One of the aspects of the Jesus story that Mythicists target is that of the virgin birth. They spend a lot of time looking for pagan parallels. But what do we mean by the virgin birth?
For Christians, a more accurate term would be virginal conception. The point is that Mary became pregnant without any action of a human male.
Now in pagan myths, especially the Greek ones, there are plenty of examples of gods having sex with mortal women to produce demigods and heroes. That is not what is described in the Gospels. In fact, to make it clear that the Father wasn’t mating with Mary, we are told the conception was by the Holy Spirit.
Even so, was this borrowed from earlier pagan myths? You will have a very hard finding an example of virginal conception, that is conception without any sexual activity.
I won’t say that there aren’t any example of virginal conceptions, but if they are they are very rare. We can say with confidence that the usual suspects of Horus, Dionysus and Mithras were not conceived by a virgin woman. Both Horus and Dionysus were conceived through intercourse and Mithras was born of a rock.
So why do Mythicists continue to argue that the virgin birth of Jesus came from pagan myths. They take any example of a supernatural element to the birth narrative, even if it includes intercourse, as a virgin birth.
I don’t think that is very honest. An innocent reader who comes across their claim that a particular god was virgin born, will assume that means that there was no sex involved. Unless they read the actual myth, they may not know how much they are being misled.
