That snide side-eying of the tale of the virgin birth, “oh that story only works once”, well for one, even if you’re being cynical there are already other bits of mythology that work like that. We know the Greeks have tales of ladies saying “I’m pregnant and/or it looked like I was having sex with an animal because, you know, Zeus,” and on the other side of the gender coin nymph stories that go “yes I totally did bang this hot young maiden-thing while traveling outside of town, but you know, she totally wanted it, magical powers, I couldn’t resist, anyway she’s definitely no one you’d ever meet”.

Just like the Victorians had legends that go “I’m consorting with and spending resources on this homeless urchin slum girl because of my spectacular commitment to Christian morality; also she’s dying of a wasting disease because of how particularly pure and chaste she is, one which has nothing at all to do with the madness/sickness my wife’s recently developed, which of course is the product of causeless and heavily euphemized abnormalities arising in ladyparts, as bourgeois medical science discovered around the same time that the city became a major port in an intercontinental maritime empire.”