him out, God intrudes. The life of Jesus is bracketed by two impossibilities: a virgin’s womb and an empty tomb. Jesus entered our world through a door marked ‘No Entrance’ and left through a door marked ‘No Exit." - Peter Larson

A Virgin’s Womb

This first “impossibility” was prophesied seven centuries before Jesus’ birth by the prophet Isaiah. He wrote, “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: the virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.“ (Isaiah 7:14)

Its fulfilment was described in the Gospel of Matthew with these words, “All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet” (Matthew 1:22) and then Matthew quotes the verse from Isaiah adding that the word “Immanuel” means “God with us”.

However, the term “virgin birth” seems to be a contradiction and scientific impossibility. Virgins, by definition, don’t give birth. The mother of Jesus (Mary) understood this when she was first told by an angel that she would conceive and have a a baby.

Her first reaction was to ask, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?” (Luke 1:34)

To this, the angel replied, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God.” (Luke 1:35)

This was an intellectual obstacle for Christian apologist and philosopher William Craig Lane when he was young. He said, “I thought it was absurd. For the virgin birth to be true, a Y chromosome had to be created out of nothing in Mary’s ovum because Mary didn’t have the genetic material to produce a male child.” Craig still became a Christian even though he couldn’t resolve this dilemma. Later he would write, “If I really do believe in a God who created the universe, then for Him to create a Y chromosome would be child’s play.”

ADDENDUM: Where did Jesus’ Y chromosome come from? Mary only had X chromosomes. The angel, however, was a step ahead of her and already knew the answer to this: “And the angel answered and said The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born^[b] will be called holy—the Son of God.”(Luke 1:35) So at some point shortly thereafter, God created the Y chromosome and the 22 others that would have come from a human father and inserted them into Mary’s egg, and the Son of God was begotten.

An Empty Tomb

The second “impossibility” mentioned above was the empty tomb discovered by Jesus’ followers early in the morning on what we now call Easter Sunday. Before the invention of CPR techniques, dead people (by definition) didn’t come back to life again. However, all four Gospels affirm that Jesus was resurrected from the dead after spending parts of three days in a tomb.

The apostle Paul stated that the Christian faith stood on the truth of the resurrection. Otherwise, he admitted it would be useless, futile, vain and essentially a hoax (see 1 Corinthians 15:12-19). Some atheists have taken up this tantalizing challenge to disprove Christianity. When they do serious research on the evidence for the resurrection and the alternative explanations, they become believers themselves (check out the books of Lee Strobel, Josh McDowell, Frank Morison and James Warner Wallace).

The Bottom Line

So, what do we do with these two “impossibilities”? One response is to conclude that these events simply did not happen. After all, normal people are not born from virgins and normal people do not rise from the dead.

A second response, however, is to conclude that these unusual and normally “impossible” events did happen because the Person they happened to was not a normal person but rather Someone very special, unique and (in fact) supernatural. Jesus once said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” (Matthew 19:26)

When you think of it, if Jesus truly was the Son of God (divinity in human form), wouldn’t you expect His arrival and departure to be rather special too?

by Rob Weatherby is a retired pastor and columnist for Sudbury Times (Toronto, Ontario)