“The Word Became Flesh”: The Incarnation of Christ from the Perspective of Embryology and Genetics

Theological consideration of modern scientific advances in the understanding of human reproduction discloses new support for Christian doctrine. I posit that God became incarnate, insofar as possible, through nature, not by stupendously setting aside nature. That is, it would seem to be most fitting if the very manner of how God effected the Incarnation affirmed the goodness of His creation by using the natural processes He himself had divinely created. at would affirm the goodness of creation generally and of female reproductive nature specifically. Clearly, God timed the Visitation to occur when the preborn John the Forerunner, at six months, was capable both of perceiving the sound of Mary’s greeting and of physically responding to it. In the same way, it appears that God timed the Annunciation so that Mary’s words of acceptance of God’s will could be the very instant of her ovulation, and likewise the very instance of the Incarnation’s start. e common modern assumption (by Andrew Lincoln and others) is that Mary contributed an ovum (with only one set of DNA) to her Son. Yet a virgin cannot naturally have an ovum, for that comes into existence only when an egg cell is entered by a spermatozoon. Therefore I hypothesize that Mary ovulated normally, her ovary releasing a secondary oocyte, and that at once God supernaturally transformed one set of chromosomes within that egg cell so that it held a Y chromosome and male imprinting. That is the supernatural event of incarnating involved no creation ex nihilo. Rather, God made full use of Mary’s natural gi of an egg cell and modified half of its genetic material. us Mary would be her Son’s sole source of humanity, as the Church has always held, while God was the sole source of His Son’s divinity and of his maleness. Modern embryology sheds further light on the origin of the body of the Lord. Female mammals in utero develop their lifetime supply of egg cells. us the particular egg cell which would years later ripen and emerge from Mary’s ovary to become the incarnational zygote, already existed in one of Mary’s ovaries when she herself was within her mother’s womb. Moreover, that egg cell was implicit in Mary’s DNA from the first instant of her existence as a zygote. While that egg cell was not the body of Christ, it held all of the matter which would, at the Annunciation, become the body of Christ. e venerable praise of the Conception of Anne is therefore seen to have a richer significance than was hitherto knowable.