Wikipedia – The Virgin Birth (Other articles include: In the Beginning; The End is Nigh?; Christian ~Social Teaching; The Problem of Evil; Did Jesus Exist?; Jesus and the World Religions; Jesus and the Future; Baptism; Binding and Loosing; Do Animals Have Souls?; The Conversion of Israel; Contraception; Holy Communion; Jesus and Ancient Authors; Homosexuality; Reproductive Technologies)
The Virgin Birth was not part of the main apostolic preaching in the earliest days of the Christian faith. For example, the replacement for Judas had to be a “witness to the Resurrection” (Acts 1:21-22).
Jewish tradition did not expect the coming Messiah to be born of an intact virgin despite the questionable Septuagint translation of the Hebrew “young woman” in Isaiah as “virgin”.
Those critics who suggest that the Christian belief stemmed from outside influences have in mind such instances as the following virgin birth stories:
Dionysos, Attis, Perseus, Plato, Apollonius, some of the Pharaohs, Alexander, Augustus, Karna, Zoroaster.
Other cultures which have virgin birth motifs include: African tribes, the Inuit, native North Americans, the ancient Toltecs and Aztects, the Persians and the Finns.
Because other religions and cultures from the ancient world have accounts of virgin births it does not follow that Christianity is simply one among many. There is no exact parallel to the Virgin Birth of Jesus.
The early Church is unlikely to have been attracted by some of the virgin birth accounts of the Graeco-Roman world. Many were little more than crude sexual behaviour on the part of the deity. Wisdom 14:24,26 and Romans 1:24 show how Greek-speaking Jews and Jewish Christians would have reacted to such conduct.
There is a strong tide within N.T. scholarship,including many who wear clerical collars, to reject the historicity of the details of the Christmas accounts.
The annunciation, the shepherds, the magi, the star, the flight into Egypt…..are rejected as mythical. For these scholars the Virgin Birth which is left standing surrounded by flattened discarded elements is not sacrosanct, either. It, too, is rejected.
It is a mystery why the early Christians should have invented a virgin birth for Christ, if,indeed, it did not happen. As we have seen, there is no exact parallel to the Virgin Birth in the ancient world and the earliest writers in the post-apostolic era accept the Virgin Birth.