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Thanks for the reply WR. I guess I thought that your purpose was partly to rationalize or explain the mechanism behind the whole "virgin birth" miracle, so I partially misconstrued the purpose of your original post.

Still, even focusing on the Davidic ancestry question, your apology still leaves me in a quandary about the verses listing Joseph's family tree. Does it say anywhere in the text that God contrived to give Jesus Davidic ancestry? It seems a pretty big interpolation, only made necessary by the verses that trace Jesus' descent through Joseph to David.

Why would the authors bother to write down all those "begats" if what they really meant to say was "Jesus was not the natural son of any human male, but the Holy Spirit contrived that He was of the house of David."? Granted, that does not make any more sense to me personally, but at least it avoids the difficulty for those who believe in the "capital-M Miracle". The authors must have had some purpose for writing down the geneology other than establishing decendency, since you say the decendency of Jesus was miraculously contrived, and really had nothing to do with the decendency of Joseph.

Aside: As a possible point of agreement here, I think the term "miracle" gets bandied about all too frequently in common usage. For example, in the recent news accounts of the Air France plane that crash landed and caught fire, the news heads kept calling it a miracle that all the passengers got out alive. In reality, they all got out alive because the emergency doors, the escape slides, the flight attendants, and the procedures all worked as planned, and they were lucky. No "capital-M Miracle" was required. Nobody was magically teleported, reanimated, healed, etc.

From a religious point of view, trumpeting every successful combination of luck, effort and planning as a miracle tends to devalue what you view as actual miracles in the Bible. From a secular point of view, it tends to devalue effort and planning. I assume this is what leads you to use the term "capital-M Miracle" - a somewhat cumbersome, but sadly necessary construction.