Miraculous Births in History

Miraculous births are a common myth in historical literature and religious texts. Stories of miracle births often include miraculous conceptions by a God, the supernatural or in some mythologies linked to creation.


In the story of Krishna, the God is the responsible for the conception and is also the result of the conception.

The stories of Buddha and his unusual birth developed through the centuries. In Buddhism, miraculous birth traditions were described as a series of incarnations. According to this recorded history Buddha was the first of six incarnations.  The legendary account of the birth of Buddha is in that the Great Being decided  where and when he was to be born according to the story Maya, his mother, fell asleep and dreamed of four archangels carried her to the Himalaya Mountains in her dream the Great Being came to her in the form of a white elephant. .'"


In the Hebrew Bible, there are stories of barren women giving birth where the God miraculously intercedes. The birth of Moses and the Sarah in the Old Testament is one example. The birth of Moses was foretold to Pharaoh in which caused him to command that all the male children to be thrown into the river. Moses was born on in the year 2377.


In certain Christian beliefs, Catholic, Anglican, and Orthodox, the birth of the Virgin Mary is miraculous. The Virgin Mary's parents, St. Anne and St. Joachim, were childless, when an angel came to them and told them that they would give birth to a daughter Mary, she was born without the original sin.

The Gospels record the birth of Jesus. In the Gospel of Luke, Mary was visited by the angel Gabriel and she learned that she will conceive and bear a child called Jesus. When she asks how this can be, since she is a virgin, he tells her that the Holy Spirit would come upon her. In the Gospel of Matthew, the birth came to Joseph in a dream, in which he is told to name the child Jesus. This miraculous bit is the most well known.


The Gospel of Luke recounts that Jesus was conceived when Elizabeth was about six months pregnant; when her cousin, the Virgin Mary, came to tell her about her news, Elizabeth's unborn child jumped. The Catholic calendar places the feast of John the Baptist on June 24, six months before Christmas.




The birth of a child by a God and a mortal which results in the birth of a hero comes from the belief of the origin of Gods. Some of the heroes who were born of a God with a mortal are Ion by Apollo and Creus; Asclepius by Apollo and Coronis; Helen by Zeus and Leda and Romulus by Mars and Aemila.

The majority of civilizations and cultures have stories of miraculous births in one way or another.  This belief is widespread and persists until today.  Within each account of an unusual birth there is a truth that links all of these cultures together into one sacred belief.  Are miraculous births factual or merely myths?